There's so much propaganda on both sides. I think information is deliberately unreliable otherwise Saddam would know precisely what's going to happen and when.
Well, the Iraqi Information Ministry is claiming that the footage of surrendering Iraqi soldiers was staged by the Americans using actors, and that the Coalition forces aren't even in Iraq. The question is, who do you believe?
If we truly knew where they were, why the hell did we not share the intelligence with the inspectors?
Read the articles of the UN resolutions again. The inspectors were not there to find weapons, but to be shown weapons. It's a subtle but important difference. The UN made it quite clear that Iraq had to tell the inspectors where the weapons were, not lead them on a wild goose chase.
He has body doubles, food tasters, a plethora of bodyguards
Yes, Saddam is a very different threat from Osama. Saddam loves living in palaces, he loves having his portrait on billboards, he loves hearing the crowds chanting his name. Saddam's objective is to maintain his lifestyle, he's not an ideological obsessive like Osama. I don't think he ever believed seriously that the West would actually attack him, just like he was surprised that the West cared when he invaded Kuwait.
Remind me again about what is not 'innovative' about being able to type in a band's name, anywhere in the world, and hear their music within minutes?
The people who built the system were innovative. The people who use it are not. Think of the telephone: is everyone who makes a telephone call a great innovator like Alexander Graham Bell? Is everyone who switches on a lightbulb an innovator like Thomas Edison?
This isn't a case of being bound to every other country's laws, this is a case of being bound to internationally accepted law.
So, it's not "every other country's laws" it's just "some other country's laws". That doesn't make it any more acceptable. Let's see all those other countries give their citizens the rights enshrined in the Constitution first, then we'll see about their laws.
"Innovative students who offend Corporations will be jailed. Even if the 'guilty act' does not merit such severe action ".
Remind me again what is "innovative" about using someone elses software to rip off someone elses music? Sure, the original author if the software was innovative (before everyone else jumped on the P2P bandwagon anyway) and the author of the music is innovative (more or less), but that's not who they're going after.
It is particularly sickening to see this sort of stuff on Slashdot. People who insist that their favorite license is respected won't even do other people the courtesy of respecting their licenses.
After all, the Pres has said that he'd spring from jail (in EU) any US citizen convicted of a crime by the International Court. Now who's respecting the international community?
Sorry, but what the hell is the point of even having a country if you're bound by every other country's laws? There is a lot of stuff you can do in country X that you can't do in Y, and vice versa. So, if you are actually in someone else's country and you break their laws fair enough, you get your ass slung in jail, but if you are at home and a foreign court decides you broke their laws while you weren't even there (this is what ICC does, in a nutshell) there's bugger all they can do about it right now, which is as it should be. Sign up to ICC and your citizens can be extradited to face a foreign court for something that isn't even a crime where they are now.
God, this man's hypocrisy makes me want to vomit.
No, he's pretty consistent actually: the duty of the American government is to put the interests of American citizens first. Again, if your government isn't about looking after its own tax-paying law-abiding citizens, what the hell is it for?
Re:Yet another blunder by American president
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I not against the american people nor a supporter of Iraq, i live in india and iam very proud my country is against this bloody battle.
Good for you. Wait, doesn't India have nukes pointed at its neighbor Pakistan? Don't you have troops skirmishing in Kashmir as we speak? Funny, I don't think the "world community" is too keen on India and Pakistan "testing" (read: detonating) nuclear weapons to intimidate each other.
Get of your moral high horse and remember, those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Not trying to flamebait or anything, but what does it mean "support the troops" even if you're morally opposed to the war? I just don't get it.
It's like Vietnam, the anti-war crowd took their displeasure out on ordinary soldiers returning from Vietnam, many of whom were conscripts. Why? Because they were too stupid to realize that the military is an instrument of policy, it does not make policy. The way it works in the West is that the democratically-elected government decides what's right or wrong and if necessary the military makes it happen.
I thought "I was just following orders" was considered by most to be a poor excuse for committing immoral acts. One example of this is statements by Nazi soliders who worked in concentration camps during WWII. A large percentage of people would agree that the concentration camps (both the idea and the implementation) were immoral. I suspect that many of those people would agree that "I was just following orders" was not a morally justifiable reason.
At an individual level, no Western soldiers are committing immoral acts. They aren't raping civilian women, looting museums and so on, as Nazi troops did in Europe or Iraqi troops did in Kuwait. If a US/UK soldier did do something like that, then the excuse "only following orders" wouldn't save him from punishment, even if a commander had ordered him to.
But whether or not you think the war is justified (and personally, I do) a UK soldier, after a declaration of war, who fires on a uniformed member of enemy armed forces is committing no moral crime. The politicians make the decision to go to war.
Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
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Approximately 3,500 civilians were killed during the U.S.-led air strike campaign in August 1990, and more than 9000 homes were destroyed. The civilian death toll rose to 110,000 after the bombing stopped, and of those 70,000 were children under the age of 15.
You can see the attitude here. If Saddam builds a command center under a hospital, it's his fault if civilians are killed. Where in the West is there a military installation deliberately placed in a civilian area for the specific purpose of using those civilians as "human shields"? I'll give you a clue: nowhere. Decent folk don't work like that. We are not the bad guys here. All civilian casualties are Saddam's fault, not ours.
Sly jokes aside, where is the proof of that? Example: Hans Blix and his team found artillery warheads for the delivery of chemical weapons. The calibre was 122mm. But the US and UK don't use that, our artillery goes from 105mm straight to 155mm. There are also 120mm mortars around in the West, but mortars don't fire artillery shells, and anyway, 2mm is enough for it not to fit. So, wherever Saddam got them, it wasn't from us, was probably from the old Soviet Empire.
In such a terrain, armored forces are much less effective anyway. AFAIK, deploying tanks in a marshland is a problematic decision.
I believe (altho' I'm no expert in Middle Eastern geography) that in order to get to Baghdad from Kuwait without driving through Saudi Arabia, you have to go past Basra, which is marshy. There are many delta and tributaries before the Gulf itself.
Again, I was not in the US army, but AFAIK, when combat-engineers create a clear-lane, they mark the cleared teritory well. This means that no tank-commander should rely on GPS for avoiding minefields. Perhaps the US doctrine is different.
I'd hope so - when I was a Cadet in the early 90s we used chemical glowsticks. I don't know how the regular Army does it these days.
GPS is much more important to the US military, which does not have on-the-ground knowledge there. The US should be more worried about the Iraqis jamming GPS signals and other communications.
Actually, given the satellite photos, reconaissance aircraft and special forces, the US/UK probably know Iraq better than most of Iraq's Generals by now. Look at who's in charge on either side: the Allies have professional soldiers with decades of experience on the ground in wars, peacekeeping, exercises etc all over the world. The Iraqis have various relatives and cronies of Saddam Hussein who probably never leave their palaces unless they have to.
Of course, so far, it looks like Iraq is pretty feeble militarily. I suspect the war will be over very quickly. Which brings up the question again: why are we going?
There are many factors to consider when evaluating military strength. One is power-projection, which is the ability to move your forces to where they're needed. The UK has a relatively small army (110,000 soldiers) but can partake in these sorts of adventures because it has the air/sea capability to move them around. Iraq (like North Korea, China and a few others) has a large military, but is unable to project them any further than neighboring countries. And while Iraq is militarily weak on a "global scale", it never intended to fight a global war - it was easily strong enough to take Kuwait, for example, and were it not for Allied garrisons, it could have taken Saudi Arabia, Oman and UAE without too much trouble.
Even if you overlook the appalling human rights abuses Iraq's government is responsible for (including nerve gassing ethnic minorities), even if you ignore his sponsorship of Hamas (who admittedly aren't anything to do with al-Queda, but they're still terrorists), Saddam must not be permitted to invade his neighbors again. And yes, one reason for that is because if he gets control of all the oil, he can starve the West into submission.
What about other critical systems like police, ambulance, fire brigades and so on??
Well, in Britain the Fire Brigade are planning to time their strike over a pay raise (16% isn't enough for them, they want a 40% raise while inflation is only 2%) to coincide with the outbreak of war, meaning the Army (19,000 troops, an entire Division's worth) will be taking on their role. So they will have military GPS anyway.
My guess is that for high-precision locations, the Iraqis already measured them with high accuracy, while for, say, infantry navigation all you really need is 100m accuracy. (Even less for armored forces, of cource)
That's an awfully big assumption. Consider the terrain in southern Iraq. A few tens of metres (or less) is the difference between fording a river with your tank, and getting bogged down in marshland and having to sit and wait for a recovery vehicle, and all the while vulnerable to air attack. Iraq isn't all desert as many people think; a lot of it is quite wet because of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The inhabitants of southern Iraq are often known as the "Marsh Arabs" for this reason. Even worse, few metres can mean the difference between a clear lane through a minefield, and straying into an uncleared area. Tanks may look clumsy, but they still require precision handling.
Would be interesting to know what the EU would do with Gallileo at this moment in time. I dare say they would follow the US lead, I suppose...
It would depend on whether the British or the French has the presidency at the time. It if was the Brits, they would announce to the world via the BBC that they wre terribly sorry, but Gallileo won't be fully accurate on civilian receivers, sorry about that chaps, see you next week for tea and cricket, jolly good. The French would just immediately try to sell Iraq some military Gallileo receivers.
Daredevil has a son? Did they use anything from the original comic besides the name?
Sorry, I should have been clearer: Daredevil beats the crap out of the bad guy, then realizes that the bad guy's son was watching all along. Then the kid says "please don't hurt me" and Daredevil replies "I'm not the bad guy here" but all the kid can see is someone beating the crap out of his father.
A young boy growing up on the East Side won't relate very well to a rich lawyer with an ass-kicking girlfriend
They were both born poor, tho'. Daredevil's father was a dockworker, then a small-time crook, then a boxer, then killed by a gang. He wasn't even a particularly wealthy lawyer when he grew up, he partner complains that their clients pay them in fish or sporting goods rather than cash!
Almost all of the cool Spidey stuff in the first movie was CGI anyway, so what is it exactly that Mr. Macguire can't do?
Indeed. Anyway, Daredevil was a much better movie. Spiderman wakes up one day, sees he has super powers and starts giggling and posing in front of the mirror - Daredevil thinks he's going insane and has to work hard to turn his "powers" into something useful. Spiderman droned on about responsibility coming with power, Daredevil handled it much more subtly, when he kicks the ass of a villain without realising that that his son was watching. Spiderman's girlfriend was a passive, chronic victim, whereas Elektra was an ass-kicker in her own right. Kingpin was a much more interesting villain than the Goblin, who was basically just a cackling idiot. And the special effects in Daredevil were superior despite a lower budget. So my reaction to a second Spiderman movie being in doubt is so what, the money would better be spent on Daredevil 2 anyway.
I found out that solaris has a very interesting command: fssnap
If you are using EMC Symmetrix storage, you can use the TimeFinder product to create a "Business Continuence Volume", or BCV. It deltas against your last backup (at the track level, not files or blocks), applies changes to a copy of the last backup to create a consistent image, then you can dump that to tape.
I wonder if there's something like this for linux...
So long as you have one host (Solaris, NT, whatever) to run the TimeFinder client on, you can use the Symmetrix to provide storage to as many Linux boxes as you want.
I'd like to think that all of the women in America hold a lot more political power than media conglomerates, and unlike perhaps Christian moral law, women have *not* been completely replaced by money and corporate interests. But enough about that...
The problem with most feminist politics is that it assumes that "women" are a homogeneous group who share the same ideology and policy goals. Implicit in your statement is the assumption that there is no overlap between two groups "women in America" and "media conglomerates". Whereas in fact, you will find that the set you call "women" is actually a bunch of different people who have lots of different ideas about lots of different things, and that the set you call "conglomerates" actually employs vast numbers of the "women" set. In fact, one of the senior figures in the "conglomerates" set is actually also a member of the "women" set! Further, out here in reality, you will find another set called "men", all of whom can be said to agree with some "women" and some "conglomerates", and disagree with others.
In short, gender politics is simply not a useful framework for understanding the world, and neither is the idea that the world is divided into the opposing camps of "corporations" and "everyone else".
It would be exactly like real life! Except.. it would be under the control of a private company! Scary, isn't it? No more constitution, no more human rights. Just whatever the company decides to put in it's EULA.
You usually can't sign away your Constitutional rights. In fact, there is only one way to do so, and that is to join the military. The worst the game could do to you would be to lower your score. If, however, you freely choose to behave as if your Constitutional rights did not exist, for the purpose of improving your score (and let's face it, this is not a life and death matter, there's no coercion involved) than as a private Citizen, it's your right to do so. However, you still won't (legally) be able to kill someone, even another game player, even if the rules of the game require it. The game would have to simulate dying by excluding someone from playing, but they could not actually be harmed.
Actually, where are the damn robot servants? The ones who can cook/clean/fetch beer.
There is a chain of restaurants in London called Yo! in which there are robots that bring you beer. And it could be argued that dishwashers, washing machines and microwaves are "robot servants".
Also, wheres the AI programs that can run errands for me, like pay the bills online, record my TV shows, remind me about important dates.
Direct debit, Sky+/TiVo and Outlook.
With dual incomes becoming the norm just to live in the USA, where are the time saving robot/AI programs to give us more time to spend with the family. Work a ten hour day, commute for 2 hours, sleep for 8, doesnt leave much time to eat dinner with the family and and wind down from work.
Those things exist; the problem is that we used them to help make our lives busier.
When it comes to big organizations and big projects, the government works very well. The real question is: what big private company has been better, cheaper, or quicker than the government?
The government has one advantage that (most) corporations cannot match: a near-perfect credit rating. It can take on massive debt, secured not on existing collateral but future taxation. That's why it can afford to take on large projects.
As to your question, it cannot be answered because the lines are too blurred. When Boeing or General Dynamics develops a technology, is that the private or the public sector? Very hard to say. When MIT develops a technology is that private or public sector? Of course in some cases it is clear: when IBM develops a new fab process that's private, when RAND writes a study that's public, despite RAND nominally being a corporation.
Big corporations are command economies but without the transparency and checks-and-balances of governments, and the often do their business free of they kind of competitive pressures that make markets efficient.
No business can operate in a competitive vacuum without government fiat. That is both a theoretical and a historical fact.
I am all for a private sector and free markets in telecommunications. The trouble is that we don't have it. And if the choice is between unregulated inefficient corporate behemoths and public utilities or strongly regulated private utilities, the latter is much preferable and likely to be more efficient.
The problem with your statement is that "free market" and "strongly regulated" are mutually exclusive. For example, regulation of utilities usually means that the market can't set prices. In some cases, it works, tho', like airlines where there is both regulation and competition. But usually mixing is a disaster, like in California where they capped the price at which utilities could retail while deregulating the wholesale market. Of course, that wasn't an economic decision, it was a political exercise to discredit deregulation.
It seems oracle is going nowhere in terms of its core market. I am hoping its eating middle end and low end databases like ms-sql server. Access in the low end isn't going anywhere because of its gui and development tools.
MySQL is "stealing" marketshare from CSV and grep. Anyone who could use MySQL but instead uses Oracle has wasted their money! The two products aren't even comparable.
Slashdot Mirror
There's so much propaganda on both sides. I think information is deliberately unreliable otherwise Saddam would know precisely what's going to happen and when.
Well, the Iraqi Information Ministry is claiming that the footage of surrendering Iraqi soldiers was staged by the Americans using actors, and that the Coalition forces aren't even in Iraq. The question is, who do you believe?
If we truly knew where they were, why the hell did we not share the intelligence with the inspectors?
Read the articles of the UN resolutions again. The inspectors were not there to find weapons, but to be shown weapons. It's a subtle but important difference. The UN made it quite clear that Iraq had to tell the inspectors where the weapons were, not lead them on a wild goose chase.
He has body doubles, food tasters, a plethora of bodyguards
Yes, Saddam is a very different threat from Osama. Saddam loves living in palaces, he loves having his portrait on billboards, he loves hearing the crowds chanting his name. Saddam's objective is to maintain his lifestyle, he's not an ideological obsessive like Osama. I don't think he ever believed seriously that the West would actually attack him, just like he was surprised that the West cared when he invaded Kuwait.
This turned out to be misinformation. They weren't Scuds.
2 were Scuds, 2 were Chinese made missiles, codenamed Seersucker by the West.
Remind me again about what is not 'innovative' about being able to type in a band's name, anywhere in the world, and hear their music within minutes?
The people who built the system were innovative. The people who use it are not. Think of the telephone: is everyone who makes a telephone call a great innovator like Alexander Graham Bell? Is everyone who switches on a lightbulb an innovator like Thomas Edison?
This isn't a case of being bound to every other country's laws, this is a case of being bound to internationally accepted law.
So, it's not "every other country's laws" it's just "some other country's laws". That doesn't make it any more acceptable. Let's see all those other countries give their citizens the rights enshrined in the Constitution first, then we'll see about their laws.
"Innovative students who offend Corporations will be jailed. Even if the 'guilty act' does not merit such severe action ".
Remind me again what is "innovative" about using someone elses software to rip off someone elses music? Sure, the original author if the software was innovative (before everyone else jumped on the P2P bandwagon anyway) and the author of the music is innovative (more or less), but that's not who they're going after.
It is particularly sickening to see this sort of stuff on Slashdot. People who insist that their favorite license is respected won't even do other people the courtesy of respecting their licenses.
After all, the Pres has said that he'd spring from jail (in EU) any US citizen convicted of a crime by the International Court. Now who's respecting the international community?
Sorry, but what the hell is the point of even having a country if you're bound by every other country's laws? There is a lot of stuff you can do in country X that you can't do in Y, and vice versa. So, if you are actually in someone else's country and you break their laws fair enough, you get your ass slung in jail, but if you are at home and a foreign court decides you broke their laws while you weren't even there (this is what ICC does, in a nutshell) there's bugger all they can do about it right now, which is as it should be. Sign up to ICC and your citizens can be extradited to face a foreign court for something that isn't even a crime where they are now.
God, this man's hypocrisy makes me want to vomit.
No, he's pretty consistent actually: the duty of the American government is to put the interests of American citizens first. Again, if your government isn't about looking after its own tax-paying law-abiding citizens, what the hell is it for?
I not against the american people nor a supporter of Iraq, i live in india and iam very proud my country is against this bloody battle.
Good for you. Wait, doesn't India have nukes pointed at its neighbor Pakistan? Don't you have troops skirmishing in Kashmir as we speak? Funny, I don't think the "world community" is too keen on India and Pakistan "testing" (read: detonating) nuclear weapons to intimidate each other.
Get of your moral high horse and remember, those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Not trying to flamebait or anything, but what does it mean "support the troops" even if you're morally opposed to the war? I just don't get it.
It's like Vietnam, the anti-war crowd took their displeasure out on ordinary soldiers returning from Vietnam, many of whom were conscripts. Why? Because they were too stupid to realize that the military is an instrument of policy, it does not make policy. The way it works in the West is that the democratically-elected government decides what's right or wrong and if necessary the military makes it happen.
I thought "I was just following orders" was considered by most to be a poor excuse for committing immoral acts. One example of this is statements by Nazi soliders who worked in concentration camps during WWII. A large percentage of people would agree that the concentration camps (both the idea and the implementation) were immoral. I suspect that many of those people would agree that "I was just following orders" was not a morally justifiable reason.
At an individual level, no Western soldiers are committing immoral acts. They aren't raping civilian women, looting museums and so on, as Nazi troops did in Europe or Iraqi troops did in Kuwait. If a US/UK soldier did do something like that, then the excuse "only following orders" wouldn't save him from punishment, even if a commander had ordered him to.
But whether or not you think the war is justified (and personally, I do) a UK soldier, after a declaration of war, who fires on a uniformed member of enemy armed forces is committing no moral crime. The politicians make the decision to go to war.
Approximately 3,500 civilians were killed during the U.S.-led air strike campaign in August 1990, and more than 9000 homes were destroyed. The civilian death toll rose to 110,000 after the bombing stopped, and of those 70,000 were children under the age of 15.
You can see the attitude here. If Saddam builds a command center under a hospital, it's his fault if civilians are killed. Where in the West is there a military installation deliberately placed in a civilian area for the specific purpose of using those civilians as "human shields"? I'll give you a clue: nowhere. Decent folk don't work like that. We are not the bad guys here. All civilian casualties are Saddam's fault, not ours.
American: We kept the reciepts!
Sly jokes aside, where is the proof of that? Example: Hans Blix and his team found artillery warheads for the delivery of chemical weapons. The calibre was 122mm. But the US and UK don't use that, our artillery goes from 105mm straight to 155mm. There are also 120mm mortars around in the West, but mortars don't fire artillery shells, and anyway, 2mm is enough for it not to fit. So, wherever Saddam got them, it wasn't from us, was probably from the old Soviet Empire.
In such a terrain, armored forces are much less effective anyway. AFAIK, deploying tanks in a marshland is a problematic decision.
I believe (altho' I'm no expert in Middle Eastern geography) that in order to get to Baghdad from Kuwait without driving through Saudi Arabia, you have to go past Basra, which is marshy. There are many delta and tributaries before the Gulf itself.
Again, I was not in the US army, but AFAIK, when combat-engineers create a clear-lane, they mark the cleared teritory well. This means that no tank-commander should rely on GPS for avoiding minefields. Perhaps the US doctrine is different.
I'd hope so - when I was a Cadet in the early 90s we used chemical glowsticks. I don't know how the regular Army does it these days.
GPS is much more important to the US military, which does not have on-the-ground knowledge there. The US should be more worried about the Iraqis jamming GPS signals and other communications.
Actually, given the satellite photos, reconaissance aircraft and special forces, the US/UK probably know Iraq better than most of Iraq's Generals by now. Look at who's in charge on either side: the Allies have professional soldiers with decades of experience on the ground in wars, peacekeeping, exercises etc all over the world. The Iraqis have various relatives and cronies of Saddam Hussein who probably never leave their palaces unless they have to.
Of course, so far, it looks like Iraq is pretty feeble militarily. I suspect the war will be over very quickly. Which brings up the question again: why are we going?
There are many factors to consider when evaluating military strength. One is power-projection, which is the ability to move your forces to where they're needed. The UK has a relatively small army (110,000 soldiers) but can partake in these sorts of adventures because it has the air/sea capability to move them around. Iraq (like North Korea, China and a few others) has a large military, but is unable to project them any further than neighboring countries. And while Iraq is militarily weak on a "global scale", it never intended to fight a global war - it was easily strong enough to take Kuwait, for example, and were it not for Allied garrisons, it could have taken Saudi Arabia, Oman and UAE without too much trouble.
Even if you overlook the appalling human rights abuses Iraq's government is responsible for (including nerve gassing ethnic minorities), even if you ignore his sponsorship of Hamas (who admittedly aren't anything to do with al-Queda, but they're still terrorists), Saddam must not be permitted to invade his neighbors again. And yes, one reason for that is because if he gets control of all the oil, he can starve the West into submission.
What about other critical systems like police, ambulance, fire brigades and so on??
Well, in Britain the Fire Brigade are planning to time their strike over a pay raise (16% isn't enough for them, they want a 40% raise while inflation is only 2%) to coincide with the outbreak of war, meaning the Army (19,000 troops, an entire Division's worth) will be taking on their role. So they will have military GPS anyway.
My guess is that for high-precision locations, the Iraqis already measured them with high accuracy, while for, say, infantry navigation all you really need is 100m accuracy. (Even less for armored forces, of cource)
That's an awfully big assumption. Consider the terrain in southern Iraq. A few tens of metres (or less) is the difference between fording a river with your tank, and getting bogged down in marshland and having to sit and wait for a recovery vehicle, and all the while vulnerable to air attack. Iraq isn't all desert as many people think; a lot of it is quite wet because of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The inhabitants of southern Iraq are often known as the "Marsh Arabs" for this reason. Even worse, few metres can mean the difference between a clear lane through a minefield, and straying into an uncleared area. Tanks may look clumsy, but they still require precision handling.
Would be interesting to know what the EU would do with Gallileo at this moment in time. I dare say they would follow the US lead, I suppose...
It would depend on whether the British or the French has the presidency at the time. It if was the Brits, they would announce to the world via the BBC that they wre terribly sorry, but Gallileo won't be fully accurate on civilian receivers, sorry about that chaps, see you next week for tea and cricket, jolly good. The French would just immediately try to sell Iraq some military Gallileo receivers.
Daredevil has a son? Did they use anything from the original comic besides the name?
Sorry, I should have been clearer: Daredevil beats the crap out of the bad guy, then realizes that the bad guy's son was watching all along. Then the kid says "please don't hurt me" and Daredevil replies "I'm not the bad guy here" but all the kid can see is someone beating the crap out of his father.
A young boy growing up on the East Side won't relate very well to a rich lawyer with an ass-kicking girlfriend
They were both born poor, tho'. Daredevil's father was a dockworker, then a small-time crook, then a boxer, then killed by a gang. He wasn't even a particularly wealthy lawyer when he grew up, he partner complains that their clients pay them in fish or sporting goods rather than cash!
Almost all of the cool Spidey stuff in the first movie was CGI anyway, so what is it exactly that Mr. Macguire can't do?
Indeed. Anyway, Daredevil was a much better movie. Spiderman wakes up one day, sees he has super powers and starts giggling and posing in front of the mirror - Daredevil thinks he's going insane and has to work hard to turn his "powers" into something useful. Spiderman droned on about responsibility coming with power, Daredevil handled it much more subtly, when he kicks the ass of a villain without realising that that his son was watching. Spiderman's girlfriend was a passive, chronic victim, whereas Elektra was an ass-kicker in her own right. Kingpin was a much more interesting villain than the Goblin, who was basically just a cackling idiot. And the special effects in Daredevil were superior despite a lower budget. So my reaction to a second Spiderman movie being in doubt is so what, the money would better be spent on Daredevil 2 anyway.
I found out that solaris has a very interesting command: fssnap
If you are using EMC Symmetrix storage, you can use the TimeFinder product to create a "Business Continuence Volume", or BCV. It deltas against your last backup (at the track level, not files or blocks), applies changes to a copy of the last backup to create a consistent image, then you can dump that to tape.
I wonder if there's something like this for linux...
So long as you have one host (Solaris, NT, whatever) to run the TimeFinder client on, you can use the Symmetrix to provide storage to as many Linux boxes as you want.
I'd like to think that all of the women in America hold a lot more political power than media conglomerates, and unlike perhaps Christian moral law, women have *not* been completely replaced by money and corporate interests. But enough about that...
The problem with most feminist politics is that it assumes that "women" are a homogeneous group who share the same ideology and policy goals. Implicit in your statement is the assumption that there is no overlap between two groups "women in America" and "media conglomerates". Whereas in fact, you will find that the set you call "women" is actually a bunch of different people who have lots of different ideas about lots of different things, and that the set you call "conglomerates" actually employs vast numbers of the "women" set. In fact, one of the senior figures in the "conglomerates" set is actually also a member of the "women" set! Further, out here in reality, you will find another set called "men", all of whom can be said to agree with some "women" and some "conglomerates", and disagree with others.
In short, gender politics is simply not a useful framework for understanding the world, and neither is the idea that the world is divided into the opposing camps of "corporations" and "everyone else".
It would be exactly like real life! Except .. it would be under the control of a private company! Scary, isn't it? No more constitution, no more human rights. Just whatever the company decides to put in it's EULA.
You usually can't sign away your Constitutional rights. In fact, there is only one way to do so, and that is to join the military. The worst the game could do to you would be to lower your score. If, however, you freely choose to behave as if your Constitutional rights did not exist, for the purpose of improving your score (and let's face it, this is not a life and death matter, there's no coercion involved) than as a private Citizen, it's your right to do so. However, you still won't (legally) be able to kill someone, even another game player, even if the rules of the game require it. The game would have to simulate dying by excluding someone from playing, but they could not actually be harmed.
Actually, where are the damn robot servants? The ones who can cook/clean/fetch beer.
There is a chain of restaurants in London called Yo! in which there are robots that bring you beer. And it could be argued that dishwashers, washing machines and microwaves are "robot servants".
Also, wheres the AI programs that can run errands for me, like pay the bills online, record my TV shows, remind me about important dates.
Direct debit, Sky+/TiVo and Outlook.
With dual incomes becoming the norm just to live in the USA, where are the time saving robot/AI programs to give us more time to spend with the family. Work a ten hour day, commute for 2 hours, sleep for 8, doesnt leave much time to eat dinner with the family and and wind down from work.
Those things exist; the problem is that we used them to help make our lives busier.
When it comes to big organizations and big projects, the government works very well. The real question is: what big private company has been better, cheaper, or quicker than the government?
The government has one advantage that (most) corporations cannot match: a near-perfect credit rating. It can take on massive debt, secured not on existing collateral but future taxation. That's why it can afford to take on large projects.
As to your question, it cannot be answered because the lines are too blurred. When Boeing or General Dynamics develops a technology, is that the private or the public sector? Very hard to say. When MIT develops a technology is that private or public sector? Of course in some cases it is clear: when IBM develops a new fab process that's private, when RAND writes a study that's public, despite RAND nominally being a corporation.
Big corporations are command economies but without the transparency and checks-and-balances of governments, and the often do their business free of they kind of competitive pressures that make markets efficient.
No business can operate in a competitive vacuum without government fiat. That is both a theoretical and a historical fact.
I am all for a private sector and free markets in telecommunications. The trouble is that we don't have it. And if the choice is between unregulated inefficient corporate behemoths and public utilities or strongly regulated private utilities, the latter is much preferable and likely to be more efficient.
The problem with your statement is that "free market" and "strongly regulated" are mutually exclusive. For example, regulation of utilities usually means that the market can't set prices. In some cases, it works, tho', like airlines where there is both regulation and competition. But usually mixing is a disaster, like in California where they capped the price at which utilities could retail while deregulating the wholesale market. Of course, that wasn't an economic decision, it was a political exercise to discredit deregulation.
It seems oracle is going nowhere in terms of its core market. I am hoping its eating middle end and low end databases like ms-sql server. Access in the low end isn't going anywhere because of its gui and development tools.
MySQL is "stealing" marketshare from CSV and grep. Anyone who could use MySQL but instead uses Oracle has wasted their money! The two products aren't even comparable.