I mean first here was silver, then gold, then platinum.....I think they are going to create a new element/metal pretty soon!
The next card up from Platinum is Black from American Express. Available by invitation only to existing Platinum cardholders (which themselves are only available by invitation from Green or Gold).
I can't come up with any reason for the embedded market to inflate that significantly that quickly.
Plus, a typical embedded CPU is a Z80, a 6502 or a 68000 or StrongARM at most. There's absolutely no need for a PC-class processor for embedded tasks.
But cost of the CPU isn't the only reason. The Z80 (for example) is very well understood, it and the software running on it can be made very reliable. Applications for the Z80 can be written with minimal memory, because of its 8-bit simplicity, using a 32-bit processor would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The embedded software community are quite conservative, and will good reason, consumer electronics (other than PCs) just can't crash without serious economic consequences. If you did need a 32-bit processor, it's likely to be a SPARC or an i386 (or the aformentioned 68000) for the reason that they're cheap, reliable and well-understood.
The embedded market is already large, but it is dominated by a few entrenched players who compete aggressively with each other. Good luck to Transmeta, but I don't rate their chances.
Well, the thing with fission power is that it's relatively simple to start, but not so easy to stop. With fusion it's the opposite, starting and maintaining the reaction is fiendishly difficult. To stop a fusion reactor, just disrupt its containment, and the plasma will simply dissipate. It is really hot, sure, but there's not very much of it.
It's sad that public-funded science has to do this, but this is just how it is in modern Western society.
Yes, in the old Soviet Empire, you could walk into any used auto lot and drive away a brand new fusion powered car!
And those ancient Aztecs, it's a little known fact that their pyramids were actually fusion power plants.
Give me a break. Western society is pragmatic in the extreme, we run with what works, and we abandon what doesn't. That's why ancient societies could grasp the basics of math, chemistry, astronomy, etc, but they could never develop it, their societies were constricted by their traditions, by their religions, or other superstition.
The accomplishments of the West make the accomplishments of previous attempts at civilization pale in comparison. Our ways *work*, if they didn't, we'd find another way, and that is why Western capitalist democracy will survive.
If they hadn't wasted so much time on English classes to be well rounded and took a programming course they would have a much easier time using the machines.
Too bad they blead the Liquid Helium half way through the run.
Well, maybe if you'd taken some of those waste-of-time English courses you would be able to spell "bleed".
That's why the industry is in the sorry state it's in, too many self-proclaimed experts who are too blinkered to see out of their own narrow field.
Makes sense that HP would axe the lesser of the two operating systems.
It's not about products, it's about people. In the R&D business, that's where all the value is. Getting rid of people who are probably in the top 1000 kernel engineers in the world make no sense at all. Why not assign them to merge the best bits of HPUX and Tru64? After all, HP has PA-RISC people, Compaq has Alpha people, but Itanium is a new platform.
This is Fiorina screwing up, again, that's all. I wouldn't be at all surprised if these engineers found a warm welcome waiting for them at Sun or IBM.
These schools need funding, they get it through showing advertisements in a non-obtrusive manner.
The grad school I attended (in the UK) sold space on the "Active Desktop" to advertisers. Now that was annoying, when logging in you had to wait a minute or two before the ads would arrive, and the machine would be bogged down until they did.
Fortunately, my class almost never used to undergrad labs, but I pity the poor students who were stuck with this.
And what is wrong with this? Laws are ideally a representation of the values that a society has at large, things that a majority of us agree on. These values are based directly on our morals.
You can't abdicate moral responsibility like that. It was established that "only following orders" is not a legal defence, in war crimes trials. The problem is that many people have taken the attitude that if it's not explicitly illegal, it must be OK, and that's why we have thousands of petty laws passed every year.
Besides, a conscience is a lot easier to carry around than a library of case law, even on CD ROM:0) Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, it's as simple as that.
But yes, I have great sympathy for employees who are owed wages and take property in lieu of cash
I see where you're coming from. But getting laid off with no severance package *and* getting into trouble with the law at the same time isn't going to help anyone if they find their employer imploding around them.
I heard a story of a rival company to one I used to work for. They were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and when some employees came in one morning and found the place locked up, they panicked, broke in and made off with a bunch of equipment. Turned out that the office manager had just overslept that morning...
Treat people decently, they'll treat you decently.
This is something that some postmodernist thinkers saw coming a long time ago. It has to do with the continual separation from reality.
It does, but there is one clause: the amount of money in existance must correspond to the amount of stuff that can be exchanged for money. If there is more money in circulation than can be spent, the system adjusts itself by making the price of everything higher, in money terms, until things balance out. This is called "inflation".
Where does inflation come from? Well, typically, it comes when governments increase the supply of money out of sync with expansion of the economy. Another way is government borrowing, which secures debt on future taxation, i.e. money that doesn't exist yet.
The way to counter inflation is to make money more expensive, and the cost of money is the interest rate. But this shouldn't be so high as to be greater than the return possible from assets and/or commercial activity, otherwise it will make raising capital impossible, and the economy will grind to a halt.
So, we have just seen trillions of dollars destroyed when the "bubble burst", it stands to reason (the law of supply and demand) that money should become more expensive. But central banks everywhere have made it cheaper, by lowering interest rates, making it easier to borrow and raise speculative capital.
The thing that makes this possible is that there is more economic value in the system, because we are not (yet) in a recession, and things like property prices are still rising. A recession and "negative equity", in addition to consumer debt, are going to make the next recession a nasty one.
In ordinary circumstances, all the Fed could do would be to delay it, no matter how much the politicians there and elsewhere tried to delude themselves. But impending war means all bets are off.
The northern alliance seems quite willing to assume what we regard as their right to lead Afghanistan, and I don't imagine that it could be worse than the Taliban.
You're forgetting one thing: the Taliban came to power because they were *better* than the bandits that the former Mujehedin had become when the Soviet Empire withdraw. They enjoyed enormous popular support, at least at first, because they cracked down so hard on abuses of power.
Did you know Kabul was largely untouched by the Soviets? It was actually flattened by former resistance groups, now rivals, fighting each other with heavy weapons in the city centre. The average Afghan would support the Taliban in a heartbeat rather than go back to those days.
The Guardian in London reported Friday, citing a cable from the US Embassy in London, that the US was trying to rally an international campaign to remove the Taliban. Having removed them, we would then sponsor a UN-run temporary government in the nation.
You know, I don't really think the Taliban are the problem, at least not directly. They are isolationist in the extreme, and have no foreign policy agenda worth speaking of. The problem is that they took al-Queda in as guests, and guest is a loaded word in Islam. Once someone is your guest, Islamic custom holds that you must be prepared to defend them with your own life, if necessary. I'm guessing that the Taliban never imagined that this would entail facing down massed NATO armies and fleets lurking nearby.
The point is, the Taliban (which, incidentally means "students", not "death to the US" or anything quite as menacing) are caught between a rock and a hard place, and they don't oppose the West for the reason that most people think they do. Indeed, what they would like most of all is to simply by ignored by the rest of the planet.
The question is, what is stronger, their desire to be left alone, or their desire to uphold their tradition? If is the former, then there is scope for a deal: give us al-Queda and the US will guarentee that you are left alone. If not, then things are going to get messy.
It's not clear to me that it "would not have made any difference." It would be a lot harder for these people to purchase airline tickets if they had to show IDs that said their visas were expired. Two of them were, in fact, wanted for questioning by the FBI.
What's wrong with passports? Are the government tacitly saying that they no longer trust their existing mandatory ID scheme? And if a new scheme is introduced, how long will it be before that is compromised too?
I carry half a dozen forms of ID with me at all time anyway, like charge card, alumni card, gym membership and so forth. If there was One True Card that could intelligently take the place of all of these, I might consider it, but if I had to show it on demand to every petty official, then I'd have to think about taking my work back underground... to stop it falling into the wrong hands.
of course commercial breaks are inserted at regular intervals and CNN is likely to make significant profits in the next few weeks
Actually, I don't think that's true. I watched CNN a lot last week, and there was almost no interruption to the news, no commercial breaks at all. It must have cost them a lot of money to do that.
Never mind the millions of refugees, never mind that the amount of innocent people who will die as a direct consequence of the media show the US army is about to give in the middle east will vastly outnumber the poor souls who lost their lives in new
You're forgetting two things. Firstly, that the US hasn't actually done anything yet, it's simply moved a few ships around. And secondly, the US is the single largest provider of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. Don't let either of these facts mess with your preconceptions, tho', that would make you just as bad as "the US media and its audience" that you hold in such contempt.
Incidently, I recall that a few months ago during the election campaign dubya had some trouble answering the question who the president of pakistan was
Who is the President of Uzbekistan? Post now, don't check on google. What about Mozambique?
cash and exemptions they need to further maul the little guy into oblivion.
Let's see how long small airlines could survive without the big corporations who drive down prices for the whole industry through enabling suppliers to take advantage of economies of scale, shall we? Suddenly that $50 part might cost $500 if there were too few buyers...
Not to be too sarcastic, but remind me again- who decides on security measure in/around airports and on airplanes..?! Their lack of intelligence in decision making and they expect us to bail them out.. thems some big balls indeed..
Uhhh, that would be government regulators? Appointed by, you guessed it, the taxpayer and their elected representatives.
Consider this scenario: Micro$oft agrees to hide crypto backdoors in their latest "Outlook XP" or "Outlook.NET".
This is pathetic. Can't slashbots discuss any subject without descending to Microsoft-bashing?
FYI, you want encryption in Outlook, just use the PGP plugin. Press the buttons to encrypt, sign and send your email if you want to. Even set it to encrypt all your email by default. When you receive a PGP encrypted email, it will prompt for your passphrase, then display the message in a window cunningly designed to defeat Van Eck snooping. It's a great product.
. Including criminals and terrorists, who still aren't typically among the brightest bulbs on the planet.
However whats to stop a terrorist for writing their own version of a public cryptosystem such as RSA and not give anyone keys?
Why, nothing at all, of course. While terrorists (and paedophiles, the other usual suspects) are a problem for society, key escrow makes no more sense than a Federal law requiring the use of postcards and banning envelopes.
Don't imagine for a second that the government doesn't know this. Just as it is natural for a corporation to seek to expands its share of the market, it is natural for a government to attempt to take more and more control over its citizen's lives. But with a corporation, you are free not to buy its products - there are no armed guards forcing people to buy Gap clothes and McDonalds burgers. Governments, on the other hand, don't give you the choice.
Do you really think 'brute force' is the best solution? I am also shocked at what happened, and my heart is with the victims... but the problem will not be solved by using and causing more violence.
I was thinking about this earlier today. Bombing Afghanistan is both futile (from the point of view of getting justice for the WTC victims) and would create far more problems than it solved. What bin Laden wants most of all is to polarize the Islamic nations against the West, and indiscrimate bombing of innocents plays right into his hands (and makes us little better than him). Ditto, invading Pakistan on the way. Even using "surgical strikes", smart bombs or special forces to eliminate the Taleban, al Queda et al won't work, it will just make martyrs.
So, what to do? I think the answer is, for NATO to provide material support, logistics and training to a joint Saudi, Egyptian and Kuwaiti army, and for them to conduct operations on the ground. That way, we can fulfill our objectives, and avoid the "Islam vs the West" scenario altogether.
Why, however, with all its touting of modernism, does it not initiate an action to save the 10 million women who have no schools or social presence and are trapped under the burqa? Why doesn't it stop this primitiveness that has emerged in modern times?
Because, realistically, the only way to do that would be to invade Afghanistan, utterly destroy the clerics who are ruling the country, and install a puppet government, backed by the full force of the NATO armies. This simply isn't feasible, even if it were the "right" thing to do. We all remember the American officer in Vietnam saying "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". Getting involved in the internal politics of Afghanistan would be another Vietnam.
The West simply cannot be expected to tour the world cleaning up after everyone elses mistakes. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it's true. We have a whole bunch of our own problems to deal with - and there is no one that we can ask for help from. In some cases, like the Gulf War, the interests of the West happened to align with the interests of moderate Islamic states like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In other cases, the West finds that other Islamic states, for example Libya, are opposed to its objectives. Either way, the Western taxpayer spends billions every year on aid to less-developed countries.
If the Afghans were to overthrow the Taleban and install a genuinely democratic government, with liberal social policies and a broadly capitalist economy, they would find that the Western nations would welcome them as one of our own.
Although not truly representative of British public opinion, I found it a fascinating insight into how blinkered most of the USA are to world opinion.
As a Brit who as worked, lived and travelled extensively in the United States, I was shocked and disgusted by what I saw on Question Time. The BBC is widely known to be left-wing biased in its view, even known as the "Ministry of Propaganda" by some. The audience was chosen with this in mind, to support the prejudices of the producer, it was clear that the host (David Dimbleby, IIRC) was unable to control the crowd.
I would like to apologise on behalf of the country, but you must understand that the freedom of speech defended by the UK and the US does grant freedom even to those who show no gratitude for it. There are people even here in London who genuinely rejoiced at the news, altho' why they are living here and not in one of the world's many Islamic states seems to have escaped question. Probably because the media are terrified of being accused of racism, but race is nothing to do with it, it's about belief.
Public sentiment, to the extent that I am able to judge it, it wholly different. The British people tend to know about terrorism, we once had the IRA attempt to blow up Canary Wharf (the nearest thing we have to the WTC). We support the US without hesitation in your time of need, just as we did in the Gulf, and just as you have supported us in the Falklands and elsewhere in the world.
But, if I may, perhaps US citizens will think twice now before supporting NORAID.
When earthquakes hit distant cities, it is the United States that hurries in to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody helped.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean first here was silver, then gold, then platinum.....I think they are going to create a new element/metal pretty soon!
The next card up from Platinum is Black from American Express. Available by invitation only to existing Platinum cardholders (which themselves are only available by invitation from Green or Gold).
Someday...
I can't come up with any reason for the embedded market to inflate that significantly that quickly.
Plus, a typical embedded CPU is a Z80, a 6502 or a 68000 or StrongARM at most. There's absolutely no need for a PC-class processor for embedded tasks.
But cost of the CPU isn't the only reason. The Z80 (for example) is very well understood, it and the software running on it can be made very reliable. Applications for the Z80 can be written with minimal memory, because of its 8-bit simplicity, using a 32-bit processor would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The embedded software community are quite conservative, and will good reason, consumer electronics (other than PCs) just can't crash without serious economic consequences. If you did need a 32-bit processor, it's likely to be a SPARC or an i386 (or the aformentioned 68000) for the reason that they're cheap, reliable and well-understood.
The embedded market is already large, but it is dominated by a few entrenched players who compete aggressively with each other. Good luck to Transmeta, but I don't rate their chances.
How do you scram a fusion reactor?
Well, the thing with fission power is that it's relatively simple to start, but not so easy to stop. With fusion it's the opposite, starting and maintaining the reaction is fiendishly difficult. To stop a fusion reactor, just disrupt its containment, and the plasma will simply dissipate. It is really hot, sure, but there's not very much of it.
It's sad that public-funded science has to do this, but this is just how it is in modern Western society.
Yes, in the old Soviet Empire, you could walk into any used auto lot and drive away a brand new fusion powered car!
And those ancient Aztecs, it's a little known fact that their pyramids were actually fusion power plants.
Give me a break. Western society is pragmatic in the extreme, we run with what works, and we abandon what doesn't. That's why ancient societies could grasp the basics of math, chemistry, astronomy, etc, but they could never develop it, their societies were constricted by their traditions, by their religions, or other superstition.
The accomplishments of the West make the accomplishments of previous attempts at civilization pale in comparison. Our ways *work*, if they didn't, we'd find another way, and that is why Western capitalist democracy will survive.
If they hadn't wasted so much time on English classes to be well rounded and took a programming course they would have a much easier time using the machines.
Too bad they blead the Liquid Helium half way through the run.
Well, maybe if you'd taken some of those waste-of-time English courses you would be able to spell "bleed".
That's why the industry is in the sorry state it's in, too many self-proclaimed experts who are too blinkered to see out of their own narrow field.
Makes sense that HP would axe the lesser of the two operating systems.
It's not about products, it's about people. In the R&D business, that's where all the value is. Getting rid of people who are probably in the top 1000 kernel engineers in the world make no sense at all. Why not assign them to merge the best bits of HPUX and Tru64? After all, HP has PA-RISC people, Compaq has Alpha people, but Itanium is a new platform.
This is Fiorina screwing up, again, that's all. I wouldn't be at all surprised if these engineers found a warm welcome waiting for them at Sun or IBM.
It's not like you can slap it on your Visa card
:0)
Speak for yourself
These schools need funding, they get it through showing advertisements in a non-obtrusive manner.
The grad school I attended (in the UK) sold space on the "Active Desktop" to advertisers. Now that was annoying, when logging in you had to wait a minute or two before the ads would arrive, and the machine would be bogged down until they did.
Fortunately, my class almost never used to undergrad labs, but I pity the poor students who were stuck with this.
And what is wrong with this? Laws are ideally a representation of the values that a society has at large, things that a majority of us agree on. These values are based directly on our morals.
:0) Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, it's as simple as that.
You can't abdicate moral responsibility like that. It was established that "only following orders" is not a legal defence, in war crimes trials. The problem is that many people have taken the attitude that if it's not explicitly illegal, it must be OK, and that's why we have thousands of petty laws passed every year.
Besides, a conscience is a lot easier to carry around than a library of case law, even on CD ROM
But yes, I have great sympathy for employees who are owed wages and take property in lieu of cash
I see where you're coming from. But getting laid off with no severance package *and* getting into trouble with the law at the same time isn't going to help anyone if they find their employer imploding around them.
I heard a story of a rival company to one I used to work for. They were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and when some employees came in one morning and found the place locked up, they panicked, broke in and made off with a bunch of equipment. Turned out that the office manager had just overslept that morning...
Treat people decently, they'll treat you decently.
Aye, sometimes it really is that simple.
You're right Michael - it's okay to steal and loot because some employers can't afford to make their payroll.
Uhh, CmdrTaco? Better keep an eye on Michael when Andover starts running out of cash...
This is something that some postmodernist thinkers saw coming a long time ago. It has to do with the continual separation from reality.
It does, but there is one clause: the amount of money in existance must correspond to the amount of stuff that can be exchanged for money. If there is more money in circulation than can be spent, the system adjusts itself by making the price of everything higher, in money terms, until things balance out. This is called "inflation".
Where does inflation come from? Well, typically, it comes when governments increase the supply of money out of sync with expansion of the economy. Another way is government borrowing, which secures debt on future taxation, i.e. money that doesn't exist yet.
The way to counter inflation is to make money more expensive, and the cost of money is the interest rate. But this shouldn't be so high as to be greater than the return possible from assets and/or commercial activity, otherwise it will make raising capital impossible, and the economy will grind to a halt.
So, we have just seen trillions of dollars destroyed when the "bubble burst", it stands to reason (the law of supply and demand) that money should become more expensive. But central banks everywhere have made it cheaper, by lowering interest rates, making it easier to borrow and raise speculative capital.
The thing that makes this possible is that there is more economic value in the system, because we are not (yet) in a recession, and things like property prices are still rising. A recession and "negative equity", in addition to consumer debt, are going to make the next recession a nasty one.
In ordinary circumstances, all the Fed could do would be to delay it, no matter how much the politicians there and elsewhere tried to delude themselves. But impending war means all bets are off.
Happy people are productive people.
Actually, that's not true at all.
The northern alliance seems quite willing to assume what we regard as their right to lead Afghanistan, and I don't imagine that it could be worse than the Taliban.
You're forgetting one thing: the Taliban came to power because they were *better* than the bandits that the former Mujehedin had become when the Soviet Empire withdraw. They enjoyed enormous popular support, at least at first, because they cracked down so hard on abuses of power.
Did you know Kabul was largely untouched by the Soviets? It was actually flattened by former resistance groups, now rivals, fighting each other with heavy weapons in the city centre. The average Afghan would support the Taliban in a heartbeat rather than go back to those days.
The Guardian in London reported Friday, citing a cable from the US Embassy in London, that the US was trying to rally an international campaign to remove the Taliban. Having removed them, we would then sponsor a UN-run temporary government in the nation.
You know, I don't really think the Taliban are the problem, at least not directly. They are isolationist in the extreme, and have no foreign policy agenda worth speaking of. The problem is that they took al-Queda in as guests, and guest is a loaded word in Islam. Once someone is your guest, Islamic custom holds that you must be prepared to defend them with your own life, if necessary. I'm guessing that the Taliban never imagined that this would entail facing down massed NATO armies and fleets lurking nearby.
The point is, the Taliban (which, incidentally means "students", not "death to the US" or anything quite as menacing) are caught between a rock and a hard place, and they don't oppose the West for the reason that most people think they do. Indeed, what they would like most of all is to simply by ignored by the rest of the planet.
The question is, what is stronger, their desire to be left alone, or their desire to uphold their tradition? If is the former, then there is scope for a deal: give us al-Queda and the US will guarentee that you are left alone. If not, then things are going to get messy.
It's not clear to me that it "would not have made any difference." It would be a lot harder for these people to purchase airline tickets if they had to show IDs that said their visas were expired. Two of them were, in fact, wanted for questioning by the FBI.
What's wrong with passports? Are the government tacitly saying that they no longer trust their existing mandatory ID scheme? And if a new scheme is introduced, how long will it be before that is compromised too?
I carry half a dozen forms of ID with me at all time anyway, like charge card, alumni card, gym membership and so forth. If there was One True Card that could intelligently take the place of all of these, I might consider it, but if I had to show it on demand to every petty official, then I'd have to think about taking my work back underground... to stop it falling into the wrong hands.
of course commercial breaks are inserted at regular intervals and CNN is likely to make significant profits in the next few weeks
Actually, I don't think that's true. I watched CNN a lot last week, and there was almost no interruption to the news, no commercial breaks at all. It must have cost them a lot of money to do that.
Never mind the millions of refugees, never mind that the amount of innocent people who will die as a direct consequence of the media show the US army is about to give in the middle east will vastly outnumber the poor souls who lost their lives in new
You're forgetting two things. Firstly, that the US hasn't actually done anything yet, it's simply moved a few ships around. And secondly, the US is the single largest provider of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. Don't let either of these facts mess with your preconceptions, tho', that would make you just as bad as "the US media and its audience" that you hold in such contempt.
Incidently, I recall that a few months ago during the election campaign dubya had some trouble answering the question who the president of pakistan was
Who is the President of Uzbekistan? Post now, don't check on google. What about Mozambique?
Is there actually any evidence that the terrorists used public key cryptography to plan the attack on the World Trade Center?
Just wondering, because I haven't seen any reports with that sort of detail in.
cash and exemptions they need to further maul the little guy into oblivion.
Let's see how long small airlines could survive without the big corporations who drive down prices for the whole industry through enabling suppliers to take advantage of economies of scale, shall we? Suddenly that $50 part might cost $500 if there were too few buyers...
Not to be too sarcastic, but remind me again- who decides on security measure in/around airports and on airplanes..?! Their lack of intelligence in decision making and they expect us to bail them out.. thems some big balls indeed..
Uhhh, that would be government regulators? Appointed by, you guessed it, the taxpayer and their elected representatives.
Consider this scenario: Micro$oft agrees to hide crypto backdoors in their latest "Outlook XP" or "Outlook.NET".
This is pathetic. Can't slashbots discuss any subject without descending to Microsoft-bashing?
FYI, you want encryption in Outlook, just use the PGP plugin. Press the buttons to encrypt, sign and send your email if you want to. Even set it to encrypt all your email by default. When you receive a PGP encrypted email, it will prompt for your passphrase, then display the message in a window cunningly designed to defeat Van Eck snooping. It's a great product.
. Including criminals and terrorists, who still aren't typically among the brightest bulbs on the planet.
I pray you never get a job in an airport.
However whats to stop a terrorist for writing their own version of a public cryptosystem such as RSA and not give anyone keys?
Why, nothing at all, of course. While terrorists (and paedophiles, the other usual suspects) are a problem for society, key escrow makes no more sense than a Federal law requiring the use of postcards and banning envelopes.
Don't imagine for a second that the government doesn't know this. Just as it is natural for a corporation to seek to expands its share of the market, it is natural for a government to attempt to take more and more control over its citizen's lives. But with a corporation, you are free not to buy its products - there are no armed guards forcing people to buy Gap clothes and McDonalds burgers. Governments, on the other hand, don't give you the choice.
Do you really think 'brute force' is the best solution? I am also shocked at what happened, and my heart is with the victims... but the problem will not be solved by using and causing more violence.
I was thinking about this earlier today. Bombing Afghanistan is both futile (from the point of view of getting justice for the WTC victims) and would create far more problems than it solved. What bin Laden wants most of all is to polarize the Islamic nations against the West, and indiscrimate bombing of innocents plays right into his hands (and makes us little better than him). Ditto, invading Pakistan on the way. Even using "surgical strikes", smart bombs or special forces to eliminate the Taleban, al Queda et al won't work, it will just make martyrs.
So, what to do? I think the answer is, for NATO to provide material support, logistics and training to a joint Saudi, Egyptian and Kuwaiti army, and for them to conduct operations on the ground. That way, we can fulfill our objectives, and avoid the "Islam vs the West" scenario altogether.
Why, however, with all its touting of modernism, does it not initiate an action to save the 10 million women who have no schools or social presence and are trapped under the burqa? Why doesn't it stop this primitiveness that has emerged in modern times?
Because, realistically, the only way to do that would be to invade Afghanistan, utterly destroy the clerics who are ruling the country, and install a puppet government, backed by the full force of the NATO armies. This simply isn't feasible, even if it were the "right" thing to do. We all remember the American officer in Vietnam saying "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". Getting involved in the internal politics of Afghanistan would be another Vietnam.
The West simply cannot be expected to tour the world cleaning up after everyone elses mistakes. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it's true. We have a whole bunch of our own problems to deal with - and there is no one that we can ask for help from. In some cases, like the Gulf War, the interests of the West happened to align with the interests of moderate Islamic states like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In other cases, the West finds that other Islamic states, for example Libya, are opposed to its objectives. Either way, the Western taxpayer spends billions every year on aid to less-developed countries.
If the Afghans were to overthrow the Taleban and install a genuinely democratic government, with liberal social policies and a broadly capitalist economy, they would find that the Western nations would welcome them as one of our own.
Although not truly representative of British public opinion, I found it a fascinating insight into how blinkered most of the USA are to world opinion.
As a Brit who as worked, lived and travelled extensively in the United States, I was shocked and disgusted by what I saw on Question Time. The BBC is widely known to be left-wing biased in its view, even known as the "Ministry of Propaganda" by some. The audience was chosen with this in mind, to support the prejudices of the producer, it was clear that the host (David Dimbleby, IIRC) was unable to control the crowd.
I would like to apologise on behalf of the country, but you must understand that the freedom of speech defended by the UK and the US does grant freedom even to those who show no gratitude for it. There are people even here in London who genuinely rejoiced at the news, altho' why they are living here and not in one of the world's many Islamic states seems to have escaped question. Probably because the media are terrified of being accused of racism, but race is nothing to do with it, it's about belief.
Public sentiment, to the extent that I am able to judge it, it wholly different. The British people tend to know about terrorism, we once had the IRA attempt to blow up Canary Wharf (the nearest thing we have to the WTC). We support the US without hesitation in your time of need, just as we did in the Gulf, and just as you have supported us in the Falklands and elsewhere in the world.
But, if I may, perhaps US citizens will think twice now before supporting NORAID.
When earthquakes hit distant cities, it is the United States that hurries in to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody helped.
The NATO disaster/rescue unit has been made available to the US.