Clear cut evidence of war crimes. Define war crimes. If you saw war crimes in that video from wikileaks, then you are incompetent to judge what a war crime is. When competent authority finds evidence of a war crime, our soldiers are punished. Key word being competent.
Maybe you can link me up to some of those videos you mention? I don't claim to be competent authority - I was only an enlisted man. But, I'll bet that I'm more competent than most of the people posting damning statements on the internet about those soldiers.
Men are sentenced at court martial based on evidence, not on the common civilian's distaste for war.
You haven't studied as thoroughly as you wish to imply. Nowhere do you make mention of attack craft. You seem to grasp the concept of fighters, bombers, various support craft, but dismiss attack craft. Your point of view is both uninformed, and lacking substance.
Allow me to spell it out for you: those pilots who get down in the mud, the blood, and the gore to support their mates in real combat get more respect from me than any group of pilots sitting miles above the earth, safely insulated from battle, playing wargames on computers. That includes most rotary wing aircraft - which as you point out, the Army has plenty of.
The USAF goes behind enemy lines? Yeah? With what support, exactly? You mean a single John Wayne type of guy, with a couple engineers? Get serious. Even the RAF sends in an entire regiment. If we needed to do something similar, we have the Seabees, (NAVY again) and Combat Engineers (ARMY of course).
Sounds to me like you've been reading a lot of propaganda.
You're making a case for my own position. We should have gone into Afghanistan on a punitive expedition, then got the hell out once the government was destroyed, and incapable of supporting a military.
We should do the same thing in Somalia, except there, we don't hit the government, but the pirates.
Punitive expedition. Short and sweet. Destroy the military and/or pirating capability, then go home.
You won't find me trying to justify the invasion of Iraq - I argued long and loud against that invasion. But, now that we are there, I keep arguing for withdrawal. Their military ability has long been destroyed.
The US will never build a government to their liking, and if they did, that government would be overthrown within months after we leave. Any moron can see that, IMHO. If it wasn't destroyed, we would be likely to do another Operation Ajax to destroy it ourselves.
Here's where someone says, "HUH??"
The Wikipedia has a pretty decent article on Operation Ajax - check it out before you say that I'm ignorant.
Many cases. Many, meaning, what, exactly? I'll not try to sugar coat the fact that military life is a magnet to psychopaths, or that military life might turn some people into psychopaths. But, many?
Oh - do you notice that we are prepared for such occurences with a procedure we refer to as "Court Martial"?
And, we have convicted those psychos that were caught, and for which there was evidence sufficient to get a conviction.
The other side? Their fucking LEADERS are psychos who approve of dousing little girls with acid, or pushing them back into burning school buildings, and bombing women and children in markets.
Many rapes and murders. I think you need to step back and look at the whole picture. Standing to close to examine a detail or two really distorts you view of the entire tapestry.
Sweet jesus - you're being particularly dense. The Navy, the Marines, and the Army all establish air superiority in each of their respective theaters without any intervention by the Air Force. On the contrary - the air force is incapable of establishing a beachhead any place at all. They have to wait on the other services to provide air strips and all the support necessary for a forward base.
Want to see a REAL Air FORCE? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Regiment Those are some badass sumbitches right there - like our Marines, they can move into a hostile area and capture or build their own air strip, under fire. Show me something equally impressive that our Air "Force" can do.
Uhhh - you seem to see a difference between marine and navy pilots. There is none. The marines are part of the navy, and any marine pilot is pretty much interchangeable with a navy pilot. They fly the same planes, they go through the same training, they fly the same missions, they use the same support infrastructure.
"Best" means, we can do it all. We can deliver payloads anywhere in the world, under any conditions,and that is the bottom line. We don't make mistakes and fly nuclear ordinance halfway across a continent where they don't belong, or any of a number of other mistakes made by the Air Force. Which of the services has recently had it's chief executive replaced for what amounts to incompetence?
But - those with stars in their eyes won't understand my reasoning. Just go on believing that the Air Force is equal to the rest of the services. Maybe, just maybe, when the Air Force acquires a meaningful quantity of attack craft, and puts them to real use, and join the rest of us down in the real battle fields, THEN they might mature and take their proper place among America's fighting men.
You must be Air Force. How many attack craft does the Air Force have? And, why is that? Oh - and how many times has the Air Force mishandled a nuclear warhead? The Air Force is a political construct, as opposed to the rest of the armed forces which are - uhhh - FORCES. Phht.
I didn't say "everyone" is better than the air force, did I? I did infer that "everyone" in the US military is better than the air force - but that's not exactly "everyone". Have you looked at Iran's air force, or France's, or Zimbabwe's? Crap - anyone who can put a stealth bomber or stealth fighter into the air HAS to be moderately competent. That doesn't make you "the best" though. Naval air is the best - despite what cjstone seems to imply below. Navy and Marine pilots are the best, and the Army is the closest second. Air force? Phhht.
Oh yeah - the "undefeated" bit? Did the Air Force win in Vietnam? I didn't think so. We all got our asses handed to us there. But, I blame that on politicians, not on the armed forces.
Those recent revelations? You are referring to the video from wikileaks? I only saw two innocents - and they were dragged into a battle site by the opposition. Nice try at making villians of our guys though.
Some of us still don't recognize the "Air Force" as a real force. The Army Air Corps pioneered things like close-in ground support, earning the respect of all the services. Today? Army Air still outperforms the "Air Force", not to mention that the Navy and Marines can outfly any "Air Force" pilot. I'd rather have a sister in a whore house than a brother in the reserves or the air force.
I'm all for FSF, opensource, and freedoms in general. But, FFS, there IS NO HURD!! Go on, I challenge. Download that HURD kernel, compile it, and install it on all your production machines. What's that? It didn't work? FFS, again. Even Microsoft has a working kernel!
The Gnu part of your Gnu/Hurd statement is alright. There is a lot of Gnu software out there, being used by anyone and everyone. But, when Stallman and others start speaking up about the HURD kernel, they all come across as blind zealots. It's nothing but vaporware, and I don't expect to live long enough to see a HURD computer.
Like, I got certified as an EMT way, way back in 1980. I've never been paid a dime for performance of duties related to being an EMT. Not a cent. But, damn, it feels good to actually save someone's life. Sometimes, you even hear a word of thanks. That's cool too.
In the world of open source, I don't really contribute much, and I certainly make no money for what I do contribute. But, again, it's a good feeling just to assist somewhere, and to hope that your input might help to create a better product.
On the job? Yeah - I ask for raises now and then. I need more money. But, the money isn't the REASON I go to work. I like solving problems, I enjoy doing things. My biggest frustration on the job is not lack of money, but the shortsighted pennypinching fools who can't understand that sometimes spending x dollars will actually save x times y dollars over the next few months, or years, or decades.
Of course, the very same pennypinching fools decide whether I get my raise or not. That's not a pretty picture either.
You have the very same search bar at the upper right corner that I do. Just type "linux bug" and give it a second. Click on any article. Most bugs, after all, affect "just a handful of users" because everyone sets his machine up differently. A bug that is a serious problem for Joe, is only an irritant to Greg, and Walter never notices it, and wonders what the fuss is about.
Meanwhile, as I already said, every single open source project that I have EVER looked at prominently displays a request that you REPORT BUGS!! They don't care if only 1 in 1 million users ever finds the bug, or if it is 75 out of a hundred - it it's a bug, they want to know, and they want to fix it.
Not recently - but yes, I did rescue some WinXP installations with system restore. I don't think your question is fair or reasonable, because a lot of computer illiterates manage to make Windows work again after a driver update or some such thing. And, in rare cases, system restore actually does rescue a system from a computer virus - if caught early. Those computer illiterates don't report to techies that "HEY! System Restore worked!"
I have absolutely no idea how often SysRestore works world wide on a percentage basis, but it's almost certainly over 50% or MS would get so many complaints that they would rework it somehow.
We, the computer literate, see cases of SysRestore failing time after time, because the illiterates only bring us the machines on which SysRestore has failed already.
What parent says. I've tried system restore most often on machines that were infected. System restore points always seem to be infected - it's like an infection automatically makes Windows discard old restore points, and create new infected restore points. The best strategy is to back up the system after a fresh install, and every time something major or something important is installed. Of course, the VERY best strategy is an enterprise solution, where the system is backed up regularly - like each Friday evening.
"As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent."
All of my bittorrent clients show the IP address of people I'm downloading from, and those that I'm uploading to. Just click the tab labeled "Peers". Yeah, some of them are spoofed - no big deal, I can't identify EVERYONE. But, I'll just bet that more than 80% are real addresses, and I could send a "cease and desist" on any letterhead I chose to each of the ISP's.
It would be no big deal to maintain a log of the data in the peers tab. When a new torrent appears, one IP address alone will have a complete file. Logging that will indeed give you the majority of people who actually provide content. Again, some of THOSE are probably spoofed - but you can identify most of them.
It didn't take an astrophysicist to figure this out.
Au contraire, mon ami. (I don't speak French at all, I just heard that somewhere - hope it's not copyrighted!) It's YOU who needs to grow up and get a real job. None of us expects to be paid for the rest of our lives for having some simpleton's daydream that makes it into a song, a movie, or a book. Oh, forget the "mon ami" above. You're an ass, and I don't need asses for friends - there are plenty of pirates who are much more friendly than you are!!
Whew. I got off work, drove a hundred miles, got home, and I sit here with my head bobbing this way and that, as I eat some ice cream before falling in to bed. And, you guys have just blow my mind with the lawsuit jigsaw puzzle. I gotta say SOMETHING, but all I can think of is, "Fuck 'em all!" G'night now. Or, G'day, or whatever. It sucks working nights . . . .
I'll miss Rush just a little more than I miss Ted Kennedy. I miss Ted about as much as I would miss a malignant brain tumor. Rush? Hmmm. Maybe as much as an impacted wisdom tooth. I mean, really, how in hell do you actually "miss" a douche bag? But, a quick google says Rush is not dead. Heart attack, maybe, and he's hospitalized. Dammit - we'll suffer with that toothache a while longer.
Hmmmm. You have something of a point - except that call in talk shows generally have a disclaimer somewhere that the callers opinions are not endorsed by the station. So neither radio station A or B has passed on that opinion "with it's own authority".
Anyone who reads any forum, such as this one, and assumes that the host endorses all the many varied opinions contained therein has to be totally freaking insane.
No one implied that Google was hacked. Providing a place where people might express themselves does not make you responsible for every idea that might be expressed. It's as simple as that. Own a pub? A couple of gorillas decide to duke it out, for any number of reasons? HEY! IT'S YOUR FAULT FOR HAVING A PUBLIC PLACE WHERE PEOPLE CAN DRINK, TALK, OR FIGHT!
Clear cut evidence of war crimes. Define war crimes. If you saw war crimes in that video from wikileaks, then you are incompetent to judge what a war crime is. When competent authority finds evidence of a war crime, our soldiers are punished. Key word being competent.
Maybe you can link me up to some of those videos you mention? I don't claim to be competent authority - I was only an enlisted man. But, I'll bet that I'm more competent than most of the people posting damning statements on the internet about those soldiers.
Men are sentenced at court martial based on evidence, not on the common civilian's distaste for war.
You haven't studied as thoroughly as you wish to imply. Nowhere do you make mention of attack craft. You seem to grasp the concept of fighters, bombers, various support craft, but dismiss attack craft. Your point of view is both uninformed, and lacking substance.
Allow me to spell it out for you: those pilots who get down in the mud, the blood, and the gore to support their mates in real combat get more respect from me than any group of pilots sitting miles above the earth, safely insulated from battle, playing wargames on computers. That includes most rotary wing aircraft - which as you point out, the Army has plenty of.
The USAF goes behind enemy lines? Yeah? With what support, exactly? You mean a single John Wayne type of guy, with a couple engineers? Get serious. Even the RAF sends in an entire regiment. If we needed to do something similar, we have the Seabees, (NAVY again) and Combat Engineers (ARMY of course).
Sounds to me like you've been reading a lot of propaganda.
You're making a case for my own position. We should have gone into Afghanistan on a punitive expedition, then got the hell out once the government was destroyed, and incapable of supporting a military.
We should do the same thing in Somalia, except there, we don't hit the government, but the pirates.
Punitive expedition. Short and sweet. Destroy the military and/or pirating capability, then go home.
You won't find me trying to justify the invasion of Iraq - I argued long and loud against that invasion. But, now that we are there, I keep arguing for withdrawal. Their military ability has long been destroyed.
The US will never build a government to their liking, and if they did, that government would be overthrown within months after we leave. Any moron can see that, IMHO. If it wasn't destroyed, we would be likely to do another Operation Ajax to destroy it ourselves.
Here's where someone says, "HUH??"
The Wikipedia has a pretty decent article on Operation Ajax - check it out before you say that I'm ignorant.
Many cases. Many, meaning, what, exactly? I'll not try to sugar coat the fact that military life is a magnet to psychopaths, or that military life might turn some people into psychopaths. But, many?
Oh - do you notice that we are prepared for such occurences with a procedure we refer to as "Court Martial"?
And, we have convicted those psychos that were caught, and for which there was evidence sufficient to get a conviction.
The other side? Their fucking LEADERS are psychos who approve of dousing little girls with acid, or pushing them back into burning school buildings, and bombing women and children in markets.
Many rapes and murders. I think you need to step back and look at the whole picture. Standing to close to examine a detail or two really distorts you view of the entire tapestry.
Sweet jesus - you're being particularly dense. The Navy, the Marines, and the Army all establish air superiority in each of their respective theaters without any intervention by the Air Force. On the contrary - the air force is incapable of establishing a beachhead any place at all. They have to wait on the other services to provide air strips and all the support necessary for a forward base.
Want to see a REAL Air FORCE? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Regiment Those are some badass sumbitches right there - like our Marines, they can move into a hostile area and capture or build their own air strip, under fire. Show me something equally impressive that our Air "Force" can do.
Uhhh - you seem to see a difference between marine and navy pilots. There is none. The marines are part of the navy, and any marine pilot is pretty much interchangeable with a navy pilot. They fly the same planes, they go through the same training, they fly the same missions, they use the same support infrastructure.
"Best" means, we can do it all. We can deliver payloads anywhere in the world, under any conditions,and that is the bottom line. We don't make mistakes and fly nuclear ordinance halfway across a continent where they don't belong, or any of a number of other mistakes made by the Air Force. Which of the services has recently had it's chief executive replaced for what amounts to incompetence?
But - those with stars in their eyes won't understand my reasoning. Just go on believing that the Air Force is equal to the rest of the services. Maybe, just maybe, when the Air Force acquires a meaningful quantity of attack craft, and puts them to real use, and join the rest of us down in the real battle fields, THEN they might mature and take their proper place among America's fighting men.
You must be Air Force. How many attack craft does the Air Force have? And, why is that? Oh - and how many times has the Air Force mishandled a nuclear warhead? The Air Force is a political construct, as opposed to the rest of the armed forces which are - uhhh - FORCES. Phht.
I didn't say "everyone" is better than the air force, did I? I did infer that "everyone" in the US military is better than the air force - but that's not exactly "everyone". Have you looked at Iran's air force, or France's, or Zimbabwe's? Crap - anyone who can put a stealth bomber or stealth fighter into the air HAS to be moderately competent. That doesn't make you "the best" though. Naval air is the best - despite what cjstone seems to imply below. Navy and Marine pilots are the best, and the Army is the closest second. Air force? Phhht.
Oh yeah - the "undefeated" bit? Did the Air Force win in Vietnam? I didn't think so. We all got our asses handed to us there. But, I blame that on politicians, not on the armed forces.
Those recent revelations? You are referring to the video from wikileaks? I only saw two innocents - and they were dragged into a battle site by the opposition. Nice try at making villians of our guys though.
Some of us still don't recognize the "Air Force" as a real force. The Army Air Corps pioneered things like close-in ground support, earning the respect of all the services. Today? Army Air still outperforms the "Air Force", not to mention that the Navy and Marines can outfly any "Air Force" pilot. I'd rather have a sister in a whore house than a brother in the reserves or the air force.
"I miss TeX on my iPhone."
So, donwload a picture of your guy, and save it to the iphone.
http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:HB_dKdvH5jP9wM:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/93/207891426_773fe934b5.jpg
I'm all for FSF, opensource, and freedoms in general. But, FFS, there IS NO HURD!! Go on, I challenge. Download that HURD kernel, compile it, and install it on all your production machines. What's that? It didn't work? FFS, again. Even Microsoft has a working kernel!
The Gnu part of your Gnu/Hurd statement is alright. There is a lot of Gnu software out there, being used by anyone and everyone. But, when Stallman and others start speaking up about the HURD kernel, they all come across as blind zealots. It's nothing but vaporware, and I don't expect to live long enough to see a HURD computer.
Yeah, sort of.
Like, I got certified as an EMT way, way back in 1980. I've never been paid a dime for performance of duties related to being an EMT. Not a cent. But, damn, it feels good to actually save someone's life. Sometimes, you even hear a word of thanks. That's cool too.
In the world of open source, I don't really contribute much, and I certainly make no money for what I do contribute. But, again, it's a good feeling just to assist somewhere, and to hope that your input might help to create a better product.
On the job? Yeah - I ask for raises now and then. I need more money. But, the money isn't the REASON I go to work. I like solving problems, I enjoy doing things. My biggest frustration on the job is not lack of money, but the shortsighted pennypinching fools who can't understand that sometimes spending x dollars will actually save x times y dollars over the next few months, or years, or decades.
Of course, the very same pennypinching fools decide whether I get my raise or not. That's not a pretty picture either.
You have the very same search bar at the upper right corner that I do. Just type "linux bug" and give it a second. Click on any article. Most bugs, after all, affect "just a handful of users" because everyone sets his machine up differently. A bug that is a serious problem for Joe, is only an irritant to Greg, and Walter never notices it, and wonders what the fuss is about.
Meanwhile, as I already said, every single open source project that I have EVER looked at prominently displays a request that you REPORT BUGS!! They don't care if only 1 in 1 million users ever finds the bug, or if it is 75 out of a hundred - it it's a bug, they want to know, and they want to fix it.
Great attitude. As opposed to any open source community, which begs, "Please, tell us about bugs!"
Not recently - but yes, I did rescue some WinXP installations with system restore. I don't think your question is fair or reasonable, because a lot of computer illiterates manage to make Windows work again after a driver update or some such thing. And, in rare cases, system restore actually does rescue a system from a computer virus - if caught early. Those computer illiterates don't report to techies that "HEY! System Restore worked!"
I have absolutely no idea how often SysRestore works world wide on a percentage basis, but it's almost certainly over 50% or MS would get so many complaints that they would rework it somehow.
We, the computer literate, see cases of SysRestore failing time after time, because the illiterates only bring us the machines on which SysRestore has failed already.
What parent says. I've tried system restore most often on machines that were infected. System restore points always seem to be infected - it's like an infection automatically makes Windows discard old restore points, and create new infected restore points. The best strategy is to back up the system after a fresh install, and every time something major or something important is installed. Of course, the VERY best strategy is an enterprise solution, where the system is backed up regularly - like each Friday evening.
Don't forget to add some electricity, and a little radiation. I don't think you'll build much of anything without them.
"As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent."
All of my bittorrent clients show the IP address of people I'm downloading from, and those that I'm uploading to. Just click the tab labeled "Peers". Yeah, some of them are spoofed - no big deal, I can't identify EVERYONE. But, I'll just bet that more than 80% are real addresses, and I could send a "cease and desist" on any letterhead I chose to each of the ISP's.
It would be no big deal to maintain a log of the data in the peers tab. When a new torrent appears, one IP address alone will have a complete file. Logging that will indeed give you the majority of people who actually provide content. Again, some of THOSE are probably spoofed - but you can identify most of them.
It didn't take an astrophysicist to figure this out.
Au contraire, mon ami. (I don't speak French at all, I just heard that somewhere - hope it's not copyrighted!) It's YOU who needs to grow up and get a real job. None of us expects to be paid for the rest of our lives for having some simpleton's daydream that makes it into a song, a movie, or a book. Oh, forget the "mon ami" above. You're an ass, and I don't need asses for friends - there are plenty of pirates who are much more friendly than you are!!
Whew. I got off work, drove a hundred miles, got home, and I sit here with my head bobbing this way and that, as I eat some ice cream before falling in to bed. And, you guys have just blow my mind with the lawsuit jigsaw puzzle. I gotta say SOMETHING, but all I can think of is, "Fuck 'em all!" G'night now. Or, G'day, or whatever. It sucks working nights . . . .
I'll miss Rush just a little more than I miss Ted Kennedy. I miss Ted about as much as I would miss a malignant brain tumor. Rush? Hmmm. Maybe as much as an impacted wisdom tooth. I mean, really, how in hell do you actually "miss" a douche bag? But, a quick google says Rush is not dead. Heart attack, maybe, and he's hospitalized. Dammit - we'll suffer with that toothache a while longer.
Try that clamav an Debian, with SEL. It's worked great for a lot of people!!
Hmmmm. You have something of a point - except that call in talk shows generally have a disclaimer somewhere that the callers opinions are not endorsed by the station. So neither radio station A or B has passed on that opinion "with it's own authority".
Anyone who reads any forum, such as this one, and assumes that the host endorses all the many varied opinions contained therein has to be totally freaking insane.
No one implied that Google was hacked. Providing a place where people might express themselves does not make you responsible for every idea that might be expressed. It's as simple as that. Own a pub? A couple of gorillas decide to duke it out, for any number of reasons? HEY! IT'S YOUR FAULT FOR HAVING A PUBLIC PLACE WHERE PEOPLE CAN DRINK, TALK, OR FIGHT!