> so many leftists take the road that all Republicans are just "idiots"
No, just Dubba. The rest are Evil.
> I just don't get why democrats have to convince > themselves that their opponents are mentally inferior
They have a hard time believing it, too--I mean, what are the odds? But after they refine their classification method with the addition of the Evil column, things tally up again.
> the issue was NEVER over Bill's sex life
You can take that and smoke it. That became the issue AFTER the revelation of Bill's sex life failed to incense the American public to any critical degree. It became the fall-back issue--you know, kind of like the justifications for the Iraq "war": it's because of the WMDs--no, wait, it's because of the atrocities--no, wait--aw, what the hell, it was the oil, fer Christ's sake!
As far as the lies are concerned, they were false answers to questions that shouldn't have been legal to ask anyway. Nobody's sex life--and I mean, NOBODY's--is anybody else's business. Texas tried to overturn that recently, but the Supreme Court struck them down. And you know what? Most people I know would have lied in the same position, and many have admitted as much. So much for Bill's serious crime.
Remind me again, what are his convixshons of the week?
> Two more positive election cycles for the GOP and that > will put the nail in the coffin of the social fascists
Speaking of nails and coffins, two more years of our current great economy, and there won't be enough wars to wage in the world to prevent this ship from sinking.
If Iraq did indeed signify a break with the past of ingoring atrocities, hurrah! Alas, pragmatism would indicate to be just a wee bit cautious with expectation. In fact, we had already two more crises--in Africa--since Iraq, and so far we intervened in neither. So much for changing our ways.
> In fact, all countries of the world should have taken action long ago.
I wholeheartedly agree. In fact, I believe that even France and Germany would have gone along in Iraq if the motivations had been the right ones. At least a lot of the people in German fora seem to be of that opinion, and if that had been representative of the wider popular opinion, and people had been equally willing to take to the street protesting for action, the governments would have been in a difficult position to refuse.
OTOH, as someone else pointed out, there really were no mass killings occuring anymore in Iraq--the graves found are from a decade or more ago. So intervening now to take down Saddam would have been an odd choice of timing, and I'm sure this argument would have been brought up had that been used as the motivation for action.
> So, why are we so concerned about thousands of people who were killed in Iraq in years gone by? > Why are we so unconcerned about thousands being slaughtered right now?
> And where do you get off claiming that Bush is demonized more than Saddam?
It's a popular debating technique amongst those devoid of arguments--redirecting your argument. If they can't refute your argument, they change it and make it sound like you're arguing some else entirely, something that's obvious wrong, or much easier to refute.
> cover up all of those mass graves, put all those children back in prison
Blather, blather. I didn't hear "your ilk" complain about that before the glimmer of war sparked in Dubbya's eye, the opportunity to showcase our fine military machinery, the greatest army on earth, yada, yada. I saw no holy indignation when 800,000 Rwandans killed each other, no urge to send in 200,000 troops to stop the savage butchery. Nor did I hear you complain about the goings on in the Congo, or in Liberia. Sure, let's set up some committes and feasibility studies about whether we SHOULD send some troops in. Where are Rummies snap "three minute decision[s]--and the first two just to get coffee" now? And how much did the indignation lead to military intervention when my country was exterminating Jews by the millions? Remember what it took for the US to mobilize its military? Yeah, having its interests threatened directly.
If you want to do good--and Lord knows Saddam was one draconian bastard worthy getting rid of--do so blindely, impartially, and consistently. When the very people you're trying to help ask you to please stop helping quite so much, maybe it's time to re-evaluate your strategy.
> You and your ilk have offered nothing but criticism. No solutions.
Au contraire, my ilk and I have proffered our view of the Right Way for a long time, and it involved treating the root of the problem, not its symptoms. There are very simple and tractable causes for why the Arab world hates the West, but in particular the US. Remove those, and you're well on your way to mend things. But that would involve putting the Big Stick down and talking, something people with Big Sticks are loath to do. We're asking Isreal to refrain from retaliaton after suicide attacks in order to facilitate dialog and not endanger the peace process, yet how willing were we to do the same after the towers came down? Maybe a moment of introspection, of oh-my-God-how-come-they're-hating-us-so-much, instead of reaching for the guns and assuming with a mere shrug that they were simply jealous of "our way of life."
> United States had moral, legal, and political justification
Morality is a funny thing--it only means something when the majority agrees on its definiton. Otherwise I could define it as me coming over to your house and taking your car. The US forfeited its moral authority through inaction in many other similar cases.
> I'll never forget the images of those Iraqis beating that Saddam > statue with the shoes off of their feet
Hmm, they seem to have forgotten them, because they're quite keen for us to go back home. Which brings up another interesting thing--the indignation amongst those American Righteous in favor of "the war" at the Iraqi's thanklessness for their own liberation. That begs the question, what exactly was the motivation behind this "liberation"--to earn thanks and admiration, or to merely help in an altruistic fashion?
> No, the main thing with Bush is 8-10 thousand dead people
Well, first things first. At first you have to establish that it really was an unjustified and illegal war before you can accuse him of murder. But since that seems to have been the case, it would be very ironic indeed if some leading member(s) of his administration would have to answer to the International Criminal Court which they so opposed.
I really think 160x160 screens suck for mapping, even in color. Moving up to 320x320, like on some of the Clies that can be had quite cheaply (esp. factory refurbs), adds so much more usability to the maps.
I don't see how you need GPS for most urban areas, especially ones that you're already partially familiar with. Maps OTOH--I love having Mapopolis and the local county map on my Clie, this tiny device replaces a whole lotta paper maps and books. Finding an unknown street just involves locating it on the map, to get the general idea of the neighborhood. If you've lived in town for any length of time you'd know how to get to any particular area anyway.
> That's funny, the majority of privacy-invading laws are backed by the far right.
Thank you! This is a new age, where repealing civil liberties and introducing large-scale monitoring of the population are considered good patriotic form, while proposing adequate healthcare implies big-brother socialism. Welcome to the future George Orwell didn't anticipate.
At least the main things involving slipping with Clinton were women's panties. With our Chimp In Chief they involve things like wool and eyes. It's amazing how "outraged" some people managed to get over Bill's sex life, yet here the reasons for the Iraq war are being systematically deconstructed, and no-one seems to give a damn. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
Go back and re-read my post. Is was a simple pragmatic question: what is the difference between fighting entities that get in one's way, and preserving one's interests? The former is simply the definition of the latter.
The last two "big enterprises" I've worked for (including the current one) have only used the out-of-the-box functionality of Exchange. VoIP? Ha! Blackberry? Ha! Just because InfoWorld profiles a couple of companies using that stuff doesn't mean that the majority of companies do.
As a company, that is. At first they were all chummy with the small shop/home user community, encouraging add-on development for Groove and spouting its open, P2P, XML-based architecture in every tech rag Ray Ozzie could get an article into. Once they started receiving "corporate" attention (esp. Microsoft), things changed, and they lost interest in the small guys. The free edition has been steadily losing features, while at the same time gaining heft. No thanks!
> At some point, the cost of moving to another architecture will decline to near-zero
Yes, at about the same point on the graph where time approaches infinity. The thing is, it's a nice theory, but we're more than a couple of years away from that ideal. Even with Linux, you may be able to take quite a bit of software along to a new platform, but if you can't get (often closed) drivers for that sweetheart hardware you can't live without, you're stuck to the platform of choice of those hardware manufacturers anyway. I believe that's still a major issue with Linux on PPC at the moment, and I don't see it going away anytime soon.
Don't get me wrong, as a long-time 680x0 fan I was always fond of Motorola's chips, and I followed the PPC with great enthusiasm for quite a while, but at some point pragmatism got the better of me.
> It is not about how PPC is faster than x86. It's about how PPC is more > *efficient* than x86 which leads in the long term to lower power usage
Fair enough, but the same still holds. I don't see a mass shift to another platform because the chips run cooler. Think about it! CPU temperature is something most consumers aren't even aware of. And in a few years I'm sure that technologies like copper interconnect and/or asynchronously clocked subsystems, in addition to ever decreasing voltages, will find their ways into the x86 and keep it humming along acceptably, even if not on the leading edge. The thing is, you rarely find the leading technologies also leading the market. Good enough is the name of the game (unfortunately).
> rating them by Mhz is often times the way to > not understand what makes a RISC a RISC
What you mean is that you can't compare RISC MHz to CISC MHz--or any design's MHz to any other design's MHz, for that matter. Your statement in fact reveals that YOU don't understand RISC, because MHz are a much more reliable metric for RISC than for CISC CPUs. That is because by the very definition RISC CPUs tend to take a constant amount of ticks per instruction, which is not the case for CISC. So yes, comparing two RISC CPUs that both execute one instruction every two cycles on a MHz basis will give you a pretty good comparison of their relative performance.
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> so many leftists take the road that all Republicans are just "idiots"
No, just Dubba. The rest are Evil.
> I just don't get why democrats have to convince
> themselves that their opponents are mentally inferior
They have a hard time believing it, too--I mean, what are the odds? But after they refine their classification method with the addition of the Evil column, things tally up again.
> the issue was NEVER over Bill's sex life
You can take that and smoke it. That became the issue AFTER the revelation of Bill's sex life failed to incense the American public to any critical degree. It became the fall-back issue--you know, kind of like the justifications for the Iraq "war": it's because of the WMDs--no, wait, it's because of the atrocities--no, wait--aw, what the hell, it was the oil, fer Christ's sake!
As far as the lies are concerned, they were false answers to questions that shouldn't have been legal to ask anyway. Nobody's sex life--and I mean, NOBODY's--is anybody else's business. Texas tried to overturn that recently, but the Supreme Court struck them down. And you know what? Most people I know would have lied in the same position, and many have admitted as much. So much for Bill's serious crime.
> I love his convictions
Remind me again, what are his convixshons of the week?
> Two more positive election cycles for the GOP and that
> will put the nail in the coffin of the social fascists
Speaking of nails and coffins, two more years of our current great economy, and there won't be enough wars to wage in the world to prevent this ship from sinking.
> So we should keep doing it?
If Iraq did indeed signify a break with the past of ingoring atrocities, hurrah! Alas, pragmatism would indicate to be just a wee bit cautious with expectation. In fact, we had already two more crises--in Africa--since Iraq, and so far we intervened in neither. So much for changing our ways.
> In fact, all countries of the world should have taken action long ago.
I wholeheartedly agree. In fact, I believe that even France and Germany would have gone along in Iraq if the motivations had been the right ones. At least a lot of the people in German fora seem to be of that opinion, and if that had been representative of the wider popular opinion, and people had been equally willing to take to the street protesting for action, the governments would have been in a difficult position to refuse.
OTOH, as someone else pointed out, there really were no mass killings occuring anymore in Iraq--the graves found are from a decade or more ago. So intervening now to take down Saddam would have been an odd choice of timing, and I'm sure this argument would have been brought up had that been used as the motivation for action.
> Kinda looks to me like you're trying to redirect the argument
Hmm? I wasn't arguing him there, I was making an observation to a third party.
> This adminstration [...] intelligence.
Careful there!
> So, why are we so concerned about thousands of people who were killed in Iraq in years gone by?
> Why are we so unconcerned about thousands being slaughtered right now?
That's an excellent angle.
> And where do you get off claiming that Bush is demonized more than Saddam?
It's a popular debating technique amongst those devoid of arguments--redirecting your argument. If they can't refute your argument, they change it and make it sound like you're arguing some else entirely, something that's obvious wrong, or much easier to refute.
> cover up all of those mass graves, put all those children back in prison
Blather, blather. I didn't hear "your ilk" complain about that before the glimmer of war sparked in Dubbya's eye, the opportunity to showcase our fine military machinery, the greatest army on earth, yada, yada. I saw no holy indignation when 800,000 Rwandans killed each other, no urge to send in 200,000 troops to stop the savage butchery. Nor did I hear you complain about the goings on in the Congo, or in Liberia. Sure, let's set up some committes and feasibility studies about whether we SHOULD send some troops in. Where are Rummies snap "three minute decision[s]--and the first two just to get coffee" now? And how much did the indignation lead to military intervention when my country was exterminating Jews by the millions? Remember what it took for the US to mobilize its military? Yeah, having its interests threatened directly.
If you want to do good--and Lord knows Saddam was one draconian bastard worthy getting rid of--do so blindely, impartially, and consistently. When the very people you're trying to help ask you to please stop helping quite so much, maybe it's time to re-evaluate your strategy.
> You and your ilk have offered nothing but criticism. No solutions.
Au contraire, my ilk and I have proffered our view of the Right Way for a long time, and it involved treating the root of the problem, not its symptoms. There are very simple and tractable causes for why the Arab world hates the West, but in particular the US. Remove those, and you're well on your way to mend things. But that would involve putting the Big Stick down and talking, something people with Big Sticks are loath to do. We're asking Isreal to refrain from retaliaton after suicide attacks in order to facilitate dialog and not endanger the peace process, yet how willing were we to do the same after the towers came down? Maybe a moment of introspection, of oh-my-God-how-come-they're-hating-us-so-much, instead of reaching for the guns and assuming with a mere shrug that they were simply jealous of "our way of life."
> United States had moral, legal, and political justification
Morality is a funny thing--it only means something when the majority agrees on its definiton. Otherwise I could define it as me coming over to your house and taking your car. The US forfeited its moral authority through inaction in many other similar cases.
> I'll never forget the images of those Iraqis beating that Saddam
> statue with the shoes off of their feet
Hmm, they seem to have forgotten them, because they're quite keen for us to go back home. Which brings up another interesting thing--the indignation amongst those American Righteous in favor of "the war" at the Iraqi's thanklessness for their own liberation. That begs the question, what exactly was the motivation behind this "liberation"--to earn thanks and admiration, or to merely help in an altruistic fashion?
> No, the main thing with Bush is 8-10 thousand dead people
Well, first things first. At first you have to establish that it really was an unjustified and illegal war before you can accuse him of murder. But since that seems to have been the case, it would be very ironic indeed if some leading member(s) of his administration would have to answer to the International Criminal Court which they so opposed.
I really think 160x160 screens suck for mapping, even in color. Moving up to 320x320, like on some of the Clies that can be had quite cheaply (esp. factory refurbs), adds so much more usability to the maps.
I don't see how you need GPS for most urban areas, especially ones that you're already partially familiar with. Maps OTOH--I love having Mapopolis and the local county map on my Clie, this tiny device replaces a whole lotta paper maps and books. Finding an unknown street just involves locating it on the map, to get the general idea of the neighborhood. If you've lived in town for any length of time you'd know how to get to any particular area anyway.
He didn't disclose the genders of either participant in the bobbing.
> Besides, that's not even a LIE, didn't you hear him?
That's right, they MADE him do it. Boo-hoo-hoo!
> That's funny, the majority of privacy-invading laws are backed by the far right.
Thank you! This is a new age, where repealing civil liberties and introducing large-scale monitoring of the population are considered good patriotic form, while proposing adequate healthcare implies big-brother socialism. Welcome to the future George Orwell didn't anticipate.
And has he mastered watching TV and swallowing at the same time?
> guy is as slippery as an Arkansas governor
At least the main things involving slipping with Clinton were women's panties. With our Chimp In Chief they involve things like wool and eyes. It's amazing how "outraged" some people managed to get over Bill's sex life, yet here the reasons for the Iraq war are being systematically deconstructed, and no-one seems to give a damn. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
Go back and re-read my post. Is was a simple pragmatic question: what is the difference between fighting entities that get in one's way, and preserving one's interests? The former is simply the definition of the latter.
>> its sole purpose is to threaten or attack other countries that get in America's way
> No asshole. Its sole purpose is to defend US interests.
What's the difference?
The last two "big enterprises" I've worked for (including the current one) have only used the out-of-the-box functionality of Exchange. VoIP? Ha! Blackberry? Ha! Just because InfoWorld profiles a couple of companies using that stuff doesn't mean that the majority of companies do.
As a company, that is. At first they were all chummy with the small shop/home user community, encouraging add-on development for Groove and spouting its open, P2P, XML-based architecture in every tech rag Ray Ozzie could get an article into. Once they started receiving "corporate" attention (esp. Microsoft), things changed, and they lost interest in the small guys. The free edition has been steadily losing features, while at the same time gaining heft. No thanks!
> At some point, the cost of moving to another architecture will decline to near-zero
Yes, at about the same point on the graph where time approaches infinity. The thing is, it's a nice theory, but we're more than a couple of years away from that ideal. Even with Linux, you may be able to take quite a bit of software along to a new platform, but if you can't get (often closed) drivers for that sweetheart hardware you can't live without, you're stuck to the platform of choice of those hardware manufacturers anyway. I believe that's still a major issue with Linux on PPC at the moment, and I don't see it going away anytime soon.
Don't get me wrong, as a long-time 680x0 fan I was always fond of Motorola's chips, and I followed the PPC with great enthusiasm for quite a while, but at some point pragmatism got the better of me.
> It is not about how PPC is faster than x86. It's about how PPC is more
> *efficient* than x86 which leads in the long term to lower power usage
Fair enough, but the same still holds. I don't see a mass shift to another platform because the chips run cooler. Think about it! CPU temperature is something most consumers aren't even aware of. And in a few years I'm sure that technologies like copper interconnect and/or asynchronously clocked subsystems, in addition to ever decreasing voltages, will find their ways into the x86 and keep it humming along acceptably, even if not on the leading edge. The thing is, you rarely find the leading technologies also leading the market. Good enough is the name of the game (unfortunately).
> rating them by Mhz is often times the way to
> not understand what makes a RISC a RISC
What you mean is that you can't compare RISC MHz to CISC MHz--or any design's MHz to any other design's MHz, for that matter. Your statement in fact reveals that YOU don't understand RISC, because MHz are a much more reliable metric for RISC than for CISC CPUs. That is because by the very definition RISC CPUs tend to take a constant amount of ticks per instruction, which is not the case for CISC. So yes, comparing two RISC CPUs that both execute one instruction every two cycles on a MHz basis will give you a pretty good comparison of their relative performance.
PhysicsGenius is a veteran troll. Just check his posting history.