The miltary might of the US is already over taxed by US foreign polocy. Declaring war on Europe would be a disaster.
No, it's not overtaxed. I don't know where you got that idea, but it's not true at all.
Our military is huge. The vast majority of the people I worked with had never done any actual operational work. A lot of the people in Iraq are from the National Guard (think the state militia here) and the Reserves. These people don't have the training much of our full-time military gets - they're average joes who meet up at the armory once a month to do a little training exercise and then go somewhere for a couple weeks in the summer for some active expeirience. Sure, we've got full-time military there, but the vast majority of our deployable forces are not deployed. If worse comes to worse, people like me could be recalled into the service. Or hell, they could start another draft.
Most of our equipment is here, not there. If we were attacked tomorrow, we'd be more than ready to defend ourselves.
The thing is, wars have been unpopular in general since Vietnam, since it was such a SNAFU. Bush doesn't want to send too many troops over, because if he does popular opinion will turn against him. If this were a more popular war, like WWII was, then we'd pull a trick out of Reagan's book and have Iraq covered in asphalt and be painting parking stripes on it by now.
And therein lies the problem with a Country that fails to fulfill its obligations to World politics, serisouly thinks it is more important than every other Country and currently has an administration that is trying to disengage with everyone else.
Bear in mind that the U. S. government is answerable to the citizens of the U. S., and not any other countries. Sure, we're in the U. N., but seriously - who listens to U. N. resolutions without considering how to make it a win for their own country?
Our government here has one of the largest economies, the largest military, and influence unparalleled in the world. We can use that to our advantage. Were your government in this position, it would do the exact same thing, because that's its job. You can't blame the U. S. government for abusing its power to act in what it considers the best interests of its people - you can only argue that its decisions are incorrect.
The Assyrian government acted in the best interests of Assyria when it invaded its neighbors and created the Assyrian empire. The Chaldeans did the same thing when they defeated the Assyrians, and the Persians when they defeated the Chaldeans. The Macedonians acted in the best interests of the Macedonian government when they invaded Greece, and with Alexander a good portion of the Mediterranean region. The Romans acted in the best interests of Rome, the Vatican in the best interests of the Church, Napolean in the best interests of France, the Germans in the best interests of Germany, and so on. Sure, there's been corruption at the highest level in many of these cases, it hasn't always worked out, and each of these empires have fallen, but each of these examples show that the primary purpose of the government is to provide for its country without reguard to others.
Conquest isn't in vogue these days (Iraq isn't a conquest, given that we don't plan on keeping it), and the welfare of the people in the country is a bit more imporant than in ancient times, so the U. S. makes do with spreading its influence and economic power. I'm sure that in Bush's little brain he thinks that what he's doing will improve the U. S. and better the situation for the people the government serves. You can fault him for being wrong and causing damage to the U. S., but it's not his job to worry about the welfare of everywhere else.
We've lost more of our own than they have in this Iraq thing. The U. K. elected a guy who has his head up Bush's ass. That's not our problem. I don't know or care why Italy and Austrailia are there. If you live in one of those places, tell your government to pull out your troops. We've got a lot more troops we could send to replace them if we had to.
The only people in this situation who didn't have a choice are the Iraqis, and if they'd only quit blowing shit up and decide on a constitution, we'd get out of there and ten years from now they can strike down the constitution and go back to the way they were. Yeah, sucks for them, but it sucks for everyone sometime.
It's been a while since I've seen any of them, but try looking up one of the old host maps of the 70's ARPANET and MILNET. They're not designed around survivability. There's a lot of sections where there's single points of failure.
As far as MILNET between the split and the late 90's, I have no idea. That was in the mid-70's sometime, I believe . I won't comment on.mil's current state, but the military had a network that predated the ARPANET, was not packet-based, and was designed for survivability. That network was still operating when I left the military in 2002.
Back during the late 60's and early 70's, computers were the wave of the future - the government, especially the military, was very interested in using them to their advantage. The common setup back then was based on mainframes, and since it wasn't feasible to have a mainframe on every military installation, remote access was the best option. The building where I used to work in Japan was once the Data Processing Center for the Pacific theater, supporting all the bases around Japan and Korea (perhaps Guam and the Phillipenes as well). Lots of things were (and still are, in some cases) migrated to remote mainframes for centralized control - logistics, finance and payroll, personnel records, etc. Remote computer access was also handy for weapons research, where the weapons would be tested far from the computer site.
I won't say that the idea of survivability was never brought up or researched, but it was never implemented in the ARPANET, and was never laid down as one of the goals of the system.
Holy crap, it took you guys until the last two presidential terms to stop trusing us?
We've had our fingers in everyone's pies since WWII. We've gone around telling other countries what government they can and can't have. Our little tiff with the Soviet Union caused trouble for all kinds of places that weren't otherwise involved at all.
We've ignored our own constitution and persecuted people's freedom of speech (see the McCarthy trials). We've broken treaty after treaty with the American Indians. We've fueled wars and sold weapons to both sides.
We've funded revolutions, we've changed loyalties (see Vietnam and Cuba), and we've pulled every stop to build U. S. market dominance in the world. We've got a military that we can drop damn near anywhere and if not take over, at least cause a lot of strife.
I wouldn't trust us. Hell, I don't, and I used to be in the U. S. military.
Granted though, in my opinion, you asked for it. We had a policy of letting Europeans kill each other all they wanted without our involvement until Germany dragged us into WWI by trying to get Mexico to attack us. Then, when we decided to go back to our policy of leaving everyone else alone, Germany and Japan dragged us back into it with WWII. It's always one asshole that ruins it for everyone. Saddam dragged us into the gulf war by attacking one of our allies, and good ol' bin Laden, in an attempt to get us out of the middle east, started the current chain of events that led to our invading Afghanistan (personally, I think Iraq was just finishing daddy's work for ol' dubya, but that's just me).
We're the big kid on the block, and if you're tired of our bullying, you're going to have to fight back. And I'm not talking with words, mind you. The American people don't care, by and large, and our politicians have no reason to put an end to it. Until then, you're just going to have to wait until either an economic crisis cripples us, or civil war breaks out. I don't see either happening any time soon.
The world is big. The radius of total destruction of a nuclear weapon is less than twenty miles, even for the big ones. That's a _lot_ of nukes.
We could probably disrupt every other government on earth by blowing up major cities, but we couldn't kill everyone on earth with direct strikes, much less "obliterate the earth". Things might suck, but mankind would survive. Nuclear winter might solve the global warming problem, though.
The internet was used ideas from research (packet switching research, mostly) designed for that goal. However, it was not built for the purpose of being an emergency communication network. Look at the early designs of the backbone and the central control by BBN - a well-placed nuclear strike would have taken down the internet, no problem. The location of the data lines and hosts was never classified, which it certainly would have been if it was expected to be used in the case of nuclear attack.
It's still not really designed this way - if a nuclear weapon was to hit almost any major U. S. city, a large portion of the internet would drop offline until manually rerouted. The original research design was to have no manual rerouting necessary.
Oh, and the precessesor of DARPA was ARPA, and its successor was ARPA. Same organization, they just liked to change the name a lot.
Yes, the U. S. did invent the Internet. We built the ARPANEt, split off MILNET, then connected it to NSFnet (National Science Foundation, "National" meaning U. S. in this case), who then connected it to several networks inside the U. S. (corporate, government, and educational). All this before the privitization of the Internet that opened it globally.
Note that "internet" (note the lower-case I) means "between networks". Since we're talking the same network that later became what you call the Internet, and we branced it off to connect several networks before it was global, then how can you claim that the U. S. didn't invent it?
Hrm, Europeans didn't wire the U. S. telephone network. Nor did they build my computer (most of the parts are from southeast Asia, although the computer itself was assembled by me), the Japanese built my "Ford" truck, my '65 Ford Galaxie was built by Americans, and you can bloody well have the TV's as far as I care (although, once again, most TV's in the U. S. are certainly not built in Europe).
We make our own paper, thank you very much, and if China doesn't want us to use their explosives, they should stop selling them to us. We generally only use Chinese explosives for fireworks on Independance Day anyway.
Oh and the WWW? My browser is written by people from all over the world, including the U. S., based on Netscape, which in turn was based on Mosaic, which was designed in Champagne-Urbana, Illinois here in America. The protocol is mainained by the IETF (a traditionally American organization) and the format is maintained by an international standards body (the W3C).
Each of these examples, except for the telephone network and the 'WWW', are concrete items. You can't compare them to the internet, which is a communications network. This would be more similar to my city demanding that SBC give it control over the local phone number database. Even that's not completely apt because SBC owns the phone lines here, while your country or businesses within it own the internet infastructure in your country.
Tell you what, the ITU, based in Europe, controls the standards for the modem sitting on my shelf (although the standard it uses was pioneered by Lucent Technologies, a U. S. company). Europe can drop by and pick it up any time it wants.
What's with all this "we" business? Unless the poster actually had a founding hand in setting up what became the Internet, then how do they have any more right to it than anyone else? Because they happen to have been born in the same country as people who did? Accident of birth is no ethical basis for distributing non-local resources.
How about our taxes paying for the research, development, and the 20+ years it operated while inaccessible to the common citizen (only certain university students and the military could access the arpanet before the late 80's, and the general public didn't have access until the 90's). When the U. S. allowed the rest of the world to join, it was debugged, working, and ready to go.
I didn't pour asphalt for U. S. Highway 60, but I drive on it every day, and it's mine in the sense that the taxes I, my parents before me, and my grandparents before them paid built it and continue to pay for upkeep.
That said, I think the whole deal is stupid. Who cares who controls the root servers? Every country has their own TLD, except the ones that sold theirs off, and I'm sure there's registrars that aren't based in the U. S. that have access to the general TLD's. Other than the possibility we would block a country from the root servers (which would be a huge deal, since the government doesn't really control any but the.mil and (I'm assuming).gov servers), there's no advantage either way. ICANN doesn't do the greatest job at policy making, but personally I think they do a better job than the U. N. would do - the U. N. would just argue about it all day while China pushed for more segregation capability and the hardcore religious countries pushed to have the domain name of sites with pornographic and material revoked. Great, more bickering.
A compromise by putting some root servers outside the U. S. would all but eliminate the possibility of the U. S. cutting off a country. We're not going to cut off, say, all of Asia or Europe.
Personally, if I was the U. N., I'd be pushing for control of the IETF.
It's been a long time since I've played around with Blender... but can it animate fluidly? Can it render using the latest and greatest renderers? (RenderMan, MentalRay, Maxwell, Brazil, VRay, etc) Can it do dynamics and simulations? Does it have complex textruing utilities and abilities? Can you set up complex rigging solutions with it? I'm guessing the answer is no to a lot of those questions. And even if it does do some of that in some fashion or another.. I guarantee that it's not nearly up to the quality the people using Max or Maya would expect.
So... you haven't used it in a long time, don't know its capabilities, yet you feel that it's not up to the standards of Maya or Max?
Anyone with working experience in Blender and Maya have an opinion?
You don't have secret courts, and your rights to speech, movement, and religion are secure, are they?
I sincerely congratulate you. Mine aren't. And that's the funny thing, becuase that's what the U.S. was supposed to be about. That's why I'm protective about my rights. In any event, since you're not a U.S. citizen, ignore my point about your rights in particular, since my argument only concerns the U.S. government. You guys can run your country however you feel.
Now, I've never been to New Zealand, although I'd like to someday (just so I can smoke up the place... just kidding), but around here, if you don't smoke and you want to go out, no problem! There's tons of places you can go and not have to deal with us smokers. Restaurants, bars, movie theaters, you name it! All the smokers will be out in the parking lot, telling jokes and talking about stuff.
I'll be at my diner, lit cigarette in one hand, coffee cup in the other, meeting up with my friends over a plate of greasy, overpriced cheese fries. I ain't hurtin' nobody but myself, and that's my business (we don't have public health care here, so I'm not even hurting anyone financially). When the government decides to butt itself into my business, that's when I get pissed.
Now, as for a little advice: you want the places you like to go to be non-smoking? Tell them! Tell them you'll stop going because of the smoke. Tell your friends to do the same thing. Places like that are owned by businessmen, and if they lose money by allowing smoking (hey, you're the majority, right?) then it's good business sense to stop. You guys have a free market economy, right? That's what happened here, before a lot of those laws went into effect. If it doesn't work for you, then maybe anti-smokers aren't as plentiful as you think they are.
Actually, I don't have nor need a concealed carry license, since I've never fired a handgun. I have friends with cc licences, but they're either serious collectors, bounty hunters or security guards. I just own a couple rifles and take them out for target practice every now and again - they're more heirlooms than anything. Handguns are for killing people, collecting, law enforcement, and target practice. I've got rifles for target practice and collecting, no law enforcement job, and no expectation of having to kill anyone. Besides, I was given plenty of gun safety training while in the military.
The thing is, why would we need to outlaw handguns? Are they too much of a problem? If so, then how? Gang members? No, they'd get the guns anyway. Policemen? No, they need them for their job. Kids who grab their parents'.45 and go shooting up the school? Sure, it'd make it harder for them to get them, but how many of them are there? People who don't know how to take care of guns and end up shooting themselves while cleaning them? Well, there's a lot I could say about that one, but either way, is it the government's place to protect us from ourselves? That's a larger argument I'd rather not stray into on slashdot.
How likely are you to blow away people in a supermarket? How likely is the average citizen? How often does it happen? Are you more likely to be shot buying tic tacs at your local Safeway by someone who wouldn't have an illegal weapon than being struck by lightning? Is it worth taking a right that we've had for years just to lessen the small chance that you won't be shot by some nutjob?
That's the thing. You have a right not to live in fear, but outlawing handguns won't make you feel more safe. East St. Louis will still be just as dangerous to drive through. Criminals will still get them. You've just reduced the tiny, tiny chance that someone with a few wires crossed will shoot you. If you would feel silly wearing a bulletproof vest in public, then why don't you feel silly trying to take away a right that has been ours since the country was founded?
I doubt rocket launchers were legal to own at the time of their invention as weapons. If I invented a new type of weapon tomorrow, it would be covered by quite a few existing laws. That's not to mention the fact that even if those laws weren't in place at the time of the rocket launcher's invention, blowing up other people's property and injuring/killing people was already illegal. Of the other items I mentioned, some of them are perfectly legal to own if you go through the paperwork for them (the M-60, tanks, and probably some of the others). The laws of physics keep me from carrying antimatter in my pocket, and they're rigorously enforced.
Oh, and carrying knives of any decent size is illegal in most places as well, as I've been reminded by people when I forget to take my sword off when going on a shopping run during an SCA event. Nothing like the looks you get when you walk into a grocery store wearing medieval garb and a claymore:)
You apparently haven't travelled much outside the country. The U.S. is one of the most anti-smoking countries in the world. Personally, I think it's because of the high asshole per capita we have here, but that's just my opinion.
Besides, you miss the point. I say I've lost the right to smoke in most buildings. I have no problem if a building has a no smoking sign on it. I do have a problem if the government tells me where I can and can't smoke (excepting government buildings, of course). Where I can smoke should be left up to the owner of whatever property I'm currently on.
It's things like this that piss me off. You don't like smoking, so it's cool with you if the government takes away people's right to smoke in certain places. A lot of people think smoking should be outlawed altogether, because _they_ personally don't like it. They think that's fine for them. But the deal is, that's one more right that you're losing, even if you don't use it. Next it could be a favorite hobby of yours that gets owtlawed because people don't like it. I'm not trying to build a slippery slope argument here, but if people support the taking of rights they don't agree with, what will they do when they find themselves in the minority?
That being said, the one public building I smoke in is a diner. About 95% of the people who go there smoke. Non-smokers have plenty of places (including other diners) that are non-smoking, so it's not like they're forced to deal with it. However, come January, it'll have to go non-smoking due to a law that passed in Oklahoma. Thanks to assholes with reasoning suspiciously similar to yours, we've lost our place to go and socialize, and that diner will will go out of business. People who say we can go outside to smoke just show they don't understand smokers or our culture.
I hope the next right we lose (because there will be more) will be one that you hold very, very dear.
Why is this flamebait? This is why consumers get screwed, we always have a choice between two bozos at elections, and boycotts don't work 99% of the time.
If you want to carry around something that you can keep in your pocket, point at someone, pull the trigger and become judge-jury-and-executioner, ask yourself this one question. What have you done to show me that you can be trusted with this kind of power?
Well, in Oklahoma, I'd have gotten a concealed carry license. It costs money and requires you to go through a course on gun handling and lethal force. In Illinois, any gun owner is required to have a firearm owner's ID card. I have no idea what Illinois' concealed carry laws are. It varies depending on your state.
Here's the deal. Right now, it's legal for people to own handguns, shotguns, and rifles. The laws vary, but you can own them. I have a couple of rifles passed down from my grandparents. Can I buy a full-auto AK-47? Nope, not here. How about an M-60 machine gun? Nope. No missles, other than model rockets, no biological warfare agents, only the barest of chemical agents (kitchen sink chem warfare), no nukes, no tanks, no fighter jets, and no battleships. But that's OK, I could rejoin the military if I really wanted to play with those, biological and chemical stuff excepted (hey, I could always join the Iranian army, I guess). Could I commit a felony and own a firearm? Nope, just like the right to vote, by commiting a felony I'd have given up the right to own a gun. That's fair.
All right, so what's my rights? I can own certain firearms. Cool. I've taken advantage of that right. You don't want to let people walk around with rocket launchers? That's OK with me. I don't currently have the right anyway, and I'm not greedy.
If you want to take away my rights, that's where I have a problem with you. I've lost the right to not wear a seatbelt in my own vehicle. I've lost the right to circumvent copy protection. I've lost the right to drive a vehicle without insurance. Same goes for the rights to not have my house searched without my knowledge, have my library records kept confidential, and smoke inside most buildings. I've lost enough rights, and if you feel that my owning weapons makes you feel too unsafe, then that's your problem. You choose to live in fear. And hey, that's your right. Just leave mine alone.
Without Debian, Ubuntu wouldn't exist. Debian's an excellent general purpose distribution, but the goals between it and Ubuntu are different.
Linspire, on the other hand, has very similar goals to Ubuntu with reguards to the userbase and applications included. It would make more sense for Linspire to be based on Ubuntu, since most end users can't handle the long release cycle or need the plethora of applications available in Debian. Ubuntu already tracks Debian Sid and makes customizations for desktop users, so it would make sense for Linspire to take advantage of that.
That said, I don't know the guy, but if he does end up being a power-hungry idealist, then so what? It's not like we've got a shortage of them. A lot of people would accuse Theo of OpenBSD fame of the same thing, but it's moving along just fine. If, in the worst case, he ends up killing Ubuntu with ideaology, then people will just use something else. It's not like Ubuntu is the only distro around.
What keeps me with debian is the QA and integration of _everything_. Unlike using a public repository, everything in the debian project is made to work with everything else. It's not perfect, but it's damn close.
FC3 came on four CD's, I believe. I think sarge comes on 11, if I remember right (I only download the first CD and apt the other stuff I need, personally). All that extra software is part of the debian project and fits seamlessly into it. Everything is available from one place, which makes searching for and installing packages a snap. Damn near everything I use is part of the system (which is a lot, lemme tell you), and while there are other apt sources out there for the things debian doesn't include, I usually just install those from source.
That said, change sucks, so if you're used to the redhat way, then it'll drive you up the wall at first. Use it for a while and then see what you like better.
> If the state could make a ton of $$$ by suing MS for breach of contract, do you think they would let it slide?
Yes. A few words with some key political people and the general apathy and ignorance of politicians goes a long way.
This is a fairly big issue right now, but Microsoft is used to dealing with the government and understands how to manipulate them. It really boils down to how stubborn the politicians want to be.
Slashdot Mirror
The miltary might of the US is already over taxed by US foreign polocy. Declaring war on Europe would be a disaster.
No, it's not overtaxed. I don't know where you got that idea, but it's not true at all.
Our military is huge. The vast majority of the people I worked with had never done any actual operational work. A lot of the people in Iraq are from the National Guard (think the state militia here) and the Reserves. These people don't have the training much of our full-time military gets - they're average joes who meet up at the armory once a month to do a little training exercise and then go somewhere for a couple weeks in the summer for some active expeirience. Sure, we've got full-time military there, but the vast majority of our deployable forces are not deployed. If worse comes to worse, people like me could be recalled into the service. Or hell, they could start another draft.
Most of our equipment is here, not there. If we were attacked tomorrow, we'd be more than ready to defend ourselves.
The thing is, wars have been unpopular in general since Vietnam, since it was such a SNAFU. Bush doesn't want to send too many troops over, because if he does popular opinion will turn against him. If this were a more popular war, like WWII was, then we'd pull a trick out of Reagan's book and have Iraq covered in asphalt and be painting parking stripes on it by now.
And therein lies the problem with a Country that fails to fulfill its obligations to World politics, serisouly thinks it is more important than every other Country and currently has an administration that is trying to disengage with everyone else.
Bear in mind that the U. S. government is answerable to the citizens of the U. S., and not any other countries. Sure, we're in the U. N., but seriously - who listens to U. N. resolutions without considering how to make it a win for their own country?
Our government here has one of the largest economies, the largest military, and influence unparalleled in the world. We can use that to our advantage. Were your government in this position, it would do the exact same thing, because that's its job. You can't blame the U. S. government for abusing its power to act in what it considers the best interests of its people - you can only argue that its decisions are incorrect.
The Assyrian government acted in the best interests of Assyria when it invaded its neighbors and created the Assyrian empire. The Chaldeans did the same thing when they defeated the Assyrians, and the Persians when they defeated the Chaldeans. The Macedonians acted in the best interests of the Macedonian government when they invaded Greece, and with Alexander a good portion of the Mediterranean region. The Romans acted in the best interests of Rome, the Vatican in the best interests of the Church, Napolean in the best interests of France, the Germans in the best interests of Germany, and so on. Sure, there's been corruption at the highest level in many of these cases, it hasn't always worked out, and each of these empires have fallen, but each of these examples show that the primary purpose of the government is to provide for its country without reguard to others.
Conquest isn't in vogue these days (Iraq isn't a conquest, given that we don't plan on keeping it), and the welfare of the people in the country is a bit more imporant than in ancient times, so the U. S. makes do with spreading its influence and economic power. I'm sure that in Bush's little brain he thinks that what he's doing will improve the U. S. and better the situation for the people the government serves. You can fault him for being wrong and causing damage to the U. S., but it's not his job to worry about the welfare of everywhere else.
And... who made them come along for the ride?
We've lost more of our own than they have in this Iraq thing. The U. K. elected a guy who has his head up Bush's ass. That's not our problem. I don't know or care why Italy and Austrailia are there. If you live in one of those places, tell your government to pull out your troops. We've got a lot more troops we could send to replace them if we had to.
The only people in this situation who didn't have a choice are the Iraqis, and if they'd only quit blowing shit up and decide on a constitution, we'd get out of there and ten years from now they can strike down the constitution and go back to the way they were. Yeah, sucks for them, but it sucks for everyone sometime.
It's been a while since I've seen any of them, but try looking up one of the old host maps of the 70's ARPANET and MILNET. They're not designed around survivability. There's a lot of sections where there's single points of failure.
.mil's current state, but the military had a network that predated the ARPANET, was not packet-based, and was designed for survivability. That network was still operating when I left the military in 2002.
As far as MILNET between the split and the late 90's, I have no idea. That was in the mid-70's sometime, I believe . I won't comment on
Back during the late 60's and early 70's, computers were the wave of the future - the government, especially the military, was very interested in using them to their advantage. The common setup back then was based on mainframes, and since it wasn't feasible to have a mainframe on every military installation, remote access was the best option. The building where I used to work in Japan was once the Data Processing Center for the Pacific theater, supporting all the bases around Japan and Korea (perhaps Guam and the Phillipenes as well). Lots of things were (and still are, in some cases) migrated to remote mainframes for centralized control - logistics, finance and payroll, personnel records, etc. Remote computer access was also handy for weapons research, where the weapons would be tested far from the computer site.
I won't say that the idea of survivability was never brought up or researched, but it was never implemented in the ARPANET, and was never laid down as one of the goals of the system.
Holy crap, it took you guys until the last two presidential terms to stop trusing us?
We've had our fingers in everyone's pies since WWII. We've gone around telling other countries what government they can and can't have. Our little tiff with the Soviet Union caused trouble for all kinds of places that weren't otherwise involved at all.
We've ignored our own constitution and persecuted people's freedom of speech (see the McCarthy trials). We've broken treaty after treaty with the American Indians. We've fueled wars and sold weapons to both sides.
We've funded revolutions, we've changed loyalties (see Vietnam and Cuba), and we've pulled every stop to build U. S. market dominance in the world. We've got a military that we can drop damn near anywhere and if not take over, at least cause a lot of strife.
I wouldn't trust us. Hell, I don't, and I used to be in the U. S. military.
Granted though, in my opinion, you asked for it. We had a policy of letting Europeans kill each other all they wanted without our involvement until Germany dragged us into WWI by trying to get Mexico to attack us. Then, when we decided to go back to our policy of leaving everyone else alone, Germany and Japan dragged us back into it with WWII. It's always one asshole that ruins it for everyone. Saddam dragged us into the gulf war by attacking one of our allies, and good ol' bin Laden, in an attempt to get us out of the middle east, started the current chain of events that led to our invading Afghanistan (personally, I think Iraq was just finishing daddy's work for ol' dubya, but that's just me).
We're the big kid on the block, and if you're tired of our bullying, you're going to have to fight back. And I'm not talking with words, mind you. The American people don't care, by and large, and our politicians have no reason to put an end to it. Until then, you're just going to have to wait until either an economic crisis cripples us, or civil war breaks out. I don't see either happening any time soon.
No, we don't.
The world is big. The radius of total destruction of a nuclear weapon is less than twenty miles, even for the big ones. That's a _lot_ of nukes.
We could probably disrupt every other government on earth by blowing up major cities, but we couldn't kill everyone on earth with direct strikes, much less "obliterate the earth". Things might suck, but mankind would survive. Nuclear winter might solve the global warming problem, though.
Never been there, so I wouldn't know. I know it was a project of UIUC.
:)
Sorry about the misspelling, BTW. We have indian names like Okfuskee around here. French ones throw me off
This is a common misconception.
The internet was used ideas from research (packet switching research, mostly) designed for that goal. However, it was not built for the purpose of being an emergency communication network. Look at the early designs of the backbone and the central control by BBN - a well-placed nuclear strike would have taken down the internet, no problem. The location of the data lines and hosts was never classified, which it certainly would have been if it was expected to be used in the case of nuclear attack.
It's still not really designed this way - if a nuclear weapon was to hit almost any major U. S. city, a large portion of the internet would drop offline until manually rerouted. The original research design was to have no manual rerouting necessary.
Oh, and the precessesor of DARPA was ARPA, and its successor was ARPA. Same organization, they just liked to change the name a lot.
Ack! I meant .mil, not .net. Bah, skipped that over while previewing.
Actually, IIRC, .cx was sold to a corporate entity. It's not in the control of the Christmas Islands anymore.
.gov and .net). ICANN opened those up a while back.
I'm sure there's non-U. S. registrars for the main TLD's (except
What other countries have that guarantee?
Quite a few, actually. You'd be surprised.
But yeah, I argued a similar point myself. I don't trust the U. N. to control the DNS servers either.
Yes, the U. S. did invent the Internet. We built the ARPANEt, split off MILNET, then connected it to NSFnet (National Science Foundation, "National" meaning U. S. in this case), who then connected it to several networks inside the U. S. (corporate, government, and educational). All this before the privitization of the Internet that opened it globally.
Note that "internet" (note the lower-case I) means "between networks". Since we're talking the same network that later became what you call the Internet, and we branced it off to connect several networks before it was global, then how can you claim that the U. S. didn't invent it?
Hrm, Europeans didn't wire the U. S. telephone network. Nor did they build my computer (most of the parts are from southeast Asia, although the computer itself was assembled by me), the Japanese built my "Ford" truck, my '65 Ford Galaxie was built by Americans, and you can bloody well have the TV's as far as I care (although, once again, most TV's in the U. S. are certainly not built in Europe).
We make our own paper, thank you very much, and if China doesn't want us to use their explosives, they should stop selling them to us. We generally only use Chinese explosives for fireworks on Independance Day anyway.
Oh and the WWW? My browser is written by people from all over the world, including the U. S., based on Netscape, which in turn was based on Mosaic, which was designed in Champagne-Urbana, Illinois here in America. The protocol is mainained by the IETF (a traditionally American organization) and the format is maintained by an international standards body (the W3C).
Each of these examples, except for the telephone network and the 'WWW', are concrete items. You can't compare them to the internet, which is a communications network. This would be more similar to my city demanding that SBC give it control over the local phone number database. Even that's not completely apt because SBC owns the phone lines here, while your country or businesses within it own the internet infastructure in your country.
Tell you what, the ITU, based in Europe, controls the standards for the modem sitting on my shelf (although the standard it uses was pioneered by Lucent Technologies, a U. S. company). Europe can drop by and pick it up any time it wants.
What's with all this "we" business? Unless the poster actually had a founding hand in setting up what became the Internet, then how do they have any more right to it than anyone else? Because they happen to have been born in the same country as people who did? Accident of birth is no ethical basis for distributing non-local resources.
.mil and (I'm assuming) .gov servers), there's no advantage either way. ICANN doesn't do the greatest job at policy making, but personally I think they do a better job than the U. N. would do - the U. N. would just argue about it all day while China pushed for more segregation capability and the hardcore religious countries pushed to have the domain name of sites with pornographic and material revoked. Great, more bickering.
How about our taxes paying for the research, development, and the 20+ years it operated while inaccessible to the common citizen (only certain university students and the military could access the arpanet before the late 80's, and the general public didn't have access until the 90's). When the U. S. allowed the rest of the world to join, it was debugged, working, and ready to go.
I didn't pour asphalt for U. S. Highway 60, but I drive on it every day, and it's mine in the sense that the taxes I, my parents before me, and my grandparents before them paid built it and continue to pay for upkeep.
That said, I think the whole deal is stupid. Who cares who controls the root servers? Every country has their own TLD, except the ones that sold theirs off, and I'm sure there's registrars that aren't based in the U. S. that have access to the general TLD's. Other than the possibility we would block a country from the root servers (which would be a huge deal, since the government doesn't really control any but the
A compromise by putting some root servers outside the U. S. would all but eliminate the possibility of the U. S. cutting off a country. We're not going to cut off, say, all of Asia or Europe.
Personally, if I was the U. N., I'd be pushing for control of the IETF.
It's been a long time since I've played around with Blender... but can it animate fluidly? Can it render using the latest and greatest renderers? (RenderMan, MentalRay, Maxwell, Brazil, VRay, etc) Can it do dynamics and simulations? Does it have complex textruing utilities and abilities? Can you set up complex rigging solutions with it? I'm guessing the answer is no to a lot of those questions. And even if it does do some of that in some fashion or another.. I guarantee that it's not nearly up to the quality the people using Max or Maya would expect.
So... you haven't used it in a long time, don't know its capabilities, yet you feel that it's not up to the standards of Maya or Max?
Anyone with working experience in Blender and Maya have an opinion?
You don't have secret courts, and your rights to speech, movement, and religion are secure, are they?
I sincerely congratulate you. Mine aren't. And that's the funny thing, becuase that's what the U.S. was supposed to be about. That's why I'm protective about my rights. In any event, since you're not a U.S. citizen, ignore my point about your rights in particular, since my argument only concerns the U.S. government. You guys can run your country however you feel.
Now, I've never been to New Zealand, although I'd like to someday (just so I can smoke up the place... just kidding), but around here, if you don't smoke and you want to go out, no problem! There's tons of places you can go and not have to deal with us smokers. Restaurants, bars, movie theaters, you name it! All the smokers will be out in the parking lot, telling jokes and talking about stuff.
I'll be at my diner, lit cigarette in one hand, coffee cup in the other, meeting up with my friends over a plate of greasy, overpriced cheese fries. I ain't hurtin' nobody but myself, and that's my business (we don't have public health care here, so I'm not even hurting anyone financially). When the government decides to butt itself into my business, that's when I get pissed.
Now, as for a little advice: you want the places you like to go to be non-smoking? Tell them! Tell them you'll stop going because of the smoke. Tell your friends to do the same thing. Places like that are owned by businessmen, and if they lose money by allowing smoking (hey, you're the majority, right?) then it's good business sense to stop. You guys have a free market economy, right? That's what happened here, before a lot of those laws went into effect. If it doesn't work for you, then maybe anti-smokers aren't as plentiful as you think they are.
Actually, I don't have nor need a concealed carry license, since I've never fired a handgun. I have friends with cc licences, but they're either serious collectors, bounty hunters or security guards. I just own a couple rifles and take them out for target practice every now and again - they're more heirlooms than anything. Handguns are for killing people, collecting, law enforcement, and target practice. I've got rifles for target practice and collecting, no law enforcement job, and no expectation of having to kill anyone. Besides, I was given plenty of gun safety training while in the military.
.45 and go shooting up the school? Sure, it'd make it harder for them to get them, but how many of them are there? People who don't know how to take care of guns and end up shooting themselves while cleaning them? Well, there's a lot I could say about that one, but either way, is it the government's place to protect us from ourselves? That's a larger argument I'd rather not stray into on slashdot.
:)
The thing is, why would we need to outlaw handguns? Are they too much of a problem? If so, then how? Gang members? No, they'd get the guns anyway. Policemen? No, they need them for their job. Kids who grab their parents'
How likely are you to blow away people in a supermarket? How likely is the average citizen? How often does it happen? Are you more likely to be shot buying tic tacs at your local Safeway by someone who wouldn't have an illegal weapon than being struck by lightning? Is it worth taking a right that we've had for years just to lessen the small chance that you won't be shot by some nutjob?
That's the thing. You have a right not to live in fear, but outlawing handguns won't make you feel more safe. East St. Louis will still be just as dangerous to drive through. Criminals will still get them. You've just reduced the tiny, tiny chance that someone with a few wires crossed will shoot you. If you would feel silly wearing a bulletproof vest in public, then why don't you feel silly trying to take away a right that has been ours since the country was founded?
I doubt rocket launchers were legal to own at the time of their invention as weapons. If I invented a new type of weapon tomorrow, it would be covered by quite a few existing laws. That's not to mention the fact that even if those laws weren't in place at the time of the rocket launcher's invention, blowing up other people's property and injuring/killing people was already illegal. Of the other items I mentioned, some of them are perfectly legal to own if you go through the paperwork for them (the M-60, tanks, and probably some of the others). The laws of physics keep me from carrying antimatter in my pocket, and they're rigorously enforced.
Oh, and carrying knives of any decent size is illegal in most places as well, as I've been reminded by people when I forget to take my sword off when going on a shopping run during an SCA event. Nothing like the looks you get when you walk into a grocery store wearing medieval garb and a claymore
You apparently haven't travelled much outside the country. The U.S. is one of the most anti-smoking countries in the world. Personally, I think it's because of the high asshole per capita we have here, but that's just my opinion.
Besides, you miss the point. I say I've lost the right to smoke in most buildings. I have no problem if a building has a no smoking sign on it. I do have a problem if the government tells me where I can and can't smoke (excepting government buildings, of course). Where I can smoke should be left up to the owner of whatever property I'm currently on.
It's things like this that piss me off. You don't like smoking, so it's cool with you if the government takes away people's right to smoke in certain places. A lot of people think smoking should be outlawed altogether, because _they_ personally don't like it. They think that's fine for them. But the deal is, that's one more right that you're losing, even if you don't use it. Next it could be a favorite hobby of yours that gets owtlawed because people don't like it. I'm not trying to build a slippery slope argument here, but if people support the taking of rights they don't agree with, what will they do when they find themselves in the minority?
That being said, the one public building I smoke in is a diner. About 95% of the people who go there smoke. Non-smokers have plenty of places (including other diners) that are non-smoking, so it's not like they're forced to deal with it. However, come January, it'll have to go non-smoking due to a law that passed in Oklahoma. Thanks to assholes with reasoning suspiciously similar to yours, we've lost our place to go and socialize, and that diner will will go out of business. People who say we can go outside to smoke just show they don't understand smokers or our culture.
I hope the next right we lose (because there will be more) will be one that you hold very, very dear.
Why is this flamebait? This is why consumers get screwed, we always have a choice between two bozos at elections, and boycotts don't work 99% of the time.
You can't make people care.
If you want to carry around something that you can keep in your pocket, point at someone, pull the trigger and become judge-jury-and-executioner, ask yourself this one question. What have you done to show me that you can be trusted with this kind of power?
Well, in Oklahoma, I'd have gotten a concealed carry license. It costs money and requires you to go through a course on gun handling and lethal force. In Illinois, any gun owner is required to have a firearm owner's ID card. I have no idea what Illinois' concealed carry laws are. It varies depending on your state.
Here's the deal. Right now, it's legal for people to own handguns, shotguns, and rifles. The laws vary, but you can own them. I have a couple of rifles passed down from my grandparents. Can I buy a full-auto AK-47? Nope, not here. How about an M-60 machine gun? Nope. No missles, other than model rockets, no biological warfare agents, only the barest of chemical agents (kitchen sink chem warfare), no nukes, no tanks, no fighter jets, and no battleships. But that's OK, I could rejoin the military if I really wanted to play with those, biological and chemical stuff excepted (hey, I could always join the Iranian army, I guess). Could I commit a felony and own a firearm? Nope, just like the right to vote, by commiting a felony I'd have given up the right to own a gun. That's fair.
All right, so what's my rights? I can own certain firearms. Cool. I've taken advantage of that right. You don't want to let people walk around with rocket launchers? That's OK with me. I don't currently have the right anyway, and I'm not greedy.
If you want to take away my rights, that's where I have a problem with you. I've lost the right to not wear a seatbelt in my own vehicle. I've lost the right to circumvent copy protection. I've lost the right to drive a vehicle without insurance. Same goes for the rights to not have my house searched without my knowledge, have my library records kept confidential, and smoke inside most buildings. I've lost enough rights, and if you feel that my owning weapons makes you feel too unsafe, then that's your problem. You choose to live in fear. And hey, that's your right. Just leave mine alone.
It'll run both, yes. I can't say about the integration of the menus and themes, but there's no reason you can't run KDE apps in a GNOME environment.
Why wouldn't they have CS programs in Texas?
What, you think all they teach at Texas univiersities is agriculture and oil-related subjects?
Don't judge Texas until you've spent some time there. I hate the place, but I'm from Oklahoma where hating Texas is a requirement of citizenship.
I don't get that insinuation at all.
Without Debian, Ubuntu wouldn't exist. Debian's an excellent general purpose distribution, but the goals between it and Ubuntu are different.
Linspire, on the other hand, has very similar goals to Ubuntu with reguards to the userbase and applications included. It would make more sense for Linspire to be based on Ubuntu, since most end users can't handle the long release cycle or need the plethora of applications available in Debian. Ubuntu already tracks Debian Sid and makes customizations for desktop users, so it would make sense for Linspire to take advantage of that.
That said, I don't know the guy, but if he does end up being a power-hungry idealist, then so what? It's not like we've got a shortage of them. A lot of people would accuse Theo of OpenBSD fame of the same thing, but it's moving along just fine. If, in the worst case, he ends up killing Ubuntu with ideaology, then people will just use something else. It's not like Ubuntu is the only distro around.
What keeps me with debian is the QA and integration of _everything_. Unlike using a public repository, everything in the debian project is made to work with everything else. It's not perfect, but it's damn close.
FC3 came on four CD's, I believe. I think sarge comes on 11, if I remember right (I only download the first CD and apt the other stuff I need, personally). All that extra software is part of the debian project and fits seamlessly into it. Everything is available from one place, which makes searching for and installing packages a snap. Damn near everything I use is part of the system (which is a lot, lemme tell you), and while there are other apt sources out there for the things debian doesn't include, I usually just install those from source.
That said, change sucks, so if you're used to the redhat way, then it'll drive you up the wall at first. Use it for a while and then see what you like better.
> If the state could make a ton of $$$ by suing MS for breach of contract, do you think they would let it slide?
Yes. A few words with some key political people and the general apathy and ignorance of politicians goes a long way.
This is a fairly big issue right now, but Microsoft is used to dealing with the government and understands how to manipulate them. It really boils down to how stubborn the politicians want to be.