Yes, because Lord knows this administration is gung-ho about standing up for the United Nations!
I love the posturing from conservatives about how we had to go to war in Iraq because of the U.N. resolutions. As if Bush and Co. haven't been more than willing in the past to disregard the will of the U.N. completely.
All these quotes are from people whose understanding of the Iraqi WMD situation would have come through the Administration's filter. Executive branch personnel -- the ones who work in and for the White House -- are the ones who see the whole mass of intelligence our systems gather. Members of Congress don't have that privilege -- they see what the Administration chooses to share with them. (Those who sit on national security & intelligence-related committees see more than others -- but even they only get predigested intel.)
In other words, your list of quotes proves nothing except that these people could all have been lied to as well. If the President calls a Senator into the Oval Office, shows him an incomplete picture, and leaves out relevant facts that might contradict his position, is the Senator the liar if he leaves the meeting convinced that the President has identified a real threat?
And never mind that you selectively quote people like Scott Ritter -- who by 2002 had doubled back on his earlier belief in Iraqi WMDs. If you're going to quote Ritter circa 1998, why not Ritter circa 2002? I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that showing how Ritter's position evolved would undermine your premise that he was a "liar" like the President and his crew are.
When it comes to intelligence, there are a few people, all in the White House -- the President, the National Security Advisor, and so on -- who are expected to know more than any Senator or Congressman. They're expected to know the whole picture. That's what makes it a different matter entirely when Condoleeza Rice or Dick Cheney shrieked about Iraqi WMDs than when J. Random Congressman did so.
The bill to which you refer (HR 163 and its Senate counterpart, S 89) are not what you seem to think it is. It was launched in the run-up to the Iraq war by Rep. Charlie Rangel to illustrate the potential risk of launching that conflict. It accomplished its purpose (Rangel got on the news decrying the looming war) and it then essentially died in the House Armed Services Committee.
Here's a link to HR 163's details on THOMAS for more info. As you can see there's been no action on it since February 2003 -- long before the Democratic nomination contest had even begun.
If you don't believe me, go poke through news archives from January-February 2003 and look for articles about Rep. Rangel. (I'll leave looking up the links as an exercise for the reader.)
Indeed, they learn a whole battery of rhetorical tricks specifically to avoid having to deal with hypotheticals. Watch the next time you see somebody pose one to a politician -- any politician -- and you'll immediately see that, no matter what their answer, it has nothing to do with the hypothetical. Which is a shame, since hypotheticals can be useful ways to see how someone thinks; but maybe that's the reason why they avoid them so assiduously...
And the good news is if you have the updated version of Windows (Windowws XP SP2) then you aren't affected by the similar critical flaw either but it's different when it's OSS huh?
If I'm running Windows 2000 and I'm told I have to update to XP SP2 to fix a bug, it costs me ~US$200.
If I'm running Firefox 0.8 and I'm told I have to update to Firefox 1.0PR to fix a bug, it costs me nothing.
It's kind of spooky how quickly paranoia has come back into fashion. I wonder if Bert the Turtle is looking for work:-)
Also in the ActivePython docs
on
Dive Into Python
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If you use ActiveState's free distribution of Python for Windows, ActivePython, the electronic version of Dive into Python is included in the documentation file under "Helpful Resources". Very handy!
The problem was that PC users were dicks. Let me rephrase that - "mice are for wimps."
Funny -- this attitude went so far that many people actually used the word as the acronym for the whole GUI, point-and-click paradigm. "WIMP" -- short for "windows, icons, menu, pointing device." So when talking about the Mac, you could proudly say you owned the first "complete WIMP system" to reach the consumer market. Just what everyone wants to brag to their cubemates...
Why the huge price differential? I can't figure out any logical reason why a job ad should cost 300% in SF of what it costs in New York or LA -- hardly insignificant cities. Unless that's just what the SF market will bear, of course...
... and you'll see a key for every entry in your Add/Remove Programs menu. Just delete the keys for the old versions of Firefox/Thunderbird and they will disappear from the menu.
The Firefox/Thunderbird installers seem to assume that users will always uninstall before they install a new version. I know that I for a long time was not doing that, which (oooops) made Add/Remove Programs a mess until I figured this Registry trick out. Hopefully Moz.org will make the installer smart enough to do this on its own soon...
I don't see how this explanation washes, quite frankly.
Trippi ended up making a little over $100,000 for his work on the Dean campaign. But he would have made that money whether he had worked his ass off as campaign manager or not. His firm had already been hired to do the media, and as a partner, he would have gotten 1/3 of the 7% commission no matter what.
Isn't the conflict of interest in such an arrangement obvious? You don't need to speculate about "kickbacks" or "embezzlement" -- all you need to do is think about whether it's a good idea for the head media buyer for a campaign to be buying TV services from, essentially, himself.
Is he going to have any incentive to negotiate for the best rates? Is he going to push back if the media consultants come to him with ads of sub-par quality? Is he going to be able to objectively evaluate how much of the media buy should be TV (as opposed to, say, direct mail, or print advertising, or grassroots organizing), when he gets a cut of every dollar that goes into TV and nothing from the dollars that go everywhere else?
You don't have to be a genius to see the conflicts of interest. So why run the risk? When Trippi came on board as the campaign manager, why didn't he sever the relationship with Trippi, McMahon, & Squier and find a new TV firm, just to ensure the appearance of integrity? (You can be the campaign manager, or the media consultant -- pick one.) And if he wouldn't do that, why didn't he have adult supervision there to notice that before he burned through $40 million dollars?
I wrote about this when Trippi's arrangement was first disclosed, and I have yet to hear an explanation from him that puts these concerns to rest for me.
Look, I was a Deaniac. I put my $100 into Trippi's $100 Revolution. But I did so on the assumption that my money was being managed in a responsible manner. And having the guy in charge use his own company for the media buys just doesn't strike me as very responsible.
(Oh, and TMS's ads sucked, too. But that's a story for another day...)
The basic premise is that the guns are VERY realistic, shoot.25g pellets, and are extremely moddable. I have a Walther p-99, a Colt M-4, and a psg-1. People see me walking out from my apartment and they get afraid.
Please tell me you're kidding. We live in a country where the police can blow you away for pulling out a wallet, and you think it's a good idea to tote around replica weapons that are indistinguishable from the real thing? That sounds like a baaaaaad idea to me...
I'm not an expert on Mozilla's codebase, but based on their history, I would say that your worries are probably misplaced.
Firefox is purposely limited to the bare minimum of functionality that general users required. If any extensions ever rise to that level of ubiquity, they'll probably get adopted by moz.org and slipstreamed into the code base, which should remove the performance concern.
After all, that's how tabbed browsing made it into Mozilla -- first as a separate XPI extension (Multizilla), which got incorporated into the code base when the developers saw how popular it was.
Of course, it will require some serious popularity to rise to that level, and I doubt that many extensions will ever make it. But that's the beauty of the extension framework, my Firefox can be very different from yours...
No, that's the definition of the adjective form of the word "documentary", not the noun form, which is what we are discussing when we talk about "a documentary".
I knocked down this little bit of selective mis-definition in an earlier thread... the fact that it keeps popping up when it is so obviously wrong indicates that either many people here need to learn how to use a dictionary, or they need to learn how to do more than just parrot Republican talking points.
... the "Standard" editions of VS.NET 2003? You can currently buy these cut-down versions of Visual Studio that only support C#, VB.NET, "J#" (whatever nightmare spawn of Java that is), or C++ for about $100 each. I imagine that when these "Express" products leave beta we'll see them priced at about the same level.
For someone who has a beef with Moore for quoting out of context, you do a pretty good job of doing the same thing yourself. Let's look at both definitions dictionary.com provides for "documentary" from the American Heritage Dictionary:
documentary
adj.
Consisting of, concerning, or based on documents.
Presenting facts objectively without editorializing or inserting fictional matter, as in a book or film.
n. pl. documentaries
A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration.
Notice how the noun form (which is what we're talking about here -- a "documentary") does not include strict objectivity as part of the definition -- which makes sense, considering that just about every documentary film ever made has a point of view on its subject matter. What you quoted was the definition for the adjective form of the word (in other words, it's the definition of "documentary" when used as a descriptor for things that are documentary-like -- and not actual documentaries.)
Did you do this out of simple error, I wonder -- not having the attention span to read past the first definition -- or are you as guilty of having a (gasp!) point of view as you say Moore is?
My friend runs a small record shop. The basic trends he sees are:
... not representative of the public at large, I'd wager.
The type of customer who seeks out the small, independent record shop is going to be different than the kind who just goes to whatever place is most convenient (Best Buy, Sam Goody, etc.), or whatever place has the best price (probably Best Buy, Sam Goody, etc.). Your friend's customers are probably far more likely than the average music shopper to (a) be interested in fringe formats like vinyl, (b) have strong opinions on DRM.
I'm not saying that his/her experiences aren't valid, just that you should be careful about generalizing too broadly from the experiences of small, boutique businesses in today's age of big-box retail.
If cheap-o consumer routers getting 0wned thanks to pathetic Wi-Fi security seems bad, consider this: at least one vendor of e-voting systems depends on WEP as the only security measure between their voting machines and the ballot-counting system.
Yes, that's right -- ballots are passed wirelessly, and only protected via standard 802.11 WEP. How long until someone tries to 0wn a polling place? Or, worse, just sniffs the ballots out of the air and dumps them to a log file (so much for the secret ballot), say?
I wrote the article linked to above when the systems were being evaluated in Fairfax County, Virginia -- a wealthy and populous suburb of Washington, DC -- but they've since been approved by the county board of elections and used in two elections to date. Who knows how many other local governments have bought into similar systems?
They're not considered because for personal blogs they are probably more trouble than they're worth. I manage The Oceana Network, a group blog on global efforts to defend the oceans, for my employer, Oceana. (Disclaimer: the opinions expressed here are mine alone and not those of Oceana, yadda yadda.) The Network is based on Scoop.
For a blog like ours, that handles posts from a large group of authors and that needs to be able to support very long discussions, Scoop is fantastic. Give it an inexpensive Linux/BSD box all to itself and it is a very, very nice and flexible online community platform.
However, if you fit the profile of the typical single-author blog author, installing Scoop probably isn't for you. It's a tricky process, requiring "now edit your httpd.conf"-type steps that are just not realistic to expect from someone on a virtual hosting setup. (Not to say that it can't be done -- just that it's not realistic to expect many people to do it.)
And Scoop's primary benefit -- its very nice moderated comment system -- is wasted on a personal blog, where no post will ever get more than a few comments. (I know that ours doesn't have that many yet either, but we've only been up and running for a couple of weeks... give us time:-) )
For those users, MT, WordPress, etc. are much better solutions -- easier installs, and just enough features to be useful without overcomplicating things.
If your blogging ambitions are grander than a simple personal site, though, Scoop is great -- definitely check it out if you haven't already.
The publication of these "principles" has nothing to do with getting other vendors to start behaving nicely, and everything to do with getting people ready for the impending launch of Google's desktop search app.
To make the leap from being a Web site to being software you have to install locally, there's a much higher burden of trust they have to surmount -- especially when that software will index your entire local filesystem (just think of the snooping possibilities!).
So, I see this as a kind of pre-emptive strike on their part -- a way that they can claim that they will be as "non-evil" on the desktop as they supposedly are on the Web, and have a document to back it up.
If any other companies follow the principles that document outlines, that's probably gravy, from their perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because Lord knows this administration is gung-ho about standing up for the United Nations!
I love the posturing from conservatives about how we had to go to war in Iraq because of the U.N. resolutions. As if Bush and Co. haven't been more than willing in the past to disregard the will of the U.N. completely.
This is insightful? Puh-leeze.
All these quotes are from people whose understanding of the Iraqi WMD situation would have come through the Administration's filter. Executive branch personnel -- the ones who work in and for the White House -- are the ones who see the whole mass of intelligence our systems gather. Members of Congress don't have that privilege -- they see what the Administration chooses to share with them. (Those who sit on national security & intelligence-related committees see more than others -- but even they only get predigested intel.)
In other words, your list of quotes proves nothing except that these people could all have been lied to as well. If the President calls a Senator into the Oval Office, shows him an incomplete picture, and leaves out relevant facts that might contradict his position, is the Senator the liar if he leaves the meeting convinced that the President has identified a real threat?
And never mind that you selectively quote people like Scott Ritter -- who by 2002 had doubled back on his earlier belief in Iraqi WMDs. If you're going to quote Ritter circa 1998, why not Ritter circa 2002? I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that showing how Ritter's position evolved would undermine your premise that he was a "liar" like the President and his crew are.
When it comes to intelligence, there are a few people, all in the White House -- the President, the National Security Advisor, and so on -- who are expected to know more than any Senator or Congressman. They're expected to know the whole picture. That's what makes it a different matter entirely when Condoleeza Rice or Dick Cheney shrieked about Iraqi WMDs than when J. Random Congressman did so.
The bill to which you refer (HR 163 and its Senate counterpart, S 89) are not what you seem to think it is. It was launched in the run-up to the Iraq war by Rep. Charlie Rangel to illustrate the potential risk of launching that conflict. It accomplished its purpose (Rangel got on the news decrying the looming war) and it then essentially died in the House Armed Services Committee.
Here's a link to HR 163's details on THOMAS for more info. As you can see there's been no action on it since February 2003 -- long before the Democratic nomination contest had even begun.
If you don't believe me, go poke through news archives from January-February 2003 and look for articles about Rep. Rangel. (I'll leave looking up the links as an exercise for the reader.)
Hardly a "conspiracy".
Which is probably why one of the first lessons any politician has drilled into him by The Experts is "Never answer a hypothetical question."
Indeed, they learn a whole battery of rhetorical tricks specifically to avoid having to deal with hypotheticals. Watch the next time you see somebody pose one to a politician -- any politician -- and you'll immediately see that, no matter what their answer, it has nothing to do with the hypothetical. Which is a shame, since hypotheticals can be useful ways to see how someone thinks; but maybe that's the reason why they avoid them so assiduously...
What rhymes with "Ko-Dan Armada"?
... Danza...
Oh, you mean like that "bimbo eruption" he tried to pin on Kerry back in the primaries that turned out to be such a load of hooey he ended up apologizing to the woman he pointed the finger at?
Yeah, he's a real Beacon of Truth, all right.
If I'm running Windows 2000 and I'm told I have to update to XP SP2 to fix a bug, it costs me ~US$200.
If I'm running Firefox 0.8 and I'm told I have to update to Firefox 1.0PR to fix a bug, it costs me nothing.
So yeah, I'd say that's different!
You don't think a ~500% increase in Mozilla usage is significant? You should complain to wherever you took your statistics classes :-)
Why rely on memory when you can watch the actual "Duck and Cover" film, courtesy of the Internet Archive?
It's kind of spooky how quickly paranoia has come back into fashion. I wonder if Bert the Turtle is looking for work :-)
If you use ActiveState's free distribution of Python for Windows, ActivePython, the electronic version of Dive into Python is included in the documentation file under "Helpful Resources". Very handy!
No...
Funny -- this attitude went so far that many people actually used the word as the acronym for the whole GUI, point-and-click paradigm. "WIMP" -- short for "windows, icons, menu, pointing device." So when talking about the Mac, you could proudly say you owned the first "complete WIMP system" to reach the consumer market. Just what everyone wants to brag to their cubemates...
Why the huge price differential? I can't figure out any logical reason why a job ad should cost 300% in SF of what it costs in New York or LA -- hardly insignificant cities. Unless that's just what the SF market will bear, of course...
Agreed that this is annoying, but you can fix it if you're not afraid to get into the Registry.
In Regedit, go to this branch of the Registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Cu rrentVersion\Uninstall
... and you'll see a key for every entry in your Add/Remove Programs menu. Just delete the keys for the old versions of Firefox/Thunderbird and they will disappear from the menu.
The Firefox/Thunderbird installers seem to assume that users will always uninstall before they install a new version. I know that I for a long time was not doing that, which (oooops) made Add/Remove Programs a mess until I figured this Registry trick out. Hopefully Moz.org will make the installer smart enough to do this on its own soon...
I don't see how this explanation washes, quite frankly.
Isn't the conflict of interest in such an arrangement obvious? You don't need to speculate about "kickbacks" or "embezzlement" -- all you need to do is think about whether it's a good idea for the head media buyer for a campaign to be buying TV services from, essentially, himself.
Is he going to have any incentive to negotiate for the best rates? Is he going to push back if the media consultants come to him with ads of sub-par quality? Is he going to be able to objectively evaluate how much of the media buy should be TV (as opposed to, say, direct mail, or print advertising, or grassroots organizing), when he gets a cut of every dollar that goes into TV and nothing from the dollars that go everywhere else?
You don't have to be a genius to see the conflicts of interest. So why run the risk? When Trippi came on board as the campaign manager, why didn't he sever the relationship with Trippi, McMahon, & Squier and find a new TV firm, just to ensure the appearance of integrity? (You can be the campaign manager, or the media consultant -- pick one.) And if he wouldn't do that, why didn't he have adult supervision there to notice that before he burned through $40 million dollars?
I wrote about this when Trippi's arrangement was first disclosed, and I have yet to hear an explanation from him that puts these concerns to rest for me.
Look, I was a Deaniac. I put my $100 into Trippi's $100 Revolution. But I did so on the assumption that my money was being managed in a responsible manner. And having the guy in charge use his own company for the media buys just doesn't strike me as very responsible.
(Oh, and TMS's ads sucked, too. But that's a story for another day...)
Please tell me you're kidding. We live in a country where the police can blow you away for pulling out a wallet, and you think it's a good idea to tote around replica weapons that are indistinguishable from the real thing? That sounds like a baaaaaad idea to me...
I'm not an expert on Mozilla's codebase, but based on their history, I would say that your worries are probably misplaced.
Firefox is purposely limited to the bare minimum of functionality that general users required. If any extensions ever rise to that level of ubiquity, they'll probably get adopted by moz.org and slipstreamed into the code base, which should remove the performance concern.
After all, that's how tabbed browsing made it into Mozilla -- first as a separate XPI extension (Multizilla), which got incorporated into the code base when the developers saw how popular it was.
Of course, it will require some serious popularity to rise to that level, and I doubt that many extensions will ever make it. But that's the beauty of the extension framework, my Firefox can be very different from yours...
No, that's the definition of the adjective form of the word "documentary", not the noun form, which is what we are discussing when we talk about "a documentary".
Don't believe me? Look for yourself.
I knocked down this little bit of selective mis-definition in an earlier thread... the fact that it keeps popping up when it is so obviously wrong indicates that either many people here need to learn how to use a dictionary, or they need to learn how to do more than just parrot Republican talking points.
... the "Standard" editions of VS.NET 2003? You can currently buy these cut-down versions of Visual Studio that only support C#, VB.NET, "J#" (whatever nightmare spawn of Java that is), or C++ for about $100 each. I imagine that when these "Express" products leave beta we'll see them priced at about the same level.
For someone who has a beef with Moore for quoting out of context, you do a pretty good job of doing the same thing yourself. Let's look at both definitions dictionary.com provides for "documentary" from the American Heritage Dictionary:
Notice how the noun form (which is what we're talking about here -- a "documentary") does not include strict objectivity as part of the definition -- which makes sense, considering that just about every documentary film ever made has a point of view on its subject matter. What you quoted was the definition for the adjective form of the word (in other words, it's the definition of "documentary" when used as a descriptor for things that are documentary-like -- and not actual documentaries.)
Did you do this out of simple error, I wonder -- not having the attention span to read past the first definition -- or are you as guilty of having a (gasp!) point of view as you say Moore is?
... not representative of the public at large, I'd wager.
The type of customer who seeks out the small, independent record shop is going to be different than the kind who just goes to whatever place is most convenient (Best Buy, Sam Goody, etc.), or whatever place has the best price (probably Best Buy, Sam Goody, etc.). Your friend's customers are probably far more likely than the average music shopper to (a) be interested in fringe formats like vinyl, (b) have strong opinions on DRM.
I'm not saying that his/her experiences aren't valid, just that you should be careful about generalizing too broadly from the experiences of small, boutique businesses in today's age of big-box retail.
If cheap-o consumer routers getting 0wned thanks to pathetic Wi-Fi security seems bad, consider this: at least one vendor of e-voting systems depends on WEP as the only security measure between their voting machines and the ballot-counting system.
Yes, that's right -- ballots are passed wirelessly, and only protected via standard 802.11 WEP. How long until someone tries to 0wn a polling place? Or, worse, just sniffs the ballots out of the air and dumps them to a log file (so much for the secret ballot), say?
I wrote the article linked to above when the systems were being evaluated in Fairfax County, Virginia -- a wealthy and populous suburb of Washington, DC -- but they've since been approved by the county board of elections and used in two elections to date. Who knows how many other local governments have bought into similar systems?
They're not considered because for personal blogs they are probably more trouble than they're worth. I manage The Oceana Network, a group blog on global efforts to defend the oceans, for my employer, Oceana. (Disclaimer: the opinions expressed here are mine alone and not those of Oceana, yadda yadda.) The Network is based on Scoop.
For a blog like ours, that handles posts from a large group of authors and that needs to be able to support very long discussions, Scoop is fantastic. Give it an inexpensive Linux/BSD box all to itself and it is a very, very nice and flexible online community platform.
However, if you fit the profile of the typical single-author blog author, installing Scoop probably isn't for you. It's a tricky process, requiring "now edit your httpd.conf"-type steps that are just not realistic to expect from someone on a virtual hosting setup. (Not to say that it can't be done -- just that it's not realistic to expect many people to do it.)
And Scoop's primary benefit -- its very nice moderated comment system -- is wasted on a personal blog, where no post will ever get more than a few comments. (I know that ours doesn't have that many yet either, but we've only been up and running for a couple of weeks... give us time :-) )
For those users, MT, WordPress, etc. are much better solutions -- easier installs, and just enough features to be useful without overcomplicating things.
If your blogging ambitions are grander than a simple personal site, though, Scoop is great -- definitely check it out if you haven't already.
The publication of these "principles" has nothing to do with getting other vendors to start behaving nicely, and everything to do with getting people ready for the impending launch of Google's desktop search app.
To make the leap from being a Web site to being software you have to install locally, there's a much higher burden of trust they have to surmount -- especially when that software will index your entire local filesystem (just think of the snooping possibilities!).
So, I see this as a kind of pre-emptive strike on their part -- a way that they can claim that they will be as "non-evil" on the desktop as they supposedly are on the Web, and have a document to back it up.
If any other companies follow the principles that document outlines, that's probably gravy, from their perspective.