Because we're very near solar minimum, so this is about all the cooling we're going to get. Now for another ten or so years of rising, followed by perhaps another plateau
Let's examine the relavant phase in the article:
"The Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel anticipates the solar minimum marking the onset of Cycle 24 will occur in March, 2008 (±6 months). The panel reached this conclusion due to the absence of expected signatures of minimum-like conditions on the Sun at the time of the panel meeting in March, 2007:"
We can restate that in a less obfuscated way as: "we blew the prediction last march, so we'll make the same prediction again for this year." As it stands, the solar minimum continues, with no sign of abating, and, if it does, then we stand a chance of having a Little Ice Age. As it stands, right now, today, global temperatures are LOWER than they have been in quite some time. Keep your eyes fixed on this:
And note the most recent solar weather - one tiny little sunspot (nothing to write home about), continued low magnetic readings... basically, the sun's minimum continues for another year. So, in two weeks, we'll be TWO years overdue for the end of the solar minimum. My question to you is, how many years of an extended solar minimum coupled with plunging global temperatures will it take for you to believe that the sun is the predominant force in global temperature.
Now, I'm NOT saying that, we should go and say "hey, the sun is to blame, therefor, we are off the hook for emissions". Absolutely not. You can't dump waste into a lake and we shouldn't be dumping it into the atmosphere either. We manage the content of our water, the chemistry of our soil, and it stands to reason that we should take on the management of the air as well. But... to go and say that the sun doesn't have an effect on global temperatures is just, without even thinking about it, is ridiculous. Without the sun, there is no global temperature.
Programming Superstars get that way because they program a lot. They love it. Programmers program. So, I would think that you look at people who actually have their own little shareware, blog, or some sort of program that they've written in their own time along with anything else on their resume. Just take the time to look at their sites and see what they are up to. If they are building things that you don't think your company could ever build, chances are, you would benefit from hiring them.
Well, yeah... the thing though, is that separates FOSS from socialism is that there is no scarcity for duplicating software, and, as a consequence, there is a complete lack of central control.
Animal Farm, warns us, quite rightly, that, once you decide to have a government doling out resources "fairly", then, the government is going to abuse the privilege and the result will be a huge, inefficient mess. However, no one in Linux can be the Orwell's Napolean Pig because no one owns it. There's no central control, no authority. If anyone is like animal farm, it is in fact, Microsoft, because it is a single, centrally planned system.
That's not to say that there's some nauseatingly liberal folks working on Linux. There are. Richard Stallman is all but a bleeding heart socialist, but I think in his case it is forgivable because he spent all that time writing emacs when he could have been improving vi And true, some Linux people will argue in favor of standards and a single approach to something, but, for an operating system that has more desktops GUIs, more languages, more file systems, and more databases out of the box, I'd have to say that a lot less people buy into that central argument on the Linux side than do the MS side, which has one desktop, maybe two programming languages, a single file system and a single database server.
I've been working so hard to warm the planet up, with my CO2 belching truck, but the lack of sunspots has made this year the coldest and snowiest winter since the 1960s....
You mean, being nuked is better than being gunned down
You make an argument that says, at first, the Taliban are religious, and the other guys are not, but then you go and essentially the entire country is filled with religious fruitcakes, otherwise, they wouldn't have the Constitution that they have.
So really, what it boils down to, is that, yeah, the entire population is in fact the problem. So therefor, even if a morally wrong choice, wouldn't nuclear weapons be an option? If Shariah law is evil, but everyone wants it, then, doesn't that make everyone over there evil?
Honestly, the USA should have just nuked Kandahar, and not invaded either country. It satisfies domestic lust for revenge against arabs post 9/11, and keeps the USA from being entangled into two wars of liberation for a people that want to enslave.
My whole point of investing my time into Linux is because FOSS is a cultural phenomon that is completely new. Nobody, at least, not a single entity, owns Linux, and for that reason, it belongs to everyone. If you make some sort of a contribution to it, free of charge, it is almost like making a contribution directly to humanity.
I can't possibly see how Microsoft could pull off a similar thing.
No amount of being nice or slick marketing posters could make me think that writing for free on platform with a track record of sickening self interest could even remotely equate to the grand social experiment that is Linux.
But that's really not the worst of it. If anything, the slick marketing posters that come with Windows are a part of the problem. To a large extent, I view the drive for Linux as a push for a newer set of ethics for consulting firms.
We need to at some examine the relationship consulting firms have with large concerns like Microsoft. I always though that in the ideal case, a consultant was somewhat akin to a doctor, supposedly free of any sort of taint from any particular vendor's solution. But that's not what we have today. We have consulting firms that are "Junior, Gold", and more with Microsoft. It's an unholy alliance, where, consultants invest in MCSD's and other certifications, pay through the nose to get a product logo'd as compatible. In exchange, Microsoft gives those companies preferred listings and free development tools and operating systems. So basically, Microsoft is using artificial prices for copying to induce consultants to support their platform for free, and those consultants, in turn, are going to always be biased towards push their clients to Microsoft products. Indeed, higher levels of Microsoft partnership require sales of Microsoft products to achieve Gold or some other channel status.
If doctors did that, they would be barred from practice, and I think this comingling of a vendor with a solution provider is flat out wrong. In other lines of business, if you were paid by a vendor to advocate a particular product, selling everything from nuts and bolts to window frames, you would wind up in jail. But this practice of "partnering" is mysteriously ok in IT.
Adopting Linux removes this disgust. Because the software is free, there's no incentive to copy it, and ultimately, the customer is going to wind up with a solution that is genuinely more right sized for their needs. With Microsoft, you'll always have consultants pushing Biztalk and Enterprise this or Enterprise that, because, well, they are getting paid to do it.
The bottom line is this. If Microsoft genuinely wants to promote an open source environment, then yes, it has to make open source software, but it also has to work to promote the idea of a consultant as an independent advocate for his or her clients. We are not some salesman on the cheap motivated by free licensing for products similar to what Linux gives you for free.
Mod me down, but I'm always surprised by the amount of hate US has against the talibans.
Taliban are a bunch of Pakistani trained people that took over Afghanistan after the Russian withdrawal and turned it into a medieval butcher shop. they publicly gunned down people, censored everything, harassed and abused women, destroyed priceless cultural landmarks, drove their people in backwards illiterate oppression, but other than that, I guess they were ok.
Sure, they say that Titanium Dioxide, that uber dangerous chemical also found in white paint, is safe to wear now, but, what about 20 years ago? Back in my day, scientists said that lead was safe for gasoline, and that was wrong. Then they said that the pill was safe, until fish started popping up without sex organs? They used to have this four food groups and said I needed to eat a lot of peanut butter and cheese, and I did, and now I need a new thing to get my cholesterol back down, and I can only eat food that even dogs wouldn't eat. Back in my day, doctors used to dole out speed like it was going out of style and advocate a smoke to calm your nerves. Now they've taken all of that away, all the good stuff, and instead, I've got clothes that I won't have to wash. I know those are going to kill me too.
Nope, I'll just stick to washing clothes with water and a bit of soap!
Tsar Bomba fit alright in the belly of the Russian bomber from whence it was dropped. They only say these weapons didn't have military value because the USA and the Soviet Union, left unchecked, could have pushed 100MT designs and more, and these become more genocidal weapons capable of destroying entire continents. Anything in the megaton range is unimaginably powerful. To give you a simple idea, the sort of device tested by the USA in the 1950s (and exceeded by Tsar Bomba), would at least damage or irradiate everything from New York City to Virginia if dropped on Philadelphia. That's good stuff.
I thought all the nuclear bunkers were built to survive a conventional a-bomb attack in an era where the CEP was so high that a miss was likely. Secrecy was a part of it too. The idea was to not get hit at all, survive a near miss from a small bomb in case they did find you. But, once the H-Bombs came of age, all of that was made obsolete. I mean, some of the USA test h-bomb shots in the pacific blew entire islands off of the map, and the Russians actually built much larger h-bombs that that.
God that's depressing. Do you not have any greater ambitions for your country than to emulate nineteenth century Britain?
I want the USA to build spaceships and leave the rest of the world behind.
I am a total Isolationist.
Trying to be an empire isn't just costing us militarily, it also costs us trade concessions everywhere on the globe. I'm sick of the bases and the bribes, and really, don't care about the rest of the world any more. It's all just another place that's somehow important that we might have to fight for, or need to respect, and I just don't care any more. We have a whole continent to ourselves, and will have almost 500 million people within 20 years, and yet, we need to be mucking all over the planet.
The fact was that Netscape was its own enemy there. Netscape 3 was really good, a lean and fast browser. It didn't have good support for CSS, but was years ahead of IE
It was definitely better than IE2, but when IE4 came out, with a fully programmable DOM, it was all over for Netscape. Netscape never really worked to try to improve their core browser engine from 1 to 4, just kept hacking on it and building out more stuff, whereas Microsoft did. At IE4, web developers began writing for IE, rather than Netscape, and that's what really killed the old N.
Now MS is running an engine in their browser that's basically a hacked on version of IE4, while FireFox is sporting a newer engine, and look whose losing now. FireFox continues to gain market share and it won't be long before developers say screw it and start writing for FireFox. (Indeed, many already have).
Well, someone surely has seen some point in such an alliance in the past. And you will not be naive enough to believe that the motives on the part of the US have been to protect the poor weaklings that are the European countries...
The past is the past. Let's not let sentiment get in the way of strategic realities today. There is no common immediate threat to the USA and Europe that requires a military alliance.
1) No country has the ability to project conventional power in any way against the USA, given its command of the sea and the air, 2) and the desire to have a free trading world makes little sense for a United States that is already importing far beyond its means. 3) There's not even a potential power that can threaten Europe with conventional forces. The Red Army is not what it once was, and Russia would rather bully people economically through natural gas deals than with the threat of a bazillion tanks rolling across the border. Besides, the French have the bomb, and the Germans could always get it, if they wanted it.
There's no threat to the USA, no threat to Europe, so what's the point? Even if we imagined a rising Iran gets the bomb and somehow dominates the middle east, that would damage Europe more than the USA, so it really doesn't benefit the USA -that- much and why should the USA act against Iran, if the people theoretically threatened by it, Europe, don't care either?
And again, the French have the bomb, so do the British. If Iran gets the bomb and targets Europe with IRBMS, Europe has a sufficient deterrent in its own right. The only thing that really could go wrong in those cases is that you run a higher risk of a limited nuclear exchange between Europe and Iran, and, from the USA perspective (and this is super-cold), it would probably be beneficial. Europe calls itself a rival to the USA, and so does Iran, so, if they did nuke each other, its all roses for the USA. If they allied against the USA, then, the USA has sufficient nuclear deterrent to destroy both, and, again, neither country can project conventional power to the USA. Iran can't. Maybe a European naval task force could threaten the CONUSA, but, there's enough land based, naval based and other assets that could project CONUSA from that.
Really, there's just no need for NATO, for any party.
It may not look that way to you, but a huge part of the world sees the US and Bush (who's fortunately in his way out, at least) in a very similar light as you see Russia and Putin. He is a thug, but Bush---and, most importantly, those around him---are not bette....Your view of Europe and of this responsability on the US's behalf to be the caring big brother appear absurd to me.
Western Europe recovered remarkably quickly because money was invested back into the civilian economy, what became the Eastern Bloc was hardly damaged because the German army blitzed across each country before any significant damage was done (Soviet installed governments were responsible for most of the damage these nations suffered) and finally Russia did suffer the famines you describe because Stalin decided that strengthening the military was more important than the civilian infrastructure, Russia's economic power in the 60's and 70's could have easily rivalled the US if Stalin didn't choose to become a militaristic power. Europe inst anti-American, they are anti-idiot, this may explain your misconceptions about Europe.
Your history is, well completely wrong. Germans killed 20 million Russians, and destroyed an incredible part of the entire Soviet Industrial base. The only reason that the Soviet Union survived World War II was because they were able to relocate key industries farther to the east, but a good portion of the stuff needed to make an economy tick was left behind, and looted and destroyed by the Germans. Then, as the Red Army pushed the Germans farther west, the Germans destroyed everything they could headed back as part of a scorched earth policy. Russia's economic power could never have equaled that of the USA in the 1960s and the 1970s because Russia was too screwed up and her heavy losses in World War II played a big role in that.
You strike me as a person who spends most of their time bashing the left rather than evaluating solutions for their merits (this fanatical devotion to left or right wing is one of the biggest problems with the US political system).
You strike me as a person who does not realize that the definition of left wing and right wing changes daily in American politics. George Bush and the Republican Party are considered by Europe to be right wing, and yet, they have increased domestic spending in the United States more than any American administration since LBJ's Democrats in the 1960s, whereas Bill Clinton, considered to be a liberal president, ran a fiscal course that was straight out of the textbook of classic 1930s Republicans. Even Bush's invasion of Iraq and so-called neo-conservatism is nothing more than Wilson, (the arch liberal), writ large. "Make the world safe for democracy" is a complete role reversal between so-called liberals and conservatives.
Really, Americans just like to argue and argue in circles.
Over here in Australia and Europe the majority of us are capable of dealing with both sides of an argument and selecting the best solution rather than just picking a which ever one jives with your parties propaganda
Yeah, but pretty much everyone in Europe is on the same ideological page, because there's no point to even imagining change. There's not nearly the diversity of opinion in Europe as there is in the United States. Just look at France. In the last election, Sarkozy inspired riots because he wanted to make some comparitively minor changes to French labor laws. In the USA, we have candidates proposing everything from getting rid of our own social net, to getting rid of corporations, to doubling the military, to getting rid of it, and the way our system is set up, they could do each of those things.
Had Bush would have not been so mired in the war, he very well could have changed our own social security system from a public insurance plan to a private stock investment plan. Those sorts of huge, structural changes are simply impossible in Europe because your parliamentary system relies on coalition governments that are often too weak to make any major changes to anything. As a result, you wind up looking way too much at the style of your leaders because you know they can't deliver on the substance. France, Germany, Italy, all come to mind. How many governments has Italy had in the last few years? I've lost count.
As for war, Europe is amongst the first in where it is need
Every single one of these engineering challenges would benefit by any significant gains made towards the efficient calculation of "intractible problems". So really, while one could argue that yes, we should spend billions of dollars on brute force research on all of these, one could also argue that we should also be trying to cultivate that one Newton of our day that can solve TSP in polynomial time. Then you could just have a computer crunch out solutions to all of the problems on the list, even by using the same core open source library.
This isolationist attitude would eventually lead to our demise.
I would love to be an isolationist militarily, but be global in trade. However, it seems as if Putin's up to Russia's old tricks again, and the USA will have to stand behind Europe, and be firm against him. So, we have to stay in NATO and get those radars up in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Georgia... and, when Russian jets once again buzz European airspace, we need to have our F-22s, F-35s and EF-2000s ready to escort them back to where they belong.
I'll tell you this much. As much as I would have loved to have bailed on NATO, I heard a British author really laying it on the line about what Russia is up to these days and quite honestly it felt like the old Russian bear is up to its tricks again. Really, when I heard that Mr. Putin is bringing back that old practice of putting activists into psychiatric hospitals, sneaking gunships into Georgia, playing European states against each other for natural gas, and derailing NATO efforts to run another pipeline, I completely flipped my s---t.
So, here's what the alliance means to me. The United States will not let Russia bully Europe around. Not now. Not ever. Mr. Putin may have fooled Bush, but he hasn't fooled the rest of America, and we stand with you. I don't feel bad about putting NMD radars in Poland, at all, now. The only way to deal with the Russians is to stand together and be firm.
I do not know what most USians want, and maybe they really do not want an Empire, but they should very carefully consider what it is they want and what consequences carrying out their wishes bring: whatever they wanted that resulted in such massive support for the `liberation' of Iraq, even if it was not the desire for an Empire, did very much have consequences for which they have to take responsability.
I'll be completely honest. What happened is that Americans were a bit shocked at how fast things unfolded in Afghanistan and it seemed like what had taken the Soviet Union a decade to fail at, the USA had achieved in a matter of weeks. So, there was still a lot of anger over 9/11, and Saddam had been a long time annoyance. So really, it was all about 9/11 rage at the arab world in general and the idea was to just go kick ass in as many arab countries as possible. I'm quite sure that if the USA had not been bogged down in Iraq, then, it would have no doubt moved on into Syria and Iran.
You are right about taking responsibility for Iraq. My wife, a long time liberal, was dead set against the war from the get go, but, to echo Colin Powell, we broke it, so now we have to fix it. The civil war in Iraq may have been decades, if not centuries in the making, but you honestly can't say that we were not warned - every European country with a deep experience in former colonial affairs in the Islamic world warned us that we were making a tremendous mistake. One has to wonder if the French saw Iraq as America's Algeria....
So, the USA -has- to stay in Iraq, and stay until the country is governed in a democracy, under the rule of law and with peace for all. If that takes 100 years and trillions of dollars, that sucks, but the USA made its decision when the bombing campaign opened so long ago in March 2003.
Also, I have had to rethink on the way home my stance with Europe and NATO. I listened to a very moving discussion of the state of affairs about Russia, by a British broadcaster on American public radio. Now, I don't know you much you know about the BBC as presented in the USA, but its a pretty liberal institution, and generally against any sort of confrontation or militarism of any kind. In short, you would say that they are radically left wing. However, I heard about lurid tales about how Russia is trying to bully Europe about with its gas pipelines, has squelched NATO efforts to run other gas pipelines for Europe, has basically reverted to cleptocratic rule, has reverted to state run media, squelched all political dissent, and is once again, and most despicably, resumed putting its political dissidents into psychiatric hospitals. It's "the Gulag Archipeligo" all over again, and it is wrong, it is wrong, and it is wrong. This Putin is a thug.
So yeah, I do not want to be in any military alliance with anyone, but Russia is threatening the peace and freedom of hundreds of millions of people, again.... and so, yeah, we can't abandon Europe to them. Europeans are a bunch of peacenik woosies that wouldn't attack anyone, and the idea of the Russian Bear bullying them around, really, picking on them, is completely and morally offensive to me, that, yeah, if we have to get back to another bloody cold war, and put American cities back on the nuclear firing line to stand against Russia, then, yes, that's just what we have to do.
What's a mountain of nukes and a missile defense system (which barely works) going to do for us, when we're gun shy to pull the trigger when a plane full of citizens flies into a tower? (I know, this is almost invoking a type of Godwin on my argument)
Well, we could still always nuke someone. Heck, we invaded Iraq and they had nothing to do with 9/11.
Our bases in Germany constitute a very large carrot that we can dangle whenever we want Germany to do something for us either on their own or as a member of the EU. That's really why we have bases with so many troops there, now.
Our entire military spending in Germany is fraction of what trade is between the two countries. Germany gets more out of BMW sales to the USA in one month or even Braun shavers than it will see out of US military bases in a year.
If we want to wave a carrot to Germany, we could change the regulation on diesel engines in the USA to make it better for their cars to be exported to the USA.
My less facetious point is, if all American soldiers came home (or, to be fair, had the option to settle as immigrants under proper visas in the countries they have so far lived their lives and raised their families in, in some cases), why would anyone want to attack? The US is far away. It would be better defended. And, it wouldn't be mucking about as the aggressors in foreign wars...
It's a long swim from New York to Saudi Arabia, I'll tell ya that much. I'm thinking, big oceans still work wonders.
Treating Europe as an ally and with respect doesn't weaken the US, and in fact, has worked to our benefit for the past 50 years.
The fundamental point is, what is to ally about? You only have a defensive alliance when there is a common threat, and there isn't one. So, the USA wanted NATO to be an offensive alliance, first in Kosovo and then in Iraq. Oh well, the Europeans don't. Its nothing to hate them for, but at the same, we can't say they are allies, because, there's no need for a defensive alliance and there's no agreement on an offensive one.
seriously, forget about attacking the USA, who, could actually attack Germany?
Slashdot Mirror
Because we're very near solar minimum, so this is about all the cooling we're going to get. Now for another ten or so years of rising, followed by perhaps another plateau
Let's examine the relavant phase in the article:
"The Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel anticipates the solar minimum marking the onset of Cycle 24 will occur in March, 2008 (±6 months). The panel reached this conclusion due to the absence of expected signatures of minimum-like conditions on the Sun at the time of the panel meeting in March, 2007:"
We can restate that in a less obfuscated way as: "we blew the prediction last march, so we'll make the same prediction again for this year." As it stands, the solar minimum continues, with no sign of abating, and, if it does, then we stand a chance of having a Little Ice Age. As it stands, right now, today, global temperatures are LOWER than they have been in quite some time. Keep your eyes fixed on this:
http://www.solarcycle24.com/
And note the most recent solar weather - one tiny little sunspot (nothing to write home about), continued low magnetic readings... basically, the sun's minimum continues for another year. So, in two weeks, we'll be TWO years overdue for the end of the solar minimum. My question to you is, how many years of an extended solar minimum coupled with plunging global temperatures will it take for you to believe that the sun is the predominant force in global temperature.
Now, I'm NOT saying that, we should go and say "hey, the sun is to blame, therefor, we are off the hook for emissions". Absolutely not. You can't dump waste into a lake and we shouldn't be dumping it into the atmosphere either. We manage the content of our water, the chemistry of our soil, and it stands to reason that we should take on the management of the air as well. But... to go and say that the sun doesn't have an effect on global temperatures is just, without even thinking about it, is ridiculous. Without the sun, there is no global temperature.
Programming Superstars get that way because they program a lot. They love it. Programmers program. So, I would think that you look at people who actually have their own little shareware, blog, or some sort of program that they've written in their own time along with anything else on their resume. Just take the time to look at their sites and see what they are up to. If they are building things that you don't think your company could ever build, chances are, you would benefit from hiring them.
You are the good guys of course. Alot of this FOSS rhetoric reminds me of Animal Farm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm with MS as the humans.
Well, yeah... the thing though, is that separates FOSS from socialism is that there is no scarcity for duplicating software, and, as a consequence, there is a complete lack of central control.
Animal Farm, warns us, quite rightly, that, once you decide to have a government doling out resources "fairly", then, the government is going to abuse the privilege and the result will be a huge, inefficient mess. However, no one in Linux can be the Orwell's Napolean Pig because no one owns it. There's no central control, no authority. If anyone is like animal farm, it is in fact, Microsoft, because it is a single, centrally planned system.
That's not to say that there's some nauseatingly liberal folks working on Linux. There are. Richard Stallman is all but a bleeding heart socialist, but I think in his case it is forgivable because he spent all that time writing emacs when he could have been improving vi
And true, some Linux people will argue in favor of standards and a single approach to something, but, for an operating system that has more desktops GUIs, more languages, more file systems, and more databases out of the box, I'd have to say that a lot less people buy into that central argument on the Linux side than do the MS side, which has one desktop, maybe two programming languages, a single file system and a single database server.
I've been working so hard to warm the planet up, with my CO2 belching truck, but the lack of sunspots has made this year the coldest and snowiest winter since the 1960s....
You mean, being nuked is better than being gunned down
You make an argument that says, at first, the Taliban are religious, and the other guys are not, but then you go and essentially the entire country is filled with religious fruitcakes, otherwise, they wouldn't have the Constitution that they have.
So really, what it boils down to, is that, yeah, the entire population is in fact the problem. So therefor, even if a morally wrong choice, wouldn't nuclear weapons be an option? If Shariah law is evil, but everyone wants it, then, doesn't that make everyone over there evil?
Honestly, the USA should have just nuked Kandahar, and not invaded either country. It satisfies domestic lust for revenge against arabs post 9/11, and keeps the USA from being entangled into two wars of liberation for a people that want to enslave.
My whole point of investing my time into Linux is because FOSS is a cultural phenomon that is completely new. Nobody, at least, not a single entity, owns Linux, and for that reason, it belongs to everyone. If you make some sort of a contribution to it, free of charge, it is almost like making a contribution directly to humanity.
I can't possibly see how Microsoft could pull off a similar thing.
No amount of being nice or slick marketing posters could make me think that writing for free on platform with a track record of sickening self interest could even remotely equate to the grand social experiment that is Linux.
But that's really not the worst of it. If anything, the slick marketing posters that come with Windows are a part of the problem. To a large extent, I view the drive for Linux as a push for a newer set of ethics for consulting firms.
We need to at some examine the relationship consulting firms have with large concerns like Microsoft. I always though that in the ideal case, a consultant was somewhat akin to a doctor, supposedly free of any sort of taint from any particular vendor's solution. But that's not what we have today. We have consulting firms that are "Junior, Gold", and more with Microsoft. It's an unholy alliance, where, consultants invest in MCSD's and other certifications, pay through the nose to get a product logo'd as compatible. In exchange, Microsoft gives those companies preferred listings and free development tools and operating systems. So basically, Microsoft is using artificial prices for copying to induce consultants to support their platform for free, and those consultants, in turn, are going to always be biased towards push their clients to Microsoft products. Indeed, higher levels of Microsoft partnership require sales of Microsoft products to achieve Gold or some other channel status.
If doctors did that, they would be barred from practice, and I think this comingling of a vendor with a solution provider is flat out wrong. In other lines of business, if you were paid by a vendor to advocate a particular product, selling everything from nuts and bolts to window frames, you would wind up in jail. But this practice of "partnering" is mysteriously ok in IT.
Adopting Linux removes this disgust. Because the software is free, there's no incentive to copy it, and ultimately, the customer is going to wind up with a solution that is genuinely more right sized for their needs. With Microsoft, you'll always have consultants pushing Biztalk and Enterprise this or Enterprise that, because, well, they are getting paid to do it.
The bottom line is this. If Microsoft genuinely wants to promote an open source environment, then yes, it has to make open source software, but it also has to work to promote the idea of a consultant as an independent advocate for his or her clients. We are not some salesman on the cheap motivated by free licensing for products similar to what Linux gives you for free.
Mod me down, but I'm always surprised by the amount of hate US has against the talibans.
Taliban are a bunch of Pakistani trained people that took over Afghanistan after the Russian withdrawal and turned it into a medieval butcher shop. they publicly gunned down people, censored everything, harassed and abused women, destroyed priceless cultural landmarks, drove their people in backwards illiterate oppression, but other than that, I guess they were ok.
We should have nuked Afghanistan.
Sure, they say that Titanium Dioxide, that uber dangerous chemical also found in white paint, is safe to wear now, but, what about 20 years ago? Back in my day, scientists said that lead was safe for gasoline, and that was wrong. Then they said that the pill was safe, until fish started popping up without sex organs? They used to have this four food groups and said I needed to eat a lot of peanut butter and cheese, and I did, and now I need a new thing to get my cholesterol back down, and I can only eat food that even dogs wouldn't eat. Back in my day, doctors used to dole out speed like it was going out of style and advocate a smoke to calm your nerves. Now they've taken all of that away, all the good stuff, and instead, I've got clothes that I won't have to wash. I know those are going to kill me too.
Nope, I'll just stick to washing clothes with water and a bit of soap!
Tsar Bomba fit alright in the belly of the Russian bomber from whence it was dropped. They only say these weapons didn't have military value because the USA and the Soviet Union, left unchecked, could have pushed 100MT designs and more, and these become more genocidal weapons capable of destroying entire continents. Anything in the megaton range is unimaginably powerful. To give you a simple idea, the sort of device tested by the USA in the 1950s (and exceeded by Tsar Bomba), would at least damage or irradiate everything from New York City to Virginia if dropped on Philadelphia. That's good stuff.
I thought all the nuclear bunkers were built to survive a conventional a-bomb attack in an era where the CEP was so high that a miss was likely. Secrecy was a part of it too. The idea was to not get hit at all, survive a near miss from a small bomb in case they did find you. But, once the H-Bombs came of age, all of that was made obsolete. I mean, some of the USA test h-bomb shots in the pacific blew entire islands off of the map, and the Russians actually built much larger h-bombs that that.
The whole bunker thing is a joke.
God that's depressing. Do you not have any greater ambitions for your country than to emulate nineteenth century Britain?
I want the USA to build spaceships and leave the rest of the world behind.
I am a total Isolationist.
Trying to be an empire isn't just costing us militarily, it also costs us trade concessions everywhere on the globe. I'm sick of the bases and the bribes, and really, don't care about the rest of the world any more. It's all just another place that's somehow important that we might have to fight for, or need to respect, and I just don't care any more. We have a whole continent to ourselves, and will have almost 500 million people within 20 years, and yet, we need to be mucking all over the planet.
The fact was that Netscape was its own enemy there. Netscape 3 was really good, a lean and fast browser. It didn't have good support for CSS, but was years ahead of IE
It was definitely better than IE2, but when IE4 came out, with a fully programmable DOM, it was all over for Netscape. Netscape never really worked to try to improve their core browser engine from 1 to 4, just kept hacking on it and building out more stuff, whereas Microsoft did. At IE4, web developers began writing for IE, rather than Netscape, and that's what really killed the old N.
Now MS is running an engine in their browser that's basically a hacked on version of IE4, while FireFox is sporting a newer engine, and look whose losing now. FireFox continues to gain market share and it won't be long before developers say screw it and start writing for FireFox. (Indeed, many already have).
Well, someone surely has seen some point in such an alliance in the past. And you will not be naive enough to believe that the motives on the part of the US have been to protect the poor weaklings that are the European countries...
The past is the past. Let's not let sentiment get in the way of strategic realities today. There is no common immediate threat to the USA and Europe that requires a military alliance.
1) No country has the ability to project conventional power in any way against the USA, given its command of the sea and the air,
2) and the desire to have a free trading world makes little sense for a United States that is already importing far beyond its means.
3) There's not even a potential power that can threaten Europe with conventional forces. The Red Army is not what it once was, and Russia would rather bully people economically through natural gas deals than with the threat of a bazillion tanks rolling across the border. Besides, the French have the bomb, and the Germans could always get it, if they wanted it.
There's no threat to the USA, no threat to Europe, so what's the point? Even if we imagined a rising Iran gets the bomb and somehow dominates the middle east, that would damage Europe more than the USA, so it really doesn't benefit the USA -that- much and why should the USA act against Iran, if the people theoretically threatened by it, Europe, don't care either?
And again, the French have the bomb, so do the British. If Iran gets the bomb and targets Europe with IRBMS, Europe has a sufficient deterrent in its own right. The only thing that really could go wrong in those cases is that you run a higher risk of a limited nuclear exchange between Europe and Iran, and, from the USA perspective (and this is super-cold), it would probably be beneficial. Europe calls itself a rival to the USA, and so does Iran, so, if they did nuke each other, its all roses for the USA. If they allied against the USA, then, the USA has sufficient nuclear deterrent to destroy both, and, again, neither country can project conventional power to the USA. Iran can't. Maybe a European naval task force could threaten the CONUSA, but, there's enough land based, naval based and other assets that could project CONUSA from that.
Really, there's just no need for NATO, for any party.
One thing is to participate in strategic alliances and involve in cooperation against aggression.
I see no point in this "strategic alliance" with Europe. Let's trade with them, and put the idea of an alliance to bed.
It may not look that way to you, but a huge part of the world sees the US and Bush (who's fortunately in his way out, at least) in a very similar light as you see Russia and Putin. He is a thug, but Bush---and, most importantly, those around him---are not bette....Your view of Europe and of this responsability on the US's behalf to be the caring big brother appear absurd to me.
Cool, then we don't have to have US in NATO then!
Western Europe recovered remarkably quickly because money was invested back into the civilian economy, what became the Eastern Bloc was hardly damaged because the German army blitzed across each country before any significant damage was done (Soviet installed governments were responsible for most of the damage these nations suffered) and finally Russia did suffer the famines you describe because Stalin decided that strengthening the military was more important than the civilian infrastructure, Russia's economic power in the 60's and 70's could have easily rivalled the US if Stalin didn't choose to become a militaristic power. Europe inst anti-American, they are anti-idiot, this may explain your misconceptions about Europe.
Your history is, well completely wrong. Germans killed 20 million Russians, and destroyed an incredible part of the entire Soviet Industrial base. The only reason that the Soviet Union survived World War II was because they were able to relocate key industries farther to the east, but a good portion of the stuff needed to make an economy tick was left behind, and looted and destroyed by the Germans. Then, as the Red Army pushed the Germans farther west, the Germans destroyed everything they could headed back as part of a scorched earth policy. Russia's economic power could never have equaled that of the USA in the 1960s and the 1970s because Russia was too screwed up and her heavy losses in World War II played a big role in that.
You strike me as a person who spends most of their time bashing the left rather than evaluating solutions for their merits (this fanatical devotion to left or right wing is one of the biggest problems with the US political system).
You strike me as a person who does not realize that the definition of left wing and right wing changes daily in American politics. George Bush and the Republican Party are considered by Europe to be right wing, and yet, they have increased domestic spending in the United States more than any American administration since LBJ's Democrats in the 1960s, whereas Bill Clinton, considered to be a liberal president, ran a fiscal course that was straight out of the textbook of classic 1930s Republicans. Even Bush's invasion of Iraq and so-called neo-conservatism is nothing more than Wilson, (the arch liberal), writ large. "Make the world safe for democracy" is a complete role reversal between so-called liberals and conservatives.
Really, Americans just like to argue and argue in circles.
Over here in Australia and Europe the majority of us are capable of dealing with both sides of an argument and selecting the best solution rather than just picking a which ever one jives with your parties propaganda
Yeah, but pretty much everyone in Europe is on the same ideological page, because there's no point to even imagining change. There's not nearly the diversity of opinion in Europe as there is in the United States. Just look at France. In the last election, Sarkozy inspired riots because he wanted to make some comparitively minor changes to French labor laws. In the USA, we have candidates proposing everything from getting rid of our own social net, to getting rid of corporations, to doubling the military, to getting rid of it, and the way our system is set up, they could do each of those things.
Had Bush would have not been so mired in the war, he very well could have changed our own social security system from a public insurance plan to a private stock investment plan. Those sorts of huge, structural changes are simply impossible in Europe because your parliamentary system relies on coalition governments that are often too weak to make any major changes to anything. As a result, you wind up looking way too much at the style of your leaders because you know they can't deliver on the substance. France, Germany, Italy, all come to mind. How many governments has Italy had in the last few years? I've lost count.
As for war, Europe is amongst the first in where it is need
Every single one of these engineering challenges would benefit by any significant gains made towards the efficient calculation of "intractible problems". So really, while one could argue that yes, we should spend billions of dollars on brute force research on all of these, one could also argue that we should also be trying to cultivate that one Newton of our day that can solve TSP in polynomial time. Then you could just have a computer crunch out solutions to all of the problems on the list, even by using the same core open source library.
This isolationist attitude would eventually lead to our demise.
I would love to be an isolationist militarily, but be global in trade. However, it seems as if Putin's up to Russia's old tricks again, and the USA will have to stand behind Europe, and be firm against him. So, we have to stay in NATO and get those radars up in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Georgia... and, when Russian jets once again buzz European airspace, we need to have our F-22s, F-35s and EF-2000s ready to escort them back to where they belong.
You don't know what a military allie is.
I'll tell you this much. As much as I would have loved to have bailed on NATO, I heard a British author really laying it on the line about what Russia is up to these days and quite honestly it felt like the old Russian bear is up to its tricks again. Really, when I heard that Mr. Putin is bringing back that old practice of putting activists into psychiatric hospitals, sneaking gunships into Georgia, playing European states against each other for natural gas, and derailing NATO efforts to run another pipeline, I completely flipped my s---t.
So, here's what the alliance means to me. The United States will not let Russia bully Europe around. Not now. Not ever. Mr. Putin may have fooled Bush, but he hasn't fooled the rest of America, and we stand with you. I don't feel bad about putting NMD radars in Poland, at all, now. The only way to deal with the Russians is to stand together and be firm.
I do not know what most USians want, and maybe they really do not want an Empire, but they should very carefully consider what it is they want and what consequences carrying out their wishes bring: whatever they wanted that resulted in such massive support for the `liberation' of Iraq, even if it was not the desire for an Empire, did very much have consequences for which they have to take responsability.
I'll be completely honest. What happened is that Americans were a bit shocked at how fast things unfolded in Afghanistan and it seemed like what had taken the Soviet Union a decade to fail at, the USA had achieved in a matter of weeks. So, there was still a lot of anger over 9/11, and Saddam had been a long time annoyance. So really, it was all about 9/11 rage at the arab world in general and the idea was to just go kick ass in as many arab countries as possible. I'm quite sure that if the USA had not been bogged down in Iraq, then, it would have no doubt moved on into Syria and Iran.
You are right about taking responsibility for Iraq. My wife, a long time liberal, was dead set against the war from the get go, but, to echo Colin Powell, we broke it, so now we have to fix it. The civil war in Iraq may have been decades, if not centuries in the making, but you honestly can't say that we were not warned - every European country with a deep experience in former colonial affairs in the Islamic world warned us that we were making a tremendous mistake. One has to wonder if the French saw Iraq as America's Algeria....
So, the USA -has- to stay in Iraq, and stay until the country is governed in a democracy, under the rule of law and with peace for all. If that takes 100 years and trillions of dollars, that sucks, but the USA made its decision when the bombing campaign opened so long ago in March 2003.
Also, I have had to rethink on the way home my stance with Europe and NATO. I listened to a very moving discussion of the state of affairs about Russia, by a British broadcaster on American public radio. Now, I don't know you much you know about the BBC as presented in the USA, but its a pretty liberal institution, and generally against any sort of confrontation or militarism of any kind. In short, you would say that they are radically left wing. However, I heard about lurid tales about how Russia is trying to bully Europe about with its gas pipelines, has squelched NATO efforts to run other gas pipelines for Europe, has basically reverted to cleptocratic rule, has reverted to state run media, squelched all political dissent, and is once again, and most despicably, resumed putting its political dissidents into psychiatric hospitals. It's "the Gulag Archipeligo" all over again, and it is wrong, it is wrong, and it is wrong. This Putin is a thug.
So yeah, I do not want to be in any military alliance with anyone, but Russia is threatening the peace and freedom of hundreds of millions of people, again.... and so, yeah, we can't abandon Europe to them. Europeans are a bunch of peacenik woosies that wouldn't attack anyone, and the idea of the Russian Bear bullying them around, really, picking on them, is completely and morally offensive to me, that, yeah, if we have to get back to another bloody cold war, and put American cities back on the nuclear firing line to stand against Russia, then, yes, that's just what we have to do.
What's a mountain of nukes and a missile defense system (which barely works) going to do for us, when we're gun shy to pull the trigger when a plane full of citizens flies into a tower? (I know, this is almost invoking a type of Godwin on my argument)
Well, we could still always nuke someone. Heck, we invaded Iraq and they had nothing to do with 9/11.
Why should your children benefit from your works after you're dead?
Why shouldn't your children benefit from your works after your dead. Everyone else does!
Our bases in Germany constitute a very large carrot that we can dangle whenever we want Germany to do something for us either on their own or as a member of the EU. That's really why we have bases with so many troops there, now.
Our entire military spending in Germany is fraction of what trade is between the two countries. Germany gets more out of BMW sales to the USA in one month or even Braun shavers than it will see out of US military bases in a year.
If we want to wave a carrot to Germany, we could change the regulation on diesel engines in the USA to make it better for their cars to be exported to the USA.
My less facetious point is, if all American soldiers came home (or, to be fair, had the option to settle as immigrants under proper visas in the countries they have so far lived their lives and raised their families in, in some cases), why would anyone want to attack? The US is far away. It would be better defended. And, it wouldn't be mucking about as the aggressors in foreign wars...
It's a long swim from New York to Saudi Arabia, I'll tell ya that much. I'm thinking, big oceans still work wonders.
Treating Europe as an ally and with respect doesn't weaken the US, and in fact, has worked to our benefit for the past 50 years.
The fundamental point is, what is to ally about? You only have a defensive alliance when there is a common threat, and there isn't one. So, the USA wanted NATO to be an offensive alliance, first in Kosovo and then in Iraq. Oh well, the Europeans don't. Its nothing to hate them for, but at the same, we can't say they are allies, because, there's no need for a defensive alliance and there's no agreement on an offensive one.
seriously, forget about attacking the USA, who, could actually attack Germany?