U.S. Government Developed the iPod

ezavada writes "Engadget reports that in a speech at Tuskegee University, President Bush claims that government research developed the iPod." From the article: "While we have to gratefully acknowledge the efforts of government agencies such as DARPA in some of the fields mentioned by the President, we also feel obligated to point out the accomplishments of private companies in the US and abroad, including IBM, Hitachi and Toshiba -- not to mention the Fraunhofer Institute, which developed the original MP3 codec ..."

Comments

Que expected Bush flaming...

[Anonymous Coward]

Que expected Bush flaming...

Re:Que expected Bush flaming...

[PakProtector]

In three, two, ..., ...

AL GORE Hi, I'm Al Gore! You may remember me from such Vice-Presidencies as the 45th... And I was critical in securing the funding that made the DARPA project that became the Internet possible.

QUEUE CARD GUY: The iPod, sir.

AL GORE: The iPod possible.

Re:Que expected Bush flaming...

[Ugly American]

Right, and the next thing you tell me is that pigs can actually fly and hell has already become frozen.

Not all of hell, just Cocytus.

As for flying pigs, what else do you think all those farm subsidies are for?

Re:Que expected Bush flaming...

[gEvil (beta)]

Que? No comprende.

Re:Que expected Bush flaming...

[sgt_doom]

So that's how Bush's slogan became:

iPod ergo sum!

[I hear the voices! - Geo. W. Bush]

Re:Que expected Bush flaming...

[TheCrackRat]

People keep using that word, I do not think it means what they think it means.

From tactical to practical

[guabah]

Because i'm almost sure that the US Military needed a way to store audio in a portable device without carrying tapes and disks around long before the iPod

Re:From tactical to practical

[NoMercy]

Yes, and so did everyone else, the iPod isn't just one of those devices, the major inovation of the iPod is that you can look cool while telling someone about your MP3 player, rather than blend in with the geeks.

Now if your telling me the goverment invented a way to make geeky things non-geeky without having to pay $99 for a 'sock' which fits your iPod, now that's something I'd be interested in.

Re:From tactical to practical

[cammoblammo]

From tactical to practical

Seriously, if I had any mod points left I'd send some your way on the basis of your subject line alone. That's the sort of thing that only comes to me after I hit 'Submit.'

Re:From tactical to practical

[Nutria]

Based on his sense of humor, something tells me that this has about a 100% chance of being a joke, and I'm sure that the audience probably got a kick out of it. In fact, I bet if everyone here were there, and didn't hate GW, they would laugh too.

This is Slashdot. It is de rigeur that we criticize GWB early, often and continuously, even when it's patently obvious to anyone with more than a pea-brain that GWB was making a joke.

Re:From tactical to practical

[LMariachi]

It's the name of a TV show, on the Discovery Channel I think.

Re:From tactical to practical

[Fulcrum of Evil]

This is Slashdot. It is de rigeur that we criticize GWB early, often and continuously, even when it's patently obvious to anyone with more than a pea-brain that GWB was making a joke.

Oh come on - if the press can crucify Gore for claiming to have helped the internet get where it is, then we can flame GHB for making a stupid crack about iPods.

Re:From tactical to practical

[Premo_Maggot]

it was the history channel http://www.historychannel.com/global/listings/seri es_showcase.jsp?NetwCode=THC&EGrpType=Series&Id=88 26020

Re:From tactical to practical

[Fulcrum of Evil]

So... who pushed to get the money appropriated for it?

Thank you for elaborating my point.

Oh no!

[stinerman]

Not another meme!

the iPod's chump change compared to...

[Boss Sauce]

thinks like CCD's... and this little thing... called the internet...

Thank you President Bush.

One question-- did the government invent the word "duh" as well?

Re:the iPod's chump change compared to...

[deanj]

Yeah, I'll be forever greatful for Algore for inventing the internet.

Re:the iPod's chump change compared to...

[Xytheril]

No, but they did invent the question mark. They then regretted that decision.

Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't say that at all. According to the article, he said that the "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression" and goes on to say that while the government intendeed that for one (unspecified) purpose, that "it turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod".

That's a long long way from claiming to have "invented the iPod".

This whole story is a waste of space. It doesn't even mention Ponies.

Re:Absurd

[MoonFog]

It will probably get passed around the net as if Bush said he developed the iPod. Al Gore never did say he "invented the internet" either.

Re:Absurd

[MooUK]

In standard Bush style, that's what he meant to say but it isn't quite what he said.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk about selective quoting.

The full sentence yields:

"the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."

Mr B may not claim to have invented the iPod, he's pretty much clear on the fact the iPod exists only by his grace.

Re:Absurd

[mincognito]

Not only did Bush invent the iPod, he also shuffled the shuffle.

Re:Absurd

[Carewolf]

The sentence is nonsense. First he talks about one specific reason, then it changes to accidental "it turned out". Something is missing, Bush just read the speech wrong, or the speech was nonsense to start with.

Re:Absurd

[sacrilicious]

According to the article, he said that the "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression"

BUSH said that?? He can't even pronounce "nuclear". The above probably came out as "the gubmint did work in 'puter stuff, and in electoral... elecat... elcatrikomystery stuff, and in siggy ... what is this word ...si... to hell with it, in nukular stuff."

Re:Absurd

[cluening]

That's true, he didn't say he "invented" the internet. His exact words were "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." So although you win on a technicality, the spirit of the saying is still there.

Re:Absurd

[Gulthek]

Bingo bango, Snopes strikes again: Internet of Lies

Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet.

Status: False.

Origins: Despite the derisive references that continue even today, Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs were misleading, out-of-context distortions of something he said during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Clearly, although Gore's phrasing was clumsy (and perhaps self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible, in an economic and legislative sense, for fostering the development the technology that we now know as the Internet. To claim that Gore was seriously trying to take credit for the "invention" of the Internet is, frankly, just silly political posturing that arose out of a close presidential campaign. Gore never used the word "invent," and the words "create" and "invent" have distinctly different meanings -- the former is used in the sense of "to bring about" or "to bring into existence" while the latter is generally used to signify the first instance of someone's thinking up or implementing an idea. (To those who say the words "create" and "invent" mean exactly the same thing, we have to ask why, then, the media overwhelmingly and consistently cited Gore as having claimed he "invented" the Internet, even though he never used that word, and transcripts of what he actually said were readily available.)

If President Eisenhower had said in the mid-1960s that he, while President, "created" the Interstate Highway System, we would not have seen dozens and dozens of editorials lampooning him for claiming he "invented" the concept of highways or implying that he personally went out and dug ditches across the country to help build the roadway. Everyone would have understood that Ike meant he was a driving force behind the legislation that created the highway system, and this was the very same concept Al Gore was expressing about himself with his Internet statement.

Whether Gore's statement that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet" is justified is a subject of debate. Any statement about the "creation" or "beginning" of the Internet is difficult to evaluate, because the Internet is not a homogenous entity (it's a collection of computers, networks, protocols, standards, and application programs), nor did it all spring into being at once (the components that comprise the Internet were developed in various places at different times and are continuously being modified, improved, and expanded). Despite a spirited defense of Gore's claim by Vint Cerf (often referred to as the "father of the Internet") in which he stated "that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it," many of the components of today's Internet came into being well before Gore's first term in Congress began in 1977.

It is true, though, that Gore was popularizing the term "information superhighway" in the early 1990s (although he did not, as is often claimed by others, coin the phrase himself) when few people outside academia or the computer/defense industries had heard of the Internet, and he sponsored the 1988 National High-Perf

Re:Absurd

[Shelled]

That was informative for the ten or twelve who thought Gore's claim entailed a youth spent before an amber screen crunching protocols. It also sets the record straight, finally, about Eisenhower. Thanks. For the rest of the us though, of course no one thought Gore was laying claim to the Internet's technical underpinnings. Gore has taken ridicule for expanding making "it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it" into "I took the initiative in creating the Internet". Brushing away the spin, to the vast majority of the voting public, the audience it's safe to assume Gore was addressing in the Blitzer interview, the Internet is the World Wide Web, a coupling of components which "came into being well before Gore's first term in Congress began in 1977" and a creation of the European agency CERN. How did Gore impact that? Gore rightfully takes abuse for a moment of public and ridiculous hubris.

Once thing I can thank you for is demonstrating how, like so many others on all sides, the authors of Snopes don't feel it necessary to rise above their political beliefs in the performance of their duties.

Re:Absurd

[Zoop]

Sigh. Despite what Seth Finkelstein would like to think, Al Gore said "I took the initiative to create the Internet," which to mere mortals is indeed a synonym for "invent." Even if you try to spin that to mean the enabling legislation that released the Internet from government-only hands, a) he was only one of several hundred co-sponsors, and b) the thing pre-existed his service in Congress or the Senate. Even in the narrow legislative sense, it was egregious self-aggrandizement by Gore.

Re:Absurd

[brucifer]

Its too bad I can't use my mod points to moderate the story. I think its funny how people now consider something posted on a blog as "news". If the /. poster actually read the "article" from this "new source" (whatch out, I'm " happy today) he (I always assume Anonymous Cowards are male) would have seen that Bush said "the Fraunhofer Institute, which developed the original MP3 codec, and codeveloped (with Sony, AT&T and others) the AAC format used by Apple in the iPod." Looks to me like he's saying Fraunhofer Institute had a lot to do with developing the iPod.

Lets use our collective big brains here to slam the administration for things that are actually going wrong, not some lame attempt to make them sound stupid.

Re:Absurd

[shemnon]

This partisan stuff gets old, Kerry had a lower GPA at yale and can't pronounce "idea" instead pronouncing it "idear." There's something wrong with eery politicain, watching people point it out as though it is relevant gets tireing.

Re:Absurd

[Sj0]

To be fair, neither is responsible for the JS-23311A, the space-based stike fighter which futurists believe will evolve into the "zig", which they believe will move for great justice when all our base are belong to Cats.

Re:Absurd

[Sj0]

A....PRESIDENTAL CANDIDATE......HYPING HIMSELF?

No way. I refuse to believe it. You are obviously lying. Nobody in this hallowed institution has ever done such a thing. I bid you good day.

Re:Absurd

[Sj0]

Can we stop letting C and D students into the presidency? I mean, there'a a lot of really ambitious and skilled A and B students who I'm sure have some interesting ideas about running the country, like letting congress use calculators when discussing the budget so they don't vote for tax cuts paid for by federal debt. :P

Re:Absurd

[Fulcrum of Evil]

This partisan stuff gets old, Kerry had a lower GPA at yale and can't pronounce "idea" instead pronouncing it "idear."

What I can't understand is why Lurch got nominated - is it because he came across as bland and inoffensive? Dean had a much better grasp of the issues and would have been a better president.

Re:Absurd

[smitth1276]

I'm sure he knows how to pronounce it, but I have a hunch he gets a kick out of petty, self-important assholes who have nothing better to do than obsess over how he pronounces a word as thought they themselves are smarter than he is.

Re:Absurd

[rynthetyn]

On top of that, people should realize that the "invented the iPod" line was clearly a joke. Of course, people conveniently lose their sense of humor and start taking things at ultra-literal face value when it's a politician talking.

The one thing that can be said for the whole "Al Gore invented the internet" thing was that it didn't start from somebody not being able to tell a joke from a serious comment, and I'd rather take political spin over outright stupidity from the listening audience any day.

Re:Absurd

[tm2b]

You really need to read deeper than Snopes and remove your own blinders. Educated yourself about how different "the Internet" was as the ARPAnet, as the NSF-net, and the modern commercial Internet.

This is a much more, in depth description of Gore's role. It suggests the better formulation of Gore's claim to be:

While I was serving in the Senate, I took the initiative in supporting the basic research necessary to create the Internet as we know it today.

Those of us who were actually there know that the "Internet" of the mid 80s to early 90s was a substantially different beast than what we know as the modern Internet. That transition, from the ARPA- and university-run networks to the wider NSF-funded Internet, to the fully commercial Internet as we know it today, was what Gore was making a reasonable claim to having spearheaded in Congress.

It was a long, multistage process but Gore does have a credible claim to having first legislative mover cred in the birth of the Internet as we know it today.

Re:Absurd

[honkycat]

It depends on exactly how that is punctuated. It could also mean:
"They did so for one reason... it turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod" (i.e., they did it for one reason, but it turned out to be important for something else too). This has the benefit of actually being plausibly correct and is probably what he meant to say.

Re:Absurd

[shadowcode]

Mr. Bush. Next time you post a comment, please log in.

Re:Absurd

[Shelled]

I was on the Internet in the early Nineties, back when the only access was via a portal on the GUI BBS I subscribed to and users still complained about the '.edu' season when student got access via school networks. This is in Canada. So no blinders, Republicans and Democrats are all the same to me and Gore had what to do with Internet adoption in Canada?

Re:Absurd

[Scudsucker]

he was only one of several hundred co-sponsors

No, he wasn't. No other elected official has come close to what Gore has done for the Internet - even Newt Gengrich has said so, and you should know how much love Gengrich has for anything having to do with the Clintons or Gores.

the thing pre-existed his service in Congress or the Senate.

Wrong. All an internet is, is a group of interconnected networks. The Internet, with it's millions of hosts and petabytes of data, is a work in progress. Gore was instrumental in opening up what was DARPAnet for public and commercial use. And his actions as a government official are exactly what he was talking about.

Even in the narrow legislative sense, it was egregious self-aggrandizement by Gore.

Wrong. It was an entirely appropriate comment to make. I'm curious as to why people continue to insist that Gore be held to a rehtorical standard that no human being before or since has been expected to achieve - especially by the ones making said demands. For example, during the 2000 debates Bush took credit for Texas being the first state to allow patients to sue their HMO's. Slight problem: he actually vetoed that legislation. So where was the media's contempt on that, the mother of all flip-flops?

Misleading title (from original article)

[linguae]

The title of the article is incorrect; the US government didn't develop the iPod. It just helped fund the development of certain technologies at various research labs and universities that private corporations picked up and further developed on.

In other news early this morning, the US government helped develop Linux. More details come later.

Re:Misleading title (from original article)

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they did. Go look at who created the SELinux patch set now a standard part of Linux. .. and be afraid.

Re:Misleading title (from original article)

[Jesus_666]

However, the way Bush said can be interpreted in such a way that the government funded research in "microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression" for one express purpose: To allow Apple to create the iPod.

That makes sense, of course: In the tech tree Microdrive Storage, Electrochemistry and Signal Compression are prerequisites for the development of The iPod and The iPod gives a 5% bonus on population happiness and generates 1.200 economy points per turn (until superseded by Holographic Entertainment or Psionic Mood Control). Especially during these times it makes sense to invest in morale-boosting technologies.

Haha

[tsa]

You can say what you want about Bush, but not that he hasn't got a sense of humour.

Re:Haha

[jrockway]

> You can say what you want about Bush.

True, but not on the phone!

Re:Haha

[hey!]

Or in front my kids, unless I want them to pick up bad language.

Re:Haha

[kfg]

Perhaps in future they will install a Free Speach Phone in every state.

Just take a, ummm, number.

KFG

Re:Haha

[soft_guy]

You can say what you want about Bush, but not that he hasn't got a sense of humour.

Sure. He's been having a good laugh at the country's expense for about 6 years now.

Re:Haha

[saltydogdesign]

If, by "sense of humor" you mean he enjoys humiliating his staff, appointees, and friends in public, then yes, he has a sense of humor.

Re:Haha

[slashkitty]

Fuller quote:

Here's another interesting example of where basic research can help change quality of life or provide practical applications for people. The government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the Ipod. I tune into the Ipod occasionally, you know? (Laughter.) Basic research to meet one set of objectives can lead to interesting ideas for our society. It helps us remain competitive. So the government should double the commitment to the most basic -- critical research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years. I look forward to Congress to doubling that commitment.

He was clearly making a joke about the ipod, but trying to give a basic example of how technology research is good.

Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[BaltikaTroika]

From TFA: George W. Bush told his audience, "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."

The bold type is mine. I doubt that the single reason that things like signal compression were funded was because it was necessary to develop the iPod. It seems like these things could be more useful in military/computer/communications/etc. spheres than in personal entertainment.

Does this sound like a (bad) joke taken out of context to anybody else? Don't we have editors for this sort of thing?

Baltika
--
http://www.pancakelane.com/

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[Hartree]

It's Zonk on duty. What did you expect?

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[MythMoth]

It was a speech. So the colon was placed there by a third party.

That could read two ways:
i. They did so for one and only one reason which was...
ii. They did so for one reason, but it turned out that...

Reading (ii) seems far more likely to me. It sounds more like poor phrasing than a poor joke to me (though you may well be right). But the article "helpfully" omits the broader context of the speech.

I'm no fan of the US president. But it irritates me to see the personality attacks instead of substantive policy attacks.

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want to know is: How the heck did he manage to string together such a coherent statement?

Even if he was just reading a speech, the guy has trouble saying two words together without one of them being mispronounced or inappropriate.

I guess even monkeys have their good days. His handlers must be pleased.

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[stinerman]

Does this sound like a (bad) joke taken out of context to anybody else?

Not a problem. The "Al Gore invented the Internet" quote was also badly taken out of context.

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Does this sound like a (bad) joke taken out of context to anybody else?"

It sounds like yet another attempt to discredit the president.

There's a big big flaw in my suggestion, though: It takes a lot more work to spin-doctor a story to make GWB sound untruthful than it does to set the TiVo whenever he makes a speech.

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[MooUK]

I think that if you shove the word "but" in after your bolding, you'll get what he intended to say.

"The government funded research in these areas. They did so for one reason (probably military uses), but it turned out that these technologies were vital in the creation of the iPod and similar players."

How's that sound?

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[martijnd]

I worked an internship at a computer lab in the UK during the '90 where we had PhD students trying to get voice compression to the next stage. As I recall a lot of that was based on American military voice compression research.

Now the key point was trying to achieve "real-time" compression -- seeing a P90 taking 3-4 times real-time was seen as pretty good already.

Around the same time of course MP3 compression was also just getting off the ground, and the reference source code was more or less spread around freely (though not in a free license) and MP3 compression was certainly not realtime in that day and age.

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[Khyber]

I thought we had editors too, but the submission of mine that made it on the front page seems to have been "edited" to make me look like a whiny bitch. Such is the way of Slashdot?

1. Keep all sensationalist stuff in the front-page article
2. "edit" out the relevant information in the actual submission
3. Watch as hundreds of Slashdotters get mislead by editorial idiocy, fail to get a whole picture, and uselessly flame the article submitter
4. laugh and profit at submitter's expense.

Nice way to treat those that bother to visit your page.

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[TrappedByMyself]

It was a joke. I dug up the speech

Here is more of the quote:
" Here's another interesting example of where basic research can help change quality of life or provide practical applications for people. The government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the Ipod. I tune into the Ipod occasionally, you know? (Laughter.) Basic research to meet one set of objectives can lead to interesting ideas for our society. It helps us remain competitive. So the government should double the commitment to the most basic -- critical research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years. I look forward to Congress to doubling that commitment."

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[Keebler71]

Actually... if you ask me it is probably a typo and was supposed to be a semicolon. (Same meaning as your ii)

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[Gadzinka]

They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.

Which just shows shortsightedness of Bush's and other administrations, when they deem some research as "inapropriate" and cut the funds. After sth like this (and a large those of Connections) one can clearly see, that you never know what one research program will lead to or whether it will be (ethically) good or bad.

Robert

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[kindbud]

I'm no fan of the US president. But it irritates me to see the personality attacks instead of substantive policy attacks.

Bush is famous for his malaprops. This is part of his character, his public persona. He makes these bizarre sentence construction errors all the time. There are other weird turns of phrase in that speech, like one where he used the word "nanotechnology" three times in a sentence, where other people would have used "it" after the first mention. But this one takes the cake. It's funny, laugh!

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[VoidWraith]

Even having read that, I still think a few levels up, idea (ii) was more correct. I refer to "Basic research to meet one set of objectives can lead to interesting ideas for our society." Seems to me that the joke was "I tune into the Ipod occasionally, you know?"

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[MythMoth]

Yes. Footage of the speech is online here:
http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/Category.asp?C=7907 4

The paragraph in question is about 2'08" into the second half of the speech (links top right on that page).

It's clear from his emphasis that he is using meaning (ii), and that the admittedly feeble joke was indeed the "I tune into the iPod occasionally you know?"

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[MythMoth]

Bush is famous for his malaprops.

More famous than the malaprops generally deserve. Anyone doing public speaking will mis-speak. Bush has unfortunately acquired a reputation for this, and so he can only accumulate malapropisms and never lose the taint.

Which I guess is part of the rough and tumble of politics, and no skin off my nose. But when he actually says something perfectly reasonable and this is cast as "Bush says something stupid again" then it's kind of irritating and should be pointed out.

Hell, he's arguing "basic research is a Good Thing", which is hardly a line that the slashdot collective would reject, even if it came from the mouth of the Great Satan^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Bill Gates himself...

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[Sj0]

The worst part is that defecit boy discredits himself without resorting to trash journalism.

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[Compuser]

BUSH said that?? (sorry to quote a guy a few posts up).
The same guy who is in the process of slashing NIH
budget and who will hold NSF budget essentially flat?
What am I missing?

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[Overly Critical Guy]

There was no bizarre sentence construction. He laughed after the iPod quip. Slashdot and Engadget just aren't reporting it (for some reason...).

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[bill_mcgonigle]

Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?

Since the audience started posting more comments (read ad impressions) about these stories. If we stop, they'll stop.

Next up, vi vs. emacs.

Re:Sounds like a (bad) joke to me

[lukesl]

Exactly. The President who declared war on science and scientific funding finally sees it in his political interests to start some serious pandering. I wish we had a responsible press that would report on this hypocrisy.

Ah-HAH!

[jettoki]

This proves my conspiracy theory. You think you're listening to music, but in reality, your brain juice is being sucked out and put to nefarious use by the CIA.

The truth is out there, my friends! Protect your precious bodily fluids!

Re:Ah-HAH!

[slavik1337]

Hey, easy on the CIA. I might be higher by them someday. We wouldn't want you to disappear, now do we?

Re:Ah-HAH!

[Sam Nitzberg]

Actually, I've got it on good authority that the CIA has had an active interest in identifying the roots of the effect of music on America's youth -

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/blondie/thejamwasmo vingchrissteinanddebbieharryremix.html

Re:Ah-HAH!

[Epsillon]

Actually, given the state of modern music, I would have to say that your "brain juice" was long gone already if you're listening to it.

Just my opinion, of course.

Re:Ah-HAH!

[eclectro]

your brain juice is being sucked out and put to nefarious use by the CIA.

Then you are ready to go as commentator on the FOX news channel.

Logical disconnect

[MadUndergrad]

FTFA:

"the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression."

Yes, that seems reasonable enough. The government does lots of research, much of which benefits private companies.

"They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."

The thing about this statement, is that they don't actually state a reason. They say there was a reason, then they go on to say that the research resulted in the ipod. The result is not a reason.

The sheer vagueness and lack of point to this article makes me want to smack whoever wrote it.

Re:Logical disconnect

[larry bagina]

it was posted by Zonk. That's a pretty good indication that the article is vague and lacks a point.

Re:Logical disconnect

[tsa]

Come on, it's a joke. No need to get worked up about it.

I'm rich!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well to take it to the logical extremes, the people elected the government who decided to fund these projects with their tax dollars.

Which means I indirectly contributed about a hundredth trillionth trillionth percent to the development of the iPod... which means based on iPod sales I'm owed about $400,000 in royalties, if my calculations are correct.

Re:I'm rich!

[MooUK]

You contributed the money; you didn't perform the research. Sorry, no royalties for you!

Taxe Money

[SurfSlade]

1. Use your Taxe money to develop the Ipod.

2. Ipod consumer pay taxes on purchases

3. Apple pay taxes on all money they've made from Ipod

4. Apple employees pay taxes on their income.

5. .....

6. Profits !

-1: Troll

[MythMoth]

He didn't say "we invented the iPod". He didn't say "We invented MP3".

What he did say, according to the article, was: "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."

I don't think there's anything outrageous or untrue in there. And it's so short an excerpt that it's impossible to say what the overall tone of the speech was. Quite possibly this was taken out of context.

So an obviously partisan article and an inept Slashdot summary. Don't bother to read TFA.

Since this will obviously raise the spectre of the "Al Gore invented the internet" meme, I'd like to take the opportunity to remind people that Robert Kahn and Vincent Cerf (who arguably did invent the internet) have defended Gore's actual statement, with the observation that: "No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time."

Re:-1: Troll

[Jeremi]

What he did say, according to the article, was: "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."

I don't think there's anything outrageous or untrue in there.

Maybe not outrageous, but it is (a) untrue and (b) stupid. It's ludicrous to imagine the government R&D meeting back in, say, 1994, where the director says "gentlemen, in 2001 the Apple Corporation will be releasing a product called the iPod. In order for them to do so on schedule, they will need technologies A, B, and C, so we've got to start researching those technologies now. Get to work!"

It might be that the research was done with the idea of enabling portable computing devices, and they might have even imagined a portable music player as one possible application, but to assert that the research was done "for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod" suggests that somebody has a very poor understanding of cause and effect.

Granted, it's probable just that Bush simply bungled his delivery of the line, something he is famous for. But either way it reflects poorly on the world's sole superpower to have a leader whose thinking is so muddled that he can't communicate properly.

Re:-1: Troll

[MythMoth]

Oh noes, the Republican Retard fails to get his own blowup doll's joke and now he's all pissy.

I'm British, and I'm politically left wing. And you're an illiterate dickhead.

Re:-1: Troll

[MythMoth]

Maybe not outrageous, but it is (a) untrue and (b) stupid. It's ludicrous to imagine the government R&D meeting back in, say, 1994, where the director says "gentlemen, in 2001 the Apple Corporation will be releasing a product called the iPod.

You're misinterpreting this poorly typeset transliteration of his speech. Check out the actual emphasis he used here (Top right, second link, 2 minutes 8 seconds in):
http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/Category.asp?C=7907 4

Re:-1: Troll

[16K Ram Pack]

There's a large untruth in there:-

They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod

Maybe you are reading this different to me (it doesn't scan too well), but the assertion to me is that the government did the research so someone could develop an iPod.

They didn't do it "for one reason" and it certainly would have had nothing to do with the iPod. It's like arguing that Spencer Silver of 3M deliberately made a faulty adhesive with the intention of creating the Post-it note.

Re:-1: Troll

[gad_zuki!]

Partisan and inept? Maybe you didn't notice the humor icon in the article. No one is taking this seriously.

Secondly, this is not comparable to what Al Gore has been getting from just about everyone in regards to his comment about the internet. He said he helped "create" the internet, not "invent it." Bush's speech follows:

They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.

Mouse over the foot. "Its funny. Laugh."

He did not say they invented the iPod..

[jlp2097]

From TFA:

"The government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."

So he's only claiming the funding of research for ingredients that would eventually be used in the iPod. He's not claiming that they have developed the iPod. Sounds like press hype to me.

Re:He did not say they invented the iPod..

[kindbud]

So he's only claiming the funding of research for ingredients that would eventually be used in the iPod.

No, the words he used come out claiming that the research was funded solely with the intent to develop the iPod. That's what makes this particular Bushism so amusing. Of course I don't think Bush meant that, that's what a malapropism is. Bush is a veritable fountain of them, and this one's a goody.

Who to believe?

[zaguar]

George W. Bush "invented" the iPod, and Al Gore "invented" the internet (and the Algorithm). Seems like I can't trust either side of politics at the moment!

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[baadger]

iPod's are weapons of mass destruction too, deafening the nation since just after 9-11 (october 2001).

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[strider44]

Actually another country had a few WMDs before Iraq.

Alas I don't like to get into political conversations, but I also don't like people smugly saying something so blatently wrong even more.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Tx]

If there's one thing worse than getting busted for shit, it's getting busted for shit after you flushed it already.

Vint Cerf said Al Gore was instrumental...

[Futurepower(R)]

In a private email message, Vint Cerf told me that it was true that Al Gore was instrumental in the development of the Internet. Before Mr. Gore's involvement, it was a semi-private utility known as ArpaNet and NSFNet. Mr. Gore championed the development of the private network as a public utility. This was years before Bill Gates, for example, recognized its importance.

Re:Vint Cerf said Al Gore was instrumental...

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

This was years before Bill Gates, for example, recognized its importance.

Practically everyone recognized the importance of the Internet before Bill Gates did. Hell, I probably did.

Re:Vint Cerf said Al Gore was instrumental...

[LinuxLuver]

Correct. I remember in 1988 when Gore was championing the opening up of the Internet for public use......when most people had no idea it even existed. He DID sponsor the bill the made the Internet what it is today..... All credit to him....and all crud dumped on the folks who have tried to misrepresent what he did.

Re:Vint Cerf said Al Gore was instrumental...

[LinuxLuver]

He DID create it as it is today - an open, public network.

If he claimed anywhere to have invented the technology, I haven't heard that. But his claim - as a legislator - to have created 'the Internet' is valid in that context.

Re:Vint Cerf said Al Gore was instrumental...

[LinuxLuver]

Your narrow focus on bits and bytes appears intended to ignore the very important change in use from purely governmental / academic to open and ready for business as well. You can ignore it if you like. But I won't join you in doing so. The Internet of today isn't the environment it was before Gore's law was passed. Gore did enable the Internet of today - encompassing in that term not just the OSI layers but also the way we use them. YOu can define it your way - and that's OK. But it's not a definition I agree with or accept.

He made a funny!

[riptide_dot]

Bush had to have said this to get a laugh. If he pulled it off and got a laugh, I'm honestly surprised. Not because I don't think it is funny - it is. I'm just really surprised to hear something so witty from the man that gave us these gems:

"Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." --George W. Bush, Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005

"Wow! Brazil is big." --George W. Bush, after being shown a map of Brazil by Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brasilia, Brazil, Nov. 6, 2005

"It's in our country's interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm's way." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005

"I can only speak to myself." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005

Re:He made a funny!

[MooUK]

As said above by several people, I think what he intended to say was that there was research done into these areas for one purpose (probably military uses), but later turned out that this research was vital in the design of the iPod.

Funny how much difference leaving out one minor clause of a sentence makes.

Re:He made a funny!

[soft_guy]

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
by George W. Bush

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!

Re:He made a funny!

[eclectro]

No matter what this attempt at a joke may be, the fact is that Dubya massacres the english language on a regular basis.

Re:He made a funny!

[eclectro]

Don't forget one of the all time greats;

"Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." --President George W. Bush, Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004

Personally I think he should have registered himself as a sex-offender after that comment.

Re:He made a funny!

[adrianmonk]

Bush had to have said this to get a laugh.

Actually, Bush spoke at my sister's commencement ceremony at the University of Texas at Austin back when he was the Governor of Texas, and I do not know whether he wrote his own material, but he had several good jokes in his speech, and he delivered them well and got several good laughs out of the audience. One of the jokes was where he was going on quite earnestly about how you should hold true to your values in life, and he started listing off important values like family, your religion, hard work, and one of the values he listed was that baseball should always be played on real grass and never astroturf. It was pretty funny even to me, and I am one who easily tires of sports jokes and sports analogies in speeches.

In fact, having been there and gotten a taste of Bush's sense of humor, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the iPod thing was totally intended as a joke. I can picture his delivery, and it probably would be pretty funny.

Re:He made a funny!

[Jace of Fuse!]

"I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me."

I realize this is your SIG, but it would have been really funny had it been one of his quotes. The idea of this happening to the president is just kind of funny in an "America's Funniest White House Videos" kind of way.

To submitter and writer of the article

[strider44]

Lets see if I get this right...

- * <-- joke
- o
-\|/ <-- you
-/ \

Re:To submitter and writer of the article

[Megane]

That looks sort of familiar...

- #
-_|_
-\o/ <-- guitar
-/_\

Ex-cellent!

Re:To submitter and writer of the article

[hey!]

You seem to be the only person here who's noticed that this article appears to be a JOKE!

Ah -- you must be the proverbial anthropologist from Mars. And I see you haven't worked out how politics works.

It's not the truth of an accusation that wounds your opponent. It's how true it sounds.

Political truth is what you get when you take religious truth and distill out the useless ethical and spiritual lessons. You're left with something that to the senses sounds, looks, smells, tastes, and feels more true than Truth. In the same way that if a real bannana hits your taste buds like a tack hammer, then synthetic bananna flavor extract must be a sledge hammer.

Re:To submitter and writer of the article

[zen-theorist]

unfortunately, the state of affairs is worse than that:

- * ~~~ average letterman joke

- * ~~~ average bush joke
- o
-\|/ ~~~ you
-/ \

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[trophy]

Don't you mean Weapons of Ass Destruction? No, wait.. that was some other thing.. *caugh*

Re:Nice Addition

[ikejam]

yes they are a bunch of iDiots.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe how stupid WMD believers can be, OIL was the unique weapon of mass destruction they _had_, destruction for them of course.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[barefootgenius]

And the American government still does.

Re:Bush / ipod

[sebi]

[...] are any of you watching Cheney?

Of course we aren't. Don't want to get shot in the face after all.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[ciroknight]

Not that I disagree with you, but perhaps a more credible news source would have made your point clearer, such as The BBC.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Homology]

Too bad for Saddam that he decided to play chicken with the weapons inspectors instead of complying fully as he was required to do.

The "full compliance" demand was manufactured by the US administration as an excuse to invade Iraq. According to Hans Blix (head of UN inspection teams) they complied well enough, not perfect, though. Moreover, much of the information the inspection teams was given from USA was very wrong or outright lies designed to provoke a reaction from the Iraqi government.

If he hadn't decided to bluff, then he might very well still be torturing his people to death in large numbers today.

Where Saddam stopped, USA continued, and committing many war crimes as well. Why do you think that USA is so hated by the general population in the Middle-East?

Re: Most of us expected Gore flaming...

[Cheech Wizard]

Al Gore WAS critical in securing the funding that made the DARPA project that became the Internet possible. Historical fact.

myths vs fact

[saiha]

Myth: Bush is an idiot.
Fact: Bush optimized the original MP3 codec and worked with top engineers to create the ipod.

US government supplied weapons of mass destruction

[Cheech Wizard]

The US government supplied 'weapons of mass destruction' to Iraq and Saddam Hussain in 1988 and earlier. Imagine that...

Want to read more?

[Futurepower(R)]

The mis-interpretation of Gore's words came from a dishonest political attack.

Anyone wanting to read more may be interested in a quote from Wikipedia's History of the Internet: "Funding for Mosaic [the first browser] came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by then-Senator Al Gore's High Performance Computing Act of 1991."

Here's a quote from one of Wikipedia's articles about Al Gore: 'His [Al Gore's] statement caused no surprise at the time, and none of the journalists who covered it thought it worth including in their stories. However, two days later, the Republican Party began issuing press releases and statements denouncing Gore for claiming to have "invented the Internet".'

Another Wikipedia article about Gore quotes Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf: "...as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time."

Interesting fact: IMDB says that the character Oliver in the movie "Love Story" was partly based on Al Gore. Al Gore had been a roommate of Tommy Lee Jones, who appears in the movie.

Re:Want to read more?

[nexusone]

Hum... Left out George Bush (Elder), signed the bill into law.

But the truth is Al Gore did not come up with this bill on his own, he was talked into it by Leonard Kleinrock, Ph.D and others. And from their papers agreed this needed to be funded.

Re:Want to read more?

[WindBourne]

came from a dishonest political attack.

As opposed to what, an honest political attack?

Re:Want to read more?

[Sj0]

I think attacks on Video News Releases and illegal prisons in Cuba are honest political attacks, depending on who they're coming from.

Re:Want to read more?

[Anonymous Coward]

Guantanmo isn't an "illegal prison." The liberal media hates Bush and portrays it as a worse place than it is.

A UCLA/Stanford study proved that most of the media leaned left, and polls taken showed over 80% of journalists calling themselves Democrats.

Re:Want to read more?

[samkass]

As opposed to what, an honest political attack?

YES! It is possible to attack your political opponents in an honest way. Instead, we have liars like the Swiftboat Veterans, and Karl Rove telling southerners that John McCain has a black baby and is crazy from being a POW. I miss the days before FOX News.

Re:Want to read more?

[Sj0]

"Left" doesn't mean much to me. It's part of that fuzzy political logic that lets people pick up an ideology and never have to bother looking at what they actually think.

Frankly, it's just the sort of behaviour from the proles that made me give up on democracy: People aren't willing to be democrats, thus rendering the process useless. Now it's just a way of legitimizing a government so they don't have to go to war with those who disagree with the leadership.

And by the way, Every source I've seen says that holding prisoners indefinitely is against US law.

Re:Want to read more?

[samkass]

Here's part of a speech Al Gore entered into the Congressional Record in 1986, almost exactly 20 years ago. At the time, I remember running a BBS on a 2400bps modem-- I was probably one of the geekier people among the general population then-- but even then I think Gore probably had more vision on the topic than any geek I knew. I personally think it's pretty obvious how much the Gore Vice-Presidency must have advanced the state-of-the-art over what may have happened if, say, Quayle had remained Vice-President. I honestly think Slashdot exists in no small part because of Gore's vision...

[Note that text entered in the Congressional Record is supposed to be all-caps, but Slashdot disallows that, so it's in all lowercase.]

both of these amendments seek new information on critical problems of today. the computer network study act is designed to answer critical questions on the needs of computer telecommunications systems over the next 15 years. for example, what are the future requirements for computers in terms of quantity and quality of data transmission, data security, and softwear [SIC] compatibility? what equipment must be developed to take advantage of the high transmission rates offered by fiber optic systems?

both systems designed to handle the special needs of supercomputers and systems designed to meet the needs of smaller research computers will be evaluated. the emphasis is on research computers, but the users of all computers will benefit from this study. today, we can bank by computer, shop by computer, and send letters by computer. only a few companies and individuals use these services, but the number is growing and existing capabilities are limited.

in order to cope with the explosion of computer use in the country, we must look to new ways to advance the state-of-the-art in telecommunications -- new ways to increase the speed and quality of the data transmission. without these improvements, the telecommunication networks face data bottlenecks like those we face every day on our crowded highways.

the private sector is already aware of the need to evaluate and adopt new technologies. one promising technology is the development of fiber optic systems for voice and data transmission. eventually we will see a system of fiber optic systems being installed nationwide.

america's highways transport people and materials across the country. federal freeways connect with state highways which connect in turn with county roads and city streets. to transport data and ideas, we will need a telecommunications highway connecting users coast to coast, state to state, city to city. the study required in this amendment will identify the problems and opportunities the nation will face in establishing that highway.

Re:Want to read more?

[Swift2001]

Strangely enough, an honest political attack is possible. If you're a politician who proposes ending Medicare, say, it's honest to attack you. Others may not agree that it's a bad thing to do, but there's nothing dishonest about attacking a politican for what he said or what he stands for. Attacking someone for something he didn't say is "a dishonest" attack.

Re:Want to read more?

[WindBourne]

Gitmo is not illegal. What we are doing there, is. It violates every one of our laws and conventions that we have signed. But since few in the white house served and NONE have been to war, I am not surprised.

As to how we should be treating these people, well, they are POWs. They are not citizens, so they can not be tried as such. But they are soldiers and to say otherwise, is a lie. They should all be in a POW camp with the geneva convention being applied until the end of the war with bin ladin and the rest of the terrorists.

Now, as to the media leaning left, you have to be kidding me. Show me any real study and the result, coward. In fact, I doubt that it has any validity. It reminds of me how republicans claim that "Al Gore developed the internet" statement. Every time I hear that CNN is a liberal news, I have to laugh. None of the main stream media are liberal. Not one. Now, if you say that they are sensationalists, well, yes. They chase stories and they twist them. All during the 90's, every news media looked like they were doing a fox make over. It was total BS. Worse, right after 9/11, they all got behind the president. Great. Lets ignore all the issues. Our invasion of iraq was wrong and should have been looked at much harder than it was. The media should be putting pressure on the white house for the lies, cowardarce, and treason related to such as issue as Valerie Plame, Sibel Edmunds, the give away contracts to Halliburton, how are money is being spent in iraq, etc. Bush is getting such an easy ride, it is ridiculus.

Re:Want to read more?

[Aexia]

Interesting fact: IMDB says that the character Oliver in the movie "Love Story" was partly based on Al Gore. Al Gore had been a roommate of Tommy Lee Jones, who appears in the movie.

Which brings up another manufactured attack by the right-wing noise machine. Gore mentioned in an interview that he had read in another interview that the author, Erich Segal, who knew Gore in college, had based the lead in Love Story on him.

Republicans and all their media outlets would later assail Gore for making it up... nevermind that that Erich Segal confirmed to the New York Times that yes, the male lead was indeed based on Gore.

Re:Want to read more?

[aichpvee]

Not liberal? Well what do you call THIS!?!?!? Huh, that's what I thought!

Re:Want to read more?

[bheading]

As to how we should be treating these people, well, they are POWs. They are not citizens, so they can not be tried as such. But they are soldiers and to say otherwise, is a lie. They should all be in a POW camp with the geneva convention being applied until the end of the war with bin ladin and the rest of the terrorists.

Please correct me if I'm wrong about this aspect of US government, but the only body with the authority to declare war is Congress.

Congress has not declared war, and therefore Gitmo is illegal. Correct ?

Re:Want to read more?

[smitth1276]

No, that is incorrect. The Congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force constitutes a de facto declaration of war for legal purposes. You can reference Hamdi v Rumsfeld for the legal justification for that.

Re:Want to read more?

[Swift2001]

Jeez, what's a guy gotta do? Politicians don't usually "come up" with ideas all by himself. He's not an engineer, he's a politician. He took ideas from people who knew first-hand. He could have said, ah, who cares? Let the whole thing stay private! But he didn't. Another person who recognized the importance of the Internet, to be fair, was Newt Gingrich.

Re:Want to read more?

[aichpvee]

You fucking moron, you're supposed to watch the video.

Re:Want to read more?

[Scudsucker]

I did watch the video, and it's Tom Delay chatting with Chris Matthews(?) about nothing in particular. WTF is your point?

Re:Too bad he didn't do research on Iran before

[daverabbitz]

>And we have $75 a barell oil....

1. Own (buy?) shares in American (and Saudi?) oil producers.
2. Declare war on oil producing nations, under guise of counter-terrorism.
3. Supply of foriegn oil decreases, American and Saudi oil supplies stay as they were.
3. Less oil being traded, but yours is worth more.
4. Profit!

Re:Too bad he didn't do research on Iran before

[daverabbitz]

Just to clarify, I think bush and co intended for the price of oil to increase. Pretty obvious considering how much shares Bush owns.

Re:"U.S. Government Developed the iPod" . . . ?

[Teun]

Now you mention it, this is a clear-cut example of ID.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think that USA is so hated by the general population in the Middle-East?

You misspelled world.

Just like the U.K. government invented...

[simonjp]

...robotic lapdog party leaders; programmed to obey their owner...

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Vlad2.0]

omg, and so does France, it's a conspiracy!

You know what is really funny?

[SmallFurryCreature]

He was re-elected. So say of George W. Bush what you like but if he is a moron what the hell does that make the majority of americans who elected him. (Well majority of voting americans anyway).

Remember the old saying, in the land of the blind, one-eye is king. Now in what kind of land could a certified idiot be president.

I think you know the answer.

Not that the rest of the world is any better.

Re:You know what is really funny?

[TheNetAvenger]

does that make the majority of americans who elected him.

Actually, only a small percentage of Americans voted for him. The problem is, most people did not, or were 'unable' to vote...

(Suppressing votes is a key to fundamental leaders winning; take a look at Iran for example, less than 15% of the population voted for their current leader as well.)

Watch that generalization brush when you blindly use it to paint on such a big canvas. Most people in the US think Bush is an illiterate fool with psychopathic tendencies. (Do a search on voter fraud and all the indictments in just the last year from 2004 election alone, especially all the indictments from a key state, Ohio.)

Check out http://www.airamericaradio.com/ for a view from the majority of Americans...

Re:You know what is really funny?

[Firethorn]

I'd say that it had more to do with the lousyness of who the Democrats put up. Kerry's career as a Senator gave very good indicators as to his politics. You only had to look at his voting record to see that it didn't match what was coming out of his mouth. He'd even say one thing before a crowd, then another two days later to another. That was a better campaign strategy 20 years ago, but you can't do that today, the internet will spread word of the inconsistancies. He came across as a man who likes every non-military spending bill he sees, every taxation(as long as it doesn't hit the uber-rich like him), every gun control(he even interuppted his campaign to vote for the AWB), expansion of government, etc...

The George Bush vs. John Kerry Election had more people voting against the other guy than any I've heard of before. I threw my vote to a third party candidate because I couldn't stand to vote for either of them, but I would have voted for Bush if I felt Kerry had a chance of winning my state.

Don't take it as a vote for Bush, it would have been against Kerry.

Re:You know what is really funny?

[The Man From Sears]

"He[Kerry] came across as a man who likes every non-military spending bill he sees, every taxation(as long as it doesn't hit the uber-rich like him), every gun control(he even interuppted his campaign to vote for the AWB), expansion of government, etc..."

At least Kerry would stop to take care of his duties as Senator while campaining, Bush couldn't be bothered to respond to hurricane Katrina when it was his duty to do so.

Re:You know what is really funny?

[maraist]

Well, when your options are a dush and a turd sandwhich, what do you want? American Idol?

Re:You know what is really funny?

[Scudsucker]

Oh, Kerry certianally was inept, but not for any of the reasons you suggest.

Kerry's career as a Senator gave very good indicators as to his politics. You only had to look at his voting record to see that it didn't match what was coming out of his mouth. He'd even say one thing before a crowd, then another two days later to another.

That was the GOP spin, but GOP spin and reality seldom have anything to do with eachother. Kerry's instant responce to any charges of "flip flopping" should have been "yeah, well at least I didn't take credit for legislation I vetoed." You see, during one of the 2000 debates, Bush took credit for Texas being the first state to allow states to sue their HMO's, when in fact he vetoed the bill. The media was far too obsessed with inventing Gore "fibs" at the time to take notice, however.

The problem the Dems have is that they can run very tough races against other Dems. But against a Republican, they suddenly turn into spinless pussies for no apprant reason. It's as if all the Democrats campaign managers and consultants were on the GOP payroll.

Re:You know what is really funny?

[Scudsucker]

so what the HELL are you smoking?!

Florida's felon list. Black districts in Ohio having a third the number of machines needed, resulting in some people having to stand in line for many hours to vote. What are YOU smoking?

Re:You know what is really funny?

[theLOUDroom]

He was re-elected. So say of George W. Bush what you like but if he is a moron what the hell does that make the majority of americans who elected him.


IMO, Bush was NEVER elected by a majority of Americans, but there is not sufficient evidence to prove that he was.

Bush played with the old boy network and the electoral college to get into office by rigging elections. He had help from his brother in Floida and help from Diebold in other states, possibly Traid as well.

Re:You know what is really funny?

[killjoe]

What an odd statement. So you would rather vote for an incompetent, incorehent, illeterate war pig, chicken hawk then a lying senator?

Holy crap!. At least Kerry could carry on a conversation in english and not embarass the nation in front of the entire world. Oh and how could kerry possibly done a worse job? How could anybody?

Re:You know what is really funny?

[Firethorn]

And as I'm a very anti-gun control person, he lost my vote at that moment.

As for responding to the hurricane, My impression is that the City of New Orleans and Louisiana are the ones that fell down. Federal response was within federal time guidelines. Besides, people should be able to take care of themselves for a few days. I mean, I can survive, evacuated, for over three days with just what I can carry from my place, fairly comfortably.

My grandparents live down in the hurricane zone. The feds usually take a week to show up in their area afterwards. It's always been that way.

Re:You know what is really funny?

[Firethorn]

You see, during one of the 2000 debates, Bush took credit for Texas being the first state to allow states to sue their HMO's, when in fact he vetoed the bill. The media was far too obsessed with inventing Gore "fibs" at the time to take notice, however.

Yeah, remember what I said. "I voted for a third party". I'm sorry, but Kerry rubbed me the wrong way. 'Everything I object to about Bush, Kerry's worse'. I automatically assume that politicians lie, but the question is how much?

The problem the Dems have is that they can run very tough races against other Dems. But against a Republican, they suddenly turn into spinless pussies for no apprant reason. It's as if all the Democrats campaign managers and consultants were on the GOP payroll.

I think that it's they know how to campaign for democrat votes, but not for moderate/republican votes. Thus, they say and take positions that tend to turn off the moderates.

And before you think that I'm a tool of the republican party, I'll give a quick rundown on my positions:
1: Anti-gun control

Re:You know what is really funny?

[Firethorn]

First, I didn't vote for him. I couldn't vote for Kerry either. Everthing I disliked about Bush, I felt Kerry was worse. Though today I wonder if returning to gridlock might have been better.

I can understand the president just fine. Of course, having grown up in the midwest, my speech patterns are closer to his than the east coast's.

Just so you understand that I'm a moderate, not a tool of the republicans, here's my positions:
1. Anti gun-control. I don't hunt, I do own guns. Leave them alone.
2. Pro choice
3. Pro drug legalization(End the war on (some) drugs!
4. Pro Death penalty
5. Balance the bloody budget
6. I have no objection to gay marriage
7. I'd like to see social security go away in favor of personal savings.

You could say that I'm a pro-freedom, economic conservative, social liberal. AKA libertarian.

Re:You know what is really funny?

[Scudsucker]

Yeah, remember what I said. "I voted for a third party". I'm sorry, but Kerry rubbed me the wrong way. 'Everything I object to about Bush, Kerry's worse'. I automatically assume that politicians lie, but the question is how much?

Okay, name me some of Kerry's flaws that aren't shared by Bush to a greater degree.

I think that it's they know how to campaign for democrat votes, but not for moderate/republican votes. Thus, they say and take positions that tend to turn off the moderates.

Except that the Democratic party today is a very conservative party. The Dems today are more conservative than the GOP was 30 years ago, before the God-gun nut-uber capitalist jihad was assembled. Which should tell you something about where the GOP is these days. So not only do the Dems stances match up much better with moderates, they also match up better with most Republican voters as well. See What's the matter with Kansas for examples.

And before you think that I'm a tool of the republican party, I'll give a quick rundown on my positions:
1: Anti-gun control

Ah yes. This reminds me of a single issue voter I knew of around the time of the election, who delcared he would not vote for Kerry because he would support gun control. I pointed out that Bush also supported gun control, when he said he would resign the assualt weapons ban. He went ahead and voted for Bush anyway, as opposed to the Libertarian candidate, for example. It's awsome when principles turn out to be an excuse.

Re:You know what is really funny?

[TheNetAvenger]

Has any national candiate endorsed by Air America ever won an election

Considering they don't endorse canidates, I would doubt it... Some of the hosts supports canidates, but unlike right wing radio, they don't unilaterally agree and drink the republican kool aid...

Oh, and ya, lost of canidates that have been supported by some of the hosts have, but since some of the other hosts supported other people, not ALL could possibly have won...

Ok, time for you kool-aid, don't want your republican mind control to wear off and actually let you think for yourself.

Try again...

Re:You know what is really funny?

[TheNetAvenger]

Not smoking anything, but I do know how to read past a 3rd grade level. More than I can say about the President....

Oh if you can read, here check out some of the lastest news bits on the 2004 election.

There are tons of links to every major Media and News outlet if you can figure out how to type 2004 voter fraud in Google. But in case you can't here is a link to get you started that monitors the latest information.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/archives/cat_vot e_fraud.html

Re:You know what is really funny?

[Firethorn]

Okay, name me some of Kerry's flaws that aren't shared by Bush to a greater degree.

Position on gun control. Spending habits, as bad as bush is.

Except that the Democratic party today is a very conservative party. The Dems today are more conservative than the GOP was 30 years ago, before the God-gun nut-uber capitalist jihad was assembled.

Say what? Maybe the party is, but I find many democratic candidates to be downright socialists.

Ah yes. This reminds me of a single issue voter I knew of around the time of the election, who delcared he would not vote for Kerry because he would support gun control. I pointed out that Bush also supported gun control, when he said he would resign the assualt weapons ban. He went ahead and voted for Bush anyway, as opposed to the Libertarian candidate, for example. It's awsome when principles turn out to be an excuse.

I, at least, voted libertarian even though I believe Badnirk would have been a bad president. Though, now, maybe not so bad. And the fact remains, at least Bush let the AWB die a quite death, whereas Kerry was promising to activly pursue it. Activly pursue a cosmetic gun law that had no effect on violent gun crime.

Re:You know what is really funny?

[Scudsucker]

so because ohio had some problems

Problems that just affected black voters, who generally vote Democratic. Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, was in charge of the election while at the same time being co-chair of Bush's re-election committee for his state, a conflict of interest of astronomical, clusterfucking proportions.

brilliant logic (for slashdot)

For someone with your talent for missing the obvious, it probably is.

Re:You know what is really funny?

[Scudsucker]

Okay, name me some of Kerry's flaws that aren't shared by Bush to a greater degree.
  Position on gun control.

Only to an infintesimal degree. Bush has said he would resign the assualt weapons ban, supported background checks at gun shows, spending federal money on trigger locks and all existing gun laws. The man supports gun control, end of story. The only difference between the two in the 2004 campaign is that Kerry would have pushed for a renewed ban on assault weapons as opposed to Bush saying he would only sign it if passed by Congress. If it comes down to "the lesser of two evils", then sure, vote for Bush. But harboring a deep dislike for Kerry over the issue of gun control while letting Bush slide is straight up hypocracy.

Spending habits, as bad as bush is.

Completely false. The "I voted for the war before I voted against it" line that got Kerry in so much flack was because he voted for the measure that would have gotten the money by recinding some of Bush's tax cuts, and then voted against the one that just piled more cash on the deficit mountain.

Say what? Maybe the party is, but I find many democratic candidates to be downright socialists.

Then either Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez have immigrated to the United States, registered as Democrats and are now running for office in your district, or your idea of "socialism" doesn't have anything to do with reality.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, while I'm sure it hasn't done much to endear them to the average man in the mosque, the USA was hated by people in the middle east well before any of their Iraqi adventures. The bigger fallout from the Iraq war has been the damage to America's standing amongst their allies and other friendly nations. Even if the USA is stronger, nobody likes a greedy lying bully.

Hmm?

[Ape_the_Dog]

I don't understand what he has to gain here. Is it a politicians job to make iPods? Not as far as I can tell. Is this what people expect him to do? No. What is his politican gain from this?

Nobody, as far as I can tell, will respond with: "Nice job, president". This won't get him any new voters (or at least, I truly hope it doesn't). It looks like a joke to me.

From the article, I get the impression Bush is almost claiming they invented all of those things entirely with the creation of an iPod in mind, which is obviously not true either. There was no foresight - the iPod was created using several of those things he mentions, sure, but those things were not created simply so an iPod could one day be made. This seems ridiculous. Surely there were far better reasons why researchers invented all the components with which the iPod was made possible - yet it's presented as if the iPod was the only goal here.

This is a strange speech. So, again, it looks like a joke to me - or possibly somebody spotted the potential for creating some internet hype here (because nobody checks facts on the internet, and any mention of apple and ipods gets lots of internet exposure) and decided to grab their 15 megabytes of fame.

Re:Hmm?

[Darthmalt]

It was a joke meant to make a point. That point was that basic research may not yeild any major breakthroughs right away. But when you combine them with other research you can produce usefull products Basically he's trying drum up support for an increase in baisc physical science research funding.

Bush explains his iPod technology

[mincognito]

Bush : Beach Boys, Beatles, let's see, Alan Jackson, Alan Jackson, Alejandro, Alison Krauss, the Angels, the Archies, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles, Dan McLean. Remember him? Hume: Don McLean. Bush: I mean, Don McLean. Hume: Does "American Pie," right? Bush: Great song. Hume: Yes, yes, great song. Unidentified male: . . . which ones do you play? Bush: All of these. I put it on shuffle. Dwight Yoakam. I've got the Shuffle, the, what is it called? The little. Hume: Shuffle. Bush: It looks like. Hume: The Shuffle. That is the name of one of the models. Bush: Yes, the Shuffle. Hume: Called the Shuffle. Bush: Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle. Hume: So you -- it plays . . . Bush: Put it in my pocket, got the ear things on. Hume: So it plays them in a random order. Bush: Yes. Hume: So you don't know what you're going to going to get. Bush: No. Hume: But you know -- Bush: And if you don't like it, you have got your little advance button. It's pretty high-tech stuff. Hume: . . . be good to have one of those at home, wouldn't it? Bush: Oh? Hume: Yes, hit the button and whatever it is that's in your head -- gone. Bush: . . . it's a bad day, just say, get out of here. Hume: Well, that probably is pretty . . . Bush: That works, too. ( Laughter ) Hume: Yes, right.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[bj8rn]

According to a Foreign Affairs article, Saddam fell victim to his own bluff. One one hand, he was desperate to prove that he had complied with the requests to destroy any WMD; on the other hand, however, he still kept playing the WMD card in regional matters. When he finally did decide that it was time to quit bluffing and prove that he really didn't have a WMD program anymore, these steps were intrepreted as an attempt to cover up existing WMD.

With your sig, you don't see the humor...

[MyNameIsFred]

The man with the sig - "I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me." - doesn't see the humor in "Wow! Brazil is big"... I question your neutrality.

Re:US government supplied weapons of mass destruct

[Nutria]

The US government supplied 'weapons of mass destruction' to Iraq and Saddam Hussain in 1988 and earlier.

As did the French, West Germans and Sovs.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[DrWho520]

Why do you think that USA is so hated by the general population in the Middle-East?

Because we are portrayed as the white, Christian west, the source of all the woe in the Middle East. Because we are the white devil. Because they have been rabble roused into hating us the same way we are continuously rabble roused into hating them. Because we side with Israel.

Because we have power. Because we are not afraid to use that power. Because we know embargoes and condemnations from the UN will NOT stop Iran from producing nuclear weapons, because people will sell around the embargo and no one cares what the UN says. Because the latest people to use our power have used it like a broadsword and not like a scalpel. Because we are the new Rome.

Because we are human and we make mistakes.

Because we want our way of life to remain the same. Because we can choose to be Christian or Muslim. Because we can say what we want. Because we can depose our entire government by stepping to the other side of a curtain and checking the other box. Because we won the Cold War.

Because we lost the Vietnam War.

Because we could fix all of our problems at home at the expense of ignoring everyone else abroad, but we still have the homeless, the illiterate, the destitute and ghettos.

Now mod me down, because I am not part of the group think and my ideas and opinions burn you eyes.

This is nothing new..

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

The government, or more specifically your tax dollars, have developed all kinds of stuff that gets comandeered by business. Good example: Celera. They took a whole shitload of taxpayer funded data in regards to cracking the human genome and built on top of it.

Celera needs to give some credit where credit is due as does Apple. As far as Apple being "innovative" I have been enjoying watching and recording video on my 80 Gig Archos PVR for well over a year now. Apple is only successful because they discovered that marketing actually accounts for something and they are becoming masters at it. That's not evil but it is necessary. You can only cruise on the groovy hipster elitist vibe for so long until you actually have to start showing a profit for your shareholders. (Disclaimer: new iBook G4 owner just this week).

Now that you mention it...

[ai3]

Remember the optimized version of the Fraunhofer codec done by Radium? The guy who did it was called Ignoramus... Bush's secret cracker identity has been uncovered! Impeach him now!11!! http://windows.media.player.mp3.hack.399019.crack- locator.org/

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[joel8x]

Why do you think that USA is so hated by the general population in the Middle-East?

Personally, I think it may have more to do with generations of religious zealotry breeding a general hatred of western culture, and cartel-like governments using that to control the population and secure their own power. Then again, we do pretty much the same thing in USA.

Actually

[stunt_penguin]

he should have been bragging about helping develop the Creative Nomad and Jukebox players that were among the first HD based portable mp3 players- there are a few earlier players, as I'm sure I'll now be told, but the Nomad was one of the first really popular ones. Of course Pinnochio doesn't know the difference, and I suspect that history will see itself rewritten to show that the iPod was the first HD based mp3 player on the market, but Creative were there first.

Now, Apple did an astoundingly good Job(s) in taking the existing clunky models and making a sleek, user friendly player out of more-or-less existing technologies, but by no means were they the inventors of the portable mp3 player.

Re:Actually

[JackAxe]

I didn't know that music player implied a poorly constructed - failure proned - virus infestation. Now that's just the hardware portion, the included software is actually worse.

<]=)

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[dalutong]

To quote the wikipedia article the GP linked to:

"While the United States did not supply full-fledged chemical weapons to Iraq, it did approve private business sales of biological weapon precursors to Iraq, according to a 1994 report issued by the US Senate Committee on Banking"

When will people understand that speaking in absolutist good & evil terms are never true and that it just makes people more hateful. We're all culprits to some degree.

You're right

[bobamu]

there's some kind of preverts everywhere

Lies!

[zerblat]

The US military could never have developed such advanced technology on its own. It's pretty obvious that the Ipod is alien technology planted by alien infiltrators. It's purpose? To damage our hearing so we won't hear when the full-scale invasion comes!

At least, that's my theory.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[neoform]

"Why do you think that USA is so hated by the general population in the Middle-East?"

If the Bush administration has taught me anything, it's that it's because they hate the fact that we stand for freedom. Obviously.

No digg

[Mochatsubo]

Christ, you would think the editors wouldn't have posted this... :)

-w

Don't forget

[cvalente]

The Swedish mathematician who proved a convergence theorem for Fourier series.

without him there would be no IPOD. :p

That is, according to the article in
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/2 7/0548252

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Homology]

Personally, I think it may have more to do with generations of religious zealotry breeding a general hatred of western culture, and cartel-like governments using that to control the population and secure their own power. Then again, we do pretty much the same thing in USA.

USA has a long history of toppling democracies, crushing popular movements and installing/supporting dictatorships in the Middle-East and elsewhere.

These US policies are backlashing fairly often. The USA mostly created, trained and financed those very same groups they are hunting down in their so-called "war on terror". During the Soviet occupation of Afganistan, billons of dollars was poured into these networks. US specialists in terrorism, guerilla/urban warfare and insurgency trained what is to become their enemies.

USA through their puppet governments are crushing down hard on any popular movement for social improvement, democracy or worker rights. Socialists, union activist, academics or generally any on the left side are hunted down and prosecuted. What remains are radical religious movements that hardly stand for any social progress. Yet another backlash. A good example of this is Iran where the brutal US installed was toppled.

The list goes on and on.

Hmm

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Al Gore must be fuming over this statement. It think he thinks he invented the iPod when he was dreaming up the Internet.

For the middle east people

[majortom1981]

You guys forget that alot of the people that are and were in power in the middle east we helped to get there right? Bush is trying to be al gore (with his I invented the internet quotes)

Re:For the middle east people

[Scudsucker]

Bush is trying to be al gore (with his I invented the internet quotes)

Nah, he's just being misquoted, or diliberatly taken out of context. Just like Al Gore.

nice

[penguin-collective]

Well, it' good for rightwingers like Bush to acknowledge the importance of government funding of research; in their free market fervor, right wing ideologues often forget that there is something called a "public good" (that's a technical term--look it up before you comment).

As for the iPod, Apple "invented" it in the sense of design and marketing. Almost all of Apple's underlying technology comes from elsewhere; Apple is "innovative" only in the sense of defining new product categories, not in terms of technology.

Re:nice

[16K Ram Pack]

The problem is that all resources spent on government research are taken from elsewhere. Quite a lot of government R&D goes nowhere, and is often funded due to politics and inertia, and nothing to do with the "public good".

Simply because a few projects strike it lucky doesn't mean that it's a wholesale vindication of government-funded R&D.

Re:nice

[penguin-collective]

The problem is that all resources spent on government research are taken from elsewhere.

No, that's not a "problem", that's the only way public goods can be paid for.

Quite a lot of government R&D goes nowhere, and is often funded due to politics and inertia, and nothing to do with the "public good".

Your response shows that (despite my recommendation to look up the term "public good"), you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Go look it up, understand it, and then maybe come back and opine on this.

As for funding "due to politics", that is basically corruption. The fact that corruption exists in our political system (big time) doesn't alter the need to fund public goods, it simply makes such funding less efficient.

Simply because a few projects strike it lucky doesn't mean that it's a wholesale vindication of government-funded R&D.

Government-funded R&D doesn't need to be "vindicated"--when it funds public goods, then there simply is no alternative, no matter what the success rate; the market creates public goods only in exceptional circumstances.

Re:Whoa...

[ZeroExistenZ]

Mind your own fucking businsess.

Actually, the US politics are more people's business then you might realize as it impacts more people then just Americans.
I mean if your family gets shot in the face by Americans -in your country, at your home!-, it becomes your business.
When oil-prices skyrocket because your president feels he has to go murder some people, then it becomes your business, if your president doesn't feel like trying to do something at pollution -being the head of the country with the highest pollution rate- then it becomes everyone's business.

btw, it's business. It's a shame you don't even master your own language added to your ignorance.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[SQL Error]

Yes.

Listen to any of the Islamic leaders or the Arab dictators ranting any day of the week.

They do hate us for our freedom. Or at least, incite their people to do so, so they don't rise up and hang their corrupt and incompetent governments en-masse.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[online-shopper]

Bush never claimed the government developed the iPod. Slashdot boned this one, engadget boned this one. From TFA:
"the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."
Turns out the government decided to spend our money researching some technologies that happened to be useful in portable mp3 players. no more, no less.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you any idea how many people would have died if we invaded Japan? Do you know nothing about the Pacific Theater. Let me give you a quick synopsis...

Japanese soldiers, highly trained and well equipped and wanting to die (a lot like Ira.* today, except for the well equipped part). The only way our guys on the ground could get the job done was to destroy EVERYTHING, generally by literally cooking the fanatical Japanese in their bunkers. Loss of life on our side was huge, on thiers it was nearly 100% (based on thier beliefs about dying for honor).

The Japanese were even teaching school children to fight the Americans... from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall

One mobilized high school girl, Yukiko Kasai, found herself issued an awl and told, "Even killing one American soldier will do. ... You must aim for the abdomen." (Richard B. Frank, Downfall)

The loss of life and the atrocities we would have to commit, since basically anybody would be an enemy combatant would have been too great to comprehend. Only fear would get the Janaese to surrender without us nearly wiping them off the face of the planet. We had already leveled Tokyo and other cities with firebombing campaigns (with a greater loss of life than the atomic bombings). It was obvious they had NO chance of winning the war, they were merely fighting on to keep from the dishonor of surrender. I personally believe that those bombings SAVED tens of thousands of lives or more and thus was one of the best and most humane decisions of the war. You are entitled to have your own opinion, and you're right atomic bombs are terrible things, but before dragging the US through the mud for using them, think about the consequences of not.

Disclaimer: I'm no warhawk, or crazy right-winger... and I'm only posting this AC as I have no account to use. I know that because of this I'm automatically -1 Credibility because of this :)

Here is a link to the text of the speech

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/04/20 060419-5.html

I suppose it's too much to ask that slashdotters actually read it. But I can always hope.

US Basic Research Made iPod Components Possible

[quickdot443]

I think this is what Bush was trying to put into words.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/stateoftheunion/2006/ima ges/mp3-technologies.gif

This graphic explains what Bush is talking about. Many of the components in the iPod were made possible because of basic research funded by the federal government. Much of this basic research was done at government labs, universities, and within companies with funding from the Pentagon, Department of Energy's Office of Science, National Science Foundation, etc. Hosts of other individuals and companies developed that basic research into components, but the initial funding and reseach was supported by the U.S. government.

Smaller hard drives, codecs, file compression, etc. are build on the foundation of basic reseach - much of it made possible by initial U.S. funding.

Re:US Basic Research Made iPod Components Possible

[typical]

Now, why is it that nobody pointed out that this is exactly what Gore was saying WRT the Information Superhighway?

Re:US Basic Research Made iPod Components Possible

[Scudsucker]

Two reasons: 1) the GOP lied, and the biased conservative media (which hated Gore's guts) were only too happy to spread the lie. 2) Gore didn't challenge it, anymore than he did the rest of the charachter assasination job done on him.

And to anyone who inists otherwise, consider the fact that during the presidential debates, Bush took credit for Texas being the first state to allow patients to sue their HMO's, when in fact he vetoed that legislation as govenor. This was completely ignored by the media, who were far too busy inventing stories about Gore to take notice.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[jcr]

When will people understand that speaking in absolutist good & evil terms are never true and that it just makes people more hateful.

Sorry, you're wrong. Slavery is always wrong. Need more examples?

-jcr

He joked about wanting to be a dictator, too.

[Naruki]

Based on his sense of humor, you'd probably better invest in a bigger brain.

Re:Too bad he didn't do research on Iran before

[TrappedByMyself]

I can honestly say that you're pretty clueless on the issue
Oh look, here is an article from 2005, 3 years after the "Axis of Evil" speech, talking about the youth movements in Iran.
You've taken some very common facts, tossed in a name in a lame attempt to give your opinion some weight, then just started just making shit up. Bush and Ahmadinejad shooting their mouths off from across the globe really doesn't show any insight into what is really going on. I plead that you actually do some reading on the issue before making shit up next time. Please.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[hey!]

Well, we may have a justifiable horror of chemical munitions, but it was never in question that Iraq had had them. The question was whether they still had them, in contravention to the agreement ending hostilities in the first Gulf War, and whether they were still developing new ones.

It's good that you remind us how bad the Baath regime was. But it shouldn't affect our view of the policies we're pursuing. It's also important not to "shift the goalposts" when evaluating the success of a policy. You have to judge it by its ostensible purpose, otherwise there's no accountability for failure. You might as well ask to be lead around like a pack of sheep.

There's no doubt that Hussein's regime, by any reasonable standard, was evil. But that wasn't the purpose of the war; nor was Iraq the only evil regime in the world, or even the worst regime. It was supposedly the most dangerous regime. The stated purpose of the war was to preempt the transfer of WMD to Al Qaeda. If you doubt this, check out this presidential speech:

We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.

and

Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.

and

Failure to act would embolden other tyrants, allow terrorists access to new weapons and new resources, and make blackmail a permanent feature of world events.

and finally:

We could wait and hope that Saddam does not give weapons to terrorists, or develop a nuclear weapon to blackmail the world.

The speech even conjures up the "mushroom cloud" which was so in evidence in the run up to the war, and connects it to the 9/11 attacks.

Judged on its own terms then, the policy was a failure. None of the evidence that was cited has panned out; in fact it is now clear that much of it had already been disproven when it was cited at the time, the only question being whether the knowledge of this had reached the policy making levels of the Administration. Either way you answer the question, it's not a happy scenario.

It is posssible that Sadaam had a covert WMD program, which moved its stocks and equipment to a third country, Syria as some have suggested. It's not very likely in my opinion, but less likely things have happened in the past. I could spin a pluasible sounding scenario which would explain this unlikely event, although spinning is far from proving, as we're learning to our regret. But assuming that the WMD program was taken out of the country, then the policy was if anything a worse failure than if the weapons never existed. Because now we don't know where they are, and the most likely country doesn't just have tenuous ties to Al Qaeda: it keeps its own pet terrorist groups.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Keebler71]

Where Saddam stopped, USA continued, and committing many war crimes as well. Why do you think that USA is so hated by the general population in the Middle-East?

I don't know how old you are but I have a very clear memory of the arab world hating America well before the US invaded Iraq and, wait for it,... even before Bush was elected.

This may surprise you but the majority of the middle-east is poorly educated and there is no semblance of what we would call a free press. Combine that with extremely strong fundamentalist religions beliefs and the people will believe whatever it is their religious and political leaders want them to believe. (story on conspiracy theories in middle east) No amount of US goodwill or aid can change the mind of common men if their religious leaders are telling them that US soldiers are raping muslim women - or flushing Korans down the toliet - or that not a single Jew was in the World Trade Center on 9/11. The governments of countries with rampant socio-economic and corruption problems have and will always blame others for their misfortune to draw attention away from their own missteps.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[jcr]

If the USA only wanted the oil, we could have just bought it from Saddam and let him continue to murder his own people at will.

-jcr

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Homology]

Saddam have been a brutal agressor is whole life, and much of it with US approval and support. US invaded Iraq to control the huge oil/gas resources, or do you believe it was because Iraq had WMD, oh wait, it was because Saddam was behind 9/11, oh wait, it was for freedom and democracy?

It all makes sense -- The DMCA, DRM, and FCC

[Proudrooster]

Here's another interesting example of where basic research can help change quality of life or provide practical applications for people. The government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the Ipod. I tune into the Ipod occasionally, you know?

It finally all makes sense. George Bush has publically admitted that the U.S. Government is responsible for the death of the music and movie industry. To compensate for the sins of the US Government in unleashing this horrific technology, they are now compensating and giving a nod to the RIAA and MPAA with the DMCA, DRM, and of course the new chick at the FCC who wants to copyprotect everything and make citizens register their DVD burners (just like a handgun). How could I have been so blind?! It all makes sense now!

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[kypper]

Now mod me down, because I am not part of the group think and my ideas and opinions burn you eyes.
Funny, but I see your opinion every time I tune into Fox News.

It always kills me to see the same black and white debate on the same issue. Absolutely nobody in America can stand politically in the middle, or concede that either side might have some valid point.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[jcr]

There was at least as much proof of that as there was the WMDs... i.e. very little.

The WMDs had been used extensively during the Iran-Iraq war. Thousands of dead and wounded are not "very little" proof.

-jcr

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[x1n933k]

Portrayed?

I listen to your phone calls everyday. You are Christian, elitest, and selfish often scary with your ideas of the country and god.

Not that ALL Americans are (That would be rude), but, based on the last election and the phone calls, I'd say there is a good chunk are.

[J]

iBush

[perdelucena]

I for one welcome our new iBush overlord.

Re:iBush

[Ohreally_factor]

ppht. Al Gore invented Bush.

Take it out of context, twist it around...

[Opportunist]

Now, I'm not a fan of him. But this is a prime example of what happens when you rip a few words out of context and twist them long enough to make the speaker look silly. Same with Gore and his "invention of the internet". He never said that, his words were, if I remember right, that he had the foresight to fund what became the first "browser" and thus helped to give the "net to the masses".

Imagine what could've happened about 50 years ago when JFK was standing in Berlin, giving his impressive and memorable speech that had its climax in the immortal words "Ich bin ein Berliner". The whole text around it was, IIRC, "Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was "Civis Romanus sum". Today the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner"."

In context, a speech to boost morale and faith in a town surrounded by communist GDR. Out of context, he pretty much said "I'm a donut".

Re:Take it out of context, twist it around...

[easter1916]

Wait a minute... context doesn't change the harmless gaffe, he *did* say he was a jelly donut. I believe dropping the "ein" would have corrected it.

Re:Take it out of context, twist it around...

[daemonenwind]

Two essential problems with your post:

1. The context does not exist where Gore's statement is not, at least, an enormous misstatement. Here is his entire quote...YOU tell me what the meaning, with his full quote below, could otherwise be. The conventions of the English language allow only one interpretation.
-----------
GORE: Well, I will be offering - I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.

But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

During a quarter century of public service, including most of it long before I came into my current job, I have worked to try to improve the quality of life in our country and in our world. And what I've seen during that experience is an emerging future that's very exciting, about which I'm very optimistic, and toward which I want to lead.
-----------

As for JFK, the correct German is "Ich bin auch Berliner". No article should be used (ein). Again, there is no other intrepretation, although the sentiment was certainly not lost on the audience. In my personal experience with Germans and with speaking German, they are a people who generously forgive non-native speakers making mistakes.

Re:Take it out of context, twist it around...

[drewness]

Wait a minute... context doesn't change the harmless gaffe, he *did* say he was a jelly donut. I believe dropping the "ein" would have corrected it.

I've asked several Germans about this. All of them have said something along the lines of "Everyone knew exactly what he meant. If someone (usually not a native speaker) pointed out that it could mean 'I am a donut', then you'd think 'Oh yeah. I guess it could.'" Yes, a native Berliner would say "Ich bin Berliner", but the "I am a donut" reading of "Ich bin ein Berliner" is so inplausible, especially in context, that it's just not something that crossed people's minds.

Re:Take it out of context, twist it around...

[Scudsucker]

The context does not exist where Gore's statement is not, at least, an enormous misstatement.

Bullshit. The creation of the Internet is an ongoing process, which has taken a good deal of involvement by the government. No other elected or appointed government offical has done more to spur that development than Al Gore. And that's the context to which he even explicitly stated: his actions in Congress. Go back and read your own quote. His claim was entirely appropriate to make. Deal with it.

What is most pathetic about all this is that Bush made far more brazen (and false) claims during the same election, yet he was given a free pass at the time, as opposed to those idiots who still insist, 6 years later, that Gore was a serial liar or embelisher despite large amounts of debunking. One choice example: in one of the debates he took credit for Texas being the first state to allow patients to sue their HMO's, when in fact he vetoed that legislation and then let it pass his desk without a signature when it passed again with veto proof margins.

Re:Take it out of context, twist it around...

[easter1916]

Well at least it prevented the rest of us from making the same basic mistake.

Re:Take it out of context, twist it around...

[smyle]

Bzzt. But thanks for playing and we have some nice parting gifts for you.

(link)

From the link:

It's true that the word "Berliner" in German means a particular kind of jelly-filled pastry as well as a citizen of Berlin. But look at it this way: If I were to tell a group of Americans that my editor is a New Yorker, would any of them really think I've confused him with a well-known weekly magazine?

Re:Take it out of context, twist it around...

[easter1916]

Bzzt yourself. He said "I am a jelly doughnut". Whether or not it was clear from the context that he meant "I am a Berliner" is another matter. THAT is what I was disputing, not that the context made it obvious that he meant the latter.

Re:Take it out of context, twist it around...

[smyle]

Did you even read the article?

Another quote:

Linguist Jürgen Eichhoff, writing in the academic journal Monatshefte, confirms there was no flub on Kennedy's part. "'Ich bin ein Berliner' is not only correct," he says, "but the one and only correct way of expressing in German what the President intended to say."

Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!

Re:Take it out of context, twist it around...

[easter1916]

No, this is Slashdot, of course I didn't read the article! Sheesh. Levez la vache!

Stop with the Syria Bullshit

[RedHatLinux]

Jesus Christ, do you have any idea what you are talking about? Syria and Saddam never got along. In fact, Syria backed Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, shutting off the pipelines going from Iraq to Syria for 17 years. Additionally, they dispatched several thousands troops to fight alongside American forces during Operation Desert Storm.

Plus common sense says this is a dumb idea. How does Saddam ensure Syria won't out them to their American allies in the war against Al-Qaeda. It's true Colin Powell was full of praise for Syria in fighting Al-Qaeda and we dispatched some Canadian guy to be tortured on the mistaken assumption he was al-Qaeda. Also, how does Saddam ensure he gets them back had the US called off the invasion/ It's not like he could have sued or invaded otherwise the US would have justification and he'd been fucked.

Common Sense and basic historical knowledge can be fun.

Its alright guys...

[patio11]

... we'll get Dubya to dumb it down for you next time.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[jcr]

Why do you insist on a single reason?

For a brief period after 9/11, the tolerance of the USA for criminal regimes had worn very thin. Regrettably, the will to act seems to have dissipated with Kim, Assad, and Mugabe still in power, but that's the way things go sometimes.

-jcr

Re:some other things bush said...

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize that most of these are 100% false. They've been debunked on hundereds of sites already.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[MrFebtober]

IMO, there was ONE good thing that came out of the last presidential election in the US: The whole World, at least, got to see that nearly half of us didn't want another 4 years of bush. Nearly half of us thought Bush was one of the worst presidents in history. Nearly half of us are reasonable people. Nearly half of us don't watch Faux News. Nearly half of us think the French are just great.

Stereotypes and generalizations about our country are natural and unavoidable, just the way I assume everyone in Sweden could be a super model (never been there), but it has been my hope that the World would be a little better about judging individual Americans after seeing how close that election was. Maybe it is better, idunno.

Oh for fuck's sake

[jdcook]

I want "Jurassic Park"-style cloning and futuristic intelligence enhancement for the SOLE PURPOSE of creating an army of Tyranosaurs that will repeatedly rape W and anyone that voted for him in 2004. But even I acknowledge that this was a joke that he INTENDED to tell. This is too stupid even for Slashdot. That's what Fark is for.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[drsmithy]

Why do you think that USA is so hated by the general population in the Middle-East?

Because they are largely uneducated peasants living in fundamentalist theocracies lacking even the most basic necessities for a balanced, rational society.

And it's not just the USA they hate, either, it's anyone who doesn't happen to believe in whatever piece of dogmatic fantasy they use to run their lives.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[agentskip007]

The U.S. does has a history of installing some brutal dictators into power for our own interests. However two points here:

In Iraq this time, we chose to remove a dictator in favor of a popular decomratic government. I beleive that this was done on purpose under the belief that our previous policy of supporting anyone who was against our enemies (Bin Laden against the USSR in the Afgan confilct and the Iran example you mention) did indeed backfire too much.

Second point is regarding the previous policy of installing dictators that we had before the end of the cold war. Before World War I, our motivations for doing so were, like many others including Britian, aimed at imperial power.

However, such actions conducted after WWII were for one purpose only: defeat and/or stop the spread of the Soviet Union. A big part of that included securing oil resources, which lead to action in the Middle East. The believe at the time was that the evil conducted in these actions was outweighed in stopping the greater evil of the Soviet Union. And that the Arab hatred of the U.S. and the West was at the time an acceptable side effect of the USSR's defeat.

Still, the election of Hammas should remind us that the single biggest point of hatred of the West by the Arab world remains our support for Israel. After all, the creation of Israel was the flash point that really started everything. The important takeaway from this discussion in my view is that as long as the Israel/Palestine conflict goes on and we support Israel, the U.S. never will be safe from terrorists. So what to do then?

The answer is not to simply withdrawl ourselves from the Middle East as some isolationists have suggested. The real solution is to take responsibility for our previous actions before the end of the cold war and try to repair the damage. I see the following three steps as critical:

1)Finding some kind of peacefull two state solution to the above conflict is of course the most critical objective

2) finding an alternatie energy source to oil takes away all the real power and economy that the Middle East really has. As a result, it would force them into becomming economies that are not one dimensional and give the West leverage over them instead of the opposite. This also would give the West the opportunity to improve its image if we do some kind of Middle Eastern Marshal Plan after the end of oil as the primary energy source to help the economically dependent nations cope with the change.

3)I do think that we need to try and undo the dictators in the Middle Eastern region and elsewhere. It is true that the U.S. image has suffered today for the Iraq confilct. However, if they do succeed in establishing some kind of functioning democracy and can achieve a better life for themselves, it will be really good for us and our reputation 10 or 20 years from now.

Bottom line: the West cannot run away from the mess it created in the Middle East over the past half century. We must correct it through economic aid and the elimination of authortian governments that we at one time supported. It is only fair: we created the situation in the name of the defeat of the USSR and now we must pay the cost of that policy.

You Lose

[Nazmun]

Read the actual article.

popularity

[pintomp3]

you know his low popularity is getting to him when he tries to align the govt with the ipod.

Re:popularity

[easter1916]

Ah come on... I can't stand the man, but he is allowed to make pop culture references, isn't he? Doesn't he own an iPod? Where's the harm...

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[notque]

The WMDs had been used extensively during the Iran-Iraq war.

The WMDs had been used extensively, with our support, during the Iran-Iraq war

From the man

[DuctTape]

It sounds like yet another attempt to discredit the president.

No, he does a good job of that all by himself.

DT

Re:From the man

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You should read the second line of my previous post. :P

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[notque]

If the USA only wanted the oil, we could have just bought it from Saddam and let him continue to murder his own people at will.

Buying oil, and controling oil are two different things.

[Former National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew] Brzezinski recently pointed out that victory and control in Iraq would give the US what he called critical leverage over Asian and European economies, so the US will have its hand on the spigot. I mean it already does to a substantial extent but this will be much greater. In fact, back in the 1940s the Middle East was described as a stupendous source of strategic power, the most strategically important area in the world, and the US remained an oil exporter into the 1970s but still pursued the same policies. You have got to control that massive resource, it is a source of world control. If the US or UK were to shift to renewable energy it would still stick to the same policies. It doesn't really need...I mean it does use the oil but it has other sources and the oil goes on the market anyway so it doesn't matter. But control over it does matter. And the profit from it also matters, and having bases there that allow you to organize the region in your own interests, of course that matters.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[notque]

Well, we may have a justifiable horror of chemical munitions, but it was never in question that Iraq had had them. The question was whether they still had them, in contravention to the agreement ending hostilities in the first Gulf War, and whether they were still developing new ones.

We supported Saddam while he used chemical munitions against Iran. I don't quite understand what justifiable means there.

They were not a threat to us, even if they were there. Even if he had chemical weapons, they would have been very uneffective after such a long time.

There's no doubt that Hussein's regime, by any reasonable standard, was evil.

That we supported during their worst atrocities...

It is posssible that Sadaam had a covert WMD program, which moved its stocks and equipment to a third country, Syria as some have suggested.

Or it's also possible the inspectors worked to a large degree, there was no realistic WMD program. There were old mostly useless chemical weapons still in hiding.

Saddam was quite content being a tyrant without taking large parts of land anymore. (Kind of hard with the sanctions decimating your population.).

I mean. What is there to see about this?

We act like it's some great illusion, but we've had sanctions on the country and inspectors since the gulf war. US invading now is simply a statement that we should have overthown him then, and built permanant military bases in Iraq.

Simple concept really.

Re:Whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the US politics are more people's business then you might realize as it impacts more people then just Americans.

If you're not an American, you're an American't, and, therefore, your opinion doesn't matter.


I mean if your family gets shot in the face by Americans -in your country, at your home!-, it becomes your business.

I've already apologized to Dick for getting in front of his birdshot as he swung wildly around in a drunken stupor, can we drop the subject?


When oil-prices skyrocket because your president feels he has to go murder some people, then it becomes your business,

It's called liberation from life, not murder!


if your president doesn't feel like trying to do something at pollution -being the head of the country with the highest pollution rate- then it becomes everyone's business.

It's not the pollution, it's all the particles in the air that are the problem.


btw, it's business. It's a shame you don't even master your own language added to your ignorance.

You have no chance to survive, make your time!

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[notque]

Why do they hate us? -

Because we are portrayed as the white, Christian west, the source of all the woe in the Middle East.

Okay, let's see why they say they hate us.

What about the reservoir of support? Well, it's not hard to find out what that is. One of the good things that has happened since September 11 is that some of the press and some of the discussion has begun to open up to some of these things. The best one to my knowledge is the Wall Street Journal which right away began to run, within a couple of days, serious reports, searching serious reports, on the reasons why the people of the region, even though they hate bin Laden and despise everything he is doing, nevertheless support him in many ways and even regard him as the conscience of Islam, as one said. Now the Wall Street Journal and others, they are not surveying public opinion. They are surveying the opinion of their friends: bankers, professionals, international lawyers, businessmen tied to the United States, people who they interview in MacDonalds restaurant, which is an elegant restaurant there, wearing fancy American clothes. That's the people they are interviewing because they want to find out what their attitudes are. And their attitudes are very explicit and very clear and in many ways consonant with the message of bin Laden and others. They are very angry at the United States because of its support of authoritarian and brutal regimes; its intervention to block any move towards democracy; its intervention to stop economic development; its policies of devastating the civilian societies of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein; and they remember, even if we prefer not to, that the United States and Britain supported Saddam Hussein right through his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds, bin Laden brings that up constantly, and they know it even if we don't want to. And of course their support for the Israeli military occupation which is harsh and brutal. It is now in its 35th year. The US has been providing the overwhelming economic, military, and diplomatic support for it, and still does. And they know that and they don't like it. Especially when that is paired with US policy towards Iraq, towards the Iraqi civilian society which is getting destroyed. Ok, those are the reasons roughly. And when bin Laden gives those reasons, people recognize it and support it.

Now that's not the way people here like to think about it, at least educated liberal opinion. They like the following line which has been all over the press, mostly from left liberals, incidentally. I have not done a real study but I think right wing opinion has generally been more honest. But if you look at say at the New York Times at the first op-ed they ran by Ronald Steel, serious left liberal intellectual. He asks Why do they hate us? This is the same day, I think, that the Wall Street Journal was running the survey on why they hate us. So he says "They hate us because we champion a new world order of capitalism, individualism, secularism, and democracy that should be the norm everywhere." That's why they hate us. The same day the Wall Street Journal is surveying the opinions of bankers, professionals, international lawyers and saying `look, we hate you because you are blocking democracy, you are preventing economic development, you are supporting brutal regimes, terrorist regimes and you are doing these horrible things in the region.' A couple days later, Anthony Lewis, way out on the left, explained that the terrorist seek only "apocalyptic nihilism," nothing more and nothing we do matters. The only consequence of our actions, he says, that could be harmful is that it makes it harder for Arabs to join in the coalition's anti-terrorism effort. But beyond that, everything we do is irrelevant.

Well, you know, that's got the advantage of being sort of comforting. It makes you feel good about yourself, and how wonderful you are. It enables us to evade the consequences of our actions. It has a couple of defects. One is it is at to

George W Bush insanity.

[RexRhino]

All you have to do is mention ol' Georgy, and otherwise intelligent people lose about 50 IQ points. Dubya was making a joke!

It is a sad day when a joke by G. W. Bush goes over the head of most people on Slashdot!

Re:George W Bush insanity.

[mh101]

That's the problem with Bush... It's so hard to tell whether he's making a legitimate joke, or yet another one of his trademark comments that make him look like an idiot.

It was a joke, people

[DesScorp]

It was a line calculated to get a laugh, and it did (from the crowd at Tuskeegee). Only Slashdot and DailyKos would try to interpret it literally.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Corbets]

Absolutely nobody in America can stand politically in the middle

That's a pretty extreme viewpoint in and of itself, ain't it fella? ;-)

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Corbets]

Believe it or not, the US has done a little good in its time as well. A couple of World Wars resolved come to mind.

And if you think that the setting up and supporting of these rebels in Afghanistan and Saddam in Iraq, then is it really such a bad thing when we go in and clean up our mistakes? Bush didn't do the former, but he's doing the latter...

Fine, America makes mistakes - we're not perfect, we're just the best that currently exists.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[edwdig]

The point isn't whether Iraq had chemical WMDs in the past or not. Yes, they had them in 1988. But that's 18 years ago. The weapons they used have a shelf life in the neighborhood of 3 years. You need reason to believe they were still making the weapons in recent years before you can claim they have weapons.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Homology]

Because they are largely uneducated peasants living in fundamentalist theocracies lacking even the most basic necessities for a balanced, rational society.

Oh my God, perhaps you should educate yourself? Watching Fox News does not count.

Syria the region, vs Syria the government

[hackwrench]

The argument as I hear it put forth is that Saddam wasn't giving the weapons to the Syrian government just to factions in the area.

Re:Syria the region, vs Syria the government

[Catbeller]

There are no arguments, there is no evidence. Chalabists just made the shit up for Bush to parrot. They just fed him what he wanted to hear, and bingo, instant reality, just add meathead. there are no WMDs, and Saddam didn't give anything to anyone.

You've all been snookered for five years. Time to face up to it.

Re:Moderation Abuse

[Sj0]

Because only a leftist could possibly be against an unprecidented war of aggression against an already suppressed threat.

i believe

[intthis]

he meant to say "government research developed the FreedomPod"

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

Kuwait were being real dicks. They totally had it coming, with the games they were playing with the oil market to hurt the limping Iraq after the 9 year war.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Ohreally_factor]

I think you mean sales and support.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

I'm not sure that Saddams regime was evil. From what I understand, other than a few cases where a hard line was taken against an assassination or a rebellion(or, of course, his famous culling of the political body when he took power), it looks very much like Saddam modernized and liberalized the country, and kept it more free than most countries in the reigon.

Frankly, we're there now, and we're failing to control the same forces he had to deal with. His tactics may have been utterly brutal, but they appear to have worked for the most part, where we seem doomed to stay there forever to prop up the iraqi government against factions of the iraqi people.

Also, when talking about genocide, we have to remember that hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, were killed by the economic sanctions we put in place after Kuwait, according to some organizations.

In all, this whole situation is a whole lot murkier than most people are willing to admitand just saying "that regime was evil", especially in that reigon of the world, is an almost meaningless statement.

Re:Punctuation Makes All the Difference

[Keebler71]

I'd like to point out that the correct and least ambigous choice here would be a semicolon...probably the most incorrectly used punctuation mark.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[metallic]

Stranger things have happened. Sadam did send the bulk of his air force to Iran, which quite humourously refused to return them after the first Gulf War.

Ipod key technical innovation is from tokyo ...

[alexandrecc]

No one thinks that the toshiba 1.8" hard drive is the only reason why Ipod is existing ?

Re:Fraunhofer & MP3 Development

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a lot of the critical development was done at AT&T Laboratories, a US company.

Crediting Fraunhofer with MP3 is somewhat of a historical injustice. The standard was finalized with contributions from a dozen companies.

According to what I have always read, it is the other way round.

Here is a historical overview of MP3. Granted, it's a Fraunhofer site. Nevertheless, I don't think they would ridicule themselves by making false statements. But I'm interested in your sources.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[kiddx]

I believe we are hated by the middle east mainly because we continue to back Israel no matter what they do. If the US would stop backing Israel blindly then we would probably have had a better chance. Israel has become more in line in recent years, but the cast is already made. The hatred is already there. Also, dont forget when you are at the top everyone wants to knock you off. Somewhere in the past 20 years we became the world's police because for some reason other countries cant seem to feed or defend themselves. Overall I like the plan though. To stop the upbringing of terrorists in said countries you have to turn them from dictatorships to free society. Once that is complete it can bring stability to that region where they look for political solutions instead of blowing themselves up for the cause.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Jon_A_Mnemonic]

I've lived in some of those countries that you mentioned, near or on U.S. military bases. You were apparently seeming to imply that our bases are not wanted in those countries. From experience, I can say that you are wrong about that. Everywhere there is a U.S. base, there are huge economic benefits for the surrounding area. The people NEAR the bases generally greatly wish those bases to remain where they are, because the bases positively impact their quality of life. If you go ask a mountain farm family in eastern Turkey whether they would like the airbase at Incirlik gone, they will probably say yes. However, if you ask the same question of a Turkish family living near Incirlik, 9 times out of 10 you will get the opposite reaction: "Hell no, we don't want them to leave!" That's not *always* the case, but it is true more often than not, that our bases are desired, at least by the majority of those living near enough to them to reap the economic benefits. By and large, once people get to know us (by getting to know our troops when they're not on duty), they like us. Those who never meet us never see us as actual people, so of course they are negatively biased.

Re:CLUESTICK CALLING

[MooUK]

And the only way you could possibly know that is if you were Bush or his speechwriter, which I think it is safe to say you are not. Both possibilities are equally plausible - I've made plenty of mistakes that simple myself.

And no, I'm not autistic.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[w9ofa]

I am not part of the group think

Funny, but I see your opinion every time I tune into Fox News.

Who is doing the group think?

I'm sorry, but you got way over-modded for what is nothing more than leftist group think. Can someone please tell me what merits this post +5 insightful for "Fox News teh SUX0rs! I am a middle extremist!"

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[kiddx]

This was a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It was much cheaper (at that time) to support the Afghan rebels (vs Russia), the Iraqis (vs Iran) then to get US support to do it themselves. When Russia collapsed we stopped supporting them. I guess the problem is that these people need to hate, fight, kill we kept them busy against neighboring countries and when that was over they turned to the hand that feeds. At the end of the day it is a lose-lose for them. Eventually Iraq will stabilize, and this will put alot of pressure on similar countries. Iran has already had protests in its borders by its younger generation for free elections and things of that nature. The core problem again and still is Israel. If Palestine gets its own state and we are on that road (whether Hamas run or not), and Israel can withstand a few more attacks without major retialiation I think we will be in a good position. Democracy breeds a middle class, a feeling that an individual can make a change, by voting, or standing up and being able to voice an opinion. On top of that the ability to provide a decent life for your wife and kids helps too.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[gravesb]

I am going to assume that you have never been to Iraq. The average person there does what their Imam tells them to do. Very few hate the United States for any reason that they can explain. Actually, a majority don't care about the United States. They would just like to make enough money to feed their families and see tomorrow. There are radical muslims out there, but they don't limit themselves to the United States. Spain and Great Britian were hit, as well as numerous targets in the South Pacific. I don't like Bush (especially his domestic policies), and I agree that the United States has done an enormous amount of things wrong, but the invasion of Iraq did make sense. It has been mishandled horribly, but the initial invasion was justified.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but you got way over-modded for what is nothing more than leftist group think. Can someone please tell me what merits this post +5 insightful for "Fox News teh SUX0rs! I am a middle extremist!"

You illiterate cow. First of all, he said he tunes in to Fox News, suggesting he may enjoy it. Secondly, he didn't pass judgement on Fox News at all. Finally, his point was that the opinion expressed wasn't original ("non-groupthink") -- it is just the othergroupthink opinion.

OT: Signature

[2nd Post!]

Where does OS X have DRM? I run OS X and I've never run into it.

Unless you're talking about encrypted volumes...

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[gravesb]

Actually, since such a small percentage of voters actually voted, any percentage claimed by a party in the election has no bearing on what the American population as a whole thought at the time. Also, since Bush had the largest winning percentage in over a decade, I would say that the election wasn't that close. Remember, Clinton never received 50% of the vote. I would think that most people around the world would judge us harshly based on election numbers because we are "The World's leading Democracy (tm)" and almost 80% of our eligible population wastes the right to vote for their leaders.

Audio compression without Fourier transforms

[tepples]

The Swedish mathematician who proved a convergence theorem for Fourier series. without him there would be no IPOD. :p

Without Fourier transforms, we would have used time-domain methods for processing digital audio. Shorten, FLAC, Apple Lossless, and most other lossless audio codecs make use of an autoregressive analysis of a block of audio, followed by linear prediction with entropy coding of the residuals. The GSM Full Rate codec (implemented in Toast) and the Speex codec operate in much the same way, except they add pitch analysis (to filter out the periodicity of vowels and instrumental chords) and lossy quantization.

Re:Audio compression without Fourier transforms

[cvalente]

you do realize I was joking right?

First, Fourier analysis like you wrote is not the only way to go.
Second the theorem in question is of little practical impact in these kinds of problems.
I was just mentioning the fact that someone really wrote that this was indeed responsible for the ipod (at least in part).

Re:Moderation Abuse

[heinousjay]

What does being a leftist, being against Iraq, or anything else that was being discussed, have to do with World War II? Oh, that's right, it was a rhetorically bankrupt emotionally charged bullshit slam of the US. It deserves to be +5.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol, nice crazy rationalization. Too bad the Japanese had been trying to find a way to surrender for months and had been in talk with the Soviets, and the US about it.
They wanted to keep their empereror, USA refused this request in the full knowledge that in doing so Japan could never accept.
Japan would have surrendered months earlier had this been allowed. The atomic bombs saved no lives, and to think they did is, well, typical American rationalization.
It is similar to the Lancet report which stated that the most likely (not lowest, nor highest) level of civilian casualties was 100 000. This is information that Americans do not like, so they trivialize it, repress it, mock it.

Wake up and focus

[TomMorrisey]

Let's see, we've got the Iraq War, the Plame affair, the destruction of American credibility abroad, the promotion of a black-and-white, moralistic crusade against science, oil drilling in our nature preserves, and attempts to replace the text of the Bill of Rights with the phrase, "NO HOMER-SEXSHULS ALLOWED!" ...And we're wasting time arguing about whether a comment about a music player was a joke or not.

Why is the parent marked a Troll?

[donutello]

He quoted the exact statement that Al Gore made and expressed his opinion as to what it meant. And if you remove your partisan blinders, "I took the initiative in creating" sounds a rather lot like someone taking credit for it.

Re:Why is the parent marked a Troll?

[Greg Lindahl]

Er, he deserves the credit for writing the bill which created a new IP-based interconnection network which was called the "Internet". Before that the interconnection was the DARPAnet.

It was only later that the term "Internet" became a generic term.

At the time, I remember thinking it was cool that a Congress-critter actually gave a damn about networking. But I had no doubt that slackers such as yourself would find some way to abuse him for it.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[hunterx11]

It's pretty hard to prove a negative. It's harder to prove a negative to someone who doesn't want to hear it. Even for a murderous dictator like Hussein, it's pretty untoward to expect him to let foreigners walk all over his country's sensitive installations, especially when this information is probably going to be used to attack his country. After all, since it turns out that he didn't have any significant WMDs, the most likely explanation for many of his expulsions of weapons inspectors really is that he didn't want U.S. spies in his country. Remember, he originally only expelled U.S. inspectors, and UNSCOM choose to withdraw entirely. Furthermore, under the impending threat of war, Iraq actually did begin to take tangible steps toward disarmament under UNMOVIC supervision, such as the destruction of its long range missiles. Despite his quite justified misgivings, Blix was optimistic about Iraq's cooperation, and there is little doubt that Iraq would have continued, however grudgingly, under the real threat of invasion.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[hunterx11]

I'm pretty sure the receipts from Uncle Sam were sufficient proof that he ever had them.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[linguae]

USA through their puppet governments are crushing down hard on any popular movement for social improvement, democracy or worker rights. Socialists, union activist, academics or generally any on the left side are hunted down and prosecuted.

And what makes you think that the leftist movements were good? (Before you continue reading, I define leftist as socialist or communist). What makes you think that they would have made social improvements? As far as I know, most major leftist countries (USSR and Cuba, for example) have been total economic failures. The only ones that I can think of that have some level of success are some Western European countries, but they are social democratic, not outright socialist. (As far as I know, the US never tried to topple any social democratic countries like Austria or France, but give me a link if I'm incorrect). I still don't think it is right for the US to intervene in other countries' politics, but don't think that the rulers that the US displaced were angels. In Chile, for example, Salvador Allende basically placed Chile on the fast track to becoming another Cuba. He nationalized everything that he could see in sight, implemented socialistic/communistic policies everywhere, and basically destroyed the economy within 3 years of being in office, which made the people even poorer. Pinochet is no angel either (he is an authoritarian and basically killed off any leftists, censored the press, and did a lot of very bad things), but he did save Chile from becoming another communist nation and implemented many free-market policies that led Chile to become an economic success story. (I wish that the United States would take a more free-market direction). Even though Chile is once again run by socialists, they are socialists in name only; they haven't touched Pinochet's free-market policies, simply because they work. Read more about Chile's recent policies here

I still agree with you with the premise that the United States shouldn't meddle in other countries' business. That's how we got into this Iraq situation in the first place.

Jimmy Carter couldn't pronounce it either

[winkydink]

And he is generally recognized to be a very intelligent man. Of course, given that most slashdotters weren't even Hershey bars in their dad's back pocket back when Carter was president, it doesn't surprise me that everybody thinks Bush is the only president to mispronounce nuclear.

Re:Jimmy Carter couldn't pronounce it either

[toddestan]

it doesn't surprise me that everybody thinks Bush is the only president to mispronounce nuclear.

When did anyone say that?

Re:Jimmy Carter couldn't pronounce it either

[ScrewMaster]

Well, given Carter's background you would certainly have expected him to be able to pronounce "nuclear" correctly, so I'll give Bush a pass on this one.

And you're right ... achieving the Presidency does require intelligence and ability in certain areas. Truly stupid people don't make it that far, and this constant impugning of the man's intellect is pointless. On the other hand, a high native intelligence and the capacity to exploit the political process up to the point of being elected does not, unfortunately, imply competence at the actual job of being President. That's been demonstrated repeatedly over the past two-hundred-odd years, and indicates that the political process is selecting for the wrong types. Evolution in reverse, you might say, and when we actually do get a President that leaves the country in better shape than he found it in, it just means we got lucky. It's not like we're given a lot of choice in the matter.

Re:Jimmy Carter couldn't pronounce it either

[symbolic]

While things didn't go well while Carter was in office (the economy), at least the guy recognized the importance of statesman-like conduct. He continues it to this day.

Bush's inability to pronounce "nuclear" is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg. It seems like he messes up just about every time he opens his mouth.

Re:What exactly is so special about the Ipod ?

[pembo13]

Interesting, not knowing about an Ipod == "Flaimbait" ?

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[hunterx11]

Forget Basra, what about Halabja?

Forget Halabja even, what about the Marsh Arabs?

The invasion of Iraq was not justified. Guess what, neither was the illegal bombing of Cambodia. Does that mean that Pol Pot wasn't really "evil" because he only killed a million people?

Cute.

[SvnLyrBrto]

Nice job mindlessly reciting the racist caricature put forth by the military propagandists. You duckspeak doubleplusgood.

Now let me ask: How many real-life Japanese people do you actually know? I bet the answer is: "none". I, on the other hand, know quite a few, tourists and exchange students I've met, and immigrants and their descendants I've gotten to know long-term. (Admittedly, I may have an unfair advantage. I live in San Francisco now, and used to live in Honolulu.) And they are among the nicest, most decent, generous and intelligent people I've known. And they are nothing like the stereotype that people like you try to present.

In summary, kindly FOAD plz. K thx.

cya,
john

Re:Cute.

[OldAndSlow]

How many Japanese did you know in the 1930's? In the 30's, Japan was completely militarist. Run by generals, and determined to expand into an empire that rivaled any European empire. After the war the Japanese completely reinvented themselves into a mostly pacifist country.

I have always admired Japan and its people. I understand why they chose to go for an empire (as a hint, look at the state of China circa 1900, dominated by Europeans). But that does not change the fact that they would have defended the home islands with to-the-death ferocity. Nor does it change the fact that they were brutal to the people they conquered.

Why are you willing to overlook what Japan did in Korea, Manchuria, China, SE Asia, Indonesia, and the Philipines, and yet think that we are bad guys for not accepting terms other than unconditional surrender? WWII was about destroying militarism, and by the time Japan was the last opponent standing, why should the allies give up the goal? Why not blame the Japanese for not bowing to the obvious fact that the war was lost?

These are not easy questions. My father worked on the Manhatten project and I grew up thinking that dropping the bomb was the right thing to do. Now I don't know. What I do know is that it is stupid to try to judge people who had to make horrible decisions in the middle of a desperate struggle.

Re:Cute.

[flyingsquid]

Nice job mindlessly reciting the racist caricature put forth by the military propagandists. You duckspeak doubleplusgood. Now let me ask: How many real-life Japanese people do you actually know? I bet the answer is: "none". I, on the other hand, know quite a few, tourists and exchange students I've met, and immigrants and their descendants I've gotten to know long-term.

And obviously, Japanese culture hasn't changed at allin 60 years, following hundreds of thousands of casualties, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, nuclear attacks, surrender to the U.S., the loss of the Japanese military, and the rise of Japan as one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth. So everything you've learned about Japan from nineteen-year-old Japanese exchange students carrying Hello Kitty purses and Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" provides an accurate window into Japan as it existed circa 1941-45. Whereas all the AC has to offer is verifiable, historical facts from articles and books.

The AC is NOT being racist, he is referring to documented facts about WII. Read some history books. Japanese soldiers often fought to the death, and many chose suicide- sometimes blowing themselves up with hand grenades, or leaping off of cliffs- rather than be captured. In Saipan, soldiers even forced women and children off of cliffs, rather than allow them to be captured by the Americans. I've got Japanese friends, and yes, they're nice people. But it doesn't alter the fact that an amphibious invasion of Japan would have resulted in massive civilian casualties. Arguing that the Japanese weren't fighting to the death because you've met some modern Japanese people who are nice in casual conversation is idiotic. I've met nice German people, therefore the Holocaust is anti-German propaganda? I've also met very nice people from the South and enjoyed their hospitality. So slavery didn't happen, it's just a prejudice against Southerners?

Yes, it's hard to look at people you've met from Japan and believe that during the war, Japan engaged in some atrocities which were just as brutal as anything that Germany did: raping and murdering civilians in China, forcing Korean women to work as prostitutes, working British POWs to death as slave labor, eating POWs (admittedly they were running low on food due to a successful American campaign to disrupt shipping). But these things happened. And the fact is, those nice exchange students we know from Japan, had they been born earlier, would have been part of a society that committed these acts, probably would have done nothing to stop them, and probably would have even helped. Of course, had we been born in that time and place, we probably would have helped as well, which is the scary thing.

Re:Cute.

[Diag]

And obviously, Japanese culture hasn't changed at all in 60 years...

Thank you for that post. I had to stop and take a breath after reading the parent post, (I try not to post angry), but you've pretty much covered what I was thinking.

I would only add that the parent poster doesn't even need to read a history book these days. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=japanese+war+ atrocities

Tomorrow is ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand.
As I type this, I am watching a TV documentary about Sandakan Death March.
Lest we forget.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Jeremi]

Because we have power. Because we are not afraid to use that power. [...] Because we are human and we make mistakes.

Because we have a powerful military and we think that military force is the way to solve problems. Therefore our "human mistakes" often cause thousands or tens of thousands of deaths. You may recall how a few thousand deaths in New York affected the emotions of Americans; now scale that effect up to match the number of deaths caused by American aggression in other parts of the world, and you'll understand one cause of anti-Americanism abroad.

People aren't that different anywhere. If you run roughshod over them, don't be surprised that they resent you for it.

Bushisms

[mnmn]

I wonder if his entertainment factor gives him any kind of advantage. Kerry was boring, but this guy cracks people up. Its one thing to elect big actors like Arnold and Raegan, another entirely to elect someone who is entertaining while in office.

Oh and the wars arent boring either for this cowboy country.

It's too much...

[C10H14N2]

To ask ANYONE with higher than a fifth-grade command of the English language to read that man's words.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Jeremi]

Frankly, all the justification required for resumption of hostilities occurred on a regular basis when Iraqi missile crews lit up their radars and tracked a US or British fighter in the no-fly zones.

So we invaded Iraq because Saddam turned on a radar dish? That's kind of a thin thread to hang $10 billion a month in operating costs on, don't you think?

Face it, the US government wanted to invade Iraq, and it was going to find an excuse to do so no matter what. The problem is that they didn't forsee the consequences and didn't bother to plan ahead, and now our country is being bankrupted, both financially and ethically, by the resulting fiasco.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[hunterx11]

You mean all those countries like Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Morocco where the people hate the U.S. and dislike the government for being too friendly to the U.S.? Or perhaps a place like Iran where the government hates the U.S. but the people do not? Castro and Hussein had a pretty important thing in common: both of their countries were hit by sanctions from the U.S. (though in Iraq's case it really was almost all Hussein's fault).

Personally, I'd say it has more to do with Europe and America's total disregard for national sovereignty in the Middle East.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

In order to prove that statement, you have to prove that you actually know when your Iraqi adventures began. The US was using Iraq as a proxy against Iran decades before Kuwait.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

You know, I'm not even a terrorist -- I'm a white anglo-saxon urbanite -- and I still want to bomb your ass for a response like that. "They don't like us because we're so great."

It's official. The United States is officially the "geek with no freinds and a superiority complex" of the western world.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[SQL Error]

Have you any idea how many people would have died if we invaded Japan?

Best estimates are 200,000 Allied troops and two million Japanese soldiers and civilians.

How is this possible

[xbrownx]

Is the entire audience of Slashdot and engadget so stupid that they can't tell when someone is telling a joke?

Re:How is this possible

[macker]

Our collective sense of humor has taken some serious nicks and dings from current events,
so a mildly amusing aside from GB gets blown into a 'much ado about nothing' firestorm.

Why am I not surprised?

Non-techy types aren't allowed to infiltrate the circle of geek coolness: We won't laugh at your jokes 'cause you haven't paid your bit-byte dues...

vote: do you think the gov't invented the ipod?

[slashy_poll]

Don't just comment, place your vote at: http://www.exploremix.com/polls/slashdot-ipod-gove rnemnt-aaa.php

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[SQL Error]

Nope. Sales were handled Russia, China and France. America never made significant weapons sales to Iraq.

That's why they had such crappy equipment.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

You guys need to stop living in 1942. It's the most insane fallacy there is.

You know who did even more than the United States to secure victory in WWII? Who sustained more casualties than any three other nations and most scholars believe was responsible for turning the tide of battle?

The Soviet Union under Stalin.

Since then, the cold war showed the darkest side of the US, with the government playing God around the world, setting up proxy wars, deposing governments -- both elected and otherwise, and sponsoring terrorism against their enemies.

And who are the three main names today?

Iran: We toppled their democratically elected government because it was looking too socialist.
Iraq: We used them as a proxy against soviet-backed Iran.
Afganistan: We sponsored the Taliban to fight the soviets.

Yeah we gave the good stuff to the Afghans...

[FatSean]

You know, so they could keep the Russians from infulencing the gov't. Of course, the Russians were there attempting to prevent the USA from influencing the gov't as well.

Too bad the terrorists ended up with those weapons and took down the towers. Too bad we didn't learn from that lesson.

Re:Yeah we gave the good stuff to the Afghans...

[Ohreally_factor]

You mean the box cutters that the 9/11 hijackers used were military issue?

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

Why is slavery wrong? If we're talking about an agrarian society, by preference utilitarianism, if a large group of no-cost or low-cost workers are needed for the prosperity of the state, and the state protects everyone (even the slaves themselves) with some measure of law and order, then can't it be said that slavery is not wrong at all, and instead a vital institution for the good of the many?

However, it was of course Al Gore

[Freedom451]

who invented the need for the funding for the work:-).

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

The only difference between Saddam killing thousands and us killing thousands is that we're slightly more discriminating in which thousands we're killing.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

Sir, you have broken my irony detector. Please send a cheque for it's immediate replacement, or you'll be hearing from my lawyer.

Re:US government supplied weapons of mass destruct

[Sj0]

If the French, West Germans and the Soviets jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

Re:You are wrong - Read the speech

[Sj0]

I'm not a fan of Bush, but you have to admit -- that was pretty funny.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[BeatlesForum.com]

Also, when talking about genocide, we have to remember that hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, were killed by the economic sanctions we put in place after Kuwait, according to some organizations.

If Saddam wasn't evil, he wouldn't have invaded Kuwait and forced the economic sanctions on his country. He didn't care about his country's people. Of course, Saddam's oil-for-food program was corrupt, thanks in part to the UN's Kofi Annan, who profited from the deal. (But I think *most* of the UN is full of corruption, but that's a different story.)

Saddam gassed the Kurds and killed tens of thousands of his own country's people. That's just wrong and evil. And a liberalized country is not always a good thing. A country whose people enjoy liberty is a completely different thing. And stating that Saddam kept the country more free than most other countries in the region is like saying dark brown isn't quite as dark as black. Israel is the exception, which somehow manages to not kill its own and maintains a certain level of peace even with the terrorist-led Palestinians next door.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Corbets]

No offense, but you're an idiot. Did you choose to disregard my point about cleaning up our own mistakes? I specifically mentioned both Iraq and Afghanistan. Aside from that, if you accuse me of living in the past, how long ago was it that we "toppled the Iranian government" etc.?

Also, to go back another 30 or 40 years beyond those events, the Soviets sustaining more casualties doesn't mean they did more. Manpower was ever their greatest asset, and they used it effectively. Stalin was always happy to kill his own people. They originally had a treaty with Hitler, by the way, which he broke a year too early. Had he waited till after Britain was conquered, and set up a an effective supply chain to deal with Russian winters, the Germans would easily have rolled over their country as well.

World War II ended 60 years ago. Really, two generations is not a long time, except maybe to those who don't read history. Those who don't are doomed to repeat it, by the way...

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

Kuwait was actively working against Iraqi attempts to rebuild after the nine year war with Iran. Iraq went to OPEC and asked them to reduce production to raise prices so the country could finance it's rebuilding and start to pay off the massive debts. Kuwait responded by flooding the market by cheap oil.

Frankly, I think considering the circumstances, Kuwait had it coming.

And I hate to break the news to you, but we're there killing tens of thousands of Iraqis too. Considering in a lot of cases it's the same groups Saddam had to put up with, I'm failing to see the moral difference.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Ohreally_factor]

Not true. We sold Iraq bio weapon precursors in the 80s, when we were backing them against Iran.

The reason the Bush Administration was so sure we'd find WMDs is because they had the receipts to prove it.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

Rather than asking how long ago Irans government was toppled, why not ask why it matters today? World War II isn't pertient anymore because the world has moved on. The middle east, on the other hand, is still in bits and pieces thanks to two powers playing god.

That's the thing about sins and triumphs: You live with sins forever, but triumphs are always fleeting. History shows that well.

Re:Fraunhofer & MP3 Development

[slew]

FWIW, mp4/aac which is what I think I-tunes/iPod uses (rather than the older MP3-format) is more of a AT&T/Dolby thing than a Fraunhofer thing (although both engineers from Fraunhofer and Sony were certainly involved with AAC development and of course it inherited some of its characteristics from refining mp3).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_audio_coding

In development, what eventually became the AAC/MP4 codec used to be called the NBC codec (for not-backward-compatible), because the charter was to make some better audio codec w/o necessarily inheriting anything from previous stuff...

As for MP3's, having attended some mpeg committee meetings, I think this wikipedia account is fairly accurate (from what I recall, I was mostly a video guy, but did attend some audio meetings)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3

I'm not really sure that MP3 is really more related to ASPEC (the Fraunhofer stuff) or related to Musicam (the Philips stuff). In any event, MP3 ended up to be quite a merge of different ideas by the time it got out of the MPEG committee since there had to be some compatiblity between the formats for audio layer I/II and III modes although no doubt FhG engineers put much of the work into making the final standard and probalby deserve a lot of the credit for what became MP3.

However, to be accurate, I don't think that US government funding had much involvement in this area at all. Most of the DARPA funding in audio coding was going to speech coders using various forms of predictive coding and vocal track modelling. The sub-band coding ideas, although not unknown in the general digital signal processing and signal compression community, didn't really have as much funding as the speech stuff. As you might expect, music is better modeled by transform coding than vocal track modelling, so any association the US government funding had in developing a transform coder for audio compression for music was very slight at best (even though they pour 100's of millions of research dollars into transform coding of video for military applications, the audio stuff is mostly quite different algorithmically).

On the other hand, you can probably thank DARPA and AT&T research dollars for the digital audio compression of your voice on your cell phone. If military types communicated orders using harmonicas and trumpets instead of yelling into microphones, maybe DARPA would have taken more interest in compressing music... ;^)

Absurd FUD by Slashdot

[wootest]

I'm among the last people to praise Bush for doing anything, but I think that his speech hit spot on.

The gist of his speech was that research - any kind of research - is pivotal to creating and helping develop new technology, and that often new technology that's exciting in its own right ends up being used in totally different ways, many of which are also useful (and many times more useful than what it was originally invented for), and he used the iPod and Internet (if your reply concerns Al Gore because of that word, don't even bother).

You just can't argue with that kind of logic, because it's absolutely true. This is the essence of the saying "greater than the sum of its parts" and it's a very good way to back up added funds for research, which Bush advocates (doubled funds, if I recall correctly).

I didn't think anyone would be malicious enough to graft it into "Bush claims government invented iPod". I think that those who're doing that needs to watch that portion of the speech and ask themselves if he's really saying that, or if you just wish that he did say that because then you could ridicule him. I'm all about ridiculing Bush, but there's plenty of legitimate cases to choose from, and the truth of the matter is that this isn't one of them.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[OldAndSlow]

or concede that either side might have some valid point.

I would love to conceded that they have a valid point, and I will, just as soon as it happens.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[menace3society]

They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod

That sounds to me like he's saying the US government funded research of those technologies in order to develop the iPod. Bush boned his speech; the Slashdot article accurately summarizes the literal claim he made.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[TheKidWho]

Sorry... But the Middle East is such a shit hole now because of the colonial expansions of Europe pre WW1.

FYI All this shit stems back from WW1 so yes WW1/WW2/+ are all very relevant.

Guess who drew up the borders of Iraq and put Completely different Ethnic groups together? Yeah Britain.

Does this mean that all patents are now voided?

[Allnighterking]

I mean since it was developed by the government, and anything they do is in the public trust and not owned by any one group. It can only be concluded that all patents (other than design) related to the iPod are null and void. IANAL

Re:US gov...- please, no rush to judgement!

[sgt_doom]

Hold on a second there - this explains why Bush's codename is:

doPi (dopey???)

Which, I believe, is iPod spelled backwards....or is it????

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

Absolutely, but we're not talking about the brits here, nor realistically about actions which came from their pursuits. The current enemies of the US were bought and paid for by the US. The British went through the same problems, and what are they now? Part of a nerfed Europe which came about starting with the napoleonic wars, and culminating in near total destruction after World War II.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[macadamia_harold]

If we're talking about an agrarian society, by preference utilitarianism, if a large group of no-cost or low-cost workers are needed for the prosperity of the state, and the state protects everyone (even the slaves themselves) with some measure of law and order, then can't it be said that slavery is not wrong at all, and instead a vital institution for the good of the many?

If that were truly the situation, would they not be able to locate volunteers?

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Fulcrum of Evil]

"George Bush invented the iPod!" Cheney invented the quad bypass!

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

Because just because something is moral doesn't make it fun. Nobody WANTS to do the shit job. However, it has to get done, and someone has to do it, and in slave economies, it's the slaves who do it.

We're no different. The only difference between our forefathers and ourselves is that we import our slave labour from other countries.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[flyingsquid]

Look at the sequence of events. The U.S. captures the Marianas, putting B-29 bombers in range of the Japanese homeland. By the end of the war, the U.S. was able to put 500 B-29s in the air at once, and used them for fire-bombing Japanese cities. The bombing of Tokyo on May 9-10 1945 kills ~100,000- more than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. On April 1, the U.S. invades Okinawa, with maybe 12,000 U.S. dead, 100,000 Japanese soldiers killed, and 100,000 Japanese civilian dead. Few Japanese soldiers are captured, they fight to the death or commit suicide rather than surrender. On August 6, the U.S. bombs Hiroshima. On August 8, the USSR attacks Japan in Manchuria, so now Japan is facing the U.S. and USSR. On August 9, Nagasaki is hit with an atomic bomb. On August 15, Japan surrenders.

Now, it may be that elements within the Japanese government were looking to surrender. And probably, within a matter of months, the Japanese government would have surrendered. But I don't think you can argue that the Japanese government had already decided to surrender, even conditionally. When your home islands are invaded, you get hit by an atomic bomb, Stalin declares war on you, you get hit again, and then wait a week to surrender, it's pretty clear you're not exactly falling over yourself to surrender.

Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't a pretty option, and it faced resistance even within the U.S. military. Would it have saved lives? Probably, if the U.S. had continued bombing cities with conventional bombs, cut off Japan from all imports of food, and/or launched an amphibious assault. Any of these things would easily have claimed 200,000 civilian lives. I doubt that saving Japanese lives was the top priority of course: we were at war. Our priorities were the lives of our troops. Behind that, the enormous cost of waging war, the need to rebuild Europe after Germany's surrender, a desire not to let the USSR claim a chunk of Japan, and probably a desire to test the atomic bomb probably all factored into the decision. So no, the U.S. wasn't playing the rule of humanitarian... but again, we were at war. Our first priority is looking out for U.S. citizens. The people who were supposed to look out for the lives of Japanese citizens were the Japanese government.

Which brings us to the Japanese government and society. I don't think you can absolve the Japanese themselves of guilt. Japanese culture cultivated an obsession with death, to the point of having soldiers kill themselves rather than be captured, kill their own civilians rather than allow them to be captured, use suicide as a weapon against ships, and employ human beings as living guidance systems in cruise missiles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohka. Some civilian elements in the government might have wanted to surrender, but the Japanese military types who were making the decisions were willing to have their civilian population blown away by two atom bombs before they would seriously talk about surrender. Now, humans are a violent lot, but Japanese culture seems to have taken an obsession with death to an unhealthy extreme. You can't have it both ways: you can't have an obsession with suicidal behavior, and then act like you're the victim when hundreds of thousands of your people end up dead.

There's also a modern obsession, particularly on the far left, with painting the U.S. as the bad guy in all situations. Even if we do something good like trying to restore order in Somalia, it's got to be for fundamentally evil reasons, according to these people. Now, there are plenty of reasons to criticize the United States and question the government's motives, but I don't think that this simplistic idea is any more helpful than the conservative myth where the U.S. is a global Cowboy in a White Hat, fighting for Truth and Justice, and against Bad Guys with Moustaches and Black Hats. It's just a left-wing version of the same simplistic, black-and-white thinking that got us into the Iraq mess.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[sgt_doom]

In a more serious vein, it is especially hard to

stand politically in the middle

when thousands upon thousands of innocents have died.

I had both heard and read that the Russian mob was active in Iraq - and upon hearing that 20,000 have been kidnapped there (with approximately 5,000 of them women and 2400 of them children) and now can suspect what they are doing. Look for them to show up in the next Amnesty International count of sexual slavery and child prostitution....

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Kreigaffe]

"Well, we may have a justifiable horror of chemical munitions, but it was never in question that Iraq had had them. The question was whether they still had them, in contravention to the agreement ending hostilities in the first Gulf War, and whether they were still developing new ones."

No, it wasn't a question.

Here's the lay-down. We have records saying that Timmy bought 1,000 copies of J-Fed's cd (which I believe counts as a WMD). 500 copies were used to kill Kurds. 350 copies were later destroyed by the UN.
When asked where the remaining 150 copies were, Timmy replied that there were no remaining 150 copies.

Obviously, that is a lie. It's not unreasonable to assume Timmy still has those 150 copies. Maybe they've degraded due to their own suckitude, but the fact is WE DON'T KNOW, and Timmy is acting in contradiction to UN demands to be forecoming with information.

As to the success of the war? That is debatable, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that the Iraqi citizenry will be quite a bit more comfortable ruling themselves as opposed to living under the despotic thumb of a madman. Mind you, this is the guy who was ultimately behind billions of dollars of corruption during the Food For Oil years. It's just a shame that the leader of the UN was too clever to leave any clear tracks to follow, but anyone with half a brain knows exactly what sort of payoffs and bribes were going on.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[BgJonson79]

You don't win wars by dying for your country, you make others die for theirs. Just because you suffer the most casualties doesn't mean you did anything good. After all the US suffered very few casualties in 1991, and it's impossible to deny the Coaltion won. I also question the idea that if the US wasn't sending materiel to GB and the USSR Hitler could have concentrated his efforts more and defeated both GB and the USSR in detail. Then there's the Pacific Theater...

And the Taliban wasn't formed until like 1996, while the Soviets pulled out in what, 1989?

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Chrononium]

Indeed, if it is not already obvious, the Cold War has produced real consequences, even if a shot was never fired between the United States and the Soviet Union. Before that war began, the United States did not have such an extensive history of overthrowing regimes.

Actually, this isn't one of the craziest

[Swift2001]

things I've heard Bush say. Government-sponsored research, mostly by the military, has been a prime engine of development in the United States. And it doesn't always show up in a straight-line fashion. The Manhattan Project is the best known investment, of course, but many, many other inventions were made possible by the government doing basic research. I have no doubt that the iPod contains elements that the government made possible by answering some basic questions about nature. So I think we should do ourselves a favor and not attack Bush for one of the few "sensical" things he's ever said.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Kreigaffe]

Not that evil?
He starved his people. Those sanctions MIGHT have worked out swimmingly, with no starvation, except he chose to spend that 'food' money elsewhere -- his military -- and because of the corruption that was lurking behind the Food For Oil program (thanks Kofi).

Modernized and liberalized.. yes, Iraq, the Middle East's bastion of liberty!

Seriously though you just made me weep for humanity's future.. please don't go saying stuff like that again. Iraq was not liberalised by any stretch of the imagination. Even when I had a discussion about Stalin with an old Russian guy, when he would say that Stalin did good for Russia, he never pretended that he was also a terrible tyrant who killed a lot of people. You can't pretend Saddam was not an oppressive despot just because you want to.

Gitmo

[jonskerr]

Really? You been there?

If it's so fucking nice, why did they have to use a secret place where no one can have any oversight? Why not use a prison on US soil? You fucking anonymous coward tightasses have no fucking clue, you're just knee-jerk dickwads who are so stupid you can't even tell when we're ALL getting our freedoms taken away. Fucking cocksucker.
Liberal media? That's because the inevitable result of DOING THE FUCKING RESEARCH IS TO BECOME LIBERAL. Remember how we slashdotters say to RTFA? Well, these reporters are the ones doing the investigating and know what's going on. But they have editors and other higher ups who are beholden to the corporate power structure. The reporters might be liberal (good for them) but the media in general isn't, unless you're listening to Air America radio. The media are owned by the same forces taking over our country - business interests who have manipulated crazy fundamentalists into being on their side. Mussolini himself defined fascism as the merger of state and corporate power. In an open and free country, EVERYONE should be outraged a place like Gitmo exists.

Re:Gitmo

[phlinn]

It's at an offshore military base, because some us judicial oversight doesn't come into play unless it involves US Citizens OR takes place on US soil. The prisoners of that base are subject to the Third Geneva Convention, which require a "competent tribunal" to review cases that are in doubt. This is slowly happening.

It's really not accurate that all freedoms are being taken away. Note that citizen protests usually don't end up with the protestors being arrested, barring some violation of the law. The same organizers keep doing marches, although that may just be because they are largely innefectual.

As far as the media goes, doing the research doesn't automatically make one liberal. There are right wing investigative journalists, although they often get lambasted by their peers. The media as a whole tilts slightly left, although they try to incompetently act impartial. (Evidence of journalistic laziness and incompetence abound. Asserting that a group holds some opinion which they don't and failing to actually talk to a member being one example.) They also tilt against whatever party is currently in power. These 2 biases magnify each other in some cases, and minimize each other in others.

As for the Mussolini quote, please read up on it. It appears to have never actually been stated, and may be based upon a different definition of corporatism.

Re:Whoa...

[Kreigaffe]

When oil-prices skyrocket because your president feels he has to go murder some people WOAH NOW.. slow down a minute.

You can't blame high oil prices on the US. We went to WAR for oil. Remember, Blood for Oil!

If the rest of the world had maybe gotten behind us on this, we wouldn't HAVE this ridiculously high oil prices.

Wait, yes we would, I'm sorry. I almost forgot that the high price of oil is primarily the result of rampant speculation and nothing more.

Maybe we just need more blood for oil.... let's invade the speculators. I wanna see GW pronounce "speculators". 'Speck-oo-late-urz'

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

[Foerstner]

You can't "disprove" a bad joke, no matter how much well-researched fact you throw at it. Because, frankly, nobody cares about the truth. The truth is boring.

Seeing people get worked up, on the other hand, is funny.

Re:Slashdot and Engadget's DISHONEST reporting

[Swift2001]

I think you should grow up and get out of this juvenile paranoia. This is an implanted attitude, put there by the Overlords so that you will be able to deny your lyin' eyes at all times. If something unflattering to the Generalissimo appears in the media, it must be because "80% of the media are liberal," or some such bullcrap, outdated artifact of a survey done ages ago, which ignores one big fact anyway: the great majority of the owners of the media are rock-rib Republicans. Whatever. I did see the resignation of the Democrat from the ethics committee reported. It is embarrassing, though what he's accused of is exactly the scam that Gingrich and Delay -- and a few dozen other Republicans -- have been working for years. We hear from opinion journalists that "Democrats are involved in the Abramoff scandal," but not a single Democrat is on the list of those likely to be indicted. Not that we're THAT much cleaner, but Abramoff tried to make lobbying a completely Republican province in the 1,000 Year Republican Reich. The economic data is not all that great, in fact. I suggest you read this, written by a former assistant secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts: "Nuking the Economy." http://baltimorechronicle.com/2006/021306Roberts.s html And actually, I'm pretty sure that the 60 Minutes story was pretty accurate, though the documents are likely faked. It doesn't cause you the slightest problem that the man who runs the most belligerent administration in American history was a no-show when it was time for him to do his duty? Before Bush's popularity numbers began their tumble, the media were enormously deferential to him. Remember, the leaks from Libby et al. ended up on the front page of the NY Times, that liberal bastion, helping him go to war based on fake intelligence.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[andreyw]

Last I checked, this so-called "Russian" Mob was based out of Tel-Aviv.

But why yes, the majority of the victims are poor and destitute women from former bloc countries, lured in by the hope of work and money.

Re:US government helped Iraq make poison gas

[vtcodger]

***The WMDs had been used extensively, with our support, during the Iran-Iraq war***

Not entirely wrong, but probably not entirely true either.

WMDs in the Iraq-Iran war translates to poison gas. There's no meaningful evidence that Iraq (or Iran) used biological weapons, and no indication whatsoever that Iraq had or used anything resembling a nuclear or radiation weapon of any sort.

TRUE: The US backed Saddam Hussein's Iraq against Iran.

TRUE: Saddam Hussein used poison gas several times during the Iran-Iraq war. Iran may also have used poison gas but there is no solid proof that they did so.

PROBABLY NOT TRUE: The US government supplied raw materials for poison gas to Iraq. The US government provided intelligence data and 'crop dusting' helicopters to Iraq. On the other hand, the Reagan admistration made an apparently sincere attempt in 1984 to prevent further shipping of precursor chemicals to Iraq after it was discovered that an Iraqi front business was buying and shipping DMMP (a nerve gas precursor) to Iraq. Didn't impede the Iraqis much, they just bought the stuff elsewhere.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_at tack

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[hunterx11]

The U.S. government being evil doesn't make Saddam Hussein any less evil.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[iminplaya]

...then he might very well still be torturing his people to death in large numbers today.

And I'm sure he'd do it with our full support. Just like the good old days.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

The fact that you're a sheep who believes every bit of propoganda they hand you doesn't change the reality of the situation. I may be mistaken as to the absolute nature of the regime, but I know this: If I know little, you know absolutely nothing.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

I've set a double standard intentionally. You can't keep going "We helped in the world wars so we're good" forever. On the other hand, the people who want to kill you for playing god will never go away just because you stop thinking about them.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

It's not about evil, it's about neccessity. You're going to have to use extreme force to combat extreme force. The people largely responsible for the current turmoil in Iraq were the same people who were responsible for the turmoil in Iraq under Saddam. I'm arguing that we're using the same justifyable force as Saddam did.

Re:US government supplied weapons of mass destruct

[Nutria]

If the French, West Germans and the Soviets jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

The point is that people (especially Western Europeans) who dump on the USA are being highly hypocritical, and blind to the complicity of their own governments.

Re:US government supplied weapons of mass destruct

[Sj0]

I think the current situation justifies that to some extent. It wasn't france and germany who wanted to rush into Iraq and head into war.

And as for the soviets, I severely doubt there are many russians who are exactly blind to the excesses of their government.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[hunterx11]

Did you miss the part where I wasn't talking about Hussein putting down insurrections or waging wars of aggression, but instead the murder and ethnic cleansing of Iraqi citizens? What next, you're going to argue that "extreme force" was necessary when Andrew Jackson used it?

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

From what I read, admittedly not too much, most of the "ethnic clensing" was done against the kurds, who were opposing Saddam with the help of Iran.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[iminplaya]

Rather different from Iraq, which had attacked Iran and Kuwait without provocation.

Oh, really? The war began when Iraq invaded Iran on 22 September 1980 following a long history of border disputes, the calling of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime and secret encouragement by the US administration (Jimmy Carter, conveyed through Saudi Arabia) who was embroiled in a dispute with the new regime in Iran. There was nothing unprovoked about it. Stop it already.

Nothing New

[Nerd_52637]

It seems to me that the reason this article was posted and is receiving such discussion is because Bush said it. He was obviously joking. The US Government did not fund research so Apple could make the iPod. Please.

Anyway - goverment funded research is behind all kinds of products that we use every day. NASA research for example, has led entirely or indirectly to smoke detectors, laptop computers, cordless tools, invisible braces, infrared thermometers, joystick controllers, consumer water purifiers, radiation blocking and scratch resistant eyeglass lenses, safety grooves on highways, modern athletic shoes and many others.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[rizzo320]

The WMDs had been used extensively, with our support, during the Iran-Iraq war

This explains the stalemate in the war between Iran and Iraq. With the DRM being too restrictive, the Windows Media Devices became an ineffective weapon. Realizing this, the US government went back to the drawing board and funded those technologies that are now in the iPod.

Brilliant!

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[eclectro]

Absolutely nobody in America can stand politically in the middle, or concede that either side might have some valid point.

Why would I want to concede when we already know that it's all Clinton's fault?

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[adrianmonk]

Where Saddam stopped, USA continued, and committing many war crimes as well. Why do you think that USA is so hated by the general population in the Middle-East?

Partly because many of them think the US is a nation full of Christians. I'm not saying that people who live in countries in the Middle East are bad people or hateful by nature, but keep in mind that we are talking about countries which for the most part are theocracies. All this stuff about freedom of religion that we've developed in the West during the last few centuries since the days of the Protestant Reformation mostly doesn't apply in the Middle East yet. 400-500 years ago in Europe, the Protestant Reformation was going on, people were challenging the state religion and getting burned at the stake for stuff like translating the Bible into English. That gives you an idea of what humans are capable of when someone disagrees with their beliefs, and some similar stuff is going on in the Middle East right now. In fact, consider the recent case of Abdul Rahman, who was put on trial in Afghanistan for converting to Christianity, for which the penalty was to be death. He was released, but what's significant is that it even went to trial and that there were many people in favor of having him executed. Read the Wikipedia article and see how many supporters he had within Afghanistan.

Once again, I'm not saying that Islamic people are bad, but at the same time, it's important not to lie to ourselves about what kinds of attitudes are out there. They may not be representative of the views of all Islamic people, but they are out there, and not they are not that far from the mainstream in certain areas.

The ironic thing about all this is that not that many people in the US actually care that much about Christianity. Sure, there are plenty of people who are Christians, but church membership has been slowly but steadily dropping over the course of the last few decades, and Christianity has lost a whole lot of influence in mainstream culture.

However . .

[Slithe]

>> You have got to control that massive resource, it is a source of world control.

So why did U.S. forces not occupy Kuwait at the end of Desert Storm? We were already there, and we had a good excuse: "To ensure that we can rapidly respond to another invasion attempt by Saddam Hussein." If we only cared about Iraq's oil, why did the U.S. forces depart from Iraq instead of conquering it? Why wait over ten years?

>> And the profit from it also matters,

From what I have heard, maintaining a presence in Iraq costs FAR more than the oil revenue earns.

>> and having bases there that allow you to organize the region in your own interests, of course that matters.

The U.S. already had military bases in Saudi Arabia. If the U.S. only wanted more military bases, it could have maintained a presence in Kuwait and/or conquered Iraq during Desert Storm.

Re:However . .

[Swift2001]

"So why did U.S. forces not occupy Kuwait at the end of Desert Storm? We were already there, and we had a good excuse: "To ensure that we can rapidly respond to another invasion attempt by Saddam Hussein." If we only cared about Iraq's oil, why did the U.S. forces depart from Iraq instead of conquering it? Why wait over ten years?" Because Bush, Sr., was a realist, unlike his not-right-in-the-head son. Same reason we didn't go into Baghdad. Because we'd have lost the Arab support, and we'd have to deal with all the shit we've stirred up now.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Elektroschock]

It is not a real lie, as everybody knew there was no Iraq-Al Quaida relation. It was dirty rhetorics for the masses and everybody knew.

"We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America."

Probably even this is wrong as the US is out of reach for Iraq and we don't know whether it recognised the US as an enemy or planned attacks on the US.

Intrestingly this here is almost true:

"We know that the United States of America and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- Saddam Hussein. We know that the USA and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders went to the USA. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader, who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that the US has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."

Ipod key technical innovation is from Armonk...

[Paolone]

Toshiba bought this technology from IBM years ago (BTW working there I've seen the first model of microdrive).

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[AoT]

That's right, it is.

But not for the reasons you'd expect.

It's because a lot of russian mobsters faked papers that said they were jewish so they could move to israel.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Kreigaffe]

Yes, and you are a shining bastion of civility and intelligence. Yes, Saddam having mis-allocated funds that were intended to feed Iraq and keep them healthy certainly is nothing more than propaganda -- and CERTAINLY all of the stories about massive corruption tied to the Food For Oil program, well, that's just FICTION! You, sir, DO NOT know anything about the absolute nature of the regime, but seem to be able to happily make statements based upon that ignorance. What *I* know about the regime is irrelevant. I know it was bad news, and simply believe that your statement that it was a progressive, liberal country is simply asinine, and does nothing more than pander to the "AHMAHGAH AMERIKA SUX" attitude that many adolescents are unable to escape. Seriously. Iraq under Saddam was a shithole of a dictatorship. What kind of sod would even suggest otherwise. I guess Pol Pot wasn't too bad.. surely Mao had his good points! LONG LIVE CASTRO!

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Nobody's saying that Saddam wasn't a bastard; he certainly was. What they're saying is that he was better than his neighbors and Iraq was quite a bit freer than the other countries in the region. The main reason we attacked them was oil. Everything else has been trumped up - the implied 9/11 link (even though he sent his condolences in the wake of the attacks, a lot of people thiink he had something to do with it), the WMD thing (remember when WMD meant nukes?), his being evil (lots of nasty guys out there, and a good number work for us). We wanted control of Iraq. Bush probably also wanted to distract from his poor handling of the domestic side of things - it's common to use a war to distract from homefront issues.

So what?

[Slithe]

Yeah, the NSA did create the SELinux patches, and TOR was originally developed by the US Naval Research Facility. If you worry about any backdoors in either programs, then study the source code and try to find them.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Fulcrum of Evil]

can't it be said that slavery is not wrong at all, and instead a vital institution for the good of the many?

Sure can. You could argue that prison labor is slavery in the old Roman sense - it's for a limited time, it's partially a repayment for wronging someone (though the romans did it for debt and to conquered people), and it's limited to the person in question. This sort of slavery (also known as indentured servitude) isn't always wrong, although it's illegal unless the government is doing it, as it doesn't dehumanize the person in question, and is limited in scope.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Wow, what an amazing stretch! Imagine the temerity of the USA expecting that an aggressor who had invaded a neighbor and been defeated, who obtained a cease fire under the condition of cooperation with the weapons inspectors (among other things), should actually be required to comply with the terms they'd promised!

I can certainly imagine the USA demanding full compliance even though they know it's flatly impossible, even to the point that they will manufacture noncompliance if necessary.

No

[xihr]

No, that's not what the article says. It says that the government researched key technologies which made the creation iPod (among other things) possible. That's not the same thing as claiming that they developed the iPod, except for fools with an agenda to push.

P.S. Can no one on Slashdot spell the word cue properly?

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[hunterx11]

Iraq borders not only countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria, but also Kuwait, Jordan, and even Turkey. Hussein was oppressive, and this allowed him to enforce secularism against the will of the people. Since the brutality of his dictatorship is irrelevant to the justification of Bush's stated casus belli, there's no need to equivocate it.

Re:US government supplied weapons of mass destruct

[Fulcrum of Evil]

If the French, West Germans and the Soviets jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

Probably. If the french, the West Germans, and the Soviets can agree on something, it's probably the right thing to do.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[MrCopilot]

It always kills me to see the same black and white debate on the same issue. Absolutely nobody in America can stand politically in the middle, or concede that either side might have some valid point.

You might be right. Where can I subscribe to your newsletter, and or webzine/blog/podcast.

As an american I can see you feel very strongly about your erroneous asssumption. You want my "American philosophy", Get a Pencil.

Kill less people.
I know, I know, it is radical, but then again so was paper money. Plus, completely attainable Every year all we have to do is try to kill less people.(Hell the bar is fscking high thanks to "You can't spell war without W", and friends). At some point we get really esoteric and say pollution/lack of health care/poverty is killing people. and so on....

Re:Did you seriously just write "Alas"?

[rk]

I notice, of course, that you couldn't refute his actual point. Is that why you reverted to the lame-ass attack on the word "alas", the still yet lamer spelling flame, and just to cover your tracks a bit more, went for the trifecta with the tried-and-true-slashdot-whine about idiotic mods?

Since passing out points seems to be the rage, can I give you 4 or 5 "obnoxious asshole" points?

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[jimbolaya]

The Middle East is more civilised than the people of the last country to have slaves could ever dream. Wake UP!

The last country to abolish slavery was Saudi Arabi, which is, as you know, in the Middle East. Saudi-held slaves were not emancipated until one year shy of a century after US slaves were freed. Nigeria, a nation that sold many slaves to the Americas, continued domestic slavery nearly four decades into the 20th century. Even among Western nations, Brazil didn't abolish slavery until 25 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in the US.

Slavery was an abomination, and an embarrassing part of the United States' history, but we were neither alone in this abomination, nor the last to abolish it.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[modecx]

If there's one thing worse than getting busted for shit, it's getting busted for shit after you flushed it already.

Yeah, and it's even worse yet if the cops gave it to you in the first place!

Re:Slashdot and Engadget's DISHONEST reporting

[dissident_rockstar]

If only I could mod this... I go to Oberlin College, let's not forget the liberal bias in practically all the professors, everywhere if I'm to understand it correctly. True, the earlier statement that actually doing research inevitably leads to being liberal might have some truth in it, but for god's sakes people think for yourselves! The liberals are simply the lesser of two evils, and not always right.

iTunes? (Re:OT: Signature)

[dn15]

It was probably a reference to the DRM in iTunes.

Re:iTunes? (Re:OT: Signature)

[2nd Post!]

You mean the iTunes Music Store protected aac files, right? iTunes on its own has no DRM features.

Re:iTunes? (Re:OT: Signature)

[dn15]

Sure, I guess it depends on how you look at it. iTunes does not limit how you use music obtained from sources other than its music store. But it supports DRM in that it is capable of playing the iTunes Music Store' Protected AAC files. It does also limit the number of times a specific playlist of said music can be burned before you have to alter it, and limits the number of users that can connect to your shared music each day.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[SteeldrivingJon]

"Possibly, although they could also be in Syria."

Right. They could also be up Bush's ass (right next to Bush's head).

There were none in 2003. Not that that mattered to Bush, who had a hard-on for war and was willing to resort to fraud in order to get his war on.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[SteeldrivingJon]

"The WMDs had been used extensively during the Iran-Iraq war. Thousands of dead and wounded are not "very little" proof."

Since when is a twenty year old use of WMD, at a time when Saddam was our buddy, justification for a half-trilion dollar war and thousands of dead and wounded, when, frankly, we had actual threats to be working on?

Iraq was a utopian distraction from dealing with the actual threats. A distraction that has been vastly damaging to our military and our national security.

But I guess that's what you get when you let ex-Trots come up with national policy. Once a utopian, always a utopian.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Achromatic1978]

and thus was one of the best and most humane decisions of the war.

Wow, I'm impressed at this - having the utter gall to suggest the atomic bombing of 100,000 civilians and the associated radiation sickness that plagued for decades is... wait for it... "humane". Humane? Compared to what? Our lack of gratitude that the US didn't rain mustard gas down on the populaces?

Some guys you know > Historical Fucking Fact

[I Like Pudding]

Racist caricature? Tell that to Nanking. OH GOD, THE MILTARY PROPAGANDISTS MADE IT ALL UP!

How's this for a viewpoint: I don't care about the Japanese body count in WW2. Dropping a couple nukes saved a hell of a lot more American lives than storming the island, and that's the primary thing the US miltary should be concerned about. To criticise A war of that scope does not reward mercy.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Achromatic1978]

Guess what, neither was the illegal bombing of Cambodia. Does that mean that Pol Pot wasn't really "evil"

Suggestion: do a little more research into this - you'll find that while the US was suspending aid to Cambodia, Henry Kissinger and his friends in the CIA were out and about, giving a hand to the Khmer Rouge.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Achromatic1978]

In Chile, for example, Salvador Allende ... within 3 years of being in office

And therein lies the crux. The US, "spreading democracy to the world" was more than happy to depose a popularly and democratically elected leader for a despot because "OMG! NOES! MAYBE A COMMIE!"

Pinochet is no angel either (he is an authoritarian and basically killed off any leftists, censored the press, and did a lot of very bad things), but he did save Chile from becoming another communist nation

This would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad. You shrug off murdering of opposition, censorship, all these democratic principles for what, precisely? The concept that Communism is one rung lower than Satanism on the totem pole?

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Achromatic1978]

You were apparently seeming to imply that our bases are not wanted in those countries. From experience, I can say that you are wrong about that. Everywhere there is a U.S. base, there are huge economic benefits for the surrounding area. The people NEAR the bases generally greatly wish those bases to remain where they are, because the bases positively impact their quality of life.

You may also wish to ask the Okinawans in Japan just how much they love the US and their bases there. Issues of violence, environmental destruction and the like - just for a start.

YOU should read more

[smitth1276]

***"Gitmo is not illegal. What we are doing there, is. It violates every one of our laws and conventions... these people, well, they are POWs ... they are soldiers and to say otherwise, is a lie. They should all be in a POW camp with the geneva convention being applied"

You clearly haven't read the Geneva convention. Go read it. Maybe next time you won't sound like an 8th grader spouting off crap he read on Daily Kos or something.

For the benefit of others, who may be interested in actually knowing the facts of the matter... a POW is defined as follows...

A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:

1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.[NOPE]

2. Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:

(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;[NOT EXACTLY, but arguable]

(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;{DEFINATELY NOT]

(c) That of carrying arms openly;[WELL, IN SOME CASES... but telling a retarded kid to drive a truck somewhere and remotely detonating it is arguably underhanded]

(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.[NOPE]

3. Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.[NOPE]

4. Persons who accompany the armed forces without actually being members thereof, such as civilian members of military aircraft crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they have received authorization from the armed forces which they accompany, who shall provide them for that purpose with an identity card similar to the annexed model.[NOPE]

5. Members of crews, including masters, pilots and apprentices, of the merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft of the Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit by more favourable treatment under any other provisions of international law.[NOPE.]

6. Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war. [NOPE, nothing spontaneous about the "insurgency"]

***"Now, as to the media leaning left, you have to be kidding me. Show me any real study and the result, coward."

Something like 90% of the Washington press corp votes Democrat, and twice as many self-identify as liberals as the general population.

Here is at least one poll of journalists that you could find for your self if you really wanted to know the answers to your questions.

And another, showing that they are way to the left of the general public on the Iraq war. Furthermore, if you don't trust the journalist themselves, the public, by a 5:3 margin perceives the media as being biased to the left. This margin handily exceeds the margin by which the public self-identifies as conservative (not to be confused with Republican).

Article

Re:YOU should read more

[dave420]

The fact their status is arguable, and people must be given the benefit of the doubt (that is the basis for law in the US, and most of Europe) means they should not be there.

As for Iraq somehow needing to be invaded, you really must read those news stories deeper. Iraq did nothing to provoke an invasion. They had not invaded another country, they did not have weapons to threaten other countries. Every one of its neighbours was not scared of Iraq, as Iraq was effectively neutered after the first gulf war and the sanctions. The ISG even agrees with that.

Every single reason for going into Iraq was proven incorrect. The whole world knew what would be found in Iraq, yet Bush et al. steamed on anyway. They obviously DID make the stuff up, as nothing was found. And they've had years to find it.

Re:YOU should read more

[smitth1276]

Every single reason for going into Iraq was proven incorrect.

Such as? Are you saying that Saddam hadn't systematically violated his cease-fire agreement? Are you saying that he had accounted for all of his illegal weapons? If so, direct me to the source, because as of UNSC resolution 1441, that was not the case, and in fact large quantities were unaccounted for. Hans Blix, in his final report to the security council, reiterated that many bio and chem weapons were unaccounted for.

Are you saying that Saddam wasn't harboring known al-Qaeda operatives? al-Zarqawi, for example. Are you saying he wasn't harboring the bombmaker for the original WTC attack, who mysteriously killed himself by shooting himself multiple times in the head just before the invasion? Are you saying that Saddam really wasn't funding suicide bombers? Are you saying that Saddam didn't have contacts with al-Qaeda (more docs have been coming out recently to affirm this, by the way)?

The whole world knew what would be found in Iraq, yet Bush et al. steamed on anyway.

That is the most uninformed, or blatantly revisionist, statement I have seen on slashdot today, and that is saying a lot. I ask you simply to provide a SINGLE reputable source that indicates that a major western nations intel services thought that Saddam had no WMDs. You won't find one, of course, because you just made that up out of nowhere. But you have to at least look now, lest you appear to be a complete fool.

Re:YOU should read more

[dave420]

Resolution 1441 was agreed upon to need a further resolution before armed intervention could be undertaken. Also, the fact that the US went in without the UN shows how little the US cares about the resolutions, so calling upon them after the fact is just paying lip-service.

Al-Zarqawi was not an Al-Qaida operative until *after* the invasion, when he allied his group, Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, with Al-Qaida. All other tales of Al-Qaida operatives in Saddam's Iraq at Saddam's behest or with his support are bullshit, as Saddam hated those guys more than we do. I could point out the fact that Al Qaida operatives have been in the US, and say that the Bush government wanted them there - clearly that's not the case.

As for the WMDs? The UN inspections prior to 1998, and the UN sanctions, were working well. There was agreement on that. Obviously, if the UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to stay in Iraq, that would have been ascertained. The sheer amount of harassment Iraq was receiving was hindering it greatly. The money Saddam did have was diminishing rapidly. We saw that when his army failed to do anything when we attacked.

Why do you think all those countries didn't want any part in this? They didn't want to get their jeeps dirty? Scared of scratching their jets? If you want to take a look at this situation just from news outlets, then please - judge the situation by the tiny amount of information you're getting. Look at the big picture. Why weren't any of Iraq's neighbours calling for his WMDs to be destroyed? Iraq hasn't exactly played nicely in that area - if he did have weapons, if he was able to use them, the west would know in no uncertain terms. Just because all those countries are muslim doesn't mean they're all in cahoots :)

Read about the downing street memos. Read about the scandal surrounding the "sexing-up" of intelligence dossiers to make Saddam sound dangerous - it seems you fell for it hook, line and sinker.

Re:YOU should read more

[smitth1276]

Well, you clearly haven't even read Res. 1441. What is it with you people and your refusal to actually read anything?

All other tales of Al-Qaida operatives in Saddam's Iraq at Saddam's behest or with his support are bullshit, as Saddam hated those guys more than we do.

Lol... okay, keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile new documents keep turning up showing that notion to be as baseless as common sense tells us it is. If you are going to engage in these conversations, you need to do some reading beforehand, and you need to inform yourself. There is no basis, whatsoever, for the assertion that Saddam "hated those guys more than we do." There is, however, ample evidence that they had low level contacts at the least, and other more suggestive evidence that they had operational ties.

Al-Zarqawi was not an Al-Qaida operative until *after* the invasion

You can split hairs all you want, but I will not allow you to abfuscate the issue. He was running a terror training camp in Afghanistan up to 2001, working with al-Queda, then fled to Iraq after a US missile strike where he was provided medical care by Saddam Hussein.

The UN inspections prior to 1998, and the UN sanctions, were working well. There was agreement on that. Obviously, if the UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to stay in Iraq, that would have been ascertained. The sheer amount of harassment Iraq was receiving was hindering it greatly. The money Saddam did have was diminishing rapidly. We saw that when his army failed to do anything when we attacked.

I think I will let this little gem stand on its own merit. Hehe. I mean you clearly have your facts in order, obviously. There certainly must be agreement on that. We saw that when your string of assertions failed to provide any supporting evidence at all, obviously.

Read about the downing street memos. Read about the scandal surrounding the "sexing-up" of intelligence dossiers to make Saddam sound dangerous

I have read them... I think that it reflects poorly on you that you think they are as important as you suggest they are.

Re:YOU should read more

[Swift2001]

I leave with you General Zinni's and Gen. Clark's testimony, and many other people before the war. We had him in a box, and he wasn't getting out. Saddam had been persuaded that Bush really meant it, and you can't show any way that he blocked the inspections in those last weeks. We would never have believed it, of course, because the war had been planned since 1998 or so, and that's what was going to happen, no matter what lies had to be told to move the troops. Bush never thought that, whoa, what if Saddam shows everything to us? That's why we went right to war, without giving the inspectors a chance. And Scott Ritter and the slandered Hans Blix were right, and the intelligence agencies, who knew which side of the bread to butter, were wrong. They thought he MIGHT have some residue. Ever figure out why? Because Iran was right next to him! He didn't want to give up the idea that maybe he had nasty weapons. ' The al-Qaeda operatives? That? Pure bull. Horse crap. al-Zarqawi was up between the Kurds and Iran for a reason. None of the "evidence" produced ever made any sense, and it's all been thoroughly discredited. Saddam was an evil, secular dictator. He wanted Islamist terrorists around about as much as fleas. As for the rest of your ramblings, the quicker we can get you idiots out of power, the better. It's not true, any of it. And the most ridiculous thing I've seen on Slashdot today is obvously your posting.

Re:US government supplied weapons of mass destruct

[Nutria]

It wasn't france and germany who wanted to rush into Iraq and head into war.

You're right. They just wanted to sell more and more "dual-use" technologies to Iraq while buying oil from them, ensuring that more money funneled into Saddam's pockets.

Is Slashdot negative on the humor tank today?

[vitaboy]

Uh, hello! World to Slashdot! Knock, knock, Engadget! Reminds me of a joke I heard about liberals and conservatives.

What's the difference between a liberal and a conservative? Liberals have no sense of humor.

I'm assuming the Engadget post is just another attempt to point to evidence that Bush is deranged or megalomanical. How anyone can mistake an obvious punchline to get laughs on a serious point about the importance of government-funded research seems that the more likely conclusion is that some people need to lighten up.

So for the humor impaired, here's a humor-obvious version of the punchline:

"They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod." (Laughter)

With stories like this being highlighted as "news" on Slashdot, I propose the following format for future posts for the sake of the humor challenged readers among the Engadget and Slashdot crowd.

Apple announced today a new iPod with a widescreen touch-sensitive display. (Statement) Analyst Gene Munster in reaction stated, "This should only further strengthen Apple's dominant grip on the digital music market." (Opinion). At a local Apple store in New York City, iPod user Joe Smith had this to say about the new iPod: "It is clearly yet another device designed solely for a single purpose: to cause the iPod masses to offer up their credit card numbers in divine worship." (Joke).

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[linguae]

And therein lies the crux. The US, "spreading democracy to the world" was more than happy to depose a popularly and democratically elected leader for a despot because "OMG! NOES! MAYBE A COMMIE!"

Maybe a commie? He is as communistic as communism could get. He is a Marxist, for crying out loud. Marxism is the most original form of communism you can get.

However, your point still stands. I am a staunch opponent of the US "spreading democracy around the world"; countries shouldn't intervene in other countries' politics, unless it is a dire threat (for example, the other country declares war on this country).

This would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad. You shrug off murdering of opposition, censorship, all these democratic principles for what, precisely? The concept that Communism is one rung lower than Satanism on the totem pole?

I didn't shrug it off. Pinochet's handling of socialists and communists fit my definition of evil. I personally despise socialism and communism, but killing their believers is uncalled for in a free society; people should be free to believe what they want to believe, even if their ideas are radical. I am a libertarian; I don't want the government shutting me up because my viewpoints don't match the current government's views.

However, I would have rather lived in Pinochet's Chile than Castro's Cuba, Mao's China, or the USSR. In a free-market economy, people are free to voluntarily trade. People are free to make their own economic decisions without the state or "the community" dictating what they should do with their money. Taxes are generally kept low (or even non-existant in pure capitalism) as a result. Free markets mean freedom of the economy. Free-market economics doesn't solve all of the world's problems and it doesn't give other freedoms (Pinochet is proof of that), but it is the most free option that we have.

Leftist ideologies such as socialism and communism, on the other hand, can give a rat's behind about freedom. They would rather see the individual killed with a sickle and a hammer before he is economically free. Everything is about "the state" or "the community" (depending on the exact ideology), and the individual is just a small pawn in the chess board of society; in other words, individuals don't matter. You aren't free to trade with whom you want. You aren't free to opt out of paying for social programs. You aren't free to set up businesses without mounds of regulations and taxes (and in some ideologies, businesses don't exist). You aren't even free to grow your own crops at times (I'm referring to the USSR during the first few years of Stalin's rule). Basically, you aren't free. Everything must be for the benefit of "the community" (which turns out to be the state, in most cases). When the state grows more powerful, other freedoms are taken away. Now, I'm pretty sure that when Karl Marx sat down and wrote The Communist Manifesto, he didn't plan on restricting people's right to free speech, freedom of association, freedom of press, and other freedoms (other than economic ones). However, as the communist states are formed, the states grow in power. As the state grows in power, they find other freedoms to take away from you. In Cuba, for example, you better not speak out against leftism or Castro, or you'll find yourself heavily fined, at best. At the worst extremes, you get communist leaders like Mao. Mao's killing record makes Pinochet look like an angel, and I can run down the list of other communist leaders who also participated in the killing of people just because they were right-wing or anti-communistic in another way.

Put it like this: I do not support Pinochet's policies with dealing with socialists and communists (even though I am a huge supporter of his free-market economics). It is important for all of us to keep our ideologies and actions in check. We can become so passionate about not liking a certai

Fraunhofer Institute

[Lars T.]

How nice of Bush "to point out the accomplishments of private companies in the US and abroad, [...] not to mention the Fraunhofer Institute". But the FHG is for a large part public funded.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[drsmithy]

Oh my God, perhaps you should educate yourself?

Perhaps it is you that needs to educate yourself on relative international literacy rates and educational standards, freedoms of speech, press freedoms, religious freedoms and all the other key features of liberal, secular societies.

You may then wish to examine the correlations between these things and the world's sane societies compared to the world's insane societies.

Note that you may have trouble reconciling the obvious conclusions (the foremost being that poor, uneducated peasants with little access to inbiased information are easily misled) with your "everything wrong with the world is America's fault" viewpoint.

Watching Fox News does not count.

The country I live in doesn't *have* Fox News, and from everything I've heard about it's far-right slant (and, hey, if *Americans* think it's right wing, then it's got to be way out there) I doubt I'd find much of interest on it.

Re:US government supplied weapons of mass destruct

[Sj0]

That's a ridiculously transparent thing to say: Almost all technology is 'dual use'. You can take an RTD, a plastic jug, and a heater, and use it to create a fermentation chamber. If you know what you're doing, you can make some of the most destructive chemicals known to man without working all that hard to acquire the raw materials.

The really important thing has never been about the 'dual use' technology, but ensuring that the people with the skills to do something with it aren't there -- and the shitty conditions in the war ravaged country more or less took care of that.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

Class. You've got it.

Here's a bit of information

Let's see....

"To the consternation of Islamic conservatives, his government gave women added freedoms and offered them high-level government and industry jobs.Saddam also created a Western-style legal system, making Iraq the only country in the Gulf region not ruled according to traditional Islamic law (Sharia). Saddam abolished the Sharia law courts, except for personal injury claims."

"Saddam established and controlled the "National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy" and the campaign for "Compulsory Free Education in Iraq," and largely under his auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels; hundreds of thousands learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program. The government also supported families of soldiers, granted free hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Iraq created one of the most modernized public-health systems in the Middle East, earning Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)."

As I said; If I know little, you know absolutely nothing.

Not the USA

[phorm]

Their government, and following with that military. Oh, and corporations.

In all honesty I find the ratio of Americans I dislike to those I like is probably about the same as locals here, but I find their corporate practices (esp RIAA/MPAA/Sony/etc), military machine, and government policies/corruption detestable. But then again, so do many of the more educated Americans.

Re:Not the USA

[Grishnakh]

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken

BTW, Sony is a Japanese company, not American. You're probably thinking of Microsoft, a real honest-to-goodness, all-American, evil corporation. Don't forget about the American oil companies (like Exxon, which still hasn't paid its fines for the Exxon Valdez disaster 20 years ago), Halliburton, the preeminent war profiteer, Monsanto, and many more.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[idsofmarch]

This is one of the most coherent posts I've read on Slashdot regarding any political discussion. Kudos.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

I actually *AM* saying that he's not the bastard everyone makes him out to be. He brought about modern education to Iraq, as well as roads, electricity, and mining infastructure, gave women rights and a place in the workplace, and abolished islamic law in favour of western style law, all while dealing with EXACTLY the same people we're killing in Iraq today (not to mention having to deal with war against the Iranians, who -- oh geez, we're forced to deal with today too!)

There were certainly excesses. However, the information I've read seems to point to one of the most progressive leaders in the reigon.

Is this the same Bush

[Webspit]

as the Bush that illegally copied his Beatles CD and put it on his iPod (beatles tracks aren't available in digital form in the US and ripping CDs is illegal in the US) Impeach!!!

Re:

[haqatak]

And the propaganda machine keeps churning out the same of the good old same.

I mean, the enemey will always.. ALWAYS.. be described as a suicidal maniac who is willing it give up everything, their life, civilans everything, to kill you and "your way of life"[TM]

Because obviously...

[FredFnord]

However, I would have rather lived in Pinochet's Chile than Castro's Cuba, Mao's China, or the USSR. In a free-market economy, people are free to voluntarily trade. People are free to make their own economic decisions without the state or "the community" dictating what they should do with their money.

And this is what just plain drives me nuts about today's 'libertarians'. Look at what you're saying there. Somehow, all of a sudden, the most important thing about choosing a society is what people are able to do with money. Property is more important than people. And anything that maximizes the 'freedom of the market' (whatever that means, given the tendency of a market-based economy to create economic slavery) is, ipso facto, good. It's a religion, because nobody even does a very good job of saying why a free market capitalist who puts people to death on a daily basis is somehow better than a socialist leader who doesn't. But they just are, because a free market is more important than people.

Once again, I despise socialism and communism. It saddens me to even think that people virtually want us to become slaves to collectivism forever.

I'm not a big fan of collectivism either, in its most absolute forms. However, the freer the market, the less opportunity the people with no money have to ever gain money, and the more they come to resemble slaves. (In a truly free market, without copyrights and patents, any invention made by someone without the money to market and defend it himself instantly is coopted by the organization to take advantage of it.) So now you have a choice: slavery to collectivism, or slavery to capital. The latter is often preferred by the people with capital (who tend to be Republicans and libertarians, in this country). The former isn't really preferred by anyone, which is why it's never really been tried. (The USSR, Cuba, etc are all authoritarian/aristocratic states, that are only capitalist in the lower rungs of society.) It would seem to be to be appropriate to find a happy medium where there isn't anyone who is enslaved.

Sadly, that's not the direction the USA has been moving in of late.

-fred

Re:Because obviously...

[linguae]

Somehow, all of a sudden, the most important thing about choosing a society is what people are able to do with money. Property is more important than people. And anything that maximizes the 'freedom of the market' (whatever that means, given the tendency of a market-based economy to create economic slavery) is, ipso facto, good. It's a religion, because nobody even does a very good job of saying why a free market capitalist who puts people to death on a daily basis is somehow better than a socialist leader who doesn't. But they just are, because a free market is more important than people.

I didn't say that money was more important. However, I was comparing an authoritarian capitalist leader (Pinochet) to authoritarian socialist leaders (Mao and Castro); I am not comparing Pinochet to socialists who didn't kill. In my comparison, my answer is that some freedom is better than no freedom. Under Pinochet's rule, you had free markets, but no freedom elsewhere. Under Mao's China and Cuba, there is no freedom.

An authoritarian capitalist government desparately lacks in many essential freedoms, but it is still better than having an authoritarian socialist government, simply because the economy isn't socialist. However, things get interesting when you compare a government that has free markets but completely non-free in civil liberties, to a government that has all of the civil liberties you can dream of, but has a completely non-free market (i.e., socialism or communism). Civil liberties and free markets are the yin and the yang to me; I am not pleased until I have both. Pinochet has the yang but not the yin; a socialist that fully respects civil liberties has the yin but not the yang. Just like you can't have a free country without civil liberties, you can't have a free country without free markets. Both countries in this case are equally unfree.

I don't think markets are more important than people. However, I firmly believe that people need the free market in order to be more free. Socialism and communism never allows people to be free. Even if they had all of the civil liberties in the world, what good is it if the state is telling them what to do with their money at every turn? That isn't freedom.

Freedom and individualism, to me, is the most important goals in society. Without these goals, humans are little more than slaves to somebody else or to the state. Freedom and individualism doesn't solve everything, but at least people are much more freer.

However, the freer the market, the less opportunity the people with no money have to ever gain money, and the more they come to resemble slaves.

What? In a truly free market, people will always be able to work or form businesses to earn money. If they had no money, they could borrow from somebody else and pay it back later, depending on the terms. What are you talking about?

(In a truly free market, without copyrights and patents, any invention made by someone without the money to market and defend it himself instantly is coopted by the organization to take advantage of it.)

I won't tackle the copyright issue, mostly because I haven't developed a true stance on it. I believe that copyright durations are much too long, and they need to be reduced. However, I don't know if I want to eliminate copyright or not. I've heard anarchocapitalist arguments for elimination of copyright, as well as some market-based arguments for supporting copyrights.

So now you have a choice: slavery to collectivism, or slavery to capital. The latter is often preferred by the people with capital (who tend to be Republicans and libertarians, in this country). The former isn't really preferred by anyone, which is why it's never really been tried. (The USSR, Cuba, etc are all authoritarian/aristocratic states, that are only capitalist in the lower rungs of society.) It would seem to be

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[jcr]

Since when is a twenty year old use of WMD

The previous use of them was the proof that they existed. The burden of proof was on Saddam's regime, not on the weapons inspectors. to show that the stockpiles which he acknowleged having at the time of the cease-fire, had been destroyed in accord with the cease-fire terms. He chose not to comply, so that he could bluff his neighbors into thinking he might still have them. As it happens, his own officers were surprised as hell that they didn't have that ace in the hole.

-jcr

Re:Whoa...

[FredFnord]

Maybe later we can have a discussion about Kyoto and how some of the largest polluters in the world were exempted from the treaty, thus removing any real environmental benefit while hampering U.S. economic interests.

Yap yap yap. The United States is the #1 emitter of greenhouse gasses. 5 years ago, when Kyoto was actually a going concern, we were bigger than #2 and #3 combined, and bigger than everyone from #11 on down to the last one. Adjusted for population, which in all fairness one should probably do if you're comparing the US to China, we are still the largest by a truly ridiculous ratio.

If the United States were killing, say, 1 million people a year, and China were killing 600,000 people a year, and India were killing 200,000 people a year, and there were a treaty floated that would force the United States to 'cut down' to only 400,000 people a year, I would support it even if it didn't force China or India to cut down. Even if it were a little inconvenient for the US to stop killing people.

Clearly, though, poisoning the planet and destroying fragile ecosystems and potentially causing the destruction of the homes of tens or hundreds of millions of people, social upheaval, etc, cannot reasonably be compared to that, right?

-fred

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Catbeller]

AND. Don't forget that Saddam threw open the country to the inspectors over a month before Bush had his invasion planned to begin. BUSH told the inspectors to leave Iraq - NOT SADDAM. Bush smeared the reputation of Blix for months, had the CIA spy on the team, then told him to leave Iraq or be blown up with the Iraqis. Keep in mind that Blix had complete access to Iraq at that point, and was concluding that the WMD programs were dead and the stockpiles gone (keep in mind the anthrax was dead years before as a matter of biology). Bush didn't want that to happen, so he destroyed the team's reputation, then cut their mission short. As we've conclusively seen from the British meetings, Bush had his invasion plan ready before the inspectors ever went in. And Bush STILL insists that Saddam wouldn't let the inspectors in. He's either a colossal liar or, let's say it out loud, insane.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Catbeller]

We supported the death squads in Nicaragua, actually trained them to murder thousands of "leftist sympathizers" in the 80's. It brought tears of joy to Reagan's eyes. We've aided an abetted the slaughter of millions in the last century in the name of the Dole Pinapple company and United Fruit. We slaughtered over 2,000 Panamanians in the name of capturing Manuel Noriega for some secret crime no one has told us about.

Evil? We just don't bother to write it down where we can read it. Not to mention we set up Saddam with his chemical weaponry, as long as he was fighting Iran. We have no problems with evil. Bush has a messianic complex, is talking to his god just a tad too much, and has no grasp of the history of his own country, much less others. We're being "led" by a delusional alchohol-damaged moron. Watch old Bush speechs from ten years back, and compare his older clear, intelligent delivery to today's mumbled, incoherent ramblings. He's brain-damaged.

Bush is brain damaged, and Reagan was not very bright and senile to boot. THESE are the heroes of the right wing?

Regarding Gore

[tm2b]

I hope people will read this site instead of (or at least in addition to) the Snopes article.

It's a much more complete and coherent explanation of exactly what Al Gore's legitimate claim is with respect to contributing to the creation of the modern Internet.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[conradp]

They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod

That sounds to me like he's saying the US government funded research of those technologies in order to develop the iPod. Bush boned his speech; the Slashdot article accurately summarizes the literal claim he made.

No, it's pretty clear that endgadget is trying to create a Gore-like "I invented the internet" story by taking an obvious joke out of context. Read the whole context at http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT= 104&STORY=/www/story/04-19-2006/0004343272&EDATE=. Bush is giving a long speech to a bunch of college students explaining how he thinks the government has a limited role in funding basic research while the true innovations happen in industry, and he throws in an iPod joke. Endgadget takes it out of context and Slashdot gobbles it up unquestioningly.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[conradp]

Frankly, I think considering the circumstances, Kuwait had it coming.
Wow, that's pretty disgusting. Just because Kuwait refused to participate in price collusion to screw the rest of the world so that Saddam could repay the debt he racked up while butchering his neighbors and his own people, you think Kuwait "had it coming"?!?

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[conradp]

The US was using Iraq as a proxy against Iran decades before Kuwait.
Well "decades" is certainly incorrect and "proxy" is overblown though there certainly was a lot of U.S. meddling. The U.S. hated Iraq in the 70s because it was supported and armed by the Soviets; following the Soviet model, Saddam had turned Iraq into a psuedo-socialist, brutal dictatorship. The U.S. supported Iran over Iraq until the islamists toppled the Shaw in 1979 and took over the U.S. embassy, killing 2 Americans and holding 50+ hostages for 444 days. When Saddam saw disorganization in Iran and attacked them a year or two later, the U.S. really hoped that both sides would lose.

It wasn't until 1983, when Iraq's army was up against suicidal human-wave attacks from Iran, that the U.S. became concerned that the islamic fundamentalist regime could actually take over Iraq and threaten Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well. That's when they started sending help to Saddam in the forms of guarantees on bank loans, and sometimes giving him information about Iranian military positions. Meanwhile, of course, the U.S. was also sending weapons to Iran as part of the Iran-Contra fiasco, so it seems the U.S. was still trying to ensure both sides would lose.

Re:Ipod key technical innovation is from *Tokyo*

[alexandrecc]

IBM developped the microdrive used for CF type II cards in 1999. The technology was sold to Hitachi later. Toshiba then developped a 1.8" 20 gig low power consumption hard drive. It was designed initially for the laptop market. By chance, Apple got into that and used that new 20 gig hard drive in their first Ipod model. At that time Hitachi was building 4 and 6 gig version of their microdrive used later in the Ipod mini. So unless you think that Ipod mini (discontinued!) was more popular than the classic Ipod 20 gig, then the key innovation for the Ipod is actually from Tokyo.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Jon_A_Mnemonic]

Like I said, it's not always true, but in general it is. Sure, there are exceptions, but by and large, I'd guess in 90 percent of cases, the local populace is happy with our troops (and their money), especially in cases where the base is new enough that they remember what their lives were like economically before our base was there.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Sj0]

Kuwait didn't just oppose OPEC decreasing production(By the way, by being a member of OPEC, they are part of an organization dedicated to collusion.), they went out of their way to flood the market with cheap oil. This action is completely spiteful, considering Iraq specifically requested what they did so they could pay down war debts and start rebuilding infastructure.

Re:no - *YOU* should read more, then you could spe

[smitth1276]

Ahh, thank you. You are an excellent spellchecker, sir.

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

I think this is totally awesome. I wish the government would spend more time developing stuff useful to us instead of bombing, invading and occupying other countries.

Re:Did you seriously just write "Alas"?

[heinousjay]

There was no point to refute, since it was irrelevant to the discussion. I can throw out conversation derailing insults just as well, but it doesn't mean I've contributed in a meaningful way that deserves positive attention.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Swift2001]

Hey, why not? It worked, by the way, with Gore, whose negatives are now as bad as Cheney's. This has to do with the ability of evil gossip to destroy people's reputation, and if it now happens to a Republican, why I'm just heart-struck. What's sauce for the goose ("Gore will do or say anything to be elected." "Gore even thinks he invented the Internet, haw, haw!") is sauce for the gander ("Bush says the DoD invented the iPod." "Bush says he does like black people."). How do you like it?

Re:Fraunhofer & MP3 Development

[slew]

>I'm not really sure that MP3 is really more related to ASPEC (the Fraunhofer stuff) or related to Musicam (the Philips stuff)

I thought that what everyone refers to as MP3 is Layer 3, which in turn is based on ASPEC (while Layer 1/2 are based on MUSICAM).

Certainly MP3 is layer III, but since you seem to be insisting, I'll elaborate...

Instead of the "two-path" approach that you seem to be implying (e.g., layer I/II MUSICAM and layer III based on ASPEC), instead, the MPEG 1 audio standard was structured in a series complexity layers (layer I was the simplest and layer III the most complex), but they were based on the same basic 32 sub-band filterbank schema from MUSICAM. Layer III borrowed many ideas from ASPEC (most notably augmenting the sub-band filterbank with MDCT for better frequency resolution, and using huffman codes instead of fixed length codes), but really still uses the the sub-band filterbank schema rather than the ASPEC spectral transform scheme so in a sense, layer III really had many fathers. In fact it's pretty easy to see in layer III that the MDCT was really sort of grafted in over the sub-band scheme from layer I and layer II. It's a bit unfair to say that MP3 has nothing to do with MUSICAM, although like I said, FhG certainly deserves a lot of the credit and as a result has some of their IP in the standard...

Here's a press release from the Convenor that probably conveys what I was trying to say a little bit better.

Perhaps surprisingly to most people not familiar with the process, quite a bit of technical work from many companies are integrated into standards the MPEG committee produced. This is sort of collaboration is somewhat unusual for an international standards body (which often just rubber-stamps proposals from a single company). In the committee, people/companies that have good ideas (that bear out under analysis) and are willing to do the hard work to refine the ideas into practice, generally see their IP incorporated into the standard.

Of course, the view is that "FhG developed MP3" is just a sound-bite like the "US govt developed the iPod". All sound-bites have some fraction of truth and some fraction of spin. The fraction of truth is much higher in the former than the later, but like the orignal poster said, I think that gives short shrift to the many companies and individuals that contributed to making MP3 (and that's not just a political point of view about MP3, you can see it in the technical details).

However, this is /. so it's usually just easier to dumb-down into sound-bites for the fan-boys to argue about... ;^)

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Golias]

The difference being, the Bush "quote" is obviously sarcasm taken out of context to look like he meant it.

Gore, on the other hand, was dead serious when he said, "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." He really intended for people to believe that, in spite of not even being in Congress until two full years after people started calling ARPANET "the Internet", he deserved credit for its creation.

Mad props to Gore for the work he did in Congress to advance Internet infrastucture and standards, but it's still a very silly quote, and probably the biggest PR screw-up of his entire career.

(By the way, as much as people like to say it was Bush or Cheyney or Rove or whoever that blew Gore's quote out of proportion, several of his Democratic primary opponents also gave him endless shit about it as well, until he sewed up the nomination.)

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[menace3society]

Actually, the way I read it, it seems like a typographical error that changed fairly significantly the meaning of the sentence. Try parsing it with a semicolon instead of a colon:

They did so for one reason; It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.

In other words, this would suggest that the government funded research into microelectronics was for purpose A, probably "fighting the Russians", and it ended up being useful for purpose B, a generalized form of "storing your music collection in a pack of cards." Contrariwise, the actual quote:

They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.

suggests that the particular reason for funding this research lies in the clause following the colon; to wit, developing the iPod. But the phrase "it turned out..." is thus somewhat problematic, since you wouldn't say "With regards to A, it turned out that B" when B is the intended and expected result of A (e.g. in "It turned out that my taxes were filed on time", there is an implicit expectation that the taxes hadn't been filed in time to meet the deadline). So it's the speechwriter's fault, and (by extension) Bush's for not getting it edited properly. But I agree that it wasn't the intended meaning to suggest that Bush, or the government, actually developed the iPod. Still, with the way these things go, he'll probably never live it down.

You've been disarmed

[bill_mcgonigle]

Look, Bush got into and graduated from Yale, Harvard Business, and then became the governor of Texas, then 2x President of the US. You don't get this resumé by being an idiot, even if your Daddy is powerful.

Go listen to transcripts of some of his gubernatorial debates - before he learned to say 'nuculur'. These comments and 'mismalapropisms' are calculated and deliberate. If you've been fooled otherwise you've been disarmed as designed.

Don't be used.

listening to transcripts

[bill_mcgonigle]

s/transcripts/recordings/

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[sgt_doom]

Sorry, you have misinterpreted what I posted: 5,000 Iraqi women and 240 Iraqi children have been kidnapped with the remaining 20,000 Iraqis.

These Iraqi women and children will probably end up in various parts of Asia (and the American protectorates of the N. Marianis Islands, etc.) where they will be used for sexual slavery, i.e., forced prostitution and child prostitution.

The Russian mob is reputed to be in at least 50 countries, those in Israel cleverly got out of the old Soviet Union by using fake documents proclaiming themselves Jewish (some were former members of the old KGB, GRU, etc., as are many of the Russian mob today throughout these 50 counries).

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[andreyw]

To both of the people who replied: look up Occam's Razor. /uh yeah, they pretended to be Jewish just so they could get Israeli citizenship. And they have names like Levin and Goldman. Yes. Russkies.

What came before was VERY much less...

[Futurepower(R)]

Back then, most people who had access to what would become the Internet were VERY much against letting it be open to other people.

It was a big leap of thinking that it should be a public utility.

Back then, people accessed the resources using gopher. Gore sponsered the bill that created the first browser.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Swift2001]

And the "liberal" press giggled about their non-existent quotes all the way home. But I don't care what they say about Bush. He doesn't deserve pity.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Swift2001]

"Buying oil and controlling oil are two different things." Right. In the latter, you control the access and pricing.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[Golias]

The fire-bombing of Tokyo killed far more civilians than both nukes combined, and the invasion of Japan would have killed millions. There's little question that the nukes were the only reason the Japanese commanders (not Hirohito himself) made the decision to surrender, and there's little question that, if they did not it would have been a disaster for Japan.

Think of it. Millions killed, followed by a Japan divided in two the way Germany was, meaning that half of the country would be an impoverished, oppressed, dystopic nightmare for the next 60 years.

There's no question that, in hindsight, dropping those bombs was the nicest thing the US could have done for them at that point.

The pre-cursor to the Internet was very limited...

[Futurepower(R)]

I never had access to the pre-Internet Inter-network myself, but I talked with people at Tektronix who had access. The pre-cursor to the Internet was a very limited resource compared to what resulted because of the funding arranged by Mr. Gore.

My understanding is that there was no HTML in those days, and there were no generally useful browsers. People used Gopher and Archie to access resources. Numerous provisions needed to be made before what became the Internet could be an enormously useful, and public, resource.

Back then many, many technically knowledgeable people were actually against the idea that their semi-private inter-network would become a public utility. Then Senator Gore had the vision that most people didn't have, including Bill Gates.

Quote from Marc L. Andreessen about Senator Gore: "He had people buying into the concept of the information superhighway before anybody had an idea about what it would be." (This quote is just one I found on the first page of a Google search.)

Here's another quickly found web page which discusses the issue: ... the Internet's "most determined congressional advocate"

No but the weapons used against the USS Cole were.

[FatSean]

Have you figured it out yet?

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[iainl]

Sir William isn't helping here very much. Because I'm really failing to believe that someone building a fake Jewish identity is going to pick anything other than an obviously Jewish-sounding name.

I've no position on the debate at hand, as I don't have any evidence, but these two data points aren't really independant.

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[dalutong]

Well I'm glad you believe that. I'm just curious as to what today will be considered to have been "always wrong" 200 years from now. I suspect not providing free health care when able might be on the list. Or premptively attacking countries that had done nothing to you and killing 25000 people in the process. Or considering your own interests to be more valuable than other peoples...

It will be interesting. I hope I am revived for a day 200 years from now so I can see whether we have a Star Trek: The Next Generation type society or a brave new world one.

Re:Slashdot and Engadget's DISHONEST reporting

[Orrin Bloquy]

You misspelled "Jew conspiracy."

Wired.com spread the Gore quote 1st.

[Will Rodger]

Actually, it wasn't the GOP, but Wired.com and Declan McCullagh who first jumped on the idea that Gore claimed to have invented the Net.

Seth Finkelstein has a very thorough debunking of the tale on his site, showing that while Gore was sloppy in his speech, he did lots to promote the Net.

Did any of it make a difference? Discuss among yourselves.

Re:Fraunhofer & MP3 Development

[Skuto]

I don't care what you read. Most sources are wrong and quote each other or other wrong sources anyway.

As for quoting the FhG site as an argument, do I need to even comment on that?

But if you insist, even they state:

1991: Incorporating contributions by Hannover University, AT&T, and Thomson, the Fraunhofer team improved the OCF algorithm which yields a powerful new audio codec called ASPEC (Adaptive Spectral Perceptual Entropy Coding).

If you delve into audio coding literature, you'll find that many of the critical papers came out of AT&T, more so than out of FhG. Also, if FhG really did all the work, then why do some many other companies have essential patents on the technology? As I said, crediting MP3 almost entirely to FhG is a historical injustice. Fortunately for the other contributors, their patent income doesn't depend on what the uninformed public (specifically retarded moderators here) think :)

Re:US government Invented the iPod

[BeatlesForum.com]

And I hate to break the news to you, but we're there killing tens of thousands of Iraqis too. Considering in a lot of cases it's the same groups Saddam had to put up with, I'm failing to see the moral difference.

We're killing al-Qaeda terrorists who have arrived to kill Americans (and Muslims, I might add) in Iraq. Hussein killed Kurds because of their ethnicity. Huge moral difference if you ask me. Hussein was a terrorist who had WMD to kill thousands of Kurds. Now whether or not he shipped them out to Syria before the US invasion is a different debate.

They do this in N-Korea

[Oldsmobile]

Actually, don't laugh, they do this in North Korea.

The papers are full of the Dear Leader's exploits, as he makes some new technological breakthrough, directs a hit film or finalizes the plans for some architechtual feat.

Everything in N-Korea is labeled as a N-Korean manufactured item, phones for instance, even though they might be built by a major S-Korean or Japanese manufacturer, are labeled as locally built with local brands.

The Pyongyang metro for instance uses train cars bought used from Berlin, complete with german graffiti. These have had the original (Siemens probably) manufacturers plaque removed and replaced with "Pyongyan Locomotive Company" plaques. I'm sure Kim Jong Il drew up the original designs for those train cars though :)

So, maybe this is where the US is going?