Try a bit hard to follow the logic. Many parents think violence, and content glorifying violence -- including not only violent video games and movies, but also content like weapon advocacy, hobbyist sites-- is bad for their children; something they'd rather they not read/see. Plus obviously
information regarding weaponry can be viewed as
risky and harmful ("finding sites on Internet that describe how to build bombs") in general.
Sites that are "anti-gun" oriented generally do NOT have much to do with actual guns and their usage (except for statistics regarding fatalities, crime rates),
ergo they are not different sides of a coin in the sense that's relevant to censoring the content.
I just get the feeling that people are way too lazy to even try to see rationale between different handling. I doubt Symantec is trying to censor discussion regarding "gun rights" and gun control laws, but rather blocking access to sites that have lots of gun (not gun LAW) content.
Above is just general idea, however, and it is likely that actual distinction between political sites, and gun hobbyist/nut sites is done as inefficiently as distinction between porn sites and sites with non-sexual nudity. But it shouldn't be THAT hard to see why blocking could divide sites, even without company commenting on gun legislation itself.
As for the RIAA being evil, I'm not so much convinced by how they treat their "customers" - They are a company, and the primary job of a company is to make money. I'm primarily upset by their hypocracy, and their poor treatment of their artists, the very source of their income.
Hmmh? Not that I like artists' treatment, but claiming that money does NOT come from "customers", but from artists seems bit bass ackwards to me? I know that artists creative talents create the opportunity to sell copies, but in the end it's buyers who bring in the money.
Personally I'm not so much upset by treating of customers per se, but by the fact customers are locked-in, and there's no way to choose another vendor (than members of RIAA), and by RIAA members abusing that power. If it was possible to have competition (obligatory licensing, say), there would be legal way to punish companies with bad customer "service". As of now, there is none.
For artists there is at least theoretical possibility of choosing a non-RIAA company, or even producing and distributing your music some other way. Not that this is a particularly compelling solution, but at least it could be done.
Not *one* major player in the stock market cares what the company does -or even if it's doing well.
Are you saying Warren Buffet is not a major player, or that he doesn't care about companies he (or rather, his company) owns? Because I thought he for one is and does?
He may be in minority, but as one of the most SUCCESFUL investors around he's an exception to the rule of reality distorted gambling-style investors.
Now, what and how company does is exactly what determines if it makes money; and company making money is the ONLY RELIABLE way stock will make its owner money. It is possible to earn money with bubble stocks, but that's volatile and risky way. Day trading (market timing etc) is only popular because many people refuse to accept anything but quick fixes: losing weight without eating less or exercising more, or investing without having a clue as to what company is like, just having blind faith in hocus pocus of things like "technical" analysis. As boring as long term investing in good companies is, it's still the best way; it works.
It all depends on which one you like more; Tons'O Money or Even More Money. If people who own Google aren't in it just as investors, and are already / will be making money (either via traditional profits and dividends, or through IPO), there might not be that much additional incentive to sell to the highest bidder; assuming there's also some negative side effects (ie. disliking Microsoft, either due to their behaviour or just trying to be a competitor).
So basically it really depends on how hungry owners are -- when you are satiated, juicy beef isn't all that attractive.
The other poster gave tbe "definitive" proof, but consider the fact that I could easily create "hello world" app in both C and one of basic flavours of the day. I would also assume Cobol is capable of doing that task.
Perhaps you read my statement to say "everything C can".
The tags are first and foremost a mnemonic for humans {otherwise they would be like \x1b[1m and \x1b[m},
Yes, and no. They are both compromise between human and machine readability (as in humans write, machines read and use), and to work around historical problems with transmitting anything beyond 7-bit ascii over network. Tags are text-encoding for structured documents; letters being used as opposed to other delimiters so even EBCDIC could be used (back in SGML days this was important... not as much these days).
Now, there is one very good point in trying to get rid of case-insensitivity. With 7-bit Ascii case insensitivity is easy. With unicode it's a royal pain, bloats code that handles tag parsing, and gives very little in the end. This same discussion was going in java developer circles a while back; there were people who were adamant case-sensitivity is idiotic, but also that anyone using "weird" characters (instead of ascii, which is not even enough to represent all english text... old english has 2 more letters than 7-bit ascii has) was an idiot. Why? "everyone knows it's better" seemingly being the strongest argument.:-)
So first and foremost battle between case sensitivity and insensitivity seems to be based on personal preferences; whether it should be easy by sloppy humans to create, or simple and efficient for machines to use. Since HTML (and XML markup languages even more) is IMO mostly for machine consumption, I'd prefer just going to case-sensitivity.
No, managers need to be accountants or personnel people - deal with money or people, that's what they need their skills in.
While this is in many ways true, and I do understand your sentiment (I hate situations where bit of knowledge is both too little and too much -- buzzword-throwing zombies acting like they know enough), I would argue that to deal with money and people, they SHOULD know a bit about domain, the field they are working in. Not necessarily about technical details, but about things that make the field special (in case of s/w development, there are plenty -- it's not engineering, nor manufacturing, nor constructuon, all of which have unsuccesfully used as analogies). There's a common
fallacy that there's just one type of good manager, and independent of industry (s)he can do good job, without bothering about pesky details. Selling sugar-water to building airplanes, everything's supposedly just same-old same-old people, money, deadlines.
On the other hand, as a software developer, oftentimes there is less and less need for managers; biggest driving factor being higher-level peoples' fear of not understanding of what's going on, and assuming more managers solve that problem. So sometimes managers feel the need to justify their existence (and for good reason too... better the team, less need they seem to have for one).
And as a disclaimer; no, actually I haven't had too many bad managers to speak of, quite contrary. And their technical skills range widely, and didn't seem to strongly correlate with their "goodness".
Continuations can be used to implement exceptions, user-level thread packages, "early exits" from recursive code, and other cool stuff.
Potentially other useful things are safe ways to handle leakable resources like database connections or file handles; usually via iterator-like access (like Ruby code often does).
The idea is that code that accesses such a resource (in case of DBs, up to 3 levels of things; from transaction/connection to result set to result row) makes something looking like normal method code, but called code that opens the resource still has a way to "get back" to be able to close connection, after original code goes out of scope (ie. retains its stack frame or whatever
mechanism is used to store code execution state).
It's bit difficult to explain without showing code, and for C/Java background people it's new enough concept to take a while to truly appreciate (and I count myself as one of those... even though back at school these were explained, I never got to really make use of them).
You also cannot do anything in C++ that you can in C.
I take it you misspelled something in that sentence? I'm pretty sure I can think of a few things one can do in both languages, even using exactly same syntax:-)
In fact, it would be hard to design a language that can not do anything C can.
So I read, from the good old 'Programming Pearls' book. It was example case to guide people to first consider simplest solutions, and good one at that.
In some respect this does mean that Balmer is right, extremely good software comes from a controlled process,
No, no, no. Processes never create anything. People do. Skilled, talented, motivated developers, who know the domain their applications work in; working with other necessary people -- users that will be using thing developed (unless developing for themselves), testers (which may be users, or developers; tester is a role not title).
Good software comes from good teams. Good teams apply whatever processes they feel most useful; oftentimes most light-weight one applicable for their situation.
Need for processes only comes from overhead of having to have bigger teams, which by their very
nature are less efficient than smaller ones (mostly due to communication overhead). Thus, processes are more helpful with less efficient teams; repairing damage. They do not (and can not) add anything; just prevent loss of something.
No Test Plans, no Test Matrices of test cases. Pre release versions are dumped to the public to use as they will in a blind, shotgun approach to testing. Exceptionally sloppy QA at best.
Keep in mind, though, that what you are (or sound to be) talking about is part of heavy-weight old fashioned software engineering ideology... something that on development side is challenged as fossil reminiscent of dinosaurs. Agile methodologies generally do heavily emphasise testing, but as a part of development cycle.
Generally I even dislike term QA. Term itself is implying one could slap quality, after-the-fact, instead of concentrating on making sure quality is there to begin with.
All that said, efficient testing (one way or the other; done by developers, users, professional testers) is useful and often necessary. But there are more than one way to skin the fact, and since development of OS projects is very different from their proprietary counterparts, so should testing.
MS has the luxury of releasing something that doesn't quite work properly and just working at it till it has it right.
Do you know how to COMPREHEND what you read?
Microsoft put out crap products and they should be congratulated for their persistence?
Pot, kettle, black? Read what YOU were replying
to before knee-jerking around. He was merely pointing out that in some cases bad MS _products_ have become _acceptably good_ (which may be arguable claim, but there's nothing incoherent about that). Thus, congratulating wouldn't be about initial crappy products, but about IMPROVING what you have.
I don't think such things are publicized, or included in things that have limited duration of classification? My understanding is that classified information usually pertains to decision, investigations; anything where important decisions are made, and future generations should feel obligated to know about. But I guess that's a good point; there are different types of information, of which for future generation, technical information is unlikely to be as necessary to be available.
Now, as to assasinations; evil deeds like that do not disappear by being hidden under the carpet.
So... sometimes value of truth is more valuable than (cowardly) avoiding consequences of previous mistake. That's called integrity.
Too, I have to admit that these officials must be able to extend the secrecy of these things beyond the default time limits, and that they must be able to do so without sharing the secret with me so that I can decide for myself whether it should still be a secret or not.
That sounds like eating a cake and keeping it to me.
Either there is a limit, and that's adhered to, or officials can keep anything they want to secret as long as they choose to. At least that's what you ARE saying; hey, they should disclose it, if they feel like it, but not if they don't.
But furthermore, how exactly would those guidelines be enforced? There would be no way for anyone to ever verify adherence to the said guidelines?
Well lets see, if 35,000 internet users isn't significant, then I guess the 921 likely voters with the Zogby International America Poll that gave him a 49 percent approval rating, or the
Hmmh. But isn't that a small but clear improvement over his approval rating during last elections?:-)
media picked up on WMD because it was a buzz word and a new one that
No, no and no. Bush specifically emphasised WMDs because:
None of the other reasons had enough credibility (like terrorist links that even
Bush admins considered weak enough not to stress, just imply there's some connection, sneakily implying even 9/11 was "somehow" linked)
Other powers (Russia, China, UK, France)
consider nuclear power capability as common
threat, and thus if threat was credible, they
might have let US get its way.
To think that media "created" WMD hysteria is
just plain incorrect. It certainly echoed Bush's
message about Saddam with WMDs, up to and including taunting other world leaders for not immediately buying the proof (those vague satellite images shown in UN, for example); assuming proof was really convincing, as opposed to being based more on suspicion than real current intelligence material... but didn't create it. Don't give news too much credit here.
What really was strange was that even SNL started cracking jokes about Hans Blix not finding his own butt.... looking back, that looks embarrassing. Even with 200.000+ army, no WMDs have been uncovered, so chances of anyone finding them back then must have been very slim.
Because the UN is impotent. They have been so for almost a decade now.
You must be young.:-)
My recollection is that UN has been impotent for at least about thirty years, but most likely for past 60 years; there has only been couple of tiny peaks where it has gotten any action; usually with US involvement (Korean war, 91 persian gulf). Really, current situation is hardly anything new.:-/
It's not implied. The hard evidence shows that they've materially supported the Iraqi dictatorship for years.
That/If France sold weaponry to Iraq (which it, like US, did, at least during war against Iran... but there's scant evidence it did during sanctions),
does not really prove that there are such filthy reasons.
Furthermore, your definition of "supporting" is different from mine, obviously. I don't see Safeway supporting me, even though I buy food from their stores. Nor does Slashdot support me, even though I read stories they publish. It may morally wrong to sell arms to certain countries. In some cases it may be illegal. But it does not constitute support, as is.
You may believe that fifty-year-old secrets are "ridiculous", but you can't justify that belief without knowing exactly what the secret is.
Well, let's turn this around; can you give an
example of some "public" secret (ie. thing that was documented for use by government) that should NOT be publicized at latest 50 years after being documented? And do you have more trouble with specific fixed duration, or the general idea of limiting maximum span of classification?
I do have an issue with your "if they can withhold information temporarily, they should be allowed to withhold it indefinitely" argument. As with copyrights, there is big difference of limited duration and indefinite one. You could argue 50 is not a magical number, but there has to be some fixed limit; otherwise government can pretty much destroy such records; make certain historic events potentially disappear from our collective knowledge. While 50 years is long time, it's still limited, and as such eventually truth will get uncovered.
Now the people of Iraq are free and things are improving every day (despite what the news media says).
Call me sceptic, but how did you find out about the improvements, if media says it ain't so? Did you perhaps travel to Iraq and see that first hand? Or are you just taking your input directly from administration's PR machine? It's good
to take media's words with grain of salt; but
consider that at least they don't have
single consistent agenda to further (as a whole)... unlike governments do.
Very few people claim getting rid of the tyrant in question is a bad thing. But there's old saying "ends justify means" that scares many, for good reason.
France was right. There was nothing in it for them. I mean aside from *ahem* managing the 40 billion dollars that was stolen from the Iraqi people, and their vastly below market value deals for Iraqi oil that..
And that's remarkably different from the way
oil is treated now... like, Iraqi people getting
the fair market price for themselves, right?
It's not, like, used to rebuild country that
was demolished by an invading army; contracts
handed out by party responsible for destruction,
paid for by assets they confiscated?
Asshat, France and Germany could have stopped the war. Know how? Call the US's bluff. Give in to a hard line for invasive UN inspections backed up by military ultimatum
And I have a nice bridge to sell you for fair price. Do you honestly think Bush would have given up his idea of dethroning Saddam? That was his goal, and WMD (and various other rumours spread) was only the leverage used to enable
that. I mean, even most people who consider
war justified agree that this was very personal.
Unfinished job son inherited from father.
France and others could have gone along, but
there would always have been something Iraqi
regime did wrong, form US administration
viewpoint; no matter what. In a way, France
and Germany DID call it; and found out GWB
was not really bluffing.
Hear, hear. Even if one disagrees with France's assesment of threat, it's weird that values that are so dear to most americans (integrity, standing up to what one believe's, not being pushed by bullies) are suddenly repulsive, when displayed by other nations.:-/
Somehow it was always implied that there must be some other filthy reason for them not to be gung-ho about letting the super power go vigilante, than their general aversion to war.
And on the other hand, few european leaders that openly supported US attack, such as Silvio Berlusconi, were portrayed as pretty much saints... ironic, considering that:
Berlusconi has long been claimed/suspected as being corrupt (although investigated, he hasn't been convicted), even using Italy's
political standards.
Italy in general was (and is) very vocal against death penalty, and considers US practice
barbaric... which used to strain countries'
relationship prior to war.
But I guess those leaders just knew how to play the game, and count on short memory (and lack of interest?) of US politicians, to gain some
brownie points. I mean, they didn't really send
much any soldiers, or do funding; words are
cheap.
I hate to say this (must be first time I've ever defended that airhead I reckon), but I doubt voting rate for this particular competition is anywhere near presidential election voting rate. So, chances are more people voted Nader in that race than Dubya in this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Sites that are "anti-gun" oriented generally do NOT have much to do with actual guns and their usage (except for statistics regarding fatalities, crime rates), ergo they are not different sides of a coin in the sense that's relevant to censoring the content.
I just get the feeling that people are way too lazy to even try to see rationale between different handling. I doubt Symantec is trying to censor discussion regarding "gun rights" and gun control laws, but rather blocking access to sites that have lots of gun (not gun LAW) content.
Above is just general idea, however, and it is likely that actual distinction between political sites, and gun hobbyist/nut sites is done as inefficiently as distinction between porn sites and sites with non-sexual nudity. But it shouldn't be THAT hard to see why blocking could divide sites, even without company commenting on gun legislation itself.
Hmmh? Not that I like artists' treatment, but claiming that money does NOT come from "customers", but from artists seems bit bass ackwards to me? I know that artists creative talents create the opportunity to sell copies, but in the end it's buyers who bring in the money.
Personally I'm not so much upset by treating of customers per se, but by the fact customers are locked-in, and there's no way to choose another vendor (than members of RIAA), and by RIAA members abusing that power. If it was possible to have competition (obligatory licensing, say), there would be legal way to punish companies with bad customer "service". As of now, there is none.
For artists there is at least theoretical possibility of choosing a non-RIAA company, or even producing and distributing your music some other way. Not that this is a particularly compelling solution, but at least it could be done.
Are you saying Warren Buffet is not a major player, or that he doesn't care about companies he (or rather, his company) owns? Because I thought he for one is and does? He may be in minority, but as one of the most SUCCESFUL investors around he's an exception to the rule of reality distorted gambling-style investors.
Now, what and how company does is exactly what determines if it makes money; and company making money is the ONLY RELIABLE way stock will make its owner money. It is possible to earn money with bubble stocks, but that's volatile and risky way. Day trading (market timing etc) is only popular because many people refuse to accept anything but quick fixes: losing weight without eating less or exercising more, or investing without having a clue as to what company is like, just having blind faith in hocus pocus of things like "technical" analysis. As boring as long term investing in good companies is, it's still the best way; it works.
It all depends on which one you like more; Tons'O Money or Even More Money. If people who own Google aren't in it just as investors, and are already / will be making money (either via traditional profits and dividends, or through IPO), there might not be that much additional incentive to sell to the highest bidder; assuming there's also some negative side effects (ie. disliking Microsoft, either due to their behaviour or just trying to be a competitor).
So basically it really depends on how hungry owners are -- when you are satiated, juicy beef isn't all that attractive.
Perhaps you read my statement to say "everything C can".
Yes, and no. They are both compromise between human and machine readability (as in humans write, machines read and use), and to work around historical problems with transmitting anything beyond 7-bit ascii over network. Tags are text-encoding for structured documents; letters being used as opposed to other delimiters so even EBCDIC could be used (back in SGML days this was important... not as much these days).
Now, there is one very good point in trying to get rid of case-insensitivity. With 7-bit Ascii case insensitivity is easy. With unicode it's a royal pain, bloats code that handles tag parsing, and gives very little in the end. This same discussion was going in java developer circles a while back; there were people who were adamant case-sensitivity is idiotic, but also that anyone using "weird" characters (instead of ascii, which is not even enough to represent all english text... old english has 2 more letters than 7-bit ascii has) was an idiot. Why? "everyone knows it's better" seemingly being the strongest argument. :-)
So first and foremost battle between case sensitivity and insensitivity seems to be based on personal preferences; whether it should be easy by sloppy humans to create, or simple and efficient for machines to use. Since HTML (and XML markup languages even more) is IMO mostly for machine consumption, I'd prefer just going to case-sensitivity.
While this is in many ways true, and I do understand your sentiment (I hate situations where bit of knowledge is both too little and too much -- buzzword-throwing zombies acting like they know enough), I would argue that to deal with money and people, they SHOULD know a bit about domain, the field they are working in. Not necessarily about technical details, but about things that make the field special (in case of s/w development, there are plenty -- it's not engineering, nor manufacturing, nor constructuon, all of which have unsuccesfully used as analogies). There's a common fallacy that there's just one type of good manager, and independent of industry (s)he can do good job, without bothering about pesky details. Selling sugar-water to building airplanes, everything's supposedly just same-old same-old people, money, deadlines.
On the other hand, as a software developer, oftentimes there is less and less need for managers; biggest driving factor being higher-level peoples' fear of not understanding of what's going on, and assuming more managers solve that problem. So sometimes managers feel the need to justify their existence (and for good reason too... better the team, less need they seem to have for one).
And as a disclaimer; no, actually I haven't had too many bad managers to speak of, quite contrary. And their technical skills range widely, and didn't seem to strongly correlate with their "goodness".
Potentially other useful things are safe ways to handle leakable resources like database connections or file handles; usually via iterator-like access (like Ruby code often does). The idea is that code that accesses such a resource (in case of DBs, up to 3 levels of things; from transaction/connection to result set to result row) makes something looking like normal method code, but called code that opens the resource still has a way to "get back" to be able to close connection, after original code goes out of scope (ie. retains its stack frame or whatever mechanism is used to store code execution state). It's bit difficult to explain without showing code, and for C/Java background people it's new enough concept to take a while to truly appreciate (and I count myself as one of those... even though back at school these were explained, I never got to really make use of them).
I take it you misspelled something in that sentence? I'm pretty sure I can think of a few things one can do in both languages, even using exactly same syntax :-)
In fact, it would be hard to design a language that can not do anything C can.
So I read, from the good old 'Programming Pearls' book. It was example case to guide people to first consider simplest solutions, and good one at that.
No, no, no. Processes never create anything. People do. Skilled, talented, motivated developers, who know the domain their applications work in; working with other necessary people -- users that will be using thing developed (unless developing for themselves), testers (which may be users, or developers; tester is a role not title). Good software comes from good teams. Good teams apply whatever processes they feel most useful; oftentimes most light-weight one applicable for their situation.
Need for processes only comes from overhead of having to have bigger teams, which by their very nature are less efficient than smaller ones (mostly due to communication overhead). Thus, processes are more helpful with less efficient teams; repairing damage. They do not (and can not) add anything; just prevent loss of something.
Keep in mind, though, that what you are (or sound to be) talking about is part of heavy-weight old fashioned software engineering ideology... something that on development side is challenged as fossil reminiscent of dinosaurs. Agile methodologies generally do heavily emphasise testing, but as a part of development cycle.
Generally I even dislike term QA. Term itself is implying one could slap quality, after-the-fact, instead of concentrating on making sure quality is there to begin with.
All that said, efficient testing (one way or the other; done by developers, users, professional testers) is useful and often necessary. But there are more than one way to skin the fact, and since development of OS projects is very different from their proprietary counterparts, so should testing.
Do you know how to COMPREHEND what you read?
Microsoft put out crap products and they should be congratulated for their persistence?
Pot, kettle, black? Read what YOU were replying to before knee-jerking around. He was merely pointing out that in some cases bad MS _products_ have become _acceptably good_ (which may be arguable claim, but there's nothing incoherent about that). Thus, congratulating wouldn't be about initial crappy products, but about IMPROVING what you have.
Information on Biological Weapons?
I don't think such things are publicized, or included in things that have limited duration of classification? My understanding is that classified information usually pertains to decision, investigations; anything where important decisions are made, and future generations should feel obligated to know about. But I guess that's a good point; there are different types of information, of which for future generation, technical information is unlikely to be as necessary to be available.
Now, as to assasinations; evil deeds like that do not disappear by being hidden under the carpet. So... sometimes value of truth is more valuable than (cowardly) avoiding consequences of previous mistake. That's called integrity.
That sounds like eating a cake and keeping it to me. Either there is a limit, and that's adhered to, or officials can keep anything they want to secret as long as they choose to. At least that's what you ARE saying; hey, they should disclose it, if they feel like it, but not if they don't.
But furthermore, how exactly would those guidelines be enforced? There would be no way for anyone to ever verify adherence to the said guidelines?
Hmmh. But isn't that a small but clear improvement over his approval rating during last elections? :-)
No, no and no. Bush specifically emphasised WMDs because:
To think that media "created" WMD hysteria is just plain incorrect. It certainly echoed Bush's message about Saddam with WMDs, up to and including taunting other world leaders for not immediately buying the proof (those vague satellite images shown in UN, for example); assuming proof was really convincing, as opposed to being based more on suspicion than real current intelligence material... but didn't create it. Don't give news too much credit here.
What really was strange was that even SNL started cracking jokes about Hans Blix not finding his own butt.... looking back, that looks embarrassing. Even with 200.000+ army, no WMDs have been uncovered, so chances of anyone finding them back then must have been very slim.
You must be young. :-)
My recollection is that UN has been impotent for at least about thirty years, but most likely for past 60 years; there has only been couple of tiny peaks where it has gotten any action; usually with US involvement (Korean war, 91 persian gulf). Really, current situation is hardly anything new. :-/
That/If France sold weaponry to Iraq (which it, like US, did, at least during war against Iran... but there's scant evidence it did during sanctions), does not really prove that there are such filthy reasons.
Furthermore, your definition of "supporting" is different from mine, obviously. I don't see Safeway supporting me, even though I buy food from their stores. Nor does Slashdot support me, even though I read stories they publish. It may morally wrong to sell arms to certain countries. In some cases it may be illegal. But it does not constitute support, as is.
Well, let's turn this around; can you give an example of some "public" secret (ie. thing that was documented for use by government) that should NOT be publicized at latest 50 years after being documented? And do you have more trouble with specific fixed duration, or the general idea of limiting maximum span of classification?
I do have an issue with your "if they can withhold information temporarily, they should be allowed to withhold it indefinitely" argument. As with copyrights, there is big difference of limited duration and indefinite one. You could argue 50 is not a magical number, but there has to be some fixed limit; otherwise government can pretty much destroy such records; make certain historic events potentially disappear from our collective knowledge. While 50 years is long time, it's still limited, and as such eventually truth will get uncovered.
Call me sceptic, but how did you find out about the improvements, if media says it ain't so? Did you perhaps travel to Iraq and see that first hand? Or are you just taking your input directly from administration's PR machine? It's good to take media's words with grain of salt; but consider that at least they don't have single consistent agenda to further (as a whole)... unlike governments do.
Very few people claim getting rid of the tyrant in question is a bad thing. But there's old saying "ends justify means" that scares many, for good reason.
And that's remarkably different from the way oil is treated now... like, Iraqi people getting the fair market price for themselves, right? It's not, like, used to rebuild country that was demolished by an invading army; contracts handed out by party responsible for destruction, paid for by assets they confiscated?
Asshat, France and Germany could have stopped the war. Know how? Call the US's bluff. Give in to a hard line for invasive UN inspections backed up by military ultimatum
And I have a nice bridge to sell you for fair price. Do you honestly think Bush would have given up his idea of dethroning Saddam? That was his goal, and WMD (and various other rumours spread) was only the leverage used to enable that. I mean, even most people who consider war justified agree that this was very personal. Unfinished job son inherited from father.
France and others could have gone along, but there would always have been something Iraqi regime did wrong, form US administration viewpoint; no matter what. In a way, France and Germany DID call it; and found out GWB was not really bluffing.
Somehow it was always implied that there must be some other filthy reason for them not to be gung-ho about letting the super power go vigilante, than their general aversion to war.
And on the other hand, few european leaders that openly supported US attack, such as Silvio Berlusconi, were portrayed as pretty much saints... ironic, considering that:
- Berlusconi has long been claimed/suspected as being corrupt (although investigated, he hasn't been convicted), even using Italy's
political standards.
- Italy in general was (and is) very vocal against death penalty, and considers US practice
barbaric... which used to strain countries'
relationship prior to war.
But I guess those leaders just knew how to play the game, and count on short memory (and lack of interest?) of US politicians, to gain some brownie points. I mean, they didn't really send much any soldiers, or do funding; words are cheap.I hate to say this (must be first time I've ever defended that airhead I reckon), but I doubt voting rate for this particular competition is anywhere near presidential election voting rate. So, chances are more people voted Nader in that race than Dubya in this one.
Eh, sounds convincing to me? Although I personally prefer Laurel and Hardy.