No, really. I've been scouring the job ads for nearly 6 months, and in spite of all the endless hype over mainframe Linux under VM, I haven't found a single job posting for a VM systems programmer.
Are there specialized job boards? Am I missing something?
I've seen at least one case where eBay altered the scoring of comments. It was an account used by Microsoft, and contained comment after comment still smouldering from the fifth circle of Hell, and yet they all had a 'neutral' rating. Tell me eBay wasn't tampering with those.
I emailed ebay at the time and got this response:
On Wed, 31 May 2000 12:57:51 eBay Customer Support wrote:
> Hello John, > > Thank you for taking the time to write us with your concern about our > feedback policy. I will be happy to address your concerns. First the > feedback for msoft@buddy.ebay.com hasn't been altered and our policies > haven't been changed for this member. > > About three months ago we changed our feedback policy. Before members > could leave neutral comments to any other member at any time. Negative > comments had to be transaction related, so when members were upset with > another member even if it wasn't in regards to a transaction they had > completed with that member they could leave neutral comments. > > To answer your first question the feedback wasn't altered from negative > to neutral. All of the comments that are neutral were originally left as > neutral comments. > > Many alternatives to curb misuse of the Feedback Forum while still > maintaining a non-transactional feedback option were considered. > However, the input that we received from the community was > overwhelmingly in favor of linking every comment to an actual > transaction on the site. > > Based on that, we decided to change the past system to make all feedback > transaction related. I hope that this information helps explain why this > member has so many neutral comments. If you have any other questions or > concerns feel free to contact us. > > > Regards, > > Dale H. D. > eBay Customer Support
I just checked, and it appears that all of the feedback for msoft has completely disappeared at some point in the last three years.
I would count the early arcade games, and the Apple II games.
These machines and programs jammed an enormous amount of programming functionality into incredibly tight spaces. Many of the old arcade programs ran on 4K, 8K, or 16K 8 bit computers, and ran on machines with clock speeds of under 1 MHz, and effective instruction rates of mere hundreds of thousands per second. Even a fully loaded Apple II gave you under 32K of actual program space to work with, once you subtracted the low RAM, the hires graphics areas, and the BASIC ROM space, and people did a whole lot with that 32K.
The last two games I've purchased (Simcity 4 and C&C Generals) require minimums of 500 MHz and 800 MHz processors respectively and 128M of RAM. Of course, they do a lot more, but they are certainly not 500, or 800, or 8000 times as entertaining as the Cocktail Space Invaders machine that graces my hall entryway and is such a hit when we throw parties.
Early arcade games were heroic, wildly successful efforts. Truly examples of extreme programming.
Re:Why signed binaries are not allowed by the GPL
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Linus on DRM
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· Score: 1
A file signature is a statement by the signer that the file is trustworthy in the opinion of the signer. It's exactly like "Siskel says thumbs up" to go back to the movie review analogy.
But Siskel also gives "thumbs down" to certain movies, but no one signs a binary that they don't trust. That would defeat the purpose of signing the binary.
A better analogy would be, "Ebert says that The Phantom Menace is 133 minutes long and contains (to make up a number) 2731 camera angle changes, so if you're watching a movie that you think is the Phantom Menace, and it isn't 133 minutes long, and it doesn't have 2731 camera angle changes, then it might not be an authentic copy of The Phantom Menace." (You might be watching a copy of The Phantom Edit for instance.)
This type of information has nothing to do with "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." It conveys no information about the work other than the alleged authenticity of the work. It is not a "review" of the work. The "thumbs up" you are talking about is implicit in the very existance of the signature. It isn't information carried inside of the signature.
There can be a thousand different signatures of the same file, even if each of them has the same hash for the file, because they can contain different identities.
The only difference between those signatures is a non-creative factual element -- the identity of the writer. I could make the same factual observations as Ebert -- 133 minutes, 2731 camera angle changes. That doesn't make me a movie reviewer.
Re:Why signed binaries are not allowed by the GPL
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Linus on DRM
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· Score: 3, Insightful
[a signature hash] is a qualitative statement made about the work in question, but the statement is its own creative work.
This is completely untrue. A signature hash is a quantitative statement about the work. That's the entire point of a hash. There can be a thousand english-language reviews of a movie, all of which will be different. There is only one possible hash of a kernel in any given hashing language/algorithm. There is no room for "creativity" in the computation of a signature hash.
However, I doubt that a copyright infringement case would get very far. Consider the criteria for fair use:
Criteria 1: What is the purpose and character of the use?
The purpose of a hash is completely different from the purpose of a kernel. The hash also has completely different characteristics than the kernel. Both favor fair use.
Criteria 2: What is the nature of the work?
The nature of a hash is a single factual, mechanical observation about a published work, favoring fair use.
Criteria 3: What is the amount and quality of the work being use?
The amount of the work included in the hash is a vanishingly small amount of the original work. Less then 100 bytes derived from a several megabyte program. It is impossible to reconstruct a kernel from a kernel hash. Both observations favor fair use.
Criteria 4: What effect does the use have on the market for the original work?
In reference to the current fighting...
Does AJ [show footage and discuss issues that portray Iraq in a negative light]? No.
I had an interesting discussion with a Lincoln scholar many years ago. The subject was the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The contemporary newspapers carried transcripts of the debates, and an interesting phenomenon took place.
The pro-Lincoln newspapers would gently edit Lincoln's responses, correcting the grammar, and removing sentence fragments, but each pro-Lincoln paper would edit Lincoln's responses slightly differently. On the other hand, those papers usually printed Douglas' responses verbatim, making absolutely sure to include every grammatical error and sentence fragment. The result was that, on the page, Lincoln appeared to be the more composed and articulate speaker. Lincoln's responses varied slightly from pro-Lincoln paper to pro-Lincoln paper, but Douglas' responses were nearly identical from paper to paper.
The pro-Douglas newspapers did exactly the opposite, gently editing Douglas' responses, while printing Lincoln's responses verbatim.
As a result, Scholars are pretty sure that, by combining the Lincoln transcripts from the pro-Douglas papers, and the Douglas transcripts from the pro-Lincoln papers, that they have a near-perfect record of the debates as they were actually spoken.
al-Jazeera is performing a similar function. They will show and document many things that CNN will not show, and CNN will show and document many things that AJ will not show. The result will be a more complete record of what actually happened in the Iraq war then if only one side of the story were told.
Here's my situation. I was laid off in November. I have 15 years experience in IBM VM system administration and VM systems programming. I've installed, configured, and customized VM/SP, VM/HPO, VM/XA, and VM/ESA systems. I can write assembler. I'm basically a VM kernel (nucleus) hacker. I'm not a "grey hair" -- I'm in my mid-30s.
I've been scouring the job boards for months, and I haven't found a single freaking job posting for a VM systems programmer or systems administrator. You would think that with the current IBM push towards Linux under VM, there would be a job market for people like myself, but mainframe programming and admin jobs almost never appear in the usual tech job web sites. The few jobs that do turn up are invariably for MVS work.
Where should I be looking? Does anyone have any idea where experienced VM mainframe folk go to find mainframe jobs?
Yes, but doesn't this spawn yet another "industry" of professional copyright maintainers? Sort of like domain name squatters?
It wouldn't create freelance copyright squatters. If I were to pay the copyright fee on, for instance, Star Wars, that would not give me the right to the Star Wars copyright. It would merely extend George Lucas' copyright.
However, it most certainly would create copyright fee maintenance companies, which is a problem. People would pay the initial copyright fee, but no one would want to run the risk of forgetting to renew a copyright on any non-trivial published work, so they would look to hire someone to do the job for them.
For instance, let's say that copyright renewal costs $100 every 20 years, and there's 4 renewal periods. (80 year max) I could easily go into the business of submitting copyright renewals, and I could do it for $100 per copyright for the duration of the copyright (plus my up-front fee)
I invest the $100 conservatively, and receive 5.75% interest, compounded annually. By the time 20 years rolls around, that $100 has become $205. Now I withdraw $100 of that, and pay the copyright fee to extend the copyright, leaving $105. Repeat every 20 years until the copyright reaches the statutory maximum.
In other words, the company that produced the work could be out of business, the copyright ownership could be impossible to determine, but so long as the original copyright holder made arrangement with such a copyright renewal processing company, the unknown copyright would continue to be renewed decade after decade.
The problem is that modern copyright terms are so incredibly long that even a large fee 80 or 100 years in the future translates to a small investment now. For instance, if the fee to renew a copyright will be $1,000 100 years from now, I can cover that now by investing $3.00 at 6%, compounded annually, and placing that investment in the hands of a corporation that contractually agrees to pay the copyright fee for me 100 years from now.
In other words, regular renewal requirements don't necessarily solve the problem.
Intel based Unix implementations -- AIX/PS2
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Analysis of SCO vs. IBM
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Except for SCO, none of the primary UNIX vendors ever developed a UNIX "flavor" to operate on an Intel-based processor chip set. This is because the earlier Intel processors were considered to have inadequate processing power for use in the more demanding enterprise market applications.
Sun Microsystems needs to improve its marketing efforts for Solaris x86.
Not to mention that IBM released AIX/PS2 back in the early 1990s -- a version of AIX that ran on 80386 based PS/2 hardware.
It sucked to the extent that the hardware it ran on sucked. A big, bloated Unix kernel running on an 80386 with a maximum of 16 megs of memory and a 60 meg ESDI hard drive was pretty close to a non-starter.
There can't be any doubt whatsoever that Bush' policy has completely changed the fundamental playing field and given a new incitament to acquire nukes.
Bush has not threatened and will not threaten any country with invasion that is not harboring or supporting terrorists. Hussein is known to be supporting terrorists, and appears to be harboring them.
Nevertheless, you have to address to root issues, why are people becoming suicide bombers in the first place.
Ok. Let's start with the Palestinians. Besides the cash payouts to the bombers' families, the basic problem is that the Palestinian leadership have created a death cult on an unprecedented scale. Palestinian children are taught in school and in "summer camps" to hate Jews and want to murder them. Others are recruits, usually either filled with fanatical hate towards Israel, or suicidal, or both. They are promised paradise and privilege in the afterlife. (72 virgins? Paradise is a brothel?) They are promised that their families will be well provided for on earth. They are indoctrinated with classic brainwashing techniques. They are isolated from their families, told to spend every waking hour in prayer, told to engage in repeated purification rituals. When they are ready for their mission, their handlers hold elaborate, videotaped "graduation" ceremonies, honoring the bomber, where the bomber says goodbye to his family and commits to his mission. The bomber is provided with an explosive belt, or a mission, told how to use it, and dropped off at his target. Then, once the mission is completed, the bomber is lionized in heroic posters which are plastered through the towns. Schools are named after the suicide bombers, all of which lay the groundwork for the next batch of suicide bombers.
What is happening in Israel is not random people deciding to kill themselves by murdering Jews. It is a well-funded terrorist organization that utilizes classic brainwashing techniques to create "martyrs," and it is destroying the Palestinian people from within. All this costs lots of money, and that money is coming from outside of the Palestinian territories, from Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
The same thing goes on in Al Quaeda training camps, formerly in Afghanistan, and allegedly currently in Iraq. The airline hijaakers had massive financial support, and according to the documents they left, were instructed to engage in the same concentrated prayer and to engage in purification rituals.
You have some other root causes in mind, I suppose? Ok, what are they? Poverty? Hopelessness? Suppression? Those are everywhere, but suicide bombers are not! Why are there no suicide bombers in Mexico? Why are there no waves of suicide bombings in India? Why are there no North Korean suicide bombers? Why do all of the suicide bombers happen to come from Islamic fringe sects that practice brainwashing and indoctrination, and have explicit political agendas that involve suicide bombing?
Why did the 9/11 hijackers complete their mission? They weren't desperate. They came to America, lived here comfortably for years, went to flight school, received advanced educational training. Why didn't their sense of hopelessness subside? They certainly didn't live in poverty. Why did they get on those planes? They certainly could have defected, or disappeared. The "root cause" was that they were members of a terrorist organization with a political agenda of mass murder. Those are the root causes of terrorism.
I'll have to defer to you on [Uzbekistan and Kirgistan] I don't know what we are doing there. Please, don't have a wait-and-see attitude on this.
What I meant was that I really have no information on those situations, not that I want to wait and see. If we are providing covert aid to one side, then that will probably fail, but that's not what we are doing in Iraq, so I don't see how it enters in.
Even though an U bomb is easy to make, it is still a lot of metallurgy involved, and during that process, it is impossible not to leave any trace. Just go to any physics lab where there has been tiny radioactive sources involved
Physics labs use tiny amounts of extremely radioactive sources to deliberately cause small nuclear reactions for study. This produces small amounts of intensely radioactive fission products that escape into the lab environment and wind up in the corners. Industrial uranium enrichment uses large amounts of barely radioactive natural uranium, and produces no highly radioactive fission products. They are not comparable.
If you have to sweep the corners of the room to find radioactivity in such a lab, then your argument doesn't hold water. There's no way that anyoue would find a hidden isotope separation lab based on radioactive emissions. The process just doesn't give off radiation. You can easily find a breeder reactor, because it gives off lots of radiation, tritium and the like. That's how the U.S. was able to track Soviet plutonium production, with sniffer planes.
I'll grant you, for the sake of argument, that it might be impossible for Iraqi scientists to "sanitize" an existing isotope separation facility for the inspectors, but that's meaningless because obviously the inspectors are not being shown those secret facilities, and don't know where they are! Hussein has had a decade to hide his WMD programs. By all accounts he has spent the vast majority of his country's oil revenues in doing so. Those facilities are probably hollowed out of a cave, or built into the ground, and we won't find them until we're in there, on the ground. They could very well have highly contaminated radiation laboratories, and such a laboratory could fit in a boxcar, and be anywhere in the entire country.
Just think about the unthinkable for a moment: What if it was true: He didn't have any WMDs right now. How could he possibly prove that he didn't? It is in fact impossible.
Ok, let's go by your argument. You would have to believe that he:
1) Kicked the weapons inspectors out of the country 2) Secretly destroyed his existing stockpiles of WMDs. 3) Deliberately decided that, rather then doing so in public and getting the sanctions lifted, he would do so secretly, so that he could... um... why would he do that?
But to directly answer your question, he could lead the inspectors to the facilities that were used to destroy the WMDs. He could lead them to inspect the sites containing the destroyed weapons casings. He could show them the destroyed manufacturing facilities. He could show them the destroyed storage containers and handling equipment. He could show them the incineration facilities that were used to destroy the nerve, mustard, and VX gas. He could show the records detailing the progress of the destruction process -- shipping and transportation logs showing the movement of WMD stockpiles from arsenals to destruction facilities. He could show the inspectors the dump sites containing the contaminated residue of the incineration operations. He could show the inspectors the equipment that was salvaged from the Osirak nuclear weapons development site (which was completely stripped of all equipment following the Israeli destruction of the breeder reactor core.) He could show the inspectors the actual rockets that were allegedly being made from those aluminum tubes that had been specially anodized to protect them against Uranium Hexaflouride gas, and finished to microscopic smoothness to make them suitable as gas centrifuges. I could go on and on. Hussein still has some 600 metric tons of chemical agents, 25,000 rockets, 15,000 chemical artillery shells, 520 Kg of Anthrax growth medium, all unaccounted for. It is simply beyond credibility that he even could destroy them without a trace (We can't even do that), and it is incomprehensible that he would do so in secret, instead of doing so in public to get the sanctions lifted. That makes no sense whatsoever!
Doesn't it make more sense that he still has them and is still hiding them?
I mean, you'd think that he would actually present the best available evidence before the security council
No he wouldn't. That presentation was not to reveal all of our evidence. That presentation was to reveal the absolute minimum information necessary to show that Hussein was lying about 1441, which called for full and complete disarmament
Every bit of information that Powell presented represented a destroyed intelligence source or method that cannot be used again. It was a costly presentation, and largely wasted on the audience. What you saw were deep secrets that are almost never revealed, and by their very nature, you don't get to see all of the details. The "best evidence" is certainly being held very closely, because once we are on the ground, we are going to use it to quickly locate and secure the WMD facilities. Powell showed the photographs of the decontamination trucks parked outside of the "unused" chemical weapons depots. Then he said, the next day, they were gone. Do you think we weren't tracking those decontamination trucks? Do you think we weren't tracking those truck convoys after they moved? Heck, we moved spy satellites into different orbits for this war. Every bit of recon capability we have is deployed, and you can rest assured that we have far, far more intelligence information than what Powell revealed.
The reason why we don't provide information about where to look to the inspectors is that they have a proven track record of tipping off the Iraqis. If we told the UNSC, or the Inspectors all that we knew, then Iraq would just move everything, and we wouldn't know where anything was.
the Bush administration is... trying to stage a war... but they have to create an illusion of playing by international rules.
What do you mean by "have to?" The U.N. mechanations are being done for two reasons. First, we aren't ready to attack. Second, for the benefit of Tony Blair, who needs to keep his coalition government intact in order to participate in the war. Europeans care a lot about the U.N., but the United States really doesn't. We participate in the U.N. for pragmatic reasons. If the U.N attempts to block the war, the U.N. will be finished. But really, the U.N. is effectively an ongoing diplomatic summit, not a source of moral authority in any sense whatsoever, and certainly not a source of military or economic power. Your economic power comes from the EU(or is being eviscerated by the EU, your choice), and your small amount of non-U.S. military power comes from the few countries that have bothered to maintain a standing army despite half a century of U.S. military protection. But in reality, the military protection of Europe is still the U.S. army. I'm still looking for your source of moral authority, given Europe's ongoing loving embrace of Saddam Hussein and his murderous regime, and it's incredible ignorance of its own past. Millions of Europeans have taken to the streets to protect Hussein and Iraq I can't find a single protest sign calling for Iraq to disarm, or stop using chemical weapons on the Kurds, or stop murdering dissidents. You think we don't see those signs at your protests? Do you think we don't know how little Europeans care about the Iraqi people?
big fat line big fat line big fat line big fat line big fat line
Ok, I'm drawing a big fat line because you're completely changing the subject. (I'd use a sequence of dashes, but, alas, the lameness filter.) We're not talking about Iraq anymore, you're talking about the internal politics of the U.S. None of this has any relation whatsoever to the Iraq war. It's completely off topic, but I'm going to dive in anyhow because I see a lot of common European misconceptions about American politics.
OK, look at this way: The Bush administration is clearly attacking the american public. [long list of things that I fully agree are very bad and most certainly unconstitutional.]
In times of war, our courts have traditionally deferred to the presidency and allowed the enforcement of policies and laws that they would not permit during peacetime. I agree that these laws are uncalled for, unnecessary, and probably will be found unconstitutional once the war is over. It's overreaction on the part of the Bush administration, and one of the most serious flaws of his presidency.
In addition, he is a significant threat to world peace and sits on the biggest arsenal of WMDs, and he has stated he will not hesitate to use them against any target.
Actually, he has stated that he will not hesitate to use them against any country that uses them against us first. This is the entire point of deterrence, and has proven to be a wise policy. It is the reason why, during the first Gulf war, the Scuds that fell on the Marine Barracks and Israel contained explosives, not nerve or mustard gas.
You are clearly incapable of dealing with Bush yourself.
No we aren't. We have plenty of options for "taking care of" Bush if we want him out. We can simply not elect him next time. While I agree with you that Bush "stole the election", I should point out that the election came down to a difference of about 200 votes, with thousands of ambiguous votes. No one knows who really won that election, and the truth was unknowable. It was a very unique and maddening situation, because the margin of victory was many times smaller then the margin of error, and it was the most closely scrutinized ballot count in our history.
Regardless, you can't compare that to Hussein "stealing an election" by being the only candidate on the ballot, and receiving 100% of the vote in a country that hates his guts. If Bush is voted out in 2004, he will step aside, as is our unbroken tradition.
Aside from that, we have a Congress that can effectively block Bush on domestic policy issues. The TIA was killed by Congress, who refused to fund it. Congress has the power to pass laws to override any action that Bush tries to take, and Congress has the power to override a presidential veto.
Congress also has the power to impeach the president, and remove him from office. The serious threat of using that power was enough to prompt Nixon to resign, and that power was abused on Clinton. That power could be used on Bush if necessary.
Basically you are seeing a difference between the U.S. government and European governments. We have no coalition government. We alternate between Democratic and Republican control of both houses of Congresses and the Presidency. Once a President is elected, he has a very free hand for the next four years, and does not have to tailor his policy to opinion polls the way that Tony Blair has to do so in order to keep his coalition from breaking apart.
This does not mean that he is unaccountable.
Now tell me, why shouldn't we, the rest of the world go to war and overthrow him, to liberate the US?
Because there will be an election shortly in which we will have the power to remove him from office ourselves. This is not true in Iraq.
The other option is to use those $50 billion for something good.
Ok, spend $50 billion to stop terrorism. What are your plans?
Up until that speech, the message was "disarm Hussein." That speech was, "Bring democracy to the Arab world."
Bush has been trying to say that to Europe for a long time. Perhaps your news are differently angled than what we hear here. And the reaction has always been "yeah, sure".
A long time? You mean since he was elected, or since 9/11, or since he started laying groundwork to remove Hussein?
You know, Clinton tried the same thing in Kosovo, the idea isn't actually new...
You know, Clinton was an idiot who didn't know what he was doing. He had no moral credibility, and his presidency was a foreign policy disaster from beginning to end. Kosovo was a disaster. We had no business being there. If 9/11 hadn't happened, we would have no business being in Iraq.
Then, it has been because you have failed to take precautions in time. If US use violence now, it is because they failed to take the chance to pressure Saddam out of office in early 80-ties, and so on.
Unfortunately, lacking a time machine, we have to deal with the situation, as it exists, right now. You're probably right. Hindsight is 20-20.
This theory seems especially popular with dictators and corrupt governments, but I don't buy it.
I look upon your government as one of those now (there are differences, of course),
Bush is not a dictator. He does not have absolute power. He is subject to removal in the next election. Everything law passed in this country must be passed by Congress. Every Congressman runs the risk of being thrown out of office if he or she fails to represent the people, and it happens regularly. Everything Bush does is reviewable by the Supreme Court.
OK, you may reject it, but the Security Council is intended to be that authority. OK, so the US can do whatever they like, but they are partly playing with the UN, so that means that they are partly recognizing this authority.
The UN and the UNSC are not authorities. The United States has never subjugated control to any international authority. The UN and UNSC are diplomatic bodies. We are "playing with the UN" not because we are submitting to their authority, but because we perceive it as beneficial to do so.
Well, of course, for US, it doesn't really matter, because the US can nuke anybody who doesn't want to play ball back to the stone age,
If the UNSC vetoes the war resolution, we are not going to nuke them.
and Bush has stated that he doesn't mind doing so
I talked about that earlier.
but for smaller countries, that is not really an option. We have to cooperate.
That's not what I see. What I see is a lot of small countries with near-zero economic, diplomatic, military, or leadership assets who are delighted to be part of the U.N., because it gives them wildly exaggerated power and authority. Do you think that Libya would ever head up an international human rights commission if not for the UN? Do you think that Iran and Iraq would ever be placed in charge of international disarmament if their countries hadn't happen to turn up in alphabetical order? Do you think that Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Mexico, Chile and Pakistan would ever have the power to influence a U.S./Iraq war if they weren't members of a divided UNSC? For the record, they are not being forced to cooperate. They are being asked to cooperate, and support the war, or to not cooperate, and pay the diplomatic consequences.
That's how I'm looking at this moron of yours. He can still be sincere and yet dead wrong. I believe he is sincere when he says that the only way to ensure disarmament is to remove Saddam. And I think he is sincere when he thinks that he will put in some sort of democracy. But, he is lying when he talking about all the "evidence" they have, that's a smokescrean for attacking.
As I said, not revealing evidence does not mean that you don't have it. There are many compelling reasons to reveal the minimum amount of evidence to prove the narrow case that Hussein has not complied with 1441 and fully, completely disarmed.
If any such thing as a "preemtive attack" was legitimate, there is no reason why Saddam (and pretty much any other nation that has a beef with the US) should not attack the US right now, it would have been legimate.
Sure it would be legitimate. We're about to overthrow his regime. He could preemptively attack us, but it would guarantee his death, probably the death of all the Tikritis, and possibly the death of most of Iraq if he used WMDs. That's not what he's after though.
[Bush] has the mind of a religious fanatic, who can't see colors, only that "either you are with us or you are against us".
That isn't what he said, actually. He said that either your are with us, or you are with the terrorists. This isn't a threat, it's an observation. It means that no country can afford to stand by and pretend that they are immune to terrorism. Indonesia did exactly that. They pretended that they weren't involved in the dispute, and then Al Quaida blew up a nightclub in Bali. What it means is that if a country doesn't commit to fighting terrorism, then terrorists will gravitate towards it.
I believe that Al Quaida attacked New York because Clinton had proved to them that we would not fight back with everything we have. I believe that the Palestinians are constantly attacking Israel because the Israelis are proving that they will not fight back with everything they have.
Someone with a world-view like that is an extremely dangerous man. Unfortunately, USians are the only ones who legitimately can get rid of him.
Unfortunately for you, most Americans support Bush, and I think that he is going to be reelected in the next election cycle.
I don't think that anyone is reading this except for us, and this is starting to reach the point of rehash. I know where you're coming from, you know where I'm coming from. I'm ready to wrap it up.
North Korea is arguably a far greater threat to US security than Iraq. The message to the world is thus: Get nukes as fast as you can! That's a very bad message to send.
You see it as a message. I see it as a piece of reality that hasn't changed since 1945. Once you have nuclear weapons, you become effectively unattackable. That's what makes this so urgent. Hussein with nuclear weapons will be unstoppable, and he has a proven history of attacking his neighbors and annexing their land. He did it to Kuwait, and tried to do it to Iran. I think that the prospects of an "Iraqi Empire" covering the middle east are very real and a nuclear-armed Hussein would be impossible to contain. He isn't sacrificing his country to build nuclear weapons for nothing. He expects to get his investment back manyfold once he has them.
I can't see how funding terrorism plays a vital role for suicide bombers. They would have found ways to blow themselves up regardless of financial support. I think the role money plays in terrorism is greatly exaggerated.
Hussein is paying about $25,000 to the families of each suicide bomber. It was $10,000. Then the suicide bombing started to slow down, the bounty was raised to $25,000, and the suicide bombings started to pick up again. According to this 2001 article,, unemployment in the Palestinian territories was at 38%, and the average per-capita income fell from USD2000 to USD1680.
In other words, if you become a suicide bomber, the reward to your family is equivalent to about 15 years guaranteed salary. The average per-capita income in the United States is $30,000. 15 years salary at that rate would be $450,000. The poverty line in the United States is defined at around $13,500. 15 years salary at that rate would be around $200,000. I don't want to dispute the exact numbers, but it's pretty clear that the amount of money being supplied to the poverty-stricken families of suicide bombers is enough to lift them out of poverty and live comfortably for many years, even after they lose their home after Israeli retaliation. It's not just a token payment. It's an active form of recruiting that is very successful. Delivering your immediate/extended family from poverty is a huge incentive to become a suicide bomber, and with that incentive gone, recruiting suicide bombers is going to be much more difficult.
While a prosperous Iraq may incite revolutions in other countries, it is also quite likely to have the opposite effect. Remember that many of these countries have been extremely rich, yet have oppressive regimes, and seeing US as an evil force from outside is going to make oppression stronger.
That's exactly why we can't replace Hussein with another oppressive strongman. But that's my point -- the "liberation" has to be real, or it won't serve the purpose of shutting down the terrorist organizations. Again, this requires a huge chance in U.S. policy. We now have to follow through on our words. This is Bush's risk. If he can't follow through on his promise of democracy, then this will be a disaster.
You give "just a little support" to the regimes of Uzbekistan and Kirgistan. It's deja-vu all over again...
I'll have to defer to you on that... I don't know what we are doing there. Hopefully a success in Iraq will result in a wholesale change in U.S. diplomatic strategy.
it wouldn't be hard at all to detect nukes if they had them, radioactive dust would remain at the sites where experiments were conducted, easily detectable.
I know a lot about nukes also, and all that a lack of radioactive evidence means is that they are working the U235 route, not the Plutonium route. But we knew that already.
There are two ways to make a nuclear bomb -- you can either extract U235 from natural uranium, or you can build a reactor and breed plutonium. Hussein's original plan was to breed plutonium, hence the breeder reactor that was destroyed by the Israelis. Since then, it's almost certain that he has switched over to an all-U235 weapons program, which is much more expensive, but has the advantage of being virtually undetectable.
A U235 weapon can be created without any radioactive evidence. Basically, you start with natural uranium, and use isotope separation technology to isolate the U235. No radiation or nuclear waste is created in the process. This is why the discovery of UF6 gas centrifuge technology is so disconcerting. It points to a nuclear weapons program that can be easily and perfectly concealed.
Also, the only reason that the U.S. conducted a test-firing of an atomic bomb was because of the extremely complex technology required to make a plutonium implosion bomb work. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, on the other hand, was a U235 bomb. A U235 bomb is much, much simpler. It's basically a cannon, with a U235 ring at the breech end, and a U235 slug as the "bullet". One moving part. You fire the cannon, and when the bullet enters the breech, it creates a critical mass, and the fission reaction runs away. The U.S. was so absolutely convinced that the Hiroshima bomb would work that they dropped it untested. Once you have the U235, building an atomic bomb is much, much easier then building a plutonium bomb. If you overbuild it even slightly, it's practically guaranteed to work.
I would be a lot more concerned with terrorists setting off a nuke in a US harbor they built inside a container in a ship than Saddam building nukes.
Agreed, which is why a missile defense system is obsolete. If your mission is to destroy a U.S. city, then launching a missile means national suicide, where as if you sneak a bomb into a harbor you are likely to get away with it. That's another reason why a covert nuclear weapons program is so dangerous. Plus, just an observation, The Al Quaida planners appear to be huge Tom Clancy fans. Crashing airplanes into buildings is right out of Debt of Honor., and presumably they've gotten their hands on a copy of The Sum Of All Fears.
I don't know that much about biological and chemical weapons, but lets note one thing: There's nothing you can do with bombs that you can't do with inspectors in a fast helicopter. You could look for similar things...
First, we don't know where most of the weapons are, and we won't be able to begin finding them until the U.S. has taken control of Iraq and wiped out Hussein's secret police network. Once that is done, we will easily find the weapons, using the same powerful technique that we used in the Gulf war. Bags of money. Most of the weapons systems found in the last war were found by bribing soldiers and officials. It's the most cost-effective system ever. You can spend a million dollars trying to track down a weapons system, or you can find someone who knows, and give them $10,000. It's the most basic, oldest, low-tech form of intelligence known to man, but it won't work until we're on the ground, and have wiped out the existing regime and secret police network.
Second, something that people seem to forget, the purpose of the inspectors was not to find the weapons. The resolution was that the inspectors would be led to the weapons, and would verify their destruction. This is not happening. One or two bombs every couple of weeks does not count. If Hussein were really complying with Res. 1441, the inspectors would be busy monitoring the destruction of thousands of missiles and weapons systems, and thousands of gallons of biological and chemical agents per day.
Third, the only reason that Hussein is allowing the inspectors in is that he is confident that they won't be able to find anything.
And finally, by all evidence, the inspectors have been compromised. According to Blix, they have all been offered bribes, and some of them have accepted those bribes. The Iraqis have infiltrated the inspection teams, and are being tipped off as to where the inspections are going to be. The best explanation as to why they are doing this seems to be that the inspectors see their primary role not as disarming Iraq, but in preventing war. In other words, if they admit that the inspections have failed, then they feel that they will be responsible for the war. As a result, they have now shifted from their intended role -- overseeing Iraqi destruction of their own weapons -- to a new role of working with the Iraqis to deter a U.S. attack. Hence the microscopic "progress", the dribbling out of weapons here and there. The Iraqis voluntarily hand over two weapons, and the inspectors call this a sign of progress and declare that they need more months. It isn't "progress."
In other words, the entire inspection process is a sham. It's purpose is now delay, not disarmament.
What if the inspectors continue to "inspect" Iraq for five more years, until Hussein successfully test-fires an atomic bomb, announces that Iraq is now a nuclear power, and kicks the inspectors out? Is this implausable? It appears to be Hussein's entire long-term strategy!
For example I regard the "depleted uranium" craze as a complete panic with no basis in reality.
Agreed. Depleted uranium is about as radioactive as the surrounding sand. however, large segments of the media appear to be completely ignorant about this detail. In reality, those birth defects and cancers are far more likely to be caused by exposure to chemical weapons, which the Depleted Uranium crowd conveniently forget have been used by Hussein against the Iraqi people time after time.
[U.S. attack vs revolution] To attempt an answer, it is extremely important for a people to have their own destiny in their own hands.
Internal revolutions rarely turn out well. They tend to result in a power struggle that is won by the most ruthless of the internal factions.
As an example of what we're trying to do, after the U.S. military victory in Afghanistan, the U.S. brought the factions together, provided a building with military guard, and pretty much told them to go in and not come out until they had created a representational government. Now you can argue about whether it is working or not, but if the Taliban had been ousted by a violent revolution, this would not have happened. Those warlords would not have been sitting together in a room. They would have been battling it out for control of the country. The purpose of U.S. occupation of Iraq is:
1) To prevent a power vacuum and the resulting violent power struggle. 2) To safeguard the new government against foreign invasion. (Saudi Arabia has been floating the idea of sending in "Arab peacekeepers") 3) To ensure that the new government is formed peacefully, with the participation of all of Iraq's internal factions.
None of which would come to pass in a violent revolution.
Only if they can convince a lot of people that they do have an enemy, it is possible for the theocrats to retain power. And right now, the US is that enemy. If the US seize to be that enemy, there will be a lot more room for improvement in Iran.
I think that the U.S. actively turning Iraq into a prosperous democracy will have an enormous effect on the Iranian people. They will want it too, and will be much more likely to turn to the U.S. to help make it happen.
Far more then if the U.S. stands by and does nothing. That's what we are doing now, and it isn't making us very popular. Besides, right now, Hussein's grip on Iraq is so strong that the odds of a revolution any time soon are practically zero. I think that it's a fantasy option. It's only possible with the sort of massive covert aid that I'm arguing is doomed to be a long-term strategic failure.
As for Bush recent speech, it wasn't really anything new there, as far as I can see.
Up until that speech, the message was "disarm Hussein." That speech was, "Bring democracy to the Arab world." That's a huge shift, and based on the current wave of articles on arabnews, the Saudis don't like it a bit. As a matter of fact, they're pissed off and freaking out. For good reason. If the U.S. succeeds in converting Iraq into a democracy, then the Saudi general population -- the vast majority who are not part of the monarchy -- are going to want the same thing, and the monarchy will be doomed. And that's part of Bush's secret strategy. The Saudis are part of the problem. It's just that they don't fully comprehend that we know it and are working, in the long term, to eliminate the threat of the Saudi monarchy to world peace. The Saudis are easily worse then Hussein as far as being a danger. I still haven't forgotten the Saudi "Terror telethon", where they raised $100,000,000 in contributions and handed the money over the Arafat. It isn't that we're ignoring them... they're just much further down on the list.
The US has very likely destroyed the UN.
Sorry, but the U.N. died with the fall of the Soviet Union. It isn't much of a loss. It's packed with dictatorships and tyrants. The U.N. was really a proxy organization for U.S./Soviet relations. I will agree that the U.S. has been very liberally handing out the rope for the U.N. to hang itself, but the problem is that the U.N. has gone from being pro-democratic to being pro-terrorist and pro-dictatorship. The U.N. has run its course. It will collapse and be replaced, perhaps by an institution that demands representational government as a condition of participation.
one of my favorite one-liners is "Violence is always the last resort of the incompetent" (Isaac Asimov).
I don't know the context of the quote, but it is woefully incomplete. Just because you're using violence doesn't mean that you're incompetant. It can also mean that you're defending yourself, or preventing greater violence, or liberating a people from a tyrant. This war is all about preventing greater violence and ending ongoing violence.
I really can't think of any justice system or science that can work without [the] principle [that] "the burden of the proof is on the claimnant"
International relations have never worked that way. A "justice system" presupposes a greater authority. There is no "greater authority" in world politics. It certainly isn't the U.N., where a small number of large democracies are outnumbered by dozens and dozens of small dictatorships. I reject the theory that the United States must, as a matter of some principle, treat a murderous dictatorship in the same manner as a representative democracy. This theory seems especially popular with dictators and corrupt governments, but I don't buy it.
If the U.S. goes in, and finds no WMD, and if the Iraqis rise up against us, then history will be our judge and the prestige and influence of the U.S. will be diminished. If on the other hand, we go in, and find bunkers full of nerve gas and chemical weapons, and mass graves, and operating uranium gas centrifuges, and completed nuclear bomb assemblies waiting for the uranium components, and widespread evidence of Iraqi government atrocities, then it will be a different story.
I personally think that the Iraqi people will be dancing in the streets once they are rid of Hussein, and with the sanctions lifted, Iraq will become the richest industrial democracy in the Middle East. And then the other Arab dictatorships will collapse. And then the threat of terrorism will cease, because the general population will choose security and wealth over terrorism and death. To quote again from Bush's speech:
It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world -- or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim -- is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life.... In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror.
Bush is tapping into a deep, powerful well. As I said, either you believe that he's sincere, or that he's lying and it's business as usual. I think that he's sincere in his beliefs and intentions in this instance. If you don't think that he's sincere, then you won't trust him. It all comes down to that basic assessment.
Sigh. This all started out as an interesting story about an ancient battery, a science story. If it wasn't for the crude axe-grinding of the BBC writer, we'd all be talking about electrolytes and idols. I feel like I should start an online petition asking Bush to call off his planned missile attack on the Baghdad Museum. No Batteries for Oil!
I'm going to take this a bit out of order, because something you said at the beginning ties in to your later comments.
I think Bush honestly believes that he is on a God-given mission as the World Leader to save the world.
I think that your reading of Bush is a mistake. Bush's mission is to protect America. 9/11 ended our ability to ignore what is happening in the rest of the world, the middle east in particular. Prior to 9/11, the U.S. felt it could pretty much ignore everything happening in the Arab world. All the dictatorships, mass murders, the spread of radical Islam, the enforced poverty, suppression, and injustice of Islamic law, anti-westernism, calls for jihad... we could ignore it all because it wasn't our problem. It didn't affect us, or so our government believed. The price of isolationism seemed small - a blown-up embassy here, a bombed warship there - nothing we couldn't handle.
Then 9/11 came along, and the way it all played out made it absolutely impossible to ignore. It happened live on national television, with most of the country watching. The second plane hit. The buildings slowly burning, The office workers jumping to their deaths, live on television. The shock as the first tower collapse. The excruciating wait for the inevitable second tower to collapse. The breakaway to the burning Pentagon. The shutdown of the airlines. The endless stories of the firefighters and rescue workers. It changed everything. In one morning, everything that we knew about national security since World War II flew out the window. Everything changed. What had gone before in the 1980s and 1990s became instantly obsolete. Our Federal Government had completely failed in one of it's most important functions -- to protect the United States against foreign attack, and it had failed in spectacular fashion.
In the last two years, we've discovered that those things -- dictatorships, Arab poverty, Islamic government and the violence and suppression of Sharia law -- matter a whole lot. Now it has become too dangerous to allow the situation in the Middle East to continue. The dictatorships have to be replaced with democracies. Islamic law has to be overthrown and replaced with civil law. People have to start believing that they and their people have a future on earth worth living for, so that they choose that instead of strapping on a bomb to kill Jews, or seizing an airplane to kill Americans.
Your history omits one crucial element that helps to explain -- although not to justify -- our foreign policy in the 1980s. In 1984, the cold war was still raging in the middle east, Afghanistan in particular. What the United States did in 1984 was not due to a love of dictatorships, or even so much a desire for oil. The primary reason for creating ties to Iraq was to oppose Soviet expansion into the middle-east. And yes, I agree. The United States effectively supported a murderous despot who in no way deserved our help or support. I will also add that after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1990, Hussein did not stay in the good graces of the United States for long.
Yes, Kosovo was a catastrophe. We did a lot of damage, then left. That was the problem. The U.S. tried to give the opposition "just a little support", and that's a prescription for disaster. That's how we faught the Cold War. Wherever someone was opposing the Soviet Union, we would give them "just a little support." Some notable examples of U.S. receipt of "a little support" were Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. We're not doing that this time. We're not smuggling weapons to the Iraqi opposition so that they can instigate a horrible, bloody revolution.
If Saddam had actually had WMDs that were a threat, then urgent action may have been needed.
That's the problem with nuclear weapons. Once you have them, it's too late for "urgent action." In the last few days, North Korea has restarted their nuclear reactor, and has begun mass producing plutonium. If they didn't already have a handful of nuclear weapons, that reactor would be a blackened crater right now. With nuclear weapons, you don't look for the smoking gun. You look for the cocked gun.
At the same time, the same mistakes are committed over and over again. [list of links to stories about equally bad regimes]
All in good time. This war is not going to end with the fall of Iraq. Afghanistan was the first front, Iraq is the second. There are many reasons why Iraq is a good candidate for the second phase of the war.
First off, losing Hussein will be a huge blow to organized terrorism. Once Hussein is gone, the payments to the families of the Palestinian suicide bombers will stop. This will cut the legs out from under Arafat and his campaign of terror and force the Palestinians to give up their dream of conquering Israel. Every other Arab dictator will be wondering if he is next. The "Manifest Destiny" of Islam -- to conquer the world -- will come crashing to a halt.
Second, Iraq is already largely a westernized country. Iraqis are very resourceful and have learned to survive even in the face of sanctions. Once the sanctions are lifted, under American military protection, the Iraqi people are the best candidates to immediately begin to prosper. Once Iraq begins to prosper, the people of the neighboring countries will start wanting to prosper also, notably Iranians. This will accelerate the process of revolt and revolution in those countries.
Third, support for Hussein within Iraq is greatly overestimated. I have read numerous reports from Iraqis that the general population is preying that if the U.S. does invade, to please, please not leave them hung out to dry like last time by failing to kill Hussein. Hussein thinks that there will be warfare in the streets. I suspect that there will be dancing in the streets when Hussein is killed.
Fourth, we have a bad ally. Saudi Arabia is a huge problem. Iraq is providing financial support to the Palestinian terrorists, but Saudi Arabia is providing financial support to Al Quaida. The problem is that when the revolution comes in Saudi Arabia, we want them to convert to democracy, not to militant Islam.
And finally, Iraq is a menace to its neighbors. It's invaded Kuwait, gassed Iran, and you can bet that Hussein would invade any neighbor that it thought it could get away with at a moment's notice. So long as Hussein is in power of Iraq, the entire region will be effectually in a state of suspended terror. It's very hard to commit a country to a switch to democracy when you have an enemy like Hussein breathing down your neck. I'm thinking of Iran in particular. The last thing in the world we want is to have Iran in the midst of a peaceful revolution, and have Iraq invade them. Iran will be in a better position for peaceful change with Iraq gone.
Now back to your original comment...
First, let me state that the alternative to war is not to do nothing. It is to do things more constructively, build rather than destroy.
You're one of the few people using this argument who actually elaborates on the idea.
There is a huge, well-educated middle class in Iraq, and they are the key to overthrowing Saddam. Making sure that these people can start thinking about politics again rather than worrying about getting food on the table or a US bomb down their chimney is probably the best thing you can do to forward democracy in Iraq.
The problem in Iraq isn't that the people aren't interested in politics. The problem is that anyone who takes the slightest action towards getting involved in politics disappears and is never heard from again. The Iraqi secret police is ferocious, and the idea that the Iraqi middle class is going to overthrow Hussein is about as realistic as the idea that the Soviet middle class could have overthrown Stalin. It isn't going to happen, but it does have the potential to get a lot of people killed.... which brings me to one of the most maddening aspects of the anti-war rhetoric -- that instead of invading, we should instead support an Iraqi revolution. The entire argument makes no sense. Why is it immoral and bad for the U.S. to wipe out Hussein, his administration, and his personal army using overwhelming, tightly targeted military force, but it's supposed to be ok to "encourage" the practically unarmed Iraqi people to rise up in what would be undoubtedly a spectacularly bloody, horrific revolution? If there's one thing that Hussein has proven over and over again, it's that he will stop at nothing, absolutely nothing, to prevent a civilian revolution. Mass killings. Poison gas. Chemical attacks. This is what you are wishing on the Iraqi people if you call for internal revolution in Iraq.
As far as "bombs down the chimney", that's a danger, and some Iraqi civilians are probably going to be killed. I think that the number will be very small, however, because of the types of weapons we are using now. 15 years ago, Kosovo era, if you wanted to destroy a building, you would send in 10 aircraft, drop 20 bombs, and destroy the building -- along with two city blocks in every direction. The missiles we have now are so accurate that you really can take out a single building. We just aren't going to be carpet bombing Iraqi cities. That would make no military sense. I think that the civilian damage will be surprisingly light.
As far as food, I've seen pictures of Iraqi soldiers, and none of them seem to be starving. There's food going in to Iraq, and in the hands of Hussein the distribution -- or lack of distribution -- of food is just another weapon used to suppress dissent.
There's another path. Iran has made huge progress lately, pretty much in spite of US efforts. Most of the Iranian population is really young, and they don't want to take any more bullshit from the old moronic fundamentalists.
Yes, Iran is a bright spot. I think that Iran is a situation where the U.S. should probably not intervene. The Iranian people have suffered the longest under modern Islamic fundamentalism, and, as you said, the youngest generation is restless and tired of living under a repressive theocracy that they were born into and had no part in creating. I think that Iran is probably the single situation that the U.S. could screw up the worst. Covert military aid would be disasterous. I think that the best thing that the U.S. could do would be to create and support a democracy in Iraq, right across the border. Iran doesn't need a violent revolution. Right now Iran is in a strange situation -- they have in effect two governments, a religious government, and a civil government. The dynamic between the two is that the religious government has veto power over the civil government, but that dynamic is changing. If at some point, the civil government is able to assert authority over the religious government, Iran could well have a bloodless revolution and become a democracy overnight. The structure is already in place and operational. I have high hopes for Iran, but I think that their chances improve with Iraq defeated.
Empowering these people in Iran is very likely going to light that candle of democracy... Without sacrificing human rights, like pretty much every US intervention has done in the past.
Very true. U.S. intervention worked well in World War II, but has been a miserable failure ever since. I think that the key reason comes down the Marshall plan. The United States really did stay in, rebuild Germany and Japan, and spend billions of dollars acting as their military defense so that they couldn't and wouldn't take up arms again, or revert to dictatorship or feudalism. We haven't made a long-term intervention committment since. Now I think we have to, and I see the political and national will building to do it.
But looking the other way, has never helped.
Agreed. The frustrating part about the anti-war movement is that so much of it amounts to looking the other way.
The only reason that I support this war is because I really do believe that Bush is beginning to understand that the only way out of the new threat of terrorism is to replace the dictatorships -- and just replacing them with new dictatorships won't work. They have to be replaced with representative democracies.
Bush made a very interesting speech yesterday. Interesting because what he is now saying has changed in the last few months.
The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life.
In the days following 9/11, the talk was about finding and punishing those who attacked us. Then it was about picking sides. Are you on our side or the terrorist side. This is very different. Revenge and safety were reason enough to support war on Afghanistan. Revenge and safety are not enough to gain public support for a war on Iraq. Liberating Iraq is.
The purpose of this war has certainly shifted. The question becomes whether you think that Bush's plan -- wiping out terrorism by spreading democracy and freedom throughout the Middle East -- is feasable and sincere, or just a pretext for revenge, or even worse, as a cover for unrelated expansionism.
I don't think that it's a pretext for revenge. Our war in Afghanistan was against Al Queida, and the Taliban for protecting them. We have no similar quarrel with the Iraqi people, or even the regular, conscripted army. We have been dropping leaflets promising the Iraqi soldiers that if they lay down arms, they will not be attacked, and will be allowed to return home when the war ends. We did the same thing in the first Gulf War, and we kept our word. I believe that the promise is sincere. This war is against Hussein and his ruling party, not against the Iraqi people.
I don't think that it's a pretext for expansionism. The United States is not interested in annexing more territory. If we were, we would have never left Iraq in 1991. Hell, we had full control of their oil fields, and the Kuwaiti oil fields, but we turned around and left.
You characterize Bush as "fanatically religious." I wouldn't go quite that far, but I get the feeling that Bush believes in what he is saying, and that is absolutely crucial to his having any chance at success.
This isn't really a religious war. We're not going to force the Iraqi people to convert to Christianity. We're not going to force them to give up Islam, with one exception. In the long run, we're going to have to force them to separate church and state. That's part and parcel of joining the modern world, and that's what this war is really about -- bringing the middle east out of the 7th century and into the 21st century. Iraq comes first because with Hussein gone, it will be one of the closest countries to already being there.
This must be the most pathetic anti-war stretch to date.
We must stand by and permit the torture and murder of unknown tens of thousands of Iraqis by the Hussein regime, and condemn an entire generation of Iraqis to lifelong misery and terror, because the alternative has the remote chance of destroying an ancient battery!
The priorities of the author are certainly on display.
Ok. Here's a business model that I would really like, with the potential to make a lot of money:
Offer a music service that, either for free, or for a fixed price, allows you to download all the songs you want, from fixed servers or from other peers, in some compressed format.
Provide software or a web site that allows you to easily design a "mix" CD, based on either songs you already have on MP3, or lists of songs that you don't have from a catalog.
Once you've selected up to 80 minutes of music to fill your mix CD, you design the CD label. You can pick from a template, or upload your own disc art. You can also design your own template. More on that below.
Then you select "purchase" to order a custom CD. o The custom CD is burned to a CDR, using full resolution, uncompressed WAV files. o The CDR is printed on a high-resolution full color inkjet or dye sublimation printer, using the disc art that you selected or designed. o The CDR is placed in a white sleeve, and mailed to you.
The cost would be say, $11.95 per disc plus $5.00 fixed shipping and handling charges no matter how many discs you place in a single order. Keeping the per-disc cost low and the fixed charge high is advantageous, as it would encourage larger orders.
This way, you could use the P2P system to "sample" and explore music, and find the music you really like, then order an uncompromised, top notch, attractive product:
1) The music you really like in uncompressed format -- the same bitstream as the original CD, as opposed to lossy MP3s. 2) Attractive, highly professional custom-printed CDRs with zero effort, instead of piles of hand-labelled CDs.
The "user community" would be built around bulletin boards, mix lists and disc art. Once you had paid to burn a CDR, you could opt to save and publically "publish" your mix list and disc art, so that other people could make identical copies of your mix CD by clicking a "purchase" button. You could also upload your own cover art templates that could be used to print any track list. There would be no way to download other people's disc art -- the only way to get it would be to have a CDR custom burned. This would create an additional incentive to use the pay service. There would be a system for people to rate and rank mix CDs and cover art, and a regularly published top 100 list. You could set up a system where if 1000 people use your mix list or disc art, you get a free CD, thus encouraging people to put a lot of time and effort into coming up with really good track lists and sick disc art.
It seems like it would be fun to me. Sound like a good time? Would people pay for that?
I've had a bit of experience in recording and mixing concerts, and a lot of experience in turning soundboard DATs into completed CDRs, and you overestimate the difficulty.
The first phase of the operation is getting a good audio recording mix.
If Clearchannel really wants to do it right, they will have a separate soundboard in an isolated room for a dedicated engineer to make the recording mix. A competant recording engineer can have the soundboard configured and putting out a good, clean recording mix within a few minutes -- during the same soundcheck that the house engineer sets up the room mix. In general, once the soundboard is set up for a live concert, you can leave it alone for long periods of time, often for the rest of the show.
From long-time experience, I can tell you that a lot of the time, the PA mix is the best recording source. This is especially true when recording in large halls, or recording acoustic instruments, such as bluegrass bands. In general, if the soundman can't hear any sound from the amplifiers on stage, then he will naturally produce a PA mix that is "complete" -- containing the proper proportion of each instrument and vocal mic.
The advantage to recording the PA mix is that the resulting recording will sound pretty much exactly like what the audience heard, except that it will sound clearer and crisper on their stereo, because there won't be any room echoes or crowd noise.
On the other hand, if you have a rock and roll band that is playing loud as hell in a small room, then a recording of the PA mix is going to sound terrible, because in that case the soundman is compensating for the loud amplifiers on stage by putting less (or none) in the PA mix, and a soundboard recording would have little more than the vocals. In that case you'd need a dedicated recording soundboard to generate an appropriate soundboard mix.
You won't be getting applause and shouts because stage microphones are specially designed with a proximity effect -- to reject sounds that come from far away. The purpose of this is to prevent feedback, but a side effect is that the audience is generally only softly audible between songs when the band isn't playing. Even if you have a couple of problems -- say a burst of feedback, or someone kicks over or unplugs a live mic, it isn't a problem because you can easily fix that later.
The point is that making a high quality stereo soundboard mix on the fly is not hard -- it's something that professionals do all the time, and for someone who would be doing it day in and day out, it would be a very easy and reliable process.
The second phase of the operation is in creating the CDRs.
If I were recording the shows this way, here's how I'd do it:
Use a pair of computers running Sound Forge, or some other audio recording/editing software. Split the stereo master signal three or four ways. Feed it directly into the soundcards of both computers, and also into a DAT recorder as a backup in case of a power failure, and possibly a third computer in case one of the computers crashes.
Record the first set on the first computer. Record the second set on the second computer. Record the encore on the first computer. Have all of the computers on a 100 Mb/S ethernet LAN so that you can shoot the encore onto the second computer when the show is over.
At the end of each set, stop the computer from recording and edit the set. The amount of editing you need or want to do is minimal. Trim away any dead air at the beginning of the set and any overly long pauses between songs. DON'T trim away any stage banter -- that's what people want to hear, because it's what makes the show personal and memorable. Do a visual scan for glitches and pops (such as someone unplugging a live mic) and draw those out with the pencil tool. If there's a feedback squeal, select around it, and do a quick graphic fade to make the feedback much quieter. Fade in at the beginning and fade out at the end. Place track IDs between songs, save the sound file, and burn a master CDR in disc-at-once mode.
I do this all the time. I can go from a monolithic WAV file of an entire set to a tracked, trimmed CDR image in about 10 minutes. Once you've done it a dozen or so times, it's easy and super fast.
You have the entire setbreak and second set to get the first CD ready. It won't take that long, and you can start cranking out first set CDs even before the band takes the stage for the second set.
Do the same thing when the band finishes the second set. Edit the set, remove long pauses, check for glitches, fade in at the beginning and out at the end, place the track IDs, save the sound file, and either start burning the second CD, or wait for the encore if you think it'll fit. You should have the second set tracked and ready to burn by the end of the encore.
Do the same thing with the encore. Append the encore to the second set, split it into two CDs if necessary, and burn master CDRs. Elapsed time, 10 minutes. Run the master CDRs over to the mass duplicator and get started. You can be putting complete recordings into people's hands 20 minutes after the band leaves the stage.
Oh yes, while you're doing all this, you have a third computer running photoshop. You send someone to take a couple of pictures of the band with a digital camera, and prepare the CD cover during the show. Add the song titles as the band plays them, and you can be ready to start printing jewelbox art by the time the show's over.
It isn't as impossible as you think. Concert recordings are generally very straightforward and easy, and it certainly doesn't take weeks to do the minimal amount of work necessary to create this sort of product. This is very different from a band spending months fine-tuning a concert album, where you want to make the performance sound perfect. In this sort of situation, the people who buy the CDs want and expect the CDs to sound exactly like what they heard at the show, warts and all.
I guess we can now revoke the legend of how Phish promotes free distribution of concert recordings.
Nope. Phish still allows tapers to bring their own equipment, and allows them to freely distribute the recordings made from the audience.
What they are doing is selling official soundboard releases in parallel, under the usual conditions of commercially released albums. This has absolutely no affect on the making and noncommercial trading of audience tapes.
As a matter of fact, Phish had a taping rule that said that when they released an commercial release of a show, you weren't allowed to distribute audience tapes of that show. They removed that restriction at the same time that they started offering soundboard downloads, so the new system is actually less restrictive.
NO complaints here. Phish is doing it right. They are distributing the music in lossless SHN format as well as MP3, and there's no DRM crap to mess it up. What more could you want? I have no problem with it not being free, because hopefully the cash will provide enough of an incentive for the band to continue the program for the rest of its career.
As far as Jerry Garcia, I'm sure he would be perfectly happy with the arrangement. After all, the Dead put out lots of commercial albums of live concert recordings -- Live Dead, Europe 72, Steal Your Face, etc, and Deadheads never had a problem with buying those albums instead of copying them amongst themselves.
Re:Now what people would buy...
on
Sim-Dud?
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Even better, build a house with about 30 fireplaces and no doors and fill it with furniture. Now have your klutz sims run around and light all the fireplaces. Kick back and watch the madness ensue.
ASCII art was my brief claim to fame back in 1990, as it seemed that half of the sig files on usenet incorporated part of my ASCII depiction of The Simpsons
The ironic part was that I "drew" it on a 3270, so it was actually EBCDIC art until it hit the BITNET/USENET gateway!
One of the most interesting and rewarding reactions you can study as an amateur is mirror silvering using Tollens' reagent. I had an arc lamp reflector that needed resilvering, and decided to do it myself.
After a lot of web research, I found that this website had the best directions (and the best safety warnings!):
http://lerch.no-ip.com/atm/Silver.htm
The only chemicals I had any trouble finding were silver nitrate crystals, which can be purchased from photography supply stores, such as:
http://www.photoformulary.com/
or ebay, and concentrated nitric acid, which can be purchased from lithography supply stores, such as:
http://www.rembrandtgraphicarts.com/13_rga_cat.h tm l
The hazmat shipping charge for the nitric acid will exceed the cost of the chemical.
The process is somewhat complex, involves a number of stages, but isn't too difficult to do. It's an interesting reaction to watch, and the result is cool and useful. I created a perfect mirror coating on the inside of a bottle on the second try, and successfully coated my reflector mirror immediately thereafter.
Everything worked for me, except that I found that I had to heat the muriatic acid in order to make the solder dissolve when creating the sensitizing solution.
If you really feel strongly about the matter, you could easily extract the SHNs into WAVs, then reencode them as FLACs. Since all three are lossless formats, you wouldn't lose anything. Personally, I have no plans to do so.
I'm assuming that Live Phish Downloads is licensing the SHN codec for commercial use. SoftSound did the taping community a huge favor by providing a free, unencumbered version of shorten for tape trading. I have no problem with them making a little money now that their format has caught on.
By the time they signed with Elektra in 1992, Phish was an established band that was selling out concert halls on a regular basis. Phish had been chased by record labels for years, but the band held out, preferring to retain control over their copyrights, business rights, and creative decisions.
It paid off. This allowed them to get a fantastic deal when they finally did sign with a label. Phish's contract with Elektra is a promotion and distribution contract, not a recording contract. Phish retained their copyrights, their internet rights, and their electronic distribution rights. They retained complete creative control over their music and organization. Their relationship to Elektra is basically this. They provide master tapes, and Elektra distributes and promotes the album.
You can't get that sort of contract unless you're already a big name band. If Phish had signed with a RIAA corporation back when they were a brand new band, they would not be in a position to do what they are doing now. The record label would own their copyrights, their website, and their electronic distribution rights.
Compare this system to the pathetic efforts of the RIAA to foist copy protected CDs and DRM-saturated, inferior MP3s on the public, and call that the "future" of internet music distribution.
By contrast, Phish is selling downloads of CD quality (SHN) recordings, with no DRM at all. You can download the CDs within two days of the concert. You can also download CD art. Even better, once you have paid for a recording, the system remembers that you have done so in the "My Stash" section. If you ever lose or damage your CD, you can go back to the web site and re-download the shows you lost!
I really can't imagine the system being any more customer-friendly, except if it was a bit cheaper. But the system is new, so I won't begrudge them that.
Right now, the music industry is trying to establish the Big Lie -- that music can't be distributed, especially online, unless the system is designed to treat every customer as a criminal. The music must be laden with obstructive DRM. Users must be prevented from making backups.
Live Phish Downloads has the potential to be the Big Counterexample. Phish said it themselves -- this is all about the honor system. You respect us, and we respect you.
In the end, that's how copyright was designed to work in the first place. The whole idea of copyright being a war between record labels and their customers is a relatively new concept, and this is a nice beginning to putting an end to it.
So now that phish is SELLING these recordings, is it still legal to download from furthur?
The Phish concerts on furthur are for the most part audience recordings. It will remain perfectly legal to upload or download any audience recording from Furthur.
Nothing changes there.
Consider these new downloaded soundboards as commercial releases. It's just as illegal to place these downloaded soundboards on Furthur as it would be to upload Phish's latest studio album.
But Phish has no problem with you trading audience tapes of the same shows. Just not the soundboards that they are trying to sell.
Slashdot Mirror
You should have taken a marker, laboriously crossed out all of the offending clauses, initialed the deletions, signed the contract, and returned it.
No, really. I've been scouring the job ads for nearly 6 months, and in spite of all the endless hype over mainframe Linux under VM, I haven't found a single job posting for a VM systems programmer.
Are there specialized job boards? Am I missing something?
I emailed ebay at the time and got this response:
I just checked, and it appears that all of the feedback for msoft has completely disappeared at some point in the last three years.
I would count the early arcade games, and the Apple II games.
These machines and programs jammed an enormous amount of programming functionality into incredibly tight spaces. Many of the old arcade programs ran on 4K, 8K, or 16K 8 bit computers, and ran on machines with clock speeds of under 1 MHz, and effective instruction rates of mere hundreds of thousands per second. Even a fully loaded Apple II gave you under 32K of actual program space to work with, once you subtracted the low RAM, the hires graphics areas, and the BASIC ROM space, and people did a whole lot with that 32K.
The last two games I've purchased (Simcity 4 and C&C Generals) require minimums of 500 MHz and 800 MHz processors respectively and 128M of RAM. Of course, they do a lot more, but they are certainly not 500, or 800, or 8000 times as entertaining as the Cocktail Space Invaders machine that graces my hall entryway and is such a hit when we throw parties.
Early arcade games were heroic, wildly successful efforts. Truly examples of extreme programming.
A file signature is a statement by the signer that the file is trustworthy in the opinion of the signer. It's exactly like "Siskel says thumbs up" to go back to the movie review analogy.
But Siskel also gives "thumbs down" to certain movies, but no one signs a binary that they don't trust. That would defeat the purpose of signing the binary.
A better analogy would be, "Ebert says that The Phantom Menace is 133 minutes long and contains (to make up a number) 2731 camera angle changes, so if you're watching a movie that you think is the Phantom Menace, and it isn't 133 minutes long, and it doesn't have 2731 camera angle changes, then it might not be an authentic copy of The Phantom Menace." (You might be watching a copy of The Phantom Edit for instance.)
This type of information has nothing to do with "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." It conveys no information about the work other than the alleged authenticity of the work. It is not a "review" of the work. The "thumbs up" you are talking about is implicit in the very existance of the signature. It isn't information carried inside of the signature.
There can be a thousand different signatures of the same file, even if each of them has the same hash for the file, because they can contain different identities.
The only difference between those signatures is a non-creative factual element -- the identity of the writer. I could make the same factual observations as Ebert -- 133 minutes, 2731 camera angle changes. That doesn't make me a movie reviewer.
[a signature hash] is a qualitative statement made about the work in question, but the statement is its own creative work.
This is completely untrue. A signature hash is a quantitative statement about the work. That's the entire point of a hash. There can be a thousand english-language reviews of a movie, all of which will be different. There is only one possible hash of a kernel in any given hashing language/algorithm. There is no room for "creativity" in the computation of a signature hash.
However, I doubt that a copyright infringement case would get very far. Consider the criteria for fair use:
Criteria 1: What is the purpose and character of the use?
The purpose of a hash is completely different from the purpose of a kernel. The hash also has completely different characteristics than the kernel. Both favor fair use.
Criteria 2: What is the nature of the work?
The nature of a hash is a single factual, mechanical observation about a published work, favoring fair use.
Criteria 3: What is the amount and quality of the work being use?
The amount of the work included in the hash is a vanishingly small amount of the original work. Less then 100 bytes derived from a several megabyte program. It is impossible to reconstruct a kernel from a kernel hash. Both observations favor fair use.
Criteria 4: What effect does the use have on the market for the original work?
None, thus strongly favoring fair use.
The pro-Lincoln newspapers would gently edit Lincoln's responses, correcting the grammar, and removing sentence fragments, but each pro-Lincoln paper would edit Lincoln's responses slightly differently. On the other hand, those papers usually printed Douglas' responses verbatim, making absolutely sure to include every grammatical error and sentence fragment. The result was that, on the page, Lincoln appeared to be the more composed and articulate speaker. Lincoln's responses varied slightly from pro-Lincoln paper to pro-Lincoln paper, but Douglas' responses were nearly identical from paper to paper.
The pro-Douglas newspapers did exactly the opposite, gently editing Douglas' responses, while printing Lincoln's responses verbatim.
As a result, Scholars are pretty sure that, by combining the Lincoln transcripts from the pro-Douglas papers, and the Douglas transcripts from the pro-Lincoln papers, that they have a near-perfect record of the debates as they were actually spoken.
al-Jazeera is performing a similar function. They will show and document many things that CNN will not show, and CNN will show and document many things that AJ will not show. The result will be a more complete record of what actually happened in the Iraq war then if only one side of the story were told.
Here's my situation. I was laid off in November. I have 15 years experience in IBM VM system administration and VM systems programming. I've installed, configured, and customized VM/SP, VM/HPO, VM/XA, and VM/ESA systems. I can write assembler. I'm basically a VM kernel (nucleus) hacker. I'm not a "grey hair" -- I'm in my mid-30s.
I've been scouring the job boards for months, and I haven't found a single freaking job posting for a VM systems programmer or systems administrator. You would think that with the current IBM push towards Linux under VM, there would be a job market for people like myself, but mainframe programming and admin jobs almost never appear in the usual tech job web sites. The few jobs that do turn up are invariably for MVS work.
Where should I be looking? Does anyone have any idea where experienced VM mainframe folk go to find mainframe jobs?
Yes, but doesn't this spawn yet another "industry" of professional copyright maintainers? Sort of like domain name squatters?
It wouldn't create freelance copyright squatters. If I were to pay the copyright fee on, for instance, Star Wars, that would not give me the right to the Star Wars copyright. It would merely extend George Lucas' copyright.
However, it most certainly would create copyright fee maintenance companies, which is a problem.
People would pay the initial copyright fee, but no one would want to run the risk of forgetting to renew a copyright on any non-trivial published work, so they would look to hire someone to do the job for them.
For instance, let's say that copyright renewal costs $100 every 20 years, and there's 4 renewal periods. (80 year max) I could easily go into the business of submitting copyright renewals, and I could do it for $100 per copyright for the duration of the copyright (plus my up-front fee)
I invest the $100 conservatively, and receive 5.75% interest, compounded annually. By the time 20 years rolls around, that $100 has become $205. Now I withdraw $100 of that, and pay the copyright fee to extend the copyright, leaving $105. Repeat every 20 years until the copyright reaches the statutory maximum.
In other words, the company that produced the work could be out of business, the copyright ownership could be impossible to determine, but so long as the original copyright holder made arrangement with such a copyright renewal processing company, the unknown copyright would continue to be renewed decade after decade.
The problem is that modern copyright terms are so incredibly long that even a large fee 80 or 100 years in the future translates to a small investment now. For instance, if the fee to renew a copyright will be $1,000 100 years from now, I can cover that now by investing $3.00 at 6%, compounded annually, and placing that investment in the hands of a corporation that contractually agrees to pay the copyright fee for me 100 years from now.
In other words, regular renewal requirements don't necessarily solve the problem.
Except for SCO, none of the primary UNIX vendors ever developed a UNIX "flavor" to operate on an Intel-based processor chip set. This is because the earlier Intel processors were considered to have inadequate processing power for use in the more demanding enterprise market applications.
Sun Microsystems needs to improve its marketing efforts for Solaris x86.
Not to mention that IBM released AIX/PS2 back in the early 1990s -- a version of AIX that ran on 80386 based PS/2 hardware.
It sucked to the extent that the hardware it ran on sucked. A big, bloated Unix kernel running on an 80386 with a maximum of 16 megs of memory and a 60 meg ESDI hard drive was pretty close to a non-starter.
Bush has not threatened and will not threaten any country with invasion that is not harboring or supporting terrorists. Hussein is known to be supporting terrorists, and appears to be harboring them.
Nevertheless, you have to address to root issues, why are people becoming suicide bombers in the first place.
Ok. Let's start with the Palestinians. Besides the cash payouts to the bombers' families, the basic problem is that the Palestinian leadership have created a death cult on an unprecedented scale. Palestinian children are taught in school and in "summer camps" to hate Jews and want to murder them. Others are recruits, usually either filled with fanatical hate towards Israel, or suicidal, or both. They are promised paradise and privilege in the afterlife. (72 virgins? Paradise is a brothel?) They are promised that their families will be well provided for on earth. They are indoctrinated with classic brainwashing techniques. They are isolated from their families, told to spend every waking hour in prayer, told to engage in repeated purification rituals. When they are ready for their mission, their handlers hold elaborate, videotaped "graduation" ceremonies, honoring the bomber, where the bomber says goodbye to his family and commits to his mission. The bomber is provided with an explosive belt, or a mission, told how to use it, and dropped off at his target. Then, once the mission is completed, the bomber is lionized in heroic posters which are plastered through the towns. Schools are named after the suicide bombers, all of which lay the groundwork for the next batch of suicide bombers.
What is happening in Israel is not random people deciding to kill themselves by murdering Jews. It is a well-funded terrorist organization that utilizes classic brainwashing techniques to create "martyrs," and it is destroying the Palestinian people from within. All this costs lots of money, and that money is coming from outside of the Palestinian territories, from Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
The same thing goes on in Al Quaeda training camps, formerly in Afghanistan, and allegedly currently in Iraq. The airline hijaakers had massive financial support, and according to the documents they left, were instructed to engage in the same concentrated prayer and to engage in purification rituals.
You have some other root causes in mind, I suppose? Ok, what are they? Poverty? Hopelessness? Suppression? Those are everywhere, but suicide bombers are not! Why are there no suicide bombers in Mexico? Why are there no waves of suicide bombings in India? Why are there no North Korean suicide bombers? Why do all of the suicide bombers happen to come from Islamic fringe sects that practice brainwashing and indoctrination, and have explicit political agendas that involve suicide bombing?
Why did the 9/11 hijackers complete their mission? They weren't desperate. They came to America, lived here comfortably for years, went to flight school, received advanced educational training. Why didn't their sense of hopelessness subside? They certainly didn't live in poverty. Why did they get on those planes? They certainly could have defected, or disappeared. The "root cause" was that they were members of a terrorist organization with a political agenda of mass murder. Those are the root causes of terrorism.
I'll have to defer to you on [Uzbekistan and Kirgistan] I don't know what we are doing there.
Please, don't have a wait-and-see attitude on this.
What I meant was that I really have no information on those situations, not that I want to wait and see. If we are providing covert aid to one side, then that will probably fail, but that's not what we are doing in Iraq, so I don't see how it enters in.
Even though an U bomb is easy to make, it is still a lot of metallurgy involved, and during that process, it is impossible not to leave any trace. Just go to any physics lab where there has been tiny radioactive sources involved
Physics labs use tiny amounts of extremely radioactive sources to deliberately cause small nuclear reactions for study. This produces small amounts of intensely radioactive fission products that escape into the lab environment and wind up in the corners. Industrial uranium enrichment uses large amounts of barely radioactive natural uranium, and produces no highly radioactive fission products. They are not comparable.
If you have to sweep the corners of the room to find radioactivity in such a lab, then your argument doesn't hold water. There's no way that anyoue would find a hidden isotope separation lab based on radioactive emissions. The process just doesn't give off radiation. You can easily find a breeder reactor, because it gives off lots of radiation, tritium and the like. That's how the U.S. was able to track Soviet plutonium production, with sniffer planes.
I'll grant you, for the sake of argument, that it might be impossible for Iraqi scientists to "sanitize" an existing isotope separation facility for the inspectors, but that's meaningless because obviously the inspectors are not being shown those secret facilities, and don't know where they are! Hussein has had a decade to hide his WMD programs. By all accounts he has spent the vast majority of his country's oil revenues in doing so. Those facilities are probably hollowed out of a cave, or built into the ground, and we won't find them until we're in there, on the ground. They could very well have highly contaminated radiation laboratories, and such a laboratory could fit in a boxcar, and be anywhere in the entire country.
Just think about the unthinkable for a moment: What if it was true: He didn't have any WMDs right now. How could he possibly prove that he didn't? It is in fact impossible.
Ok, let's go by your argument. You would have to believe that he:
1) Kicked the weapons inspectors out of the country
2) Secretly destroyed his existing stockpiles of WMDs.
3) Deliberately decided that, rather then doing so in public and getting the sanctions lifted, he would do so secretly, so that he could
But to directly answer your question, he could lead the inspectors to the facilities that were used to destroy the WMDs. He could lead them to inspect the sites containing the destroyed weapons casings. He could show them the destroyed manufacturing facilities. He could show them the destroyed storage containers and handling equipment. He could show them the incineration facilities that were used to destroy the nerve, mustard, and VX gas. He could show the records detailing the progress of the destruction process -- shipping and transportation logs showing the movement of WMD stockpiles from arsenals to destruction facilities. He could show the inspectors the dump sites containing the contaminated residue of the incineration operations. He could show the inspectors the equipment that was salvaged from the Osirak nuclear weapons development site (which was completely stripped of all equipment following the Israeli destruction of the breeder reactor core.) He could show the inspectors the actual rockets that were allegedly being made from those aluminum tubes that had been specially anodized to protect them against Uranium Hexaflouride gas, and finished to microscopic smoothness to make them suitable as gas centrifuges. I could go on and on. Hussein still has some 600 metric tons of chemical agents, 25,000 rockets, 15,000 chemical artillery shells, 520 Kg of Anthrax growth medium, all unaccounted for. It is simply beyond credibility that he even could destroy them without a trace (We can't even do that), and it is incomprehensible that he would do so in secret, instead of doing so in public to get the sanctions lifted. That makes no sense whatsoever!
Doesn't it make more sense that he still has them and is still hiding them?
I mean, you'd think that he would actually present the best available evidence before the security council
No he wouldn't. That presentation was not to reveal all of our evidence. That presentation was to reveal the absolute minimum information necessary to show that Hussein was lying about 1441, which called for full and complete disarmament
Every bit of information that Powell presented represented a destroyed intelligence source or method that cannot be used again. It was a costly presentation, and largely wasted on the audience. What you saw were deep secrets that are almost never revealed, and by their very nature, you don't get to see all of the details. The "best evidence" is certainly being held very closely, because once we are on the ground, we are going to use it to quickly locate and secure the WMD facilities. Powell showed the photographs of the decontamination trucks parked outside of the "unused" chemical weapons depots. Then he said, the next day, they were gone. Do you think we weren't tracking those decontamination trucks? Do you think we weren't tracking those truck convoys after they moved? Heck, we moved spy satellites into different orbits for this war. Every bit of recon capability we have is deployed, and you can rest assured that we have far, far more intelligence information than what Powell revealed.
The reason why we don't provide information about where to look to the inspectors is that they have a proven track record of tipping off the Iraqis. If we told the UNSC, or the Inspectors all that we knew, then Iraq would just move everything, and we wouldn't know where anything was.
the Bush administration is
What do you mean by "have to?" The U.N. mechanations are being done for two reasons. First, we aren't ready to attack. Second, for the benefit of Tony Blair, who needs to keep his coalition government intact in order to participate in the war. Europeans care a lot about the U.N., but the United States really doesn't. We participate in the U.N. for pragmatic reasons. If the U.N attempts to block the war, the U.N. will be finished. But really, the U.N. is effectively an ongoing diplomatic summit, not a source of moral authority in any sense whatsoever, and certainly not a source of military or economic power. Your economic power comes from the EU(or is being eviscerated by the EU, your choice), and your small amount of non-U.S. military power comes from the few countries that have bothered to maintain a standing army despite half a century of U.S. military protection. But in reality, the military protection of Europe is still the U.S. army. I'm still looking for your source of moral authority, given Europe's ongoing loving embrace of Saddam Hussein and his murderous regime, and it's incredible ignorance of its own past. Millions of Europeans have taken to the streets to protect Hussein and Iraq I can't find a single protest sign calling for Iraq to disarm, or stop using chemical weapons on the Kurds, or stop murdering dissidents. You think we don't see those signs at your protests? Do you think we don't know how little Europeans care about the Iraqi people?
Ok, I'm drawing a big fat line because you're completely changing the subject. (I'd use a sequence of dashes, but, alas, the lameness filter.) We're not talking about Iraq anymore, you're talking about the internal politics of the U.S. None of this has any relation whatsoever to the Iraq war. It's completely off topic, but I'm going to dive in anyhow because I see a lot of common European misconceptions about American politics.
OK, look at this way: The Bush administration is clearly attacking the american public. [long list of things that I fully agree are very bad and most certainly unconstitutional.]
In times of war, our courts have traditionally deferred to the presidency and allowed the enforcement of policies and laws that they would not permit during peacetime. I agree that these laws are uncalled for, unnecessary, and probably will be found unconstitutional once the war is over. It's overreaction on the part of the Bush administration, and one of the most serious flaws of his presidency.
In addition, he is a significant threat to world peace and sits on the biggest arsenal of WMDs, and he has stated he will not hesitate to use them against any target.
Actually, he has stated that he will not hesitate to use them against any country that uses them against us first. This is the entire point of deterrence, and has proven to be a wise policy. It is the reason why, during the first Gulf war, the Scuds that fell on the Marine Barracks and Israel contained explosives, not nerve or mustard gas.
You are clearly incapable of dealing with Bush yourself.
No we aren't. We have plenty of options for "taking care of" Bush if we want him out. We can simply not elect him next time. While I agree with you that Bush "stole the election", I should point out that the election came down to a difference of about 200 votes, with thousands of ambiguous votes. No one knows who really won that election, and the truth was unknowable. It was a very unique and maddening situation, because the margin of victory was many times smaller then the margin of error, and it was the most closely scrutinized ballot count in our history.
Regardless, you can't compare that to Hussein "stealing an election" by being the only candidate on the ballot, and receiving 100% of the vote in a country that hates his guts. If Bush is voted out in 2004, he will step aside, as is our unbroken tradition.
Aside from that, we have a Congress that can effectively block Bush on domestic policy issues. The TIA was killed by Congress, who refused to fund it. Congress has the power to pass laws to override any action that Bush tries to take, and Congress has the power to override a presidential veto.
Congress also has the power to impeach the president, and remove him from office. The serious threat of using that power was enough to prompt Nixon to resign, and that power was abused on Clinton. That power could be used on Bush if necessary.
Basically you are seeing a difference between the U.S. government and European governments. We have no coalition government. We alternate between Democratic and Republican control of both houses of Congresses and the Presidency. Once a President is elected, he has a very free hand for the next four years, and does not have to tailor his policy to opinion polls the way that Tony Blair has to do so in order to keep his coalition from breaking apart.
This does not mean that he is unaccountable.
Now tell me, why shouldn't we, the rest of the world go to war and overthrow him, to liberate the US?
Because there will be an election shortly in which we will have the power to remove him from office ourselves. This is not true in Iraq.
The other option is to use those $50 billion for something good.
Ok, spend $50 billion to stop terrorism. What are your plans?
Up until that speech, the message was "disarm Hussein." That speech was, "Bring democracy to the Arab world."
Bush has been trying to say that to Europe for a long time. Perhaps your news are differently angled than what we hear here. And the reaction has always been "yeah, sure".
A long time? You mean since he was elected, or since 9/11, or since he started laying groundwork to remove Hussein?
You know, Clinton tried the same thing in Kosovo, the idea isn't actually new...
You know, Clinton was an idiot who didn't know what he was doing. He had no moral credibility, and his presidency was a foreign policy disaster from beginning to end. Kosovo was a disaster. We had no business being there. If 9/11 hadn't happened, we would have no business being in Iraq.
Then, it has been because you have failed to take precautions in time. If US use violence now, it is because they failed to take the chance to pressure Saddam out of office in early 80-ties, and so on.
Unfortunately, lacking a time machine, we have to deal with the situation, as it exists, right now. You're probably right. Hindsight is 20-20.
This theory seems especially popular with dictators and corrupt governments, but I don't buy it.
I look upon your government as one of those now (there are differences, of course),
Bush is not a dictator. He does not have absolute power. He is subject to removal in the next election. Everything law passed in this country must be passed by Congress. Every Congressman runs the risk of being thrown out of office if he or she fails to represent the people, and it happens regularly. Everything Bush does is reviewable by the Supreme Court.
OK, you may reject it, but the Security Council is intended to be that authority. OK, so the US can do whatever they like, but they are partly playing with the UN, so that means that they are partly recognizing this authority.
The UN and the UNSC are not authorities. The United States has never subjugated control to any international authority. The UN and UNSC are diplomatic bodies. We are "playing with the UN" not because we are submitting to their authority, but because we perceive it as beneficial to do so.
Well, of course, for US, it doesn't really matter, because the US can nuke anybody who doesn't want to play ball back to the stone age,
If the UNSC vetoes the war resolution, we are not going to nuke them.
and Bush has stated that he doesn't mind doing so
I talked about that earlier.
but for smaller countries, that is not really an option. We have to cooperate.
That's not what I see. What I see is a lot of small countries with near-zero economic, diplomatic, military, or leadership assets who are delighted to be part of the U.N., because it gives them wildly exaggerated power and authority. Do you think that Libya would ever head up an international human rights commission if not for the UN? Do you think that Iran and Iraq would ever be placed in charge of international disarmament if their countries hadn't happen to turn up in alphabetical order? Do you think that Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Mexico, Chile and Pakistan would ever have the power to influence a U.S./Iraq war if they weren't members of a divided UNSC? For the record, they are not being forced to cooperate. They are being asked to cooperate, and support the war, or to not cooperate, and pay the diplomatic consequences.
That's how I'm looking at this moron of yours. He can still be sincere and yet dead wrong. I believe he is sincere when he says that the only way to ensure disarmament is to remove Saddam. And I think he is sincere when he thinks that he will put in some sort of democracy. But, he is lying when he talking about all the "evidence" they have, that's a smokescrean for attacking.
As I said, not revealing evidence does not mean that you don't have it. There are many compelling reasons to reveal the minimum amount of evidence to prove the narrow case that Hussein has not complied with 1441 and fully, completely disarmed.
If any such thing as a "preemtive attack" was legitimate, there is no reason why Saddam (and pretty much any other nation that has a beef with the US) should not attack the US right now, it would have been legimate.
Sure it would be legitimate. We're about to overthrow his regime. He could preemptively attack us, but it would guarantee his death, probably the death of all the Tikritis, and possibly the death of most of Iraq if he used WMDs. That's not what he's after though.
[Bush] has the mind of a religious fanatic, who can't see colors, only that "either you are with us or you are against us".
That isn't what he said, actually. He said that either your are with us, or you are with the terrorists. This isn't a threat, it's an observation. It means that no country can afford to stand by and pretend that they are immune to terrorism. Indonesia did exactly that. They pretended that they weren't involved in the dispute, and then Al Quaida blew up a nightclub in Bali. What it means is that if a country doesn't commit to fighting terrorism, then terrorists will gravitate towards it.
I believe that Al Quaida attacked New York because Clinton had proved to them that we would not fight back with everything we have. I believe that the Palestinians are constantly attacking Israel because the Israelis are proving that they will not fight back with everything they have.
Someone with a world-view like that is an extremely dangerous man. Unfortunately, USians are the only ones who legitimately can get rid of him.
Unfortunately for you, most Americans support Bush, and I think that he is going to be reelected in the next election cycle.
I don't think that anyone is reading this except for us, and this is starting to reach the point of rehash. I know where you're coming from, you know where I'm coming from. I'm ready to wrap it up.
North Korea is arguably a far greater threat to US security than Iraq. The message to the world is thus: Get nukes as fast as you can! That's a very bad message to send.
You see it as a message. I see it as a piece of reality that hasn't changed since 1945. Once you have nuclear weapons, you become effectively unattackable. That's what makes this so urgent. Hussein with nuclear weapons will be unstoppable, and he has a proven history of attacking his neighbors and annexing their land. He did it to Kuwait, and tried to do it to Iran. I think that the prospects of an "Iraqi Empire" covering the middle east are very real and a nuclear-armed Hussein would be impossible to contain. He isn't sacrificing his country to build nuclear weapons for nothing. He expects to get his investment back manyfold once he has them.
I can't see how funding terrorism plays a vital role for suicide bombers. They would have found ways to blow themselves up regardless of financial support. I think the role money plays in terrorism is greatly exaggerated.
Hussein is paying about $25,000 to the families of each suicide bomber. It was $10,000. Then the suicide bombing started to slow down, the bounty was raised to $25,000, and the suicide bombings started to pick up again. According to this 2001 article,, unemployment in the Palestinian territories was at 38%, and the average per-capita income fell from USD2000 to USD1680.
In other words, if you become a suicide bomber, the reward to your family is equivalent to about 15 years guaranteed salary. The average per-capita income in the United States is $30,000. 15 years salary at that rate would be $450,000. The poverty line in the United States is defined at around $13,500. 15 years salary at that rate would be around $200,000. I don't want to dispute the exact numbers, but it's pretty clear that the amount of money being supplied to the poverty-stricken families of suicide bombers is enough to lift them out of poverty and live comfortably for many years, even after they lose their home after Israeli retaliation. It's not just a token payment. It's an active form of recruiting that is very successful. Delivering your immediate/extended family from poverty is a huge incentive to become a suicide bomber, and with that incentive gone, recruiting suicide bombers is going to be much more difficult.
While a prosperous Iraq may incite revolutions in other countries, it is also quite likely to have the opposite effect. Remember that many of these countries have been extremely rich, yet have oppressive regimes, and seeing US as an evil force from outside is going to make oppression stronger.
That's exactly why we can't replace Hussein with another oppressive strongman. But that's my point -- the "liberation" has to be real, or it won't serve the purpose of shutting down the terrorist organizations. Again, this requires a huge chance in U.S. policy. We now have to follow through on our words. This is Bush's risk. If he can't follow through on his promise of democracy, then this will be a disaster.
You give "just a little support" to the regimes of Uzbekistan and Kirgistan. It's deja-vu all over again...
I'll have to defer to you on that
it wouldn't be hard at all to detect nukes if they had them, radioactive dust would remain at the sites where experiments were conducted, easily detectable.
I know a lot about nukes also, and all that a lack of radioactive evidence means is that they are working the U235 route, not the Plutonium route. But we knew that already.
There are two ways to make a nuclear bomb -- you can either extract U235 from natural uranium, or you can build a reactor and breed plutonium. Hussein's original plan was to breed plutonium, hence the breeder reactor that was destroyed by the Israelis. Since then, it's almost certain that he has switched over to an all-U235 weapons program, which is much more expensive, but has the advantage of being virtually undetectable.
A U235 weapon can be created without any radioactive evidence. Basically, you start with natural uranium, and use isotope separation technology to isolate the U235. No radiation or nuclear waste is created in the process. This is why the discovery of UF6 gas centrifuge technology is so disconcerting. It points to a nuclear weapons program that can be easily and perfectly concealed.
Also, the only reason that the U.S. conducted a test-firing of an atomic bomb was because of the extremely complex technology required to make a plutonium implosion bomb work. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, on the other hand, was a U235 bomb. A U235 bomb is much, much simpler. It's basically a cannon, with a U235 ring at the breech end, and a U235 slug as the "bullet". One moving part. You fire the cannon, and when the bullet enters the breech, it creates a critical mass, and the fission reaction runs away. The U.S. was so absolutely convinced that the Hiroshima bomb would work that they dropped it untested. Once you have the U235, building an atomic bomb is much, much easier then building a plutonium bomb. If you overbuild it even slightly, it's practically guaranteed to work.
I would be a lot more concerned with terrorists setting off a nuke in a US harbor they built inside a container in a ship than Saddam building nukes.
Agreed, which is why a missile defense system is obsolete. If your mission is to destroy a U.S. city, then launching a missile means national suicide, where as if you sneak a bomb into a harbor you are likely to get away with it. That's another reason why a covert nuclear weapons program is so dangerous. Plus, just an observation, The Al Quaida planners appear to be huge Tom Clancy fans. Crashing airplanes into buildings is right out of Debt of Honor., and presumably they've gotten their hands on a copy of The Sum Of All Fears.
I don't know that much about biological and chemical weapons, but lets note one thing: There's nothing you can do with bombs that you can't do with inspectors in a fast helicopter. You could look for similar things
First, we don't know where most of the weapons are, and we won't be able to begin finding them until the U.S. has taken control of Iraq and wiped out Hussein's secret police network. Once that is done, we will easily find the weapons, using the same powerful technique that we used in the Gulf war. Bags of money. Most of the weapons systems found in the last war were found by bribing soldiers and officials. It's the most cost-effective system ever. You can spend a million dollars trying to track down a weapons system, or you can find someone who knows, and give them $10,000. It's the most basic, oldest, low-tech form of intelligence known to man, but it won't work until we're on the ground, and have wiped out the existing regime and secret police network.
Second, something that people seem to forget, the purpose of the inspectors was not to find the weapons. The resolution was that the inspectors would be led to the weapons, and would verify their destruction. This is not happening. One or two bombs every couple of weeks does not count. If Hussein were really complying with Res. 1441, the inspectors would be busy monitoring the destruction of thousands of missiles and weapons systems, and thousands of gallons of biological and chemical agents per day.
Third, the only reason that Hussein is allowing the inspectors in is that he is confident that they won't be able to find anything.
And finally, by all evidence, the inspectors have been compromised. According to Blix, they have all been offered bribes, and some of them have accepted those bribes. The Iraqis have infiltrated the inspection teams, and are being tipped off as to where the inspections are going to be. The best explanation as to why they are doing this seems to be that the inspectors see their primary role not as disarming Iraq, but in preventing war. In other words, if they admit that the inspections have failed, then they feel that they will be responsible for the war. As a result, they have now shifted from their intended role -- overseeing Iraqi destruction of their own weapons -- to a new role of working with the Iraqis to deter a U.S. attack. Hence the microscopic "progress", the dribbling out of weapons here and there. The Iraqis voluntarily hand over two weapons, and the inspectors call this a sign of progress and declare that they need more months. It isn't "progress."
In other words, the entire inspection process is a sham. It's purpose is now delay, not disarmament.
What if the inspectors continue to "inspect" Iraq for five more years, until Hussein successfully test-fires an atomic bomb, announces that Iraq is now a nuclear power, and kicks the inspectors out? Is this implausable? It appears to be Hussein's entire long-term strategy!
For example I regard the "depleted uranium" craze as a complete panic with no basis in reality.
Agreed. Depleted uranium is about as radioactive as the surrounding sand. however, large segments of the media appear to be completely ignorant about this detail. In reality, those birth defects and cancers are far more likely to be caused by exposure to chemical weapons, which the Depleted Uranium crowd conveniently forget have been used by Hussein against the Iraqi people time after time.
[U.S. attack vs revolution] To attempt an answer, it is extremely important for a people to have their own destiny in their own hands.
Internal revolutions rarely turn out well. They tend to result in a power struggle that is won by the most ruthless of the internal factions.
As an example of what we're trying to do, after the U.S. military victory in Afghanistan, the U.S. brought the factions together, provided a building with military guard, and pretty much told them to go in and not come out until they had created a representational government. Now you can argue about whether it is working or not, but if the Taliban had been ousted by a violent revolution, this would not have happened. Those warlords would not have been sitting together in a room. They would have been battling it out for control of the country. The purpose of U.S. occupation of Iraq is:
1) To prevent a power vacuum and the resulting violent power struggle.
2) To safeguard the new government against foreign invasion. (Saudi Arabia has been floating the idea of sending in "Arab peacekeepers")
3) To ensure that the new government is formed peacefully, with the participation of all of Iraq's internal factions.
None of which would come to pass in a violent revolution.
Only if they can convince a lot of people that they do have an enemy, it is possible for the theocrats to retain power. And right now, the US is that enemy. If the US seize to be that enemy, there will be a lot more room for improvement in Iran.
I think that the U.S. actively turning Iraq into a prosperous democracy will have an enormous effect on the Iranian people. They will want it too, and will be much more likely to turn to the U.S. to help make it happen.
Far more then if the U.S. stands by and does nothing. That's what we are doing now, and it isn't making us very popular. Besides, right now, Hussein's grip on Iraq is so strong that the odds of a revolution any time soon are practically zero. I think that it's a fantasy option. It's only possible with the sort of massive covert aid that I'm arguing is doomed to be a long-term strategic failure.
As for Bush recent speech, it wasn't really anything new there, as far as I can see.
Up until that speech, the message was "disarm Hussein." That speech was, "Bring democracy to the Arab world." That's a huge shift, and based on the current wave of articles on arabnews, the Saudis don't like it a bit. As a matter of fact, they're pissed off and freaking out. For good reason. If the U.S. succeeds in converting Iraq into a democracy, then the Saudi general population -- the vast majority who are not part of the monarchy -- are going to want the same thing, and the monarchy will be doomed. And that's part of Bush's secret strategy. The Saudis are part of the problem. It's just that they don't fully comprehend that we know it and are working, in the long term, to eliminate the threat of the Saudi monarchy to world peace. The Saudis are easily worse then Hussein as far as being a danger. I still haven't forgotten the Saudi "Terror telethon", where they raised $100,000,000 in contributions and handed the money over the Arafat. It isn't that we're ignoring them
The US has very likely destroyed the UN.
Sorry, but the U.N. died with the fall of the Soviet Union. It isn't much of a loss. It's packed with dictatorships and tyrants. The U.N. was really a proxy organization for U.S./Soviet relations. I will agree that the U.S. has been very liberally handing out the rope for the U.N. to hang itself, but the problem is that the U.N. has gone from being pro-democratic to being pro-terrorist and pro-dictatorship. The U.N. has run its course. It will collapse and be replaced, perhaps by an institution that demands representational government as a condition of participation.
one of my favorite one-liners is "Violence is always the last resort of the incompetent" (Isaac Asimov).
I don't know the context of the quote, but it is woefully incomplete. Just because you're using violence doesn't mean that you're incompetant. It can also mean that you're defending yourself, or preventing greater violence, or liberating a people from a tyrant. This war is all about preventing greater violence and ending ongoing violence.
I really can't think of any justice system or science that can work without [the] principle [that] "the burden of the proof is on the claimnant"
International relations have never worked that way. A "justice system" presupposes a greater authority. There is no "greater authority" in world politics. It certainly isn't the U.N., where a small number of large democracies are outnumbered by dozens and dozens of small dictatorships. I reject the theory that the United States must, as a matter of some principle, treat a murderous dictatorship in the same manner as a representative democracy. This theory seems especially popular with dictators and corrupt governments, but I don't buy it.
If the U.S. goes in, and finds no WMD, and if the Iraqis rise up against us, then history will be our judge and the prestige and influence of the U.S. will be diminished. If on the other hand, we go in, and find bunkers full of nerve gas and chemical weapons, and mass graves, and operating uranium gas centrifuges, and completed nuclear bomb assemblies waiting for the uranium components, and widespread evidence of Iraqi government atrocities, then it will be a different story.
I personally think that the Iraqi people will be dancing in the streets once they are rid of Hussein, and with the sanctions lifted, Iraq will become the richest industrial democracy in the Middle East. And then the other Arab dictatorships will collapse. And then the threat of terrorism will cease, because the general population will choose security and wealth over terrorism and death. To quote again from Bush's speech: Bush is tapping into a deep, powerful well. As I said, either you believe that he's sincere, or that he's lying and it's business as usual. I think that he's sincere in his beliefs and intentions in this instance. If you don't think that he's sincere, then you won't trust him. It all comes down to that basic assessment.
I'm going to take this a bit out of order, because something you said at the beginning ties in to your later comments.
I think Bush honestly believes that he is on a God-given mission as the World Leader to save the world.
I think that your reading of Bush is a mistake. Bush's mission is to protect America. 9/11 ended our ability to ignore what is happening in the rest of the world, the middle east in particular. Prior to 9/11, the U.S. felt it could pretty much ignore everything happening in the Arab world. All the dictatorships, mass murders, the spread of radical Islam, the enforced poverty, suppression, and injustice of Islamic law, anti-westernism, calls for jihad
Then 9/11 came along, and the way it all played out made it absolutely impossible to ignore. It happened live on national television, with most of the country watching. The second plane hit. The buildings slowly burning, The office workers jumping to their deaths, live on television. The shock as the first tower collapse. The excruciating wait for the inevitable second tower to collapse. The breakaway to the burning Pentagon. The shutdown of the airlines. The endless stories of the firefighters and rescue workers. It changed everything. In one morning, everything that we knew about national security since World War II flew out the window. Everything changed. What had gone before in the 1980s and 1990s became instantly obsolete. Our Federal Government had completely failed in one of it's most important functions -- to protect the United States against foreign attack, and it had failed in spectacular fashion.
In the last two years, we've discovered that those things -- dictatorships, Arab poverty, Islamic government and the violence and suppression of Sharia law -- matter a whole lot. Now it has become too dangerous to allow the situation in the Middle East to continue. The dictatorships have to be replaced with democracies. Islamic law has to be overthrown and replaced with civil law. People have to start believing that they and their people have a future on earth worth living for, so that they choose that instead of strapping on a bomb to kill Jews, or seizing an airplane to kill Americans.
Your history omits one crucial element that helps to explain -- although not to justify -- our foreign policy in the 1980s. In 1984, the cold war was still raging in the middle east, Afghanistan in particular. What the United States did in 1984 was not due to a love of dictatorships, or even so much a desire for oil. The primary reason for creating ties to Iraq was to oppose Soviet expansion into the middle-east. And yes, I agree. The United States effectively supported a murderous despot who in no way deserved our help or support. I will also add that after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1990, Hussein did not stay in the good graces of the United States for long.
Yes, Kosovo was a catastrophe. We did a lot of damage, then left. That was the problem. The U.S. tried to give the opposition "just a little support", and that's a prescription for disaster. That's how we faught the Cold War. Wherever someone was opposing the Soviet Union, we would give them "just a little support." Some notable examples of U.S. receipt of "a little support" were Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. We're not doing that this time. We're not smuggling weapons to the Iraqi opposition so that they can instigate a horrible, bloody revolution.
If Saddam had actually had WMDs that were a threat, then urgent action may have been needed.
That's the problem with nuclear weapons. Once you have them, it's too late for "urgent action." In the last few days, North Korea has restarted their nuclear reactor, and has begun mass producing plutonium. If they didn't already have a handful of nuclear weapons, that reactor would be a blackened crater right now. With nuclear weapons, you don't look for the smoking gun. You look for the cocked gun.
At the same time, the same mistakes are committed over and over again. [list of links to stories about equally bad regimes]
All in good time. This war is not going to end with the fall of Iraq. Afghanistan was the first front, Iraq is the second. There are many reasons why Iraq is a good candidate for the second phase of the war.
First off, losing Hussein will be a huge blow to organized terrorism. Once Hussein is gone, the payments to the families of the Palestinian suicide bombers will stop. This will cut the legs out from under Arafat and his campaign of terror and force the Palestinians to give up their dream of conquering Israel. Every other Arab dictator will be wondering if he is next. The "Manifest Destiny" of Islam -- to conquer the world -- will come crashing to a halt.
Second, Iraq is already largely a westernized country. Iraqis are very resourceful and have learned to survive even in the face of sanctions. Once the sanctions are lifted, under American military protection, the Iraqi people are the best candidates to immediately begin to prosper. Once Iraq begins to prosper, the people of the neighboring countries will start wanting to prosper also, notably Iranians. This will accelerate the process of revolt and revolution in those countries.
Third, support for Hussein within Iraq is greatly overestimated. I have read numerous reports from Iraqis that the general population is preying that if the U.S. does invade, to please, please not leave them hung out to dry like last time by failing to kill Hussein. Hussein thinks that there will be warfare in the streets. I suspect that there will be dancing in the streets when Hussein is killed.
Fourth, we have a bad ally. Saudi Arabia is a huge problem. Iraq is providing financial support to the Palestinian terrorists, but Saudi Arabia is providing financial support to Al Quaida. The problem is that when the revolution comes in Saudi Arabia, we want them to convert to democracy, not to militant Islam.
And finally, Iraq is a menace to its neighbors. It's invaded Kuwait, gassed Iran, and you can bet that Hussein would invade any neighbor that it thought it could get away with at a moment's notice. So long as Hussein is in power of Iraq, the entire region will be effectually in a state of suspended terror. It's very hard to commit a country to a switch to democracy when you have an enemy like Hussein breathing down your neck. I'm thinking of Iran in particular. The last thing in the world we want is to have Iran in the midst of a peaceful revolution, and have Iraq invade them. Iran will be in a better position for peaceful change with Iraq gone.
Now back to your original comment
First, let me state that the alternative to war is not to do nothing. It is to do things more constructively, build rather than destroy.
You're one of the few people using this argument who actually elaborates on the idea.
There is a huge, well-educated middle class in Iraq, and they are the key to overthrowing Saddam. Making sure that these people can start thinking about politics again rather than worrying about getting food on the table or a US bomb down their chimney is probably the best thing you can do to forward democracy in Iraq.
The problem in Iraq isn't that the people aren't interested in politics. The problem is that anyone who takes the slightest action towards getting involved in politics disappears and is never heard from again. The Iraqi secret police is ferocious, and the idea that the Iraqi middle class is going to overthrow Hussein is about as realistic as the idea that the Soviet middle class could have overthrown Stalin. It isn't going to happen, but it does have the potential to get a lot of people killed.
As far as "bombs down the chimney", that's a danger, and some Iraqi civilians are probably going to be killed. I think that the number will be very small, however, because of the types of weapons we are using now. 15 years ago, Kosovo era, if you wanted to destroy a building, you would send in 10 aircraft, drop 20 bombs, and destroy the building -- along with two city blocks in every direction. The missiles we have now are so accurate that you really can take out a single building. We just aren't going to be carpet bombing Iraqi cities. That would make no military sense. I think that the civilian damage will be surprisingly light.
As far as food, I've seen pictures of Iraqi soldiers, and none of them seem to be starving. There's food going in to Iraq, and in the hands of Hussein the distribution -- or lack of distribution -- of food is just another weapon used to suppress dissent.
There's another path. Iran has made huge progress lately, pretty much in spite of US efforts. Most of the Iranian population is really young, and they don't want to take any more bullshit from the old moronic fundamentalists.
Yes, Iran is a bright spot. I think that Iran is a situation where the U.S. should probably not intervene. The Iranian people have suffered the longest under modern Islamic fundamentalism, and, as you said, the youngest generation is restless and tired of living under a repressive theocracy that they were born into and had no part in creating. I think that Iran is probably the single situation that the U.S. could screw up the worst. Covert military aid would be disasterous. I think that the best thing that the U.S. could do would be to create and support a democracy in Iraq, right across the border. Iran doesn't need a violent revolution. Right now Iran is in a strange situation -- they have in effect two governments, a religious government, and a civil government. The dynamic between the two is that the religious government has veto power over the civil government, but that dynamic is changing. If at some point, the civil government is able to assert authority over the religious government, Iran could well have a bloodless revolution and become a democracy overnight. The structure is already in place and operational. I have high hopes for Iran, but I think that their chances improve with Iraq defeated.
Empowering these people in Iran is very likely going to light that candle of democracy
Very true. U.S. intervention worked well in World War II, but has been a miserable failure ever since. I think that the key reason comes down the Marshall plan. The United States really did stay in, rebuild Germany and Japan, and spend billions of dollars acting as their military defense so that they couldn't and wouldn't take up arms again, or revert to dictatorship or feudalism. We haven't made a long-term intervention committment since. Now I think we have to, and I see the political and national will building to do it.
But looking the other way, has never helped.
Agreed. The frustrating part about the anti-war movement is that so much of it amounts to looking the other way.
The only reason that I support this war is because I really do believe that Bush is beginning to understand that the only way out of the new threat of terrorism is to replace the dictatorships -- and just replacing them with new dictatorships won't work. They have to be replaced with representative democracies.
Bush made a very interesting speech yesterday. Interesting because what he is now saying has changed in the last few months.
In the days following 9/11, the talk was about finding and punishing those who attacked us. Then it was about picking sides. Are you on our side or the terrorist side. This is very different. Revenge and safety were reason enough to support war on Afghanistan. Revenge and safety are not enough to gain public support for a war on Iraq. Liberating Iraq is.
The purpose of this war has certainly shifted. The question becomes whether you think that Bush's plan -- wiping out terrorism by spreading democracy and freedom throughout the Middle East -- is feasable and sincere, or just a pretext for revenge, or even worse, as a cover for unrelated expansionism.
I don't think that it's a pretext for revenge. Our war in Afghanistan was against Al Queida, and the Taliban for protecting them. We have no similar quarrel with the Iraqi people, or even the regular, conscripted army. We have been dropping leaflets promising the Iraqi soldiers that if they lay down arms, they will not be attacked, and will be allowed to return home when the war ends. We did the same thing in the first Gulf War, and we kept our word. I believe that the promise is sincere. This war is against Hussein and his ruling party, not against the Iraqi people.
I don't think that it's a pretext for expansionism. The United States is not interested in annexing more territory. If we were, we would have never left Iraq in 1991. Hell, we had full control of their oil fields, and the Kuwaiti oil fields, but we turned around and left.
You characterize Bush as "fanatically religious." I wouldn't go quite that far, but I get the feeling that Bush believes in what he is saying, and that is absolutely crucial to his having any chance at success.
This isn't really a religious war. We're not going to force the Iraqi people to convert to Christianity. We're not going to force them to give up Islam, with one exception. In the long run, we're going to have to force them to separate church and state. That's part and parcel of joining the modern world, and that's what this war is really about -- bringing the middle east out of the 7th century and into the 21st century. Iraq comes first because with Hussein gone, it will be one of the closest countries to already being there.
Just out of curiosity, what country are you posting out of?
This must be the most pathetic anti-war stretch to date.
We must stand by and permit the torture and murder of unknown tens of thousands of Iraqis by the Hussein regime, and condemn an entire generation of Iraqis to lifelong misery and terror, because the alternative has the remote chance of destroying an ancient battery!
The priorities of the author are certainly on display.
Ok. Here's a business model that I would really like, with the potential to make a lot of money:
Offer a music service that, either for free, or for a fixed price, allows you to download all the songs you want, from fixed servers or from other peers, in some compressed format.
Provide software or a web site that allows you to easily design a "mix" CD, based on either songs you already have on MP3, or lists of songs that you don't have from a catalog.
Once you've selected up to 80 minutes of music to fill your mix CD, you design the CD label. You can pick from a template, or upload your own disc art. You can also design your own template. More on that below.
Then you select "purchase" to order a custom CD.
o The custom CD is burned to a CDR, using full resolution, uncompressed WAV files.
o The CDR is printed on a high-resolution full color inkjet or dye sublimation printer, using the disc art that you selected or designed.
o The CDR is placed in a white sleeve, and mailed to you.
The cost would be say, $11.95 per disc plus $5.00 fixed shipping and handling charges no matter how many discs you place in a single order. Keeping the per-disc cost low and the fixed charge high is advantageous, as it would encourage larger orders.
This way, you could use the P2P system to "sample" and explore music, and find the music you really like, then order an uncompromised, top notch, attractive product:
1) The music you really like in uncompressed format -- the same bitstream as the original CD, as opposed to lossy MP3s.
2) Attractive, highly professional custom-printed CDRs with zero effort, instead of piles of hand-labelled CDs.
The "user community" would be built around bulletin boards, mix lists and disc art. Once you had paid to burn a CDR, you could opt to save and publically "publish" your mix list and disc art, so that other people could make identical copies of your mix CD by clicking a "purchase" button. You could also upload your own cover art templates that could be used to print any track list. There would be no way to download other people's disc art -- the only way to get it would be to have a CDR custom burned. This would create an additional incentive to use the pay service. There would be a system for people to rate and rank mix CDs and cover art, and a regularly published top 100 list. You could set up a system where if 1000 people use your mix list or disc art, you get a free CD, thus encouraging people to put a lot of time and effort into coming up with really good track lists and sick disc art.
It seems like it would be fun to me. Sound like a good time? Would people pay for that?
I've had a bit of experience in recording and mixing concerts, and a lot of experience in turning soundboard DATs into completed CDRs, and you overestimate the difficulty.
The first phase of the operation is getting a good audio recording mix.
If Clearchannel really wants to do it right, they will have a separate soundboard in an isolated room for a dedicated engineer to make the recording mix. A competant recording engineer can have the soundboard configured and putting out a good, clean recording mix within a few minutes -- during the same soundcheck that the house engineer sets up the room mix. In general, once the soundboard is set up for a live concert, you can leave it alone for long periods of time, often for the rest of the show.
From long-time experience, I can tell you that a lot of the time, the PA mix is the best recording source. This is especially true when recording in large halls, or recording acoustic instruments, such as bluegrass bands. In general, if the soundman can't hear any sound from the amplifiers on stage, then he will naturally produce a PA mix that is "complete" -- containing the proper proportion of each instrument and vocal mic.
The advantage to recording the PA mix is that the resulting recording will sound pretty much exactly like what the audience heard, except that it will sound clearer and crisper on their stereo, because there won't be any room echoes or crowd noise.
On the other hand, if you have a rock and roll band that is playing loud as hell in a small room, then a recording of the PA mix is going to sound terrible, because in that case the soundman is compensating for the loud amplifiers on stage by putting less (or none) in the PA mix, and a soundboard recording would have little more than the vocals. In that case you'd need a dedicated recording soundboard to generate an appropriate soundboard mix.
You won't be getting applause and shouts because stage microphones are specially designed with a proximity effect -- to reject sounds that come from far away. The purpose of this is to prevent feedback, but a side effect is that the audience is generally only softly audible between songs when the band isn't playing. Even if you have a couple of problems -- say a burst of feedback, or someone kicks over or unplugs a live mic, it isn't a problem because you can easily fix that later.
The point is that making a high quality stereo soundboard mix on the fly is not hard -- it's something that professionals do all the time, and for someone who would be doing it day in and day out, it would be a very easy and reliable process.
The second phase of the operation is in creating the CDRs.
If I were recording the shows this way, here's how I'd do it:
Use a pair of computers running Sound Forge, or some other audio recording/editing software. Split the stereo master signal three or four ways. Feed it directly into the soundcards of both computers, and also into a DAT recorder as a backup in case of a power failure, and possibly a third computer in case one of the computers crashes.
Record the first set on the first computer. Record the second set on the second computer. Record the encore on the first computer. Have all of the computers on a 100 Mb/S ethernet LAN so that you can shoot the encore onto the second computer when the show is over.
At the end of each set, stop the computer from recording and edit the set. The amount of editing you need or want to do is minimal. Trim away any dead air at the beginning of the set and any overly long pauses between songs. DON'T trim away any stage banter -- that's what people want to hear, because it's what makes the show personal and memorable. Do a visual scan for glitches and pops (such as someone unplugging a live mic) and draw those out with the pencil tool. If there's a feedback squeal, select around it, and do a quick graphic fade to make the feedback much quieter. Fade in at the beginning and fade out at the end. Place track IDs between songs, save the sound file, and burn a master CDR in disc-at-once mode.
I do this all the time. I can go from a monolithic WAV file of an entire set to a tracked, trimmed CDR image in about 10 minutes. Once you've done it a dozen or so times, it's easy and super fast.
You have the entire setbreak and second set to get the first CD ready. It won't take that long, and you can start cranking out first set CDs even before the band takes the stage for the second set.
Do the same thing when the band finishes the second set. Edit the set, remove long pauses, check for glitches, fade in at the beginning and out at the end, place the track IDs, save the sound file, and either start burning the second CD, or wait for the encore if you think it'll fit. You should have the second set tracked and ready to burn by the end of the encore.
Do the same thing with the encore. Append the encore to the second set, split it into two CDs if necessary, and burn master CDRs. Elapsed time, 10 minutes. Run the master CDRs over to the mass duplicator and get started. You can be putting complete recordings into people's hands 20 minutes after the band leaves the stage.
Oh yes, while you're doing all this, you have a third computer running photoshop. You send someone to take a couple of pictures of the band with a digital camera, and prepare the CD cover during the show. Add the song titles as the band plays them, and you can be ready to start printing jewelbox art by the time the show's over.
It isn't as impossible as you think. Concert recordings are generally very straightforward and easy, and it certainly doesn't take weeks to do the minimal amount of work necessary to create this sort of product. This is very different from a band spending months fine-tuning a concert album, where you want to make the performance sound perfect. In this sort of situation, the people who buy the CDs want and expect the CDs to sound exactly like what they heard at the show, warts and all.
I guess we can now revoke the legend of how Phish promotes free distribution of concert recordings.
Nope. Phish still allows tapers to bring their own equipment, and allows them to freely distribute the recordings made from the audience.
What they are doing is selling official soundboard releases in parallel, under the usual conditions of commercially released albums. This has absolutely no affect on the making and noncommercial trading of audience tapes.
As a matter of fact, Phish had a taping rule that said that when they released an commercial release of a show, you weren't allowed to distribute audience tapes of that show. They removed that restriction at the same time that they started offering soundboard downloads, so the new system is actually less restrictive.
NO complaints here. Phish is doing it right. They are distributing the music in lossless SHN format as well as MP3, and there's no DRM crap to mess it up. What more could you want? I have no problem with it not being free, because hopefully the cash will provide enough of an incentive for the band to continue the program for the rest of its career.
As far as Jerry Garcia, I'm sure he would be perfectly happy with the arrangement. After all, the Dead put out lots of commercial albums of live concert recordings -- Live Dead, Europe 72, Steal Your Face, etc, and Deadheads never had a problem with buying those albums instead of copying them amongst themselves.
Even better, build a house with about 30 fireplaces and no doors and fill it with furniture. Now have your klutz sims run around and light all the fireplaces. Kick back and watch the madness ensue.
ASCII art was my brief claim to fame back in 1990, as it seemed that half of the sig files on usenet incorporated part of my ASCII depiction of The Simpsons
The ironic part was that I "drew" it on a 3270, so it was actually EBCDIC art until it hit the BITNET/USENET gateway!
One of the most interesting and rewarding reactions you can study as an amateur is mirror silvering using Tollens' reagent. I had an arc lamp reflector that needed resilvering, and decided to do it myself.
h tm l
After a lot of web research, I found that this website had the best directions (and the best safety warnings!):
http://lerch.no-ip.com/atm/Silver.htm
The only chemicals I had any trouble finding were silver nitrate crystals, which can be purchased from photography supply stores, such as:
http://www.photoformulary.com/
or ebay, and concentrated nitric acid, which can be purchased from lithography supply stores, such as:
http://www.rembrandtgraphicarts.com/13_rga_cat.
The hazmat shipping charge for the nitric acid will exceed the cost of the chemical.
The process is somewhat complex, involves a number of stages, but isn't too difficult to do. It's an interesting reaction to watch, and the result is cool and useful. I created a perfect mirror coating on the inside of a bottle on the second try, and successfully coated my reflector mirror immediately thereafter.
Everything worked for me, except that I found that I had to heat the muriatic acid in order to make the solder dissolve when creating the sensitizing solution.
That's my recommended interesting experiment.
Tastes like "Chicken Little"!
Anyone else remember "The Space Merchants?"
Well, it's free as in beer, and nonrestrictive.
If you really feel strongly about the matter, you could easily extract the SHNs into WAVs, then reencode them as FLACs. Since all three are lossless formats, you wouldn't lose anything. Personally, I have no plans to do so.
I'm assuming that Live Phish Downloads is licensing the SHN codec for commercial use. SoftSound did the taping community a huge favor by providing a free, unencumbered version of shorten for tape trading. I have no problem with them making a little money now that their format has caught on.
By the time they signed with Elektra in 1992, Phish was an established band that was selling out concert halls on a regular basis. Phish had been chased by record labels for years, but the band held out, preferring to retain control over their copyrights, business rights, and creative decisions.
It paid off. This allowed them to get a fantastic deal when they finally did sign with a label. Phish's contract with Elektra is a promotion and distribution contract, not a recording contract. Phish retained their copyrights, their internet rights, and their electronic distribution rights. They retained complete creative control over their music and organization. Their relationship to Elektra is basically this. They provide master tapes, and Elektra distributes and promotes the album.
You can't get that sort of contract unless you're already a big name band. If Phish had signed with a RIAA corporation back when they were a brand new band, they would not be in a position to do what they are doing now. The record label would own their copyrights, their website, and their electronic distribution rights.
Compare this system to the pathetic efforts of the RIAA to foist copy protected CDs and DRM-saturated, inferior MP3s on the public, and call that the "future" of internet music distribution.
By contrast, Phish is selling downloads of CD quality (SHN) recordings, with no DRM at all. You can download the CDs within two days of the concert. You can also download CD art. Even better, once you have paid for a recording, the system remembers that you have done so in the "My Stash" section. If you ever lose or damage your CD, you can go back to the web site and re-download the shows you lost!
I really can't imagine the system being any more customer-friendly, except if it was a bit cheaper. But the system is new, so I won't begrudge them that.
Right now, the music industry is trying to establish the Big Lie -- that music can't be distributed, especially online, unless the system is designed to treat every customer as a criminal. The music must be laden with obstructive DRM. Users must be prevented from making backups.
Live Phish Downloads has the potential to be the Big Counterexample. Phish said it themselves -- this is all about the honor system. You respect us, and we respect you.
In the end, that's how copyright was designed to work in the first place. The whole idea of copyright being a war between record labels and their customers is a relatively new concept, and this is a nice beginning to putting an end to it.
So now that phish is SELLING these recordings, is it still legal to download from furthur?
The Phish concerts on furthur are for the most part audience recordings. It will remain perfectly legal to upload or download any audience recording from Furthur.
Nothing changes there.
Consider these new downloaded soundboards as commercial releases. It's just as illegal to place these downloaded soundboards on Furthur as it would be to upload Phish's latest studio album.
But Phish has no problem with you trading audience tapes of the same shows. Just not the soundboards that they are trying to sell.
Simple enough!