Because Haliburton, specifically Kellog Brown & Root, has a LOGCAP contract with the military. It is a military outsourcer. As a result of Bush Sr. and Clinton's drawdowns on the military budgets and manpower, the military has taken advantage of private/public venture statutes enacted in the Reagan Administration to outsource menial tasks that are tangential to the military's prime mission of war fighting.
We're still in Iraq because the job isn't finished yet, junior. It took Germany four years to stabilize and draw up a constitution after WWII. It took Japan a lot less time, because MacArthur wrote it for them and the country was relatively intact. A lot more so than Iraq, certainly. Countries don't magically rebound and go back to normal days or even months after being steamrolled. One of the principal stereotypes of US interventionism is the "fight and run". We do the fighting, and leave the mess to others to clean up. This stereotype isn't totally unwarranted, especially since the end of the Cold War. It certainly has been an allegation about Afghanistan, that we aren't "doing enough". Well, obviously, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Major fighting has been over for approximately 2 months. No reasonable person expects any sort of government to be functional in 2 months in a state that has been devoid of politics for 30 years, is shattered from decades of embargo and war, and still has armed elements of the former regime running around killing people. No one without an agenda, at least.
Or, in the interest of balancing out FoxNews' reporting, a hypothetical Iraqi blogger can now give the outside world a better picture of what's going on in the country.
Or, in the interest of balancing BBC World News reporting, Where's Raed can report on stuff that is closer to reality. Like, reporting from this planet.
Maybe it was the Chinese. They didn't have a problem breaking the embargo by contracting to lay miles of fiber optic cable for a state of the art air defense system in Iraq. Maybe they did a little side work for the Ministry of Information while they were in there, eh?
LOL! Oh yes, it was completely out of the kindness of their hearts. Never mind that the items being sold against the embargo benefited only the elite - the Baath party and Republican Guard - not ordinary Iraqis. Let's not mention the billions of dollars of oil being illicitly traded by the regime, an open secret, with the funds going to build billion dollar palaces and Mercedes for Republican Guard commanders.
Breaking the embargo is worse than deposing the dictator, because it allowed the dictator to remain in power. Just like EU trade with Castro, or Chinese subsidies and trade with N. Korea, props up those regimes. Especially when military equipment is being sold to the regime immediately prior to the war. Just thinking of the little people. Or in the case of France and Russia, the billions in pre-negotiated oil contracts and former arms sales debt.
Rest of the world=good US=bad
Uh uh. The embargo was broken because there was a base interest to do so.
I must say that the nature of ~ 80% of the posts here is completely misinformed crap!
Hey! You're new here aren't you? If not, you must have been reading the linked articles (silly thing, you) and not reading the comments. Or you're just a blinking unobservant idiot, but I doubt that. Of COURSE 80% (to be exceedingly generous) of the posts here are complete and utter crap. Slashdot is the dumbass magnet of the Internet.
As if orbiting Jupiter didn't juice them up enough. I don't think a few rads from uranium pellets will hurt anything. Jupiter emits twice as much energy as it recieves from the Sun. It's a big rad factory.
The reactor is encased in a core engineered to survive a reentry from orbit. Failing that, if the core is breached, the fuel is in encapsulated form so that it would be reentry safe.
NASA and Russia have been lobbing radioactive material into space for decades on their spacecraft as power sources. They're called Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators - they produce electricity from the natural decay of radioactive isotopes. There have been at least two cases of RTG reentry from orbit or near orbit without the core being breached or radioactivity released: Apollo 13, and the Nimbus B1 satellite in 1968, which failed to reach orbit and fell into Santa Barbara channel. A third RTG fell from orbit before the containment policy. The RTG was expected to burn up in the atmosphere. That was the Navy's Transit 5BN nav sat in 1964. It burned up in atmosphere with 17000 curries of rad released. Harmless.
These new designs being planned by NASA under Prometheus will be full fledged fission reactors. They'll be lobbed into orbit cold - no fission occurring, and the spacecraft will never return to Earth, at least during the halflife of the fuel. If this reactor failed to reach orbit, it would fall back to Earth harmlessly.
Today was the first time since high school 11 years ago that I've had to write in cursive. Man, it looked like crap.
This has nothing to do with computers though. I think it is part of a general decline in basic skills (basic grammar and spelling are down the commode too), and a lack of need to write in cursive. I just prefer printing, and can print fast, essentially a shorthand. While there is some merit to maintaining penmanship as an artful skill, there's really little actual demand for cursive in the real world. On the other hand, the ability to write legibly, in cursive or printing, has gone down the tubes. Most of my coworkers write like middle school kids. I swear. You know, the big blocky letters with nary a straight or parallel line in sight? That's the downside to the decline in penmanship - when necessary the written word is often unreadable, and definately doesn't look professional.
The reason that Baghdad isn't a parking lot, like Grozny, is that the US military "spending every now and then billions of $ for developing new army technology." Ask the Chechens which enemy they'd rather have, the Americans, or the Russians. I'll guarantee they'll pick Americans. We spend billions so we don't HAVE to flatten cities to achieve victory. That "helps people" not get killed.
Re:This is going to be instantly moded down (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 25, @09:19PM (#6037954) So tell me, what trauma occured in your life to give you the "little man" syndrome that you project? Too many ass kickings when you were younger? Not popular with the ladies or the gents? Parents beat you? Late night sneaky uncle?
I have a good paying job, a beautiful wife, and I'm 6 foot 2 and 200 pounds of muscle, with a BA in Anthropology and Philosophy. I'm smart, I'm successful, and I'm happy. Which is probably more than can be said for you, who has such a "little man in the pants" syndrome that you can't even post to me with anything other than Anonymous Pathetic Dickhead. Hope you get out of your parent's basement soon, loser.
It's a neat book and all, but it's a derivative work. My point being if we're supposed to be halfway intelligent people here on Slashdot, pick up a primary source and READ. If people would put half the energy into pondering real philosophical texts that they put into analyzing a half-baked action movie, they may actually learn something and come away more the wiser.
and your assumptions excluded any philosophers who beleive there's a spiritual side to enlightenment.
Of course then it would be THEOLOGY, not Philosophy. The "spiritual" isn't conducive to rational, empirical analysis. I don't know where YOU are going to school, but any such talk about "enlightenment" in such breathless terms would warrant a bemused pat on the head. Perhaps you go to Berkeley?
It's even older. The whole basis of the Matrix is rooted in Descartes' _Meditations_. You know, the whole "Cogito ergo sum" thing?
Goes like this: Our senses are unreliable, it is possible we are decieved about the nature of the world. Like maybe by an "evil genius". We can't be sure of anything, even of the existence of others (who may be machines or illusions made by the evil genius), except that "I am."
About 300 years later, Heidegger took the Cogito and radicalized it even further and created "Phenomenology". Kant also did alot of important work with "appearance and reality" and the trouble with being an animal tied to the world through the imperfect senses.
Real philosophy is boring, arduous, difficult to read and difficult to understand.
I wouldn't say it's difficult to understand, for any reasonably educated person who can think logically. It may be difficult to read, for the reason you MAY find it difficult to understand. Real philosophy is methodical and RIGOROUS. The whole point of philosophy is to understand the world through rational analysis. It isn't the sophist, circular reasoning mumbo jumbo spouted in certain sections of this Matrix. "You are, who you are" sounds real deep and mysterious. To the ignorant. As description, it's empty. The Law of Identity. And just because some guy says "Ergo" a few times in deep, sonorous, authoratative voice doesn't mean the content of his words is meaningful. And they weren't.
What better way to get kids into religion than saying "You see, Jesus was the One, much like Neo in the Matrix?"
RELIGION is the key word here. There is a lot of theology and mythological references in the Matrix, but it's light on real nitty gritty philosophy. But most people think that crap in the "New Age" section at the bookstore is Philosophy. It's not. And other than a healthy dose of Cartesian doubt, these movies are Philosophy free.
Philosophy serves to do a few things, at the bare minimum: 1, encourage people to critically analyze everything in their life, in the pursuit of enlightenment (be it purely intellectual or possibly mystical
Bzzt. You are either a. a sorry troll b. a really lousy Philosophy prof.
Pursuit of enlightenment, intellectual or MYSTICAL? Gave yourself away right from the start. I'm sure you don't find anything funny about going to a store like Waldenbooks and finding I Ching and Feng-shui books next to Kant and Betrand Russell in the Phil section.
Not to mention adhering to cabling standards and building codes...
"Plenum" cable is just that, cable designed for installation in the building "plenum" - the space between the ceiling and floor. It's teflon coated so when your pad goes up in flames, it doesn't produce poisonous gas and kill you before you can get out. It's mandated by cabling standards and by law in many places.
residents of the Great Lakes State can no longer knowingly "assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise" any device or software that conceals "the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service."
Frankly, if someone chided me for letting *my* cellphone at home, or off, or the battery dead, I'd tell them to go f*ck themselves and get a life.
This is really a case of technology run amok, if you ask me. A phone is a tool. I own the tool, the tool does not own me. There is nothing so urgent and pressing that my friends need to be able to contact me 24/7 wherever I am. It is intrusive, compulsive, obsessive, and frankly more than a tad wierd. Get a life, freak. Really.
One of my coworkers has a girlfriend that's one of these cellphone wierdos. She's calling the guy every 10 minutes, just to hear the guy breath. What the hell could you possible have to say? The girl had an 87 page, four column, front and back itemized cell bill last month. That's out of control. Turn off the phone, read a book. Take some time out to be alone and THINK for awhile, instead of losing yourself in idle shallow banter.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Haliburton, specifically Kellog Brown & Root, has a LOGCAP contract with the military. It is a military outsourcer. As a result of Bush Sr. and Clinton's drawdowns on the military budgets and manpower, the military has taken advantage of private/public venture statutes enacted in the Reagan Administration to outsource menial tasks that are tangential to the military's prime mission of war fighting.
a rticleid= 6008
Read:
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?
We're still in Iraq because the job isn't finished yet, junior. It took Germany four years to stabilize and draw up a constitution after WWII. It took Japan a lot less time, because MacArthur wrote it for them and the country was relatively intact. A lot more so than Iraq, certainly. Countries don't magically rebound and go back to normal days or even months after being steamrolled. One of the principal stereotypes of US interventionism is the "fight and run". We do the fighting, and leave the mess to others to clean up. This stereotype isn't totally unwarranted, especially since the end of the Cold War. It certainly has been an allegation about Afghanistan, that we aren't "doing enough". Well, obviously, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Major fighting has been over for approximately 2 months. No reasonable person expects any sort of government to be functional in 2 months in a state that has been devoid of politics for 30 years, is shattered from decades of embargo and war, and still has armed elements of the former regime running around killing people. No one without an agenda, at least.
Derek
Or, in the interest of balancing out FoxNews' reporting, a hypothetical Iraqi blogger can now give the outside world a better picture of what's going on in the country.
Or, in the interest of balancing BBC World News reporting, Where's Raed can report on stuff that is closer to reality. Like, reporting from this planet.
Derek
Maybe it was the Chinese. They didn't have a problem breaking the embargo by contracting to lay miles of fiber optic cable for a state of the art air defense system in Iraq. Maybe they did a little side work for the Ministry of Information while they were in there, eh?
Derek
LOL! Oh yes, it was completely out of the kindness of their hearts. Never mind that the items being sold against the embargo benefited only the elite - the Baath party and Republican Guard - not ordinary Iraqis. Let's not mention the billions of dollars of oil being illicitly traded by the regime, an open secret, with the funds going to build billion dollar palaces and Mercedes for Republican Guard commanders.
Breaking the embargo is worse than deposing the dictator, because it allowed the dictator to remain in power. Just like EU trade with Castro, or Chinese subsidies and trade with N. Korea, props up those regimes. Especially when military equipment is being sold to the regime immediately prior to the war. Just thinking of the little people. Or in the case of France and Russia, the billions in pre-negotiated oil contracts and former arms sales debt.
Rest of the world=good
US=bad
Uh uh. The embargo was broken because there was a base interest to do so.
Derek
There have been genetically modified pets for thousands of years. They're called dogs.
Derek
I must say that the nature of ~ 80% of the posts here is completely misinformed crap!
Hey! You're new here aren't you? If not, you must have been reading the linked articles (silly thing, you) and not reading the comments. Or you're just a blinking unobservant idiot, but I doubt that. Of COURSE 80% (to be exceedingly generous) of the posts here are complete and utter crap. Slashdot is the dumbass magnet of the Internet.
Derek
As if orbiting Jupiter didn't juice them up enough. I don't think a few rads from uranium pellets will hurt anything. Jupiter emits twice as much energy as it recieves from the Sun. It's a big rad factory.
Derek
The reactor is encased in a core engineered to survive a reentry from orbit. Failing that, if the core is breached, the fuel is in encapsulated form so that it would be reentry safe.
NASA and Russia have been lobbing radioactive material into space for decades on their spacecraft as power sources. They're called Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators - they produce electricity from the natural decay of radioactive isotopes. There have been at least two cases of RTG reentry from orbit or near orbit without the core being breached or radioactivity released: Apollo 13, and the Nimbus B1 satellite in 1968, which failed to reach orbit and fell into Santa Barbara channel. A third RTG fell from orbit before the containment policy. The RTG was expected to burn up in the atmosphere. That was the Navy's Transit 5BN nav sat in 1964. It burned up in atmosphere with 17000 curries of rad released. Harmless.
These new designs being planned by NASA under Prometheus will be full fledged fission reactors. They'll be lobbed into orbit cold - no fission occurring, and the spacecraft will never return to Earth, at least during the halflife of the fuel. If this reactor failed to reach orbit, it would fall back to Earth harmlessly.
Derek
Today was the first time since high school 11 years ago that I've had to write in cursive. Man, it looked like crap.
This has nothing to do with computers though. I think it is part of a general decline in basic skills (basic grammar and spelling are down the commode too), and a lack of need to write in cursive. I just prefer printing, and can print fast, essentially a shorthand. While there is some merit to maintaining penmanship as an artful skill, there's really little actual demand for cursive in the real world. On the other hand, the ability to write legibly, in cursive or printing, has gone down the tubes. Most of my coworkers write like middle school kids. I swear. You know, the big blocky letters with nary a straight or parallel line in sight? That's the downside to the decline in penmanship - when necessary the written word is often unreadable, and definately doesn't look professional.
Derek
Since when has it been the perogative of any nation to help any people other than its own? Pfft.
Derek
The reason that Baghdad isn't a parking lot, like Grozny, is that the US military "spending every now and then billions of $ for developing new army technology." Ask the Chechens which enemy they'd rather have, the Americans, or the Russians. I'll guarantee they'll pick Americans. We spend billions so we don't HAVE to flatten cities to achieve victory. That "helps people" not get killed.
Derek
Re:This is going to be instantly moded down (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 25, @09:19PM (#6037954)
So tell me, what trauma occured in your life to give you the "little man" syndrome that you project? Too many ass kickings when you were younger? Not popular with the ladies or the gents? Parents beat you? Late night sneaky uncle?
I have a good paying job, a beautiful wife, and I'm 6 foot 2 and 200 pounds of muscle, with a BA in Anthropology and Philosophy. I'm smart, I'm successful, and I'm happy. Which is probably more than can be said for you, who has such a "little man in the pants" syndrome that you can't even post to me with anything other than Anonymous Pathetic Dickhead. Hope you get out of your parent's basement soon, loser.
Derek
It's a neat book and all, but it's a derivative work. My point being if we're supposed to be halfway intelligent people here on Slashdot, pick up a primary source and READ. If people would put half the energy into pondering real philosophical texts that they put into analyzing a half-baked action movie, they may actually learn something and come away more the wiser.
Derek
and your assumptions excluded any philosophers who beleive there's a spiritual side to enlightenment.
Of course then it would be THEOLOGY, not Philosophy. The "spiritual" isn't conducive to rational, empirical analysis. I don't know where YOU are going to school, but any such talk about "enlightenment" in such breathless terms would warrant a bemused pat on the head. Perhaps you go to Berkeley?
Derek
Or hey, even better, how about picking up a book on, say - PHILOSOPHY!
Derek
It's even older. The whole basis of the Matrix is rooted in Descartes' _Meditations_. You know, the whole "Cogito ergo sum" thing?
Goes like this: Our senses are unreliable, it is possible we are decieved about the nature of the world. Like maybe by an "evil genius". We can't be sure of anything, even of the existence of others (who may be machines or illusions made by the evil genius), except that "I am."
About 300 years later, Heidegger took the Cogito and radicalized it even further and created "Phenomenology". Kant also did alot of important work with "appearance and reality" and the trouble with being an animal tied to the world through the imperfect senses.
Derek
Cause and effect, while repeatedly observed to be true, is not a basis for an entire philosophy, either.
Especially since Hume shot it all to hell oh, 300 years ago.
Derek
Real philosophy is boring, arduous, difficult to read and difficult to understand.
I wouldn't say it's difficult to understand, for any reasonably educated person who can think logically. It may be difficult to read, for the reason you MAY find it difficult to understand. Real philosophy is methodical and RIGOROUS. The whole point of philosophy is to understand the world through rational analysis. It isn't the sophist, circular reasoning mumbo jumbo spouted in certain sections of this Matrix. "You are, who you are" sounds real deep and mysterious. To the ignorant. As description, it's empty. The Law of Identity. And just because some guy says "Ergo" a few times in deep, sonorous, authoratative voice doesn't mean the content of his words is meaningful. And they weren't.
Derek
What better way to get kids into religion than saying "You see, Jesus was the One, much like Neo in the Matrix?"
RELIGION is the key word here. There is a lot of theology and mythological references in the Matrix, but it's light on real nitty gritty philosophy. But most people think that crap in the "New Age" section at the bookstore is Philosophy. It's not. And other than a healthy dose of Cartesian doubt, these movies are Philosophy free.
Derek
Philosophy serves to do a few things, at the bare minimum: 1, encourage people to critically analyze everything in their life, in the pursuit of enlightenment (be it purely intellectual or possibly mystical
Bzzt. You are either a. a sorry troll b. a really lousy Philosophy prof.
Pursuit of enlightenment, intellectual or MYSTICAL? Gave yourself away right from the start. I'm sure you don't find anything funny about going to a store like Waldenbooks and finding I Ching and Feng-shui books next to Kant and Betrand Russell in the Phil section.
Derek@philosophyonmyBA.edu
if you make this investment in CAT5 , go plenum.
Not to mention adhering to cabling standards and building codes...
"Plenum" cable is just that, cable designed for installation in the building "plenum" - the space between the ceiling and floor. It's teflon coated so when your pad goes up in flames, it doesn't produce poisonous gas and kill you before you can get out. It's mandated by cabling standards and by law in many places.
Derek
residents of the Great Lakes State can no longer knowingly "assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise" any device or software that conceals "the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service."
There goes NAT out the window folks...
Derek
The United States is not going to implement a military draft, because there is no need for it, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Jan. 7."
Especially since Rumsfeld was one of the principle architects of the all-volunteer force.
Derek
Frankly, if someone chided me for letting *my* cellphone at home, or off, or the battery dead, I'd tell them to go f*ck themselves and get a life.
This is really a case of technology run amok, if you ask me. A phone is a tool. I own the tool, the tool does not own me. There is nothing so urgent and pressing that my friends need to be able to contact me 24/7 wherever I am. It is intrusive, compulsive, obsessive, and frankly more than a tad wierd. Get a life, freak. Really.
One of my coworkers has a girlfriend that's one of these cellphone wierdos. She's calling the guy every 10 minutes, just to hear the guy breath. What the hell could you possible have to say? The girl had an 87 page, four column, front and back itemized cell bill last month. That's out of control. Turn off the phone, read a book. Take some time out to be alone and THINK for awhile, instead of losing yourself in idle shallow banter.
Derek
No worries dude. World population is due to SHRINK after 2050:
T .h tml
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/08/opinion/08WAT
Derek