Pop Quiz: Read the following (abridged) speech, and answer the question below.
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But for all our promise, all our opportunity, people in this room know very well that this is not a time free from peril, especially as a result of reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals.
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And they will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen.
There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq. His regime threatens the safety of his people, the stability of his region and the security of all the rest of us.
I want the American people to understand first the past how did this crisis come about?
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Remember, as a condition of the cease-fire after the Gulf War, the United Nations demanded not the United States the United Nations demanded, and Saddam Hussein agreed to declare within 15 days this is way back in 1991 within 15 days his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them, to make a total declaration. That's what he promised to do.
The United Nations set up a special commission of highly trained international experts called UNSCOM, to make sure that Iraq made good on that commitment. We had every good reason to insist that Iraq disarm. Saddam had built up a terrible arsenal, and he had used it not once, but many times, in a decade-long war with Iran, he used chemical weapons, against combatants, against civilians, against a foreign adversary, and even against his own people.
And during the Gulf War, Saddam launched Scuds against Saudi Arabia, Israel and Bahrain.
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Iraq repeatedly made false declarations about the weapons that it had left in its possession after the Gulf War. When UNSCOM would then uncover evidence that gave lie to those declarations, Iraq would simply amend the reports.
For example, Iraq revised its nuclear declarations four times within just 14 months and it has submitted six different biological warfare declarations, each of which has been rejected by UNSCOM.
In 1995, Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law, and the chief organizer of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, defected to Jordan. He revealed that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to build many more.
Then and only then did Iraq admit to developing numbers of weapons in significant quantities and weapon stocks. Previously, it had vehemently denied the very thing it just simply admitted once Saddam Hussein's son-in-law defected to Jordan and told the truth. Now listen to this, what did it admit?
It admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs.
And I might say UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production.
As if we needed further confirmation, you all know what happened to his son-in-law when he made the untimely decision to go back to Iraq. [He was murdered.]
Next, throughout this entire process, Iraqi agents have undermined and undercut UNSCOM. They've harassed the inspectors, lied to them, disabled monitoring cameras, literally spirited evidence out of the back doors of suspect facilities as inspectors walked through the front door. And our people were there observing it and had the pictures to prove it.
Despite Iraq's deceptions, UNSCOM has nevertheless done a remarkable job. Its inspectors the eyes and ears of the civilized world have uncovered and destroyed more weapons of mass destruction capacity than was destroyed during the Gulf War.
This includes nearly 40,000 chemical weapons, more than 100,000 gallons of chemical weapons agents, 48 o
Technology allows targets to be... well, targeted. It reduces the amount of fighting, because it's more efficient. Here's an excerpt from an interview with military historian Dr. Hanson.
Rush: We heard they marked targets for precision-guided bombs. You mentioned that they organized Kurds. But what else would Special Ops do, and how do they get away with doing what they do without being spotted and captured?
Hanson: Some wear uniforms, some wear Westernized civilian clothes. Some wear traditional Arab dress. They've been in places like Baghdad and Basra and sort of blended in. Some have probably been Western photographers, would-be journalists. What they do is get the GPS coordinates of particular houses, particular Ba'athist headquarters, particular people. And then a person who rented an apartment in Baghdad or is staying with a friend in Baghdad might be looking out the window, get the GPS coordinates and get a cell phone and say, "So-and-so is at this location." So they sort of helped to destroy the fabric of the regime from the inside out.
Every once in a while somebody in a moment of incaution said something like, "Well, we're doing it from the inside out." What I think they meant is that we destroyed with precision weapons individual houses. That has a powerful psychological effect. Machiavelli said if you want to get a man mad at you, don't kill his father; destroy his patrimony. When we destroyed a home, that left a message for other people, who said, "Look, his house is gone and mine's not, why is that?" Then they said, "Oh, yes, he's a Ba'athist." So it was very multi-layered approach to war.
It's a good cause, but not likely to budge MS. See this recent Q & A.
Host: Rob (Microsoft) Q: when will IE get transparent PNG support?
A: Ian, I'm sorry, I can't answer that question for you
Here's another choice piece about the future of IE, or lack thereof.
Host: Brian (Microsoft) Q: when / will there be the next version of IE?
A: As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.
Later, Brian of MS says, "Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1. Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."
So, enhancements to the underlying OS are necessary for the features that most other modern browsers have, such as transparent PNGs, popup blocking, and tabbed browsing? Obviously, they have no intention of ever adding these features to IE. This is awful. It's staggering that AOL just snubbed the most innovative browser on the planet to make a deal to use a stagnant, obsolete 1998 browser until 2010 (Re: this story).
You can't legitimately say that something is wasted unless you know that it has a purpose and what that purpose is.
If somebody thinks they know the purpose of the vast space of the universe, I'd sure like to hear it. Otherwise, they have no basis, even if completely subjective, to declare that it is a "waste."
Try this little freeware program. It has some nifty tools, including a Temp file tool, which is basically a GUI frontend for making a batch file to delete particular files. It's very customizable. I use it get rid of temp files in both profile temp folders and IE temp files. Just one click and you get to watch a console show you all the cruft being whizzed away.
However, don't confuse dogma with religion. The former is belief without reason; the latter is practice, to be tested by experience.
Dogma is just doctrine or beliefs, with or without reason. Nothing more. Examples: 1. There is one God. 2. There is no god. 3. Bill Gates is the devil. 4. Cars cause global warming. Religion wouldn't be religion without dogma, but it's more than dogma.
Experience and human reason have an important place in determining truth. However, divine revelation is infinitely more reliable and beneficial, especially when it comes to understanding the Big Picture. Christians and Jews go to the Guru who created the universe rather than floundering around trying to figure everything out themselves by relying on experience and human reason alone.
I'm sure the creationists will pitch a fit if chimps are reclassified.
I'm sure some will. However, there's really no reason for creationists to be upset. Species, genera, families, and so on, are subjective and somewhat arbitrary classifications used to identify organisms. If evolutionists want to squeeze chimpanzees into the same genus as humans, that's fine with me. They can include babboons and lemurs too for all I care. It wouldn't matter to me if it were found that chimps and humans had 99.999% DNA similarity. God created man with a spiritual capacity that animals do not have.
The Bible makes a clear distinction between animals and humans; there is no semi-human, sub-human, or 95%-human. In Gen. 1:24, the Creator said, "Let the earth bring forth every kind of animal." Verse 25: God creates the animals. Then, verse 26: He creates man in His image and declares his descendants to be "masters over all life--the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the livestock, wild animals, and small animals." Animals were created as property for the use of man, not as companions.
God has a special love for His creation of man. His eye is on the sparrow (as the hymn goes,) but His heart is for humans. The Creator made covenants with people, such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He came from heaven to earth as a man to die for man.
How does the genus re-classification change this? It doesn't, really. Some will conclude that chimpanzees should be regarded as humans, or at least, having human status, if such a distinction can legitimately be made. However, it's not the similarity of proteins that matters; it's the similarity of spiritual substance that matters to the Christian.
Show me real evidence of humanity in chimps: civility, law, love, worship, art, music, sports, science, philosophy, imagination, technology. There must be some essence of divinity to prove humanity, because humans were created in the image of the Divine. Show me a chimp charity, a chimp house of worship, a chimp government, a chimp judicial court, a chimp institution of learning, or a list of chimp creations as those of humans. That would be something to talk about.
It's not like it's inaccessible or written in Latin or Greek. Typical reading time is about 40 minutes for the entire document, including the amendments.
I wasn't aware of the existing Ezra-T core when I just posted. So, I stand corrected somewhat: Seeing a biblical allusion was obviously not necessary for it to be funny.
I still strongly suspect that there is a biblical theme in the processors' names. Ezra and Nehemiah are very uncommon names in most of the world. I think it's unlikely to be a coincidence.
But what is the connection between the names of Ezra and Nehemiah? Why suggest the name "Better Than Ezra" for a processor called Nehemiah?
While making reference to the band Better than Ezra (which I know nothing about, but I had heard of it), he was also alluding to the names of related books in the Bible. The book of Ezra immediately precedes the book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament. They are considered a single book (`Ezra-Nechemyah) in the Jewish writings.
rizawbone made a dual reference... or am I giving him too much credit? I wouldn't have found the comment funny at all unless I had caught both allusions.
The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Countances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.
There's an ongoing discussion about how "smart" computers have to be before they will be indistinguishable from human intellect. Let's see a bot discover new mathematical paradigms and revolutionize the field of mathematics -- without trying!
I mean, Poincaré didn't have to allocate any brain processing capability to this task. If it was quietly computing in the background (subconciously), it wasn't consuming any attention or decision-making ability from the brain, unlike the demands on the processor by software such as distributed.net and SETI@Home (which are not AI programs, of course; just using them for this point on background processing).
I was not aware that automobile emissions were producing global warming. There hasn't been conclusive evidence of global warming at all, much less a causal relation to auto emissions.
Horse manure, on the other hand, had immediate, obvious, severe repercussions on health, sanitation, air quality, economics, and general quality of life. It was much worse.
The most severe problem was that caused by horses defecating and urinating in the streets, but
dead animals and noise pollution also produced serious annoyances and even health problems. The normal city horse produced between fifteen and thirty-five pounds of manure a day and about a quart of urine, usually distributed along the course of its route or deposited in the stable.
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Manure piles also produced huge numbers of flies, in reality a much more serious vector for infectious diseases such as typhoid fever than odors. By the turn of the century public health officials had largely accepted the bacterial theory of disease and had identified the "queen of the dung-heap" or fly, as a major source.
Anything is better than the car-clogged cities we have today.
Except a horse-and-buggy-clogged city. Cars were an improvement over the previous form of transportation. Say what you will about pollution, the "emissions" aren't nearly as bad as they used to be.
I might as well have pulled out his PIII900 and dropped in a PIII600.
That's a difference of 300 MHz. I have a PII 350 with XP and all the critical updates from WindowsUpdate, but my system is not running like a 50 MHz computer. I realize you were probably exaggerating/guestimating, but I think there must be something else wrong with your computer.
I ignore a lot of the "recommended" updates, so one of those may be the culprit.
Without some standard way to prove that an e-mail was solicited, this legislation might as well be called the Trial Lawyers Employment Protection Act. The courts will be backlogged indefinitely.
Maybe a new SMTP header can be required to contain the recipient's secret "Solicitor's ID". But then, some money-grubbing person could just delete or alter it and claim to the court that it was never there. I'm not an encryption expert, but there's got to be some way with hashes and PGP or something to prove this.
In the process, you'll first have to prove that the e-mail was actually sent from the sender it claims to be sent from so that you're accusing the right party and the sender can't deny it. Then you'll have to prove that the e-mail's data wasn't somehow altered in transit, whether maliciously or by transmission error, which could botch your methods of authentication.
Another issue is:
By what criteria is an e-mail solicited: sender, subject matter, or both? I might have solicited a receipt from Amazon when I made a purchase, but not Amazon's marketing for related products. I might like to solicit e-mail from anybody about low-priced flat panel monitors, but not any other kind of e-mail from the senders with this material.
And what about combined content? Some solicited, some not. What about domains collectively owned by a number of parties, one of which is on my white list? This thing is going to be a legal quagmire. This legislation is going to have to be thousands of pages long to explain how all of this is going to work.
One more thing... If they require some kind of encryption or special e-mail header, they'll have to make another law requiring all companies and developers who make software with e-mail functionality to change their programs to bundle or imbed whatever special code the government dictates.
media wildly distort reality Take a look at your own buddy.
I have, and just like the American people, the American media portrayed widely different views. Compare the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal. National Public Radio and your local conservative talk radio station. It's night and day.
Most of the U.S. media was against the war. (Don't let the waving flag on screen fool you.) Some of it was for the war. I don't know how you managed to see only pro-U.S. news. Anti-U.S. news was rampant in the American media. The bias didn't jump up and smack you in the face in the way that the Iraqi Information Minister's statements did, but the bias was nonetheless glaring. Unless you listen to AM radio, you had to proactively seek out pro-U.S. stories during this war. You had to turn your TV to the single national station that airs conservative views. You had to cherry-pick the few conservative news publications among the reams of liberal anti-Bush ones.
Even with Fox News and talk radio, a majority of the U.S. media is still liberal and anti-Bush, especially the press. They went out of their way to exaggerate every little bruise and wayward bullet. They trumped up every civilian casualty as a potential war crime. Much of the U.S. media was declaring the war a "quagmire" only two weeks into the operation. Some were predicting tens of thousands of U.S. casualties and all kinds of catastrophes that never materialized. The U.S. liberal media did everything they could to paint the U.S. in a bad light, as liberals always do. They despise our founding principles and institutions and wish we more like old Europe.
You cannot make a legitimate comparison between American media and Arab media. The former is independent and varied; the latter is monolithic and regime-controlled.
History has spoken: Saddam out of power, an evil regime disarmed, minimal civilian casualties, few casualties of coalition troops, injured Iraqis are cared for, a nation liberated, persecution ended, POWs released, terrorists dead or fleeing, other regimes "schooled", national terrorism alert level lowered a notch, gobs of valuable intelligence acquired, Old Europe's deals with Saddam exposed undermining legitimacy of their opposition, no refugee crisis, no ecological disaster, no American occupation of Iraq, no U.S. seizure of Iraqi oil, no destruction of Islamic holy sites by Americans, no destruction of historical artifacts by Americans, troops coming home ASAP (many already here), Iraqi reconstruction underway, schools reopened, some Iraqis going back to work and receiving incomes.
Knowing what we now know, we can easily determine which media outlets were accurate and which were innacurate.
The pro-U.S. media was vindicated.
The anti-U.S. media was discredited.
The media that portrayed the U.S. in a bad light were WRONG! How can you complain that you were given accurate information (however distasteful it might have been to you) while you were in the states? Ah, I think I just answered my own question in my parenthetical remark.
Slashdot Mirror
You can hear the moveon.org TV ad here (Windows Media), with some commentary and other media sound bites.
So, enhancements to the underlying OS are necessary for the features that most other modern browsers have, such as transparent PNGs, popup blocking, and tabbed browsing? Obviously, they have no intention of ever adding these features to IE. This is awful. It's staggering that AOL just snubbed the most innovative browser on the planet to make a deal to use a stagnant, obsolete 1998 browser until 2010 (Re: this story).
If somebody thinks they know the purpose of the vast space of the universe, I'd sure like to hear it. Otherwise, they have no basis, even if completely subjective, to declare that it is a "waste."
The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?.
Try this little freeware program. It has some nifty tools, including a Temp file tool, which is basically a GUI frontend for making a batch file to delete particular files. It's very customizable. I use it get rid of temp files in both profile temp folders and IE temp files. Just one click and you get to watch a console show you all the cruft being whizzed away.
Trumpets keyed in C are common in symphony orchestras. Trumpets also come in D, Eb, F, and G.
I wish MS would make some flat languages. Maybe Vb is supposed to be V flat.
Or maybe it's just: Ignorance is bliss. :-)
(Just kidding. I agree with you.)
In all seriousness, ignore-ance is bliss. For a while. Maybe. Until the terrorists kill you in your sleep. Until you wake up in hell.
Dogma is just doctrine or beliefs, with or without reason. Nothing more. Examples: 1. There is one God. 2. There is no god. 3. Bill Gates is the devil. 4. Cars cause global warming.
Religion wouldn't be religion without dogma, but it's more than dogma.
Experience and human reason have an important place in determining truth. However, divine revelation is infinitely more reliable and beneficial, especially when it comes to understanding the Big Picture. Christians and Jews go to the Guru who created the universe rather than floundering around trying to figure everything out themselves by relying on experience and human reason alone.
I'm sure some will. However, there's really no reason for creationists to be upset. Species, genera, families, and so on, are subjective and somewhat arbitrary classifications used to identify organisms. If evolutionists want to squeeze chimpanzees into the same genus as humans, that's fine with me. They can include babboons and lemurs too for all I care. It wouldn't matter to me if it were found that chimps and humans had 99.999% DNA similarity. God created man with a spiritual capacity that animals do not have.
The Bible makes a clear distinction between animals and humans; there is no semi-human, sub-human, or 95%-human. In Gen. 1:24, the Creator said, "Let the earth bring forth every kind of animal." Verse 25: God creates the animals. Then, verse 26: He creates man in His image and declares his descendants to be "masters over all life--the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the livestock, wild animals, and small animals." Animals were created as property for the use of man, not as companions.
God has a special love for His creation of man. His eye is on the sparrow (as the hymn goes,) but His heart is for humans. The Creator made covenants with people, such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He came from heaven to earth as a man to die for man.
How does the genus re-classification change this? It doesn't, really. Some will conclude that chimpanzees should be regarded as humans, or at least, having human status, if such a distinction can legitimately be made. However, it's not the similarity of proteins that matters; it's the similarity of spiritual substance that matters to the Christian.
Show me real evidence of humanity in chimps: civility, law, love, worship, art, music, sports, science, philosophy, imagination, technology. There must be some essence of divinity to prove humanity, because humans were created in the image of the Divine. Show me a chimp charity, a chimp house of worship, a chimp government, a chimp judicial court, a chimp institution of learning, or a list of chimp creations as those of humans. That would be something to talk about.
Sometimes that "junk" DNA turns out to be significant DNA after further study.
Why don't you read the Constitution for yourself?
It's not like it's inaccessible or written in Latin or Greek. Typical reading time is about 40 minutes for the entire document, including the amendments.
I still strongly suspect that there is a biblical theme in the processors' names. Ezra and Nehemiah are very uncommon names in most of the world. I think it's unlikely to be a coincidence.
While making reference to the band Better than Ezra (which I know nothing about, but I had heard of it), he was also alluding to the names of related books in the Bible. The book of Ezra immediately precedes the book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament. They are considered a single book (`Ezra-Nechemyah) in the Jewish writings.
rizawbone made a dual reference... or am I giving him too much credit? I wouldn't have found the comment funny at all unless I had caught both allusions.
Never see PHP stories again:
I mean, Poincaré didn't have to allocate any brain processing capability to this task. If it was quietly computing in the background (subconciously), it wasn't consuming any attention or decision-making ability from the brain, unlike the demands on the processor by software such as distributed.net and SETI@Home (which are not AI programs, of course; just using them for this point on background processing).
Horse manure, on the other hand, had immediate, obvious, severe repercussions on health, sanitation, air quality, economics, and general quality of life. It was much worse.
Not with the people who love their cars, trucks, and SUVs. It's a conspiracy of millions of citizens.
Except a horse-and-buggy-clogged city. Cars were an improvement over the previous form of transportation. Say what you will about pollution, the "emissions" aren't nearly as bad as they used to be.
freedom of movement
That's a difference of 300 MHz. I have a PII 350 with XP and all the critical updates from WindowsUpdate, but my system is not running like a 50 MHz computer. I realize you were probably exaggerating/guestimating, but I think there must be something else wrong with your computer.
I ignore a lot of the "recommended" updates, so one of those may be the culprit.
Maybe a new SMTP header can be required to contain the recipient's secret "Solicitor's ID". But then, some money-grubbing person could just delete or alter it and claim to the court that it was never there. I'm not an encryption expert, but there's got to be some way with hashes and PGP or something to prove this.
In the process, you'll first have to prove that the e-mail was actually sent from the sender it claims to be sent from so that you're accusing the right party and the sender can't deny it. Then you'll have to prove that the e-mail's data wasn't somehow altered in transit, whether maliciously or by transmission error, which could botch your methods of authentication.
Another issue is:
By what criteria is an e-mail solicited: sender, subject matter, or both? I might have solicited a receipt from Amazon when I made a purchase, but not Amazon's marketing for related products. I might like to solicit e-mail from anybody about low-priced flat panel monitors, but not any other kind of e-mail from the senders with this material.
And what about combined content? Some solicited, some not. What about domains collectively owned by a number of parties, one of which is on my white list? This thing is going to be a legal quagmire. This legislation is going to have to be thousands of pages long to explain how all of this is going to work.
One more thing... If they require some kind of encryption or special e-mail header, they'll have to make another law requiring all companies and developers who make software with e-mail functionality to change their programs to bundle or imbed whatever special code the government dictates.
Take a look at your own buddy.
I have, and just like the American people, the American media portrayed widely different views. Compare the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal. National Public Radio and your local conservative talk radio station. It's night and day.
Most of the U.S. media was against the war. (Don't let the waving flag on screen fool you.) Some of it was for the war. I don't know how you managed to see only pro-U.S. news. Anti-U.S. news was rampant in the American media. The bias didn't jump up and smack you in the face in the way that the Iraqi Information Minister's statements did, but the bias was nonetheless glaring. Unless you listen to AM radio, you had to proactively seek out pro-U.S. stories during this war. You had to turn your TV to the single national station that airs conservative views. You had to cherry-pick the few conservative news publications among the reams of liberal anti-Bush ones.
Even with Fox News and talk radio, a majority of the U.S. media is still liberal and anti-Bush, especially the press. They went out of their way to exaggerate every little bruise and wayward bullet. They trumped up every civilian casualty as a potential war crime. Much of the U.S. media was declaring the war a "quagmire" only two weeks into the operation. Some were predicting tens of thousands of U.S. casualties and all kinds of catastrophes that never materialized. The U.S. liberal media did everything they could to paint the U.S. in a bad light, as liberals always do. They despise our founding principles and institutions and wish we more like old Europe.
You cannot make a legitimate comparison between American media and Arab media. The former is independent and varied; the latter is monolithic and regime-controlled.
History has spoken: Saddam out of power, an evil regime disarmed, minimal civilian casualties, few casualties of coalition troops, injured Iraqis are cared for, a nation liberated, persecution ended, POWs released, terrorists dead or fleeing, other regimes "schooled", national terrorism alert level lowered a notch, gobs of valuable intelligence acquired, Old Europe's deals with Saddam exposed undermining legitimacy of their opposition, no refugee crisis, no ecological disaster, no American occupation of Iraq, no U.S. seizure of Iraqi oil, no destruction of Islamic holy sites by Americans, no destruction of historical artifacts by Americans, troops coming home ASAP (many already here), Iraqi reconstruction underway, schools reopened, some Iraqis going back to work and receiving incomes.
Knowing what we now know, we can easily determine which media outlets were accurate and which were innacurate.
The pro-U.S. media was vindicated.
The anti-U.S. media was discredited.
The media that portrayed the U.S. in a bad light were WRONG! How can you complain that you were given accurate information (however distasteful it might have been to you) while you were in the states? Ah, I think I just answered my own question in my parenthetical remark.