That's all fine and well and your story makes me weep, but the reality is that with your emotional diatribe, you've neglected to mention that these people are not in the USA legally. So, if these "victims" can't even be bothered to follow the laws of getting into the country, why would they even be reliably expected to follow the other laws of the country as well. And you know what, they -don't-.
So please, don't keep on lying. Immigration and illegal immigration are two entirely different things. Legal immigrants are invited to this country, and improve it. Illegal immigrants are invaders.
The central thrust of the test is that if you flash a bunch of M's and the occasional W, the conservatives blow off the W and the liberals don't. But, in the real world, ignoring the occasional W is the right thing to do most of the time, as it was for the test. There was no consequence for ignoring the W. While most liberals just parrotted the M or W, and called themselves smart, conservatives thought it through and realized that the M was the signficant part of the test, it was most efficient to ignore the W, and got through it.
Honestly, the test proves what we conservatives know all along: liberals are good at getting tripped up and make themselves feel smart by parroting useless things, but conservatives can assess the value of knowledge and "get er done!"
a) The USA has bailed the French out of two its stupid wars, at the cost 500,000 men and a pretty big ton of dough. b) The USA put its cities on the nuclear line as a deterrent against a Soviet Invasion of Western Europe.
And for all of that, we not only got nothing, we got derision from the French! What the hell is the point of a military alliance with Europe when the only wars we fight in are the ones that benefit Europe!
So yeah, I'd be pissed, and am.
Mexicans
Well, let's see, you want to have your entire culture changed into something else, by a bunch of people that don't even speak your language and don't fly your flag in your country, and yeah, I'd be pissed. And I might remind you - illegal aliens are criminals. Do you have any idea how many dixiecrats and midwesterners had family in eastern europe that disappeared because it was illegal to bring them over? I have an entire branch of my family tree that is gone... and now the gov't wants me to let go of my culture and my country to a bunch of pricks that can't even follow the simplest of laws to get into the country!
The deal is not so much that conservatives like corporate leaders, it is that conservatives believe that if they work hard, and get a bit lucky, they can form their own business as well, and achieve a degree of independence. On the other hand, a socialist system offers no independence at all.
Really, conservatives place such a high premium on independence and freedom and that they are willing to accept a lot of other shitty things to get it. As much as conservatives talk about God and Jesus, really, they are all fixated on Dante's Devil, proclaiming, "It is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven"...
You know, its funny, but liberals are only open minded to their own ideas, just as much as conservatives are, and there's not a damn bit of difference between the two on that score.
It's just that liberals are more likely to be religious fruitcakes when it comes to their own "religion" of PC whereas conservatives are more likely to be cheating on theirs. Whose more screwed up in the head, the enviro-liberal who really does recycle the potato skins into blankets for baby, or a conservative that says fags suck and then, ya find out that he's a fag that does.
The new reactors are being shipped in on the ponies we're getting from Iraq, right?
You can laugh at it all you want, but, the facts are inexorable.
a) economic wealth is directly related to energy consumption. b) in order to produce more wealth, we have to have more energy per capita. c) conservation flies into the face of a & b d) therefor, we need to have more energy. e) there are not enough fossil fuels to do the job, and there's enough science to say its bad to burn that much, even if there were. f) nuclear fission is politically impossible becuase of environmental concerns about nuclear waste g) solar power does not produce energy on the planet for us to use. If we use: "Because of its spherical shape, at any instant the Earth receives on average half the incident solar flux, that is, 684 watts per square meter...." Dept of Energy, that means we would need to have the solar flux of 402 square meters at perfect conversion efficiency in order to power ONE car at a rate of performance comparable to that of my old beloved 2004 GTO.
What other energy source is there? Please, clue me in! The answer is fusion! Now, I know that it's not "possible" right now. But, if we can blow a half a trillion on Iraq, why couldn't we take the next "blow" and do a systematic program to raise a generation of physicists, then, assign them to various aspects of the commercial fusion problem.
I just can't see why we can't just "get er done." Hell, the a-bomb was built in 4 years with 1940s technology, once we willed it.
Basically, the problem is thus: we need to have some sort of a way to store energy in a car so that it can move. We've been cheating all along by using pre-stored energy in the form of fossil fuels.
So, we either store the energy in the form of sunlight, using biofuels or some other weather derived process - like flowing ocean currents or wind, or we generate the energy from some non-solar, non-fossil source. That means nuclear power, charging up electric cars. Obviously, I would like to see fission but the enviro people are too large a constituency to ram it unilaterally down their throats. Plus, it would be nice to arrive at an energy solution the entire nation could live with.
From your article: Grown for oilseed, Canadian grower's yields average 1 tonne/hectare, or about 400 lbs. per acre. Cannabis seed contains about 28% oil (112 lbs.), or about 15 gallons per acre.
To meet the gasoline consumption needs of the USA would require about 9 billion acres at the above rate. This is about 4 times the size of the USA, including Alaska, and thus is probably not a workable plan.
Dude. The World is just too well connected and complicated now to pull out like that
I'm not saying trading relationships, but military ones. By all means, keep the goodies flowing around the world, it's good for the planetary economy and that's ultimately good for the USA. But I see no reason for the USA to be in all of these military alliances. Granted, pulling out of these alliances and ending Pax Americana might plunge the world into a bunch of local wars, but, in the long run, I don't see how the USA can continue to dominate the globe - although, I must admit, the ratio of USA GDP to World GDP is actually getting better on the USA side over the last decade.
Is that sometimes, you wind up losing the race. I think AMD tried to take a risky approach of putting all four cores on one die and they shot themselves in the foot. Now Intel got some sort of quad core out there. Even if it wasn't as good, it was still better than two completely separate 2 way chips, and now, Intel is circling the wagons to do its own native quad core implementation.
I fear that Barcelona might well wind up as the Great Eastern of chip making - an impressive technological first, but, too much at once. It's a shame too, as I really, really, love my Opteron line, and I know that I will yet again ruin my career writing some sort of multithreaded thing for Barcelona because it is so novel, even if AMD gets battered by a less than spectacular launch.
I apologize for using such strong remarks. Feelings for me run higher about the world than I want to realize.
For me, I think we shouldn't have done it, not in 1991, and not in 2003. The whole Iraq situation since 1991, from the original decision to let Saddam off the hook to the ridiculous sanctions which only starved the Iraqi people, to the invasion and its aftermath has been a continuous American disaster and at this point I'm more than done with the idea of the USA as the policeman of the world.
It's simply not worth it.
I want to "win" in Iraq, so that we can save national pride, but after that, I want -out- of every military alliance the USA is in. Jack up the size of the Navy and the Air Force, and then pull the troops out of Asia, Europe, the Middle East or wherever they may be. The system of alliances the USA finds itself in is absurd. We'll go and fight to help every country of the world in its wars, but, somehow, except for the UK, no country of the world does anything significant to help the USA fight -it's- wars.
Furthermore, let's accept that the left wing premise is correct, that you cannot impose democracy at the barrel of a gun, then, the entire notion of Americans providing stability to Europe or Asia is a sham. The people of the world can choose what they want to do, and they don't need American soldiers to act as trip wires. If South Korea wants to disarm in hopes North Korea will suddenly be nice, its not up to the USA to pick up the slack. Same with Europe. If Russia wants to start bullying Europe, it's not an American problem.
I'm really sick of sitting and hearing about all these "American problems" in other parts of the world, but when I look around, I see plenty of American problems at home. Our national infrastructure is falling apart, we have huge energy issues, and instead, we blow billion s each year to give the rest of the world warm and fuzzies about their security while at home our own people don't even feel secure about their jobs, let alone future.
I keep hearing how the rest of the world now hates the USA.. Fine. I don't really know that I like the rest of the world either, but we can remain trading partners and keep the free trade, as it does benefit both. Through trade, maybe we'll be friends again. But, let's not put American soldiers and American taxpayer dollars on the line to provide a security blanket for the world that hates us. That's just stupid. Putin, Chavez, the heads of Iran and North Korea and sometimes China, the petty dictators of lore in the former Soviet Republics, not one of those evil guys is an American problem. They are dicks, so what. But, let's focus on making money at home first.
First, it was Nixon (hardly a left-winger) who finally got us out of that shit-hole.
Actually, that's not historically accurate either. Nixon withdrew the ground forces because Vietnamization basically worked. The USA was still to supply weapons and air support to the South in case of a North Vietnamese attack. When the inevitable North Vietnameze attack came, the newly elected peaceniks withdrew all funding for any US efforts to support the South, based on the idea that the victorious North would be conciliarity to the South. John Kerry said at the time, and honestly, without knowing the future, it was a reasonable theory, that the there would not be massive bloodletting or purges afterwards. Except, it wasn't the case. The North killed all sorts of people in the South, and that's the lesson learned that we seek to avoid in Iraq. Vietnam was a backwater, you're right, and there was no need to be there, but once you put a country on a battlefield, you utterly have to win it, as there's so much economic and political power that comes with victory and a lot that comes with loss.
If that's the case, then why did we have to invade in the first place? Don't you trust the Iraqi's to know what's good for them and to try to overthrow Saddam (with our support, of course). No, of course not. You have to go in preemptively and put up a big show about freedom being on the march before withdrawing and replacing a bad situation with an absolutely terrible one
The thing is, Bush the elder and Clinton both encouraged popular uprisings against Saddam, and both failed. The guy was good at being a dictator, ya know.
Repetition does not make an untrue fact true. You and others on the right fringe have been saying that about Iraq for the last 4 years. If Iraq is really doing so well, why don't we pull out right now?
Did I say that Iraq was "getting better" four years ago? Nope. I said Iraq was way f--- up last year and I thought, that if the war were to continue on like that, we may as well just eat the consequences of total failure and let the arabs all kill each other, withdraw completely from the UN and basically retreat from any military alliance anywhere. But, if it can work, and there are some signs, yes, that the surge is working, then I think we need to not walk away from the mess that we created. I'm like, if we are going to back away from every war we get into when it gets too shitty, then there's no point in the USA being in any military alliance, because this country can't honor its commitments, and honestly, our allies suck anyway (except for the British). Let Putin roll the tanks across Eastern Europe and into Paris, for all I give a shit about the fucking French.
Animal control officials are shadowing Fido, rumoured to be in a White Ford Bronco driving down I-95. Fido, the famous physics dog, is said to be a suspect in the surprising parrot case. Yesterday, a necropsy revealed teethmarks in the flank of Alex, the dancing parrot who is said to have helped invent the personal computer.
A trainer for Fido was heard to say, via cell phone, "if the tooth don't fit, you must acquit!"
I've read that IPv6, because it includes the MAC, could theoretically help this. But is that true? Could the MAC be spoofed? Or, could an ISP include coupling hardware that validates the MAC and the packet sent are the same? Theoretically, you could require that in network hardware manufacturing, so that a NIC Card would not be allowed to transmit a packet with an address that wasn't from it. But would that be enough?
Even if you weren't ideologically predisposed to sending in the SEALs to whack people for sending out spyware, you could at least block the source traffic and then gradually clean up the already infested machines or rob them of command and control without firing a shot.
I just get enraged by all of these attacks as, honestly, giving money to security people is a sort of a trampling of my job and freedom. The internet is reduced to, our "white warlords" versus their "black warlords", and I think this arrangement is total crap. I can't stand the world where we can't send EXE's as attachments and even images are suspect because I remember how cool the internet was when you could.
Computers have a lot to learn right now. I'm still waiting for a robot that can find oil, iron, nickel and steel, take all of that stuff, and make an ashtray.... let alone a car or another robot.
All in all, I think Kurzeil is a tad overrated. Sure, he did some stuff with scanning back in the day, but I think the genius label seems to be more thrown around than it should. Ask a man on the street, who is Kurzweil, and you aren't likely to get an answer. So... for a man whose career must include a lot of self promotion, he's not even half as smart as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton...
They admit they are biased liberals because they feel that their view of society is intrisincally better. It doesn't mean that you can't just not listen to them, any more than you would tune out Fox. It just means that you need to know what their agenda is, and not take what they say without a grain of salt.
Sure you are. Always the anonymous sources.
As opposed to you, merely making things up, to suit your political agenda.
The killings are "down" in that each section has pretty much killed everyone they didn't like in that section. Or the people that were being targeted have run away.
That's not true, particuarly, in Anbar. What happened in Anbar was that Al Qaeda was very popular because the people saw two things: a) the USA was overwhelmingly pro-shiite at Sunni expense, and that b) Al Qaeda said they were anti-American. However, Al Qaeda tried to establish a very strict brand of Islam, and started doing things like execute Iraqi Sunnis for crimes such as smoking a cigarette. Meanwhile, the USA switched its tactics, and, through a mixture of killing Al Qaeda, greasing a few palms, and outright negotations with the very Sunnis we were fighting, established the belief that we weren't out to destroy the Sunnis, and that, we were really after AQ, and that we wanted a stable Iraq. Pushing Maliki to include Sunnis was a huge part of that.
And when he fails, the next general will be the one "we should have had from the get go".
If he fails. Signs are, he has not.
The Kurds have been fairly peaceful ever since we established the "no fly zones" over their territory after Gulf War I. So don't go claiming that that is any improvement
Boy, that's a way to whitewash things. The Kurds aren't just peaceful, they are actually starting to have an economy.
Now it is just over who controls the oil fields and who gets stuck with the worthless territory.
The fact of the matter, is that the USA is pushing the Malika government to adopt something like the Alaska model for oil revenues - where every Iraqi would just get a piece of the oil money.
Gotta love that kind of insightful commentary.
My commentary is a thousand times more insightful than yours will ever be. You should really just be reading everything I write and become my disciple. I don't hold your ignorance against you. I really just want to save you, because, as a fellow human being, I kinda like you!
If by upswing, you mean on the verge of civil war...
But less so than a year ago. sectarian killings are down. Anbar is quieting up. Baghdad is, yes, basically being ethnically cleansed, and right we're really more presiding over a partition of the country than its unification.. but it is what the people of Iraq really want...
I'd recommend reading bbc.co.uk instead of Fox news there buddy.
bbc.co.uk is farther to the left than Fox is to the right. Ideologically, the BBC is absolutely an absurdly liberal institution but even their radio commentators on the BBC News Hour on NPR will tell you that the United States has an obligation to remain in Iraq.
Mostly, I'm basing my assesment on the military blogs and people that I know who are there. Petreaus is the general we should have had from the get go, but the USA has a history of going to war with incompetent generals and then switching gears to "get er done"... the civil war is the most famous example, but we sure had a few sore spots in WWII as well.
It seems like life is improving in Anbar, which was a difficult province for us. It's the shiite areas that are problematic now, but, even so, Kurdish + Sunni areas already give us a peaceful majority of Iraq, which is certainly an improvement. If you would have asked me about Iraq, pre-surge, I would have said, let's just leave and let them all kill each other. they are all muslims anyway... but, it seems like that bigotry is proving remarkably unfounded. The vast majority of Iraqis are not suicide bombing each other.
It worked before, right? I mean, we've caught Osama, Afghanistan and Iraq are all peaceful and dandy now, there is no anti-American sentiment in Vietnam or anywhere in the world. Everybody loves the USA, because of brililant minds like you!
I would note that millions of people who liked the USA in Vietnam were executed after you left wingers sold them out. Hopefully, we won't make THAT mistake again!
In the meantime, the USA has liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban, Iraq is on the upswing, and yes, the forces of Freedom are on the march. Maybe you can delude yourself into thinking that a 8th century mullah threatening to blow up someone's children for getting a job is the same as a US contractor trying to build schools for them. Given time, eventually, the truth will be revealed and they will see which side is really evil and which side is really good, and those people are going to choose to live for themselves, or to be enslaved by the very dictators that you left wing traitors continually support.
Seriously, somewhere, there ought to be a way of tracking the stormbot people back to its originators. From there, you can just send in a special forces team and just whack the guys. If one nation allows its citizens to hijacking of the assets of millions of another nation's citizens, isn't that just piracy by any other name, and if so, isn't that kind of an act of war?
I wouldn't necessarily say that you need to have a mountain of people to refuel a reactor quickly. A lot of companies do refueling simulations apriori and can set up a pretty good refueling script without the need for as many drones.
And, honestly, the need for safety at a nuclear power plant is so overstated that you can tend to drone it out and thus ignore those things that really do need to be safe. For example, when a company installed guard towers at its nuclear plants, the biggest dispute was that neither union or management could agree on the steps. It's just absurd, and to some extent, really, the union used the steps on the guard tower as a negotiating plank to get more money, more than any concern for safety or the obvious admonition - hang on to the rails.
I wrote a time series database, Commodity Server, and I've come to the conclusion that the only thing a SQL database really needs to do this is to have the notion of a key as a range, rather than a discrete value.
Storing that in SQL Server can be done in several ways, and, none of them are all that great. One way would be to store each row as 5/1/2007 - 5/7/2007, 22, and so forth, and another might be 5/1/2007, 22, 5/8/2007 10. In both cases, you get the problem. There's no real way within SQL to ask "4/1 - 10/1" and get a sane answer back.
To get that, you really just need to have something that hacks on the little tiny part of how keys are searched. You need to do what time series databases do, and understand ranges of dates. But, really, ultimately, to do it the right way, you need a sort of relational algebra that describes keys not in terms of discrete values but as linear functions of x or at least ranges of values across 2..n dimensions. Applications would be far greater than just time series and stock markets if you solved this problem. It would be good for maps, neural networks and all sorts of other problems as well. And THAT would make relational databases as we know them today obsolete for certain jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all fine and well and your story makes me weep, but the reality is that with your emotional diatribe, you've neglected to mention that these people are not in the USA legally. So, if these "victims" can't even be bothered to follow the laws of getting into the country, why would they even be reliably expected to follow the other laws of the country as well. And you know what, they -don't-.
So please, don't keep on lying. Immigration and illegal immigration are two entirely different things. Legal immigrants are invited to this country, and improve it. Illegal immigrants are invaders.
The central thrust of the test is that if you flash a bunch of M's and the occasional W, the conservatives blow off the W and the liberals don't. But, in the real world, ignoring the occasional W is the right thing to do most of the time, as it was for the test. There was no consequence for ignoring the W. While most liberals just parrotted the M or W, and called themselves smart, conservatives thought it through and realized that the M was the signficant part of the test, it was most efficient to ignore the W, and got through it.
Honestly, the test proves what we conservatives know all along: liberals are good at getting tripped up and make themselves feel smart by parroting useless things, but conservatives can assess the value of knowledge and "get er done!"
Jeez, its obvious:
a) The USA has bailed the French out of two its stupid wars, at the cost 500,000 men and a pretty big ton of dough.
b) The USA put its cities on the nuclear line as a deterrent against a Soviet Invasion of Western Europe.
And for all of that, we not only got nothing, we got derision from the French! What the hell is the point of a military alliance with Europe when the only wars we fight in are the ones that benefit Europe!
So yeah, I'd be pissed, and am.
Mexicans
Well, let's see, you want to have your entire culture changed into something else, by a bunch of people that don't even speak your language and don't fly your flag in your country, and yeah, I'd be pissed. And I might remind you - illegal aliens are criminals. Do you have any idea how many dixiecrats and midwesterners had family in eastern europe that disappeared because it was illegal to bring them over? I have an entire branch of my family tree that is gone... and now the gov't wants me to let go of my culture and my country to a bunch of pricks that can't even follow the simplest of laws to get into the country!
You are delusional!
The deal is not so much that conservatives like corporate leaders, it is that conservatives believe that if they work hard, and get a bit lucky, they can form their own business as well, and achieve a degree of independence. On the other hand, a socialist system offers no independence at all.
Really, conservatives place such a high premium on independence and freedom and that they are willing to accept a lot of other shitty things to get it. As much as conservatives talk about God and Jesus, really, they are all fixated on Dante's Devil, proclaiming, "It is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven"...
You know, its funny, but liberals are only open minded to their own ideas, just as much as conservatives are, and there's not a damn bit of difference between the two on that score.
It's just that liberals are more likely to be religious fruitcakes when it comes to their own "religion" of PC whereas conservatives are more likely to be cheating on theirs. Whose more screwed up in the head, the enviro-liberal who really does recycle the potato skins into blankets for baby, or a conservative that says fags suck and then, ya find out that he's a fag that does.
The new reactors are being shipped in on the ponies we're getting from Iraq, right?
..." Dept of Energy, that means we would need to have the solar flux of 402 square meters at perfect conversion efficiency in order to power ONE car at a rate of performance comparable to that of my old beloved 2004 GTO.
You can laugh at it all you want, but, the facts are inexorable.
a) economic wealth is directly related to energy consumption.
b) in order to produce more wealth, we have to have more energy per capita.
c) conservation flies into the face of a & b
d) therefor, we need to have more energy.
e) there are not enough fossil fuels to do the job, and there's enough science to say its bad to burn that much, even if there were.
f) nuclear fission is politically impossible becuase of environmental concerns about nuclear waste
g) solar power does not produce energy on the planet for us to use. If we use:
"Because of its spherical shape, at any instant the Earth receives on average half the incident solar flux, that is, 684 watts per square meter.
What other energy source is there? Please, clue me in! The answer is fusion! Now, I know that it's not "possible" right now. But, if we can blow a half a trillion on Iraq, why couldn't we take the next "blow" and do a systematic program to raise a generation of physicists, then, assign them to various aspects of the commercial fusion problem.
I just can't see why we can't just "get er done." Hell, the a-bomb was built in 4 years with 1940s technology, once we willed it.
Somewhere, there is a blog entry which reads:
"I have learned the designs of Lord Ballmer, and I now am Gnome of the Many Colors!"
Basically, the problem is thus: we need to have some sort of a way to store energy in a car so that it can move. We've been cheating all along by using pre-stored energy in the form of fossil fuels.
So, we either store the energy in the form of sunlight, using biofuels or some other weather derived process - like flowing ocean currents or wind, or we generate the energy from some non-solar, non-fossil source. That means nuclear power, charging up electric cars. Obviously, I would like to see fission but the enviro people are too large a constituency to ram it unilaterally down their throats. Plus, it would be nice to arrive at an energy solution the entire nation could live with.
That means fusion....
From your article: Grown for oilseed, Canadian grower's yields average 1 tonne/hectare, or about 400 lbs. per acre. Cannabis seed contains about 28% oil (112 lbs.), or about 15 gallons per acre.
To meet the gasoline consumption needs of the USA would require about 9 billion acres at the above rate. This is about 4 times the size of the USA, including Alaska, and thus is probably not a workable plan.
Dude. The World is just too well connected and complicated now to pull out like that
I'm not saying trading relationships, but military ones. By all means, keep the goodies flowing around the world, it's good for the planetary economy and that's ultimately good for the USA. But I see no reason for the USA to be in all of these military alliances. Granted, pulling out of these alliances and ending Pax Americana might plunge the world into a bunch of local wars, but, in the long run, I don't see how the USA can continue to dominate the globe - although, I must admit, the ratio of USA GDP to World GDP is actually getting better on the USA side over the last decade.
Is that sometimes, you wind up losing the race. I think AMD tried to take a risky approach of putting all four cores on one die and they shot themselves in the foot. Now Intel got some sort of quad core out there. Even if it wasn't as good, it was still better than two completely separate 2 way chips, and now, Intel is circling the wagons to do its own native quad core implementation.
I fear that Barcelona might well wind up as the Great Eastern of chip making - an impressive technological first, but, too much at once. It's a shame too, as I really, really, love my Opteron line, and I know that I will yet again ruin my career writing some sort of multithreaded thing for Barcelona because it is so novel, even if AMD gets battered by a less than spectacular launch.
I apologize for using such strong remarks. Feelings for me run higher about the world than I want to realize.
For me, I think we shouldn't have done it, not in 1991, and not in 2003. The whole Iraq situation since 1991, from the original decision to let Saddam off the hook to the ridiculous sanctions which only starved the Iraqi people, to the invasion and its aftermath has been a continuous American disaster and at this point I'm more than done with the idea of the USA as the policeman of the world.
It's simply not worth it.
I want to "win" in Iraq, so that we can save national pride, but after that, I want -out- of every military alliance the USA is in. Jack up the size of the Navy and the Air Force, and then pull the troops out of Asia, Europe, the Middle East or wherever they may be. The system of alliances the USA finds itself in is absurd. We'll go and fight to help every country of the world in its wars, but, somehow, except for the UK, no country of the world does anything significant to help the USA fight -it's- wars.
Furthermore, let's accept that the left wing premise is correct, that you cannot impose democracy at the barrel of a gun, then, the entire notion of Americans providing stability to Europe or Asia is a sham. The people of the world can choose what they want to do, and they don't need American soldiers to act as trip wires. If South Korea wants to disarm in hopes North Korea will suddenly be nice, its not up to the USA to pick up the slack. Same with Europe. If Russia wants to start bullying Europe, it's not an American problem.
I'm really sick of sitting and hearing about all these "American problems" in other parts of the world, but when I look around, I see plenty of American problems at home. Our national infrastructure is falling apart, we have huge energy issues, and instead, we blow billion s each year to give the rest of the world warm and fuzzies about their security while at home our own people don't even feel secure about their jobs, let alone future.
I keep hearing how the rest of the world now hates the USA.. Fine. I don't really know that I like the rest of the world either, but we can remain trading partners and keep the free trade, as it does benefit both. Through trade, maybe we'll be friends again. But, let's not put American soldiers and American taxpayer dollars on the line to provide a security blanket for the world that hates us. That's just stupid. Putin, Chavez, the heads of Iran and North Korea and sometimes China, the petty dictators of lore in the former Soviet Republics, not one of those evil guys is an American problem. They are dicks, so what. But, let's focus on making money at home first.
First, it was Nixon (hardly a left-winger) who finally got us out of that shit-hole.
Actually, that's not historically accurate either. Nixon withdrew the ground forces because Vietnamization basically worked. The USA was still to supply weapons and air support to the South in case of a North Vietnamese attack. When the inevitable North Vietnameze attack came, the newly elected peaceniks withdrew all funding for any US efforts to support the South, based on the idea that the victorious North would be conciliarity to the South. John Kerry said at the time, and honestly, without knowing the future, it was a reasonable theory, that the there would not be massive bloodletting or purges afterwards. Except, it wasn't the case. The North killed all sorts of people in the South, and that's the lesson learned that we seek to avoid in Iraq. Vietnam was a backwater, you're right, and there was no need to be there, but once you put a country on a battlefield, you utterly have to win it, as there's so much economic and political power that comes with victory and a lot that comes with loss.
If that's the case, then why did we have to invade in the first place? Don't you trust the Iraqi's to know what's good for them and to try to overthrow Saddam (with our support, of course). No, of course not. You have to go in preemptively and put up a big show about freedom being on the march before withdrawing and replacing a bad situation with an absolutely terrible one
The thing is, Bush the elder and Clinton both encouraged popular uprisings against Saddam, and both failed. The guy was good at being a dictator, ya know.
Repetition does not make an untrue fact true. You and others on the right fringe have been saying that about Iraq for the last 4 years. If Iraq is really doing so well, why don't we pull out right now?
Did I say that Iraq was "getting better" four years ago? Nope. I said Iraq was way f--- up last year and I thought, that if the war were to continue on like that, we may as well just eat the consequences of total failure and let the arabs all kill each other, withdraw completely from the UN and basically retreat from any military alliance anywhere. But, if it can work, and there are some signs, yes, that the surge is working, then I think we need to not walk away from the mess that we created. I'm like, if we are going to back away from every war we get into when it gets too shitty, then there's no point in the USA being in any military alliance, because this country can't honor its commitments, and honestly, our allies suck anyway (except for the British). Let Putin roll the tanks across Eastern Europe and into Paris, for all I give a shit about the fucking French.
Animal control officials are shadowing Fido, rumoured to be in a White Ford Bronco driving down I-95. Fido, the famous physics dog, is said to be a suspect in the surprising parrot case. Yesterday, a necropsy revealed teethmarks in the flank of Alex, the dancing parrot who is said to have helped invent the personal computer.
A trainer for Fido was heard to say, via cell phone, "if the tooth don't fit, you must acquit!"
That sums up the article for ya, right there. Famous bird, written up in New York Times. A tragedy, dead. Give me some money...
I've read that IPv6, because it includes the MAC, could theoretically help this. But is that true? Could the MAC be spoofed? Or, could an ISP include coupling hardware that validates the MAC and the packet sent are the same? Theoretically, you could require that in network hardware manufacturing, so that a NIC Card would not be allowed to transmit a packet with an address that wasn't from it. But would that be enough?
Even if you weren't ideologically predisposed to sending in the SEALs to whack people for sending out spyware, you could at least block the source traffic and then gradually clean up the already infested machines or rob them of command and control without firing a shot.
I just get enraged by all of these attacks as, honestly, giving money to security people is a sort of a trampling of my job and freedom. The internet is reduced to, our "white warlords" versus their "black warlords", and I think this arrangement is total crap. I can't stand the world where we can't send EXE's as attachments and even images are suspect because I remember how cool the internet was when you could.
Computers have a lot to learn right now. I'm still waiting for a robot that can find oil, iron, nickel and steel, take all of that stuff, and make an ashtray.... let alone a car or another robot.
All in all, I think Kurzeil is a tad overrated. Sure, he did some stuff with scanning back in the day, but I think the genius label seems to be more thrown around than it should. Ask a man on the street, who is Kurzweil, and you aren't likely to get an answer. So... for a man whose career must include a lot of self promotion, he's not even half as smart as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton...
First off, the BBC's bias is legendary and self admitted.
w s/news.html?in_article_id=411846&in_page_id=1770
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/ne
They admit they are biased liberals because they feel that their view of society is intrisincally better. It doesn't mean that you can't just not listen to them, any more than you would tune out Fox. It just means that you need to know what their agenda is, and not take what they say without a grain of salt.
Sure you are. Always the anonymous sources.
As opposed to you, merely making things up, to suit your political agenda.
The killings are "down" in that each section has pretty much killed everyone they didn't like in that section. Or the people that were being targeted have run away.
That's not true, particuarly, in Anbar. What happened in Anbar was that Al Qaeda was very popular because the people saw two things: a) the USA was overwhelmingly pro-shiite at Sunni expense, and that b) Al Qaeda said they were anti-American. However, Al Qaeda tried to establish a very strict brand of Islam, and started doing things like execute Iraqi Sunnis for crimes such as smoking a cigarette. Meanwhile, the USA switched its tactics, and, through a mixture of killing Al Qaeda, greasing a few palms, and outright negotations with the very Sunnis we were fighting, established the belief that we weren't out to destroy the Sunnis, and that, we were really after AQ, and that we wanted a stable Iraq. Pushing Maliki to include Sunnis was a huge part of that.
And when he fails, the next general will be the one "we should have had from the get go".
If he fails. Signs are, he has not.
The Kurds have been fairly peaceful ever since we established the "no fly zones" over their territory after Gulf War I. So don't go claiming that that is any improvement
Boy, that's a way to whitewash things. The Kurds aren't just peaceful, they are actually starting to have an economy.
Now it is just over who controls the oil fields and who gets stuck with the worthless territory.
The fact of the matter, is that the USA is pushing the Malika government to adopt something like the Alaska model for oil revenues - where every Iraqi would just get a piece of the oil money.
Gotta love that kind of insightful commentary.
My commentary is a thousand times more insightful than yours will ever be. You should really just be reading everything I write and become my disciple. I don't hold your ignorance against you. I really just want to save you, because, as a fellow human being, I kinda like you!
If by upswing, you mean on the verge of civil war...
But less so than a year ago. sectarian killings are down. Anbar is quieting up. Baghdad is, yes, basically being ethnically cleansed, and right we're really more presiding over a partition of the country than its unification.. but it is what the people of Iraq really want...
I'd recommend reading bbc.co.uk instead of Fox news there buddy.
bbc.co.uk is farther to the left than Fox is to the right. Ideologically, the BBC is absolutely an absurdly liberal institution but even their radio commentators on the BBC News Hour on NPR will tell you that the United States has an obligation to remain in Iraq.
Mostly, I'm basing my assesment on the military blogs and people that I know who are there. Petreaus is the general we should have had from the get go, but the USA has a history of going to war with incompetent generals and then switching gears to "get er done"... the civil war is the most famous example, but we sure had a few sore spots in WWII as well.
It seems like life is improving in Anbar, which was a difficult province for us. It's the shiite areas that are problematic now, but, even so, Kurdish + Sunni areas already give us a peaceful majority of Iraq, which is certainly an improvement. If you would have asked me about Iraq, pre-surge, I would have said, let's just leave and let them all kill each other. they are all muslims anyway... but, it seems like that bigotry is proving remarkably unfounded. The vast majority of Iraqis are not suicide bombing each other.
It worked before, right? I mean, we've caught Osama, Afghanistan and Iraq are all peaceful and dandy now, there is no anti-American sentiment in Vietnam or anywhere in the world. Everybody loves the USA, because of brililant minds like you!
I would note that millions of people who liked the USA in Vietnam were executed after you left wingers sold them out. Hopefully, we won't make THAT mistake again!
In the meantime, the USA has liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban, Iraq is on the upswing, and yes, the forces of Freedom are on the march. Maybe you can delude yourself into thinking that a 8th century mullah threatening to blow up someone's children for getting a job is the same as a US contractor trying to build schools for them. Given time, eventually, the truth will be revealed and they will see which side is really evil and which side is really good, and those people are going to choose to live for themselves, or to be enslaved by the very dictators that you left wing traitors continually support.
Seriously, somewhere, there ought to be a way of tracking the stormbot people back to its originators. From there, you can just send in a special forces team and just whack the guys. If one nation allows its citizens to hijacking of the assets of millions of another nation's citizens, isn't that just piracy by any other name, and if so, isn't that kind of an act of war?
I wouldn't necessarily say that you need to have a mountain of people to refuel a reactor quickly. A lot of companies do refueling simulations apriori and can set up a pretty good refueling script without the need for as many drones.
And, honestly, the need for safety at a nuclear power plant is so overstated that you can tend to drone it out and thus ignore those things that really do need to be safe. For example, when a company installed guard towers at its nuclear plants, the biggest dispute was that neither union or management could agree on the steps. It's just absurd, and to some extent, really, the union used the steps on the guard tower as a negotiating plank to get more money, more than any concern for safety or the obvious admonition - hang on to the rails.
I wrote a time series database, Commodity Server, and I've come to the conclusion that the only thing a SQL database really needs to do this is to have the notion of a key as a range, rather than a discrete value.
Say, for example, I want to store:
5/1/2007 - 6/1/2007, 22
5/8/2007 - 5/10/2007 10
I would expect the history to be, on query:
5/1/2007 - 5/7/2007, 22
5/8/2007 - 5/10/2007 10
5/11/2007 - 6/1/2007 22
(neglecting time).
Storing that in SQL Server can be done in several ways, and, none of them are all that great. One way would be to store each row as 5/1/2007 - 5/7/2007, 22, and so forth, and another might be 5/1/2007, 22, 5/8/2007 10. In both cases, you get the problem. There's no real way within SQL to ask "4/1 - 10/1" and get a sane answer back.
To get that, you really just need to have something that hacks on the little tiny part of how keys are searched. You need to do what time series databases do, and understand ranges of dates. But, really, ultimately, to do it the right way, you need a sort of relational algebra that describes keys not in terms of discrete values but as linear functions of x or at least ranges of values across 2..n dimensions. Applications would be far greater than just time series and stock markets if you solved this problem. It would be good for maps, neural networks and all sorts of other problems as well. And THAT would make relational databases as we know them today obsolete for certain jobs.
"Aye, you chopped my legal arm off! No big deal! Have at you!"
"Aye, you chopped my legal legs off! No big deal! I can still hop! Have at you!"