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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 ..."
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
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.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
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.
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.
You can say what you want about Bush, but not that he hasn't got a sense of humour.
-- Cheers!
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/
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!
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.
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.
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 !
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."
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
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.
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.
If there's one thing worse than getting busted for shit, it's getting busted for shit after you flushed it already.
Oh no... it's the future.
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.
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
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
[...] are any of you watching Cheney?
Of course we aren't. Don't want to get shot in the face after all.
Hank! White!
Not that I disagree with you, but perhaps a more credible news source would have made your point clearer, such as The BBC.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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.
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?
Myth: Bush is an idiot.
Fact: Bush optimized the original MP3 codec and worked with top engineers to create the ipod.
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.
You misspelled world.
...robotic lapdog party leaders; programmed to obey their owner...
, , , , , karma elon
omg, and so does France, it's a conspiracy!
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.
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.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
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/
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.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
MABASPLOOM!
The Swedish mathematician who proved a convergence theorem for Fourier series.
:p
2 7/0548252
without him there would be no IPOD.
That is, according to the article in
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
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.
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.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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.
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...
... You must aim for the abdomen." (Richard B. Frank, Downfall)
:)
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.
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
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.
The latest Slashdot meme.
I think this is what Bush was trying to put into words.
a ges/mp3-technologies.gif
http://www.whitehouse.gov/stateoftheunion/2006/im
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.
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:
and
and
and finally:
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
http://use.perl.org
I think you mean sales and support.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
It's been a long time.
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.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
No one thinks that the toshiba 1.8" hard drive is the only reason why Ipod is existing ?
For(k;;)(Fork();)
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.
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.
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
Imagine all the people...
Nope. Sales were handled Russia, China and France. America never made significant weapons sales to Iraq.
That's why they had such crappy equipment.
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.
... 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.
And you're right
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
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.
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?
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!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
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.
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.