That's actually mostly true, but their was never the kind of intelligentsia class that the Germans had. There were a lot more skilled people than we chose to use though, for sure. I briefly touched on this in my original post. Debathification was the stupidest idea ever, or at least carrying to the extremes it was taken to was.
I respectfully call Bullshit on this one. I've been a soldier, and I remember the lead up to the war (no I wasn't involved in the lead up or initial hostilities. I watched it on TV like most people). Did we win faster than expected? Yes. But not a lot faster. Whether it took a week, two weeks, or a month, we were going to defeat the Iraqi Army, and we were going to do it in short order. It was a total failure of the political leadership that there was a not a post-hostilities plan in place before the first shots were fired. Period. It was an even more egregious failure that there was essentially no serious post-hostilities plan for months after hostilities ended. I know of guys who were trading the illicit porn their family support groups sent them for weapons, because there was no plan for disarming the militias. There was not a properly resourced, serious attempt at fortifying and rebuilding until this last year. 5 years after the end of "hostilities". If we had done what we've done over the last year or so, 5 years ago, we might be talking about a peaceful withdrawal from a stable nation right now.
The failure to have a cohesive, worst case scenario, plan for how we were going to rebuild Iraq and make its people our bestest friends is the single biggest failure of an administration fraught with colossal failures. Since impeachment of the president is impossible given the current layout of Senate, the best I an hope for is that this administration is simply remembered by history as the worst in modern history.
I served in a New Orleans, Louisiana based National Guard Field Artillery Battalion. We went over to Iraq to fight in the war that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence reports to justify and failed to properly plan for. In our last month in country we watched from satellite television as a hurricane tore our city apart, and that same administration failed to provide relief. I then spent a year living in the city that the administration all but abandoned. At this point, if George W. Bush says the sky is blue, I'm walking outside to make sure it hasn't turned purple while I was typing this post.
Yeah, the list goes on and on. There's also the fact that the Germans and the Americans has very similar cultures and customs, the fact that nearly the entire male population of Germany was dead or injured so there was almost no one left to run an insurgent campaign even had they wanted to, the fact that Germans are culturally predisposed to follow instruction from people who sound like they know what their doing...
I picked the four biggest ones off the top of my head but I came up with at least 5 or 6 more.
I think the biggest single factor was the planning and execution; despite everything, had we gone into Iraq with a level of planning equal to the Marshall Plan it might have worked. Even then I don't think we could have had a "rebuilding Europe" level of success, but we might at least have a generally stable country with an infrastructure. Now though... Like I said, likely too little, certainly too late.
Good point, but from the "why is rebuilding so hard" point of view they aren't quite as important as the Sunnis and Shiites. Mainly because they are virtually autonomous in their own region, and are avoiding the "let's see who can make the other's life most miserable" game that the other two are playing.
Yes and no. My understanding (and limited experience, I got to talk to locals occasionally, but wasn't really friendly with any) is that Saddam did look out for his clan quite a bit, but not so much for the entire Sunni sect. Essentially, while most of the people in power were Sunnis, being a Sunni was hardly a ticket to power. Plenty of Sunnis had miserable lives under Saddam, but more Sunnis had good lives than any other ethnic group. The majority of Sunnis didn't care any more for Saddam than their Shiite neighbors.
(I'm basing this almost entirely on the cultural sensitivity classes the Army gave me, discussing religion or sect with Local Nationals was more or less verboten while in country)
Yes, well, to do something like the Marshall plan in Iraq presupposes... a plan. Speaking as someone who spent a year in Iraq with the US military, our plan was essentially "build some stuff and be nice to people, unless they annoy us in some way, then be rude." "Rude" had definitions that varied from simple rudeness in conversation, to firing warning shots without sufficient provocation to, in some of the most extreme cases, stuff like Abu Ghraib. In defense of the soldiers, "annoy us" could vary from roadside bombs, to being cut off in traffic (more serious than it sounds since in a minority of cases those sorts of cut offs were followed by planned ambushes and the afore mentioned roadside bombs).
The number of differences between Iraq and Postwar Germany are staggering:
1) The Bush Administration had no coherent post was plan. The Marshall Pan was very well thought out was being implemented even before the end of hostilities. We finished the war already prepared for, and in some cases already implementing, the rebuilding plan. What we're doing in Iraq may be to little and is certainly too late.
2) The Germans had a long tradition of self government, and the allies forgave former Nazi's who could reasonably show that they had not been involved in war crimes. This meant that the new German government could rely on the experience of life long government administrators. Most had worked for the Weimars before the Nazis, some had even worked for the Kaiser before that. It was simple enough to build a new government that more or less mirrored the old structure, just without the evil dictator at the top. By contrast the Iraqis have no real tradition of self government, having been under a series of colonial governors, hereditary kings and various strongmen for the last hundred or so years at least. We also "de-bathified" what experienced government officials existed, without giving them any chance to show whether or not they deserved it.
3) Germany did not have two (three if you count the Kurds) major ethnic groups that never really liked each other and only tolerated each other because they could agree on a mutual dislike of Saddam. Tragically this was at least partly because all of the other ethnic groups in Germany had been decimated by concentration camps, but it all the same it did make make post war integration easier.
4) Germany, the US and most of the other Axis and Allied powers could see, almost immediately after the War, that it was in all of their best interests to rebuild everything they could and stick together, because there was a serious mutual threat sitting off to the east. However much Germans mistrusted Brits and Americans or vice versa, they were all mutually terrified of what the USSR was doing. There is no such powerful motivator acting in Iraq.
The list goes on of course. Comparing the current situation to post War Europe is completely ridiculous. We are NEVER going to turn Iraq into the "Germany" of the Middles East. 6 years on, the best we can say is that the government is less oppressive that the old one, mostly because it's too damned incompetent to impose its will. The worst we can say is that in all ways other than a less oppressive government, the life of Ali the average Iraqi is worse than it was when we started. Who hoo.
I used to think that it was our moral obligation to leave Iraq at least as nice as we found it (though I thought we never should have invaded in the first place), but given that after all of these years it's obvious that:
a) we're incompetent boobs who screwed up the first 4 years of rebuilding and b) The Iraqis themselves no longer seem to want our help
There is an alternative, Sprial Scouts. I'm not saying it's a great alternative, they're a small organization with a fairly limited number of troops at local levels, but they are an alternative. It was founded as kind of a Wiccan/Pagan alternative to BS and GS, but they are explicitly unbiased on any points of religion, race, sex, or sexuality.
My understanding is that they're a fairly crunchy granola sort of organization (makes sense, given their origins), but the few people I've known who worked with them (all online friends) said the national organization was nice to work with and helped as much as possible. YMMV, and I've never personally been involved with them in any way.
As a semantic matter, Jindal did not win a "special election". It was a regular plain old election. The only oddity was that the incumbent decided not to seek re-election. Mainly because she handled Katrina so poorly that she had popularity numbers in line with GWB.
And yet, all the major oil companies have reported record profits for last five years. Amazing how that can do that with low profit margins and all the evil government regulation. Also, who's fault do you suppose it is that we haven't built any refineries in the last 30 years?
That's only partially true. The last time my cable Internet went down I called Tech Support. They only support out to the router, but they want a computer plugged into the router to test everything. I was constantly telling the guy I had a Mac, and thus no "Control Panel", that my network dialog didn't look like his, and that in general, "No, I didn't do EXACTLY what you told me, I'm on a Mac."
And Macs are SUPPORTED. Hate to see this dude trying to troubleshoot a connection where the only available computer to test was a Linux box. Now you might say that I should have just translated what he said to "Mac", and that's basically what I did, but in the end the troubleshooting is almost certainly less effective if the troubleshooter doesn't understand the client.
I saw that the kid had everything dropped with instructions that Cult isn't strong enough to kick the law in but the idea of having to ask first is very frightening in my opinion. Basically it was overzealous policing. It happens here in the US too. People have been arrested for lots of things that aren't really illegal, because cops either didn't understand what their instructions were or were given bad instructions by someone higher up. Whole bunch of people were arrested in a demonstration in New York not too long ago. Nothing every came of it, but they spent 24 hours or so being jerked around by the cops. Most were never charged.
Fact is, cops can write you tickets and even arrest you with no better reason than "because I said so". There might not be charges, and the cop might even get in trouble after the fact, but s/he can do it. We rely on the fact that they usually don't try to screw people, and the fact that if they screw very many people, or even one person really badly, they're usually fired. It's not a perfect system, but we hope it's as reasonable as possible.
The problem is that the British Government doesn't really have a foundational document of the type one thinks of when looking at the Constitution of the US, or the various constitutions and charters that have founded most modern states. Britain has one of the oldest (if not THE oldest, I don't know) contiguous governments in the world. Don't misunderstand, there are countries that are as old or older, but most of them have, at one point or another, had a complete change of government. The British government is essentially the same one as was established by William the Conquerer in 1066. During the intervening 1000 or so years there have been changes in monarchs, changes in rights and privileges available to various classes of people, even briefly a complete revolutionary change (during the English Civil War there was a very brief period where the monarchy was abolished), but in general it has been a thousand year evolutionary process of change.
What this means is that there are many documents (the Magna Carta is the first and most famous) that establish the rights and privileges of various classes of people through the history of English government. To further complicate matters, some rights and privileges are enshrined in Common Law and Judicial precedent (Similar to the same concepts here in the US, but more so). Then there is the EU Charter, which the British Government is more or less bound to.
So the simple answer is: "Yes, basic human rights are enshrined in more than law in England." The complicated answer is: "If you want to know where, exactly, a given right is codified, you might wanna talk to a solicitor specializing in the appropriate type of law." I'm sure someone more familiar with recent (last 200 or so years) British history could tell you where the big ones (speech, expression, etc) are, my detailed knowledge stops at around 1600 (I was a medievalist in college).
The thing is, the fact that this kid was prosecuted says to me that any British subject can be thrown in jail at any time at all for saying anything at all. You know, had you read the article, you'd have seen the last line:
We did not advise on this specific case prior to the summons being issued - which the police can do without reference to us - but if we receive a file we will review it in the normal way according to the code for crown prosecutors. He hasn't been prosecuted. His file hadn't even reached the Crown Prosecutors' (British equivalent of the DA) desks at press time. It is entirely possible that the whole thing will be laughed at and ignored. Hopefully he'll sue the London PD in that case. So far this is only an example of a police officer overreaching her authority. Unfortunate, but it happens. Should prosecution proceed, that would be something to make me worry about the future of free speech rights in Britain.
I don't honestly know that I want the people to decide how the people are governed in a broad sort of way. In general, people as groups tend to panic. Things like the Constitution and UK Common Law may be fragile protection, but they are protection. If you'd actually asked them, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a majority of Americans would have favored an even more knee jerk reaction to 9/11 than actually occurred.
Besides, I'm not sure how it would help in this case. Even if "the people" were making the laws there would still be a need for enforcement therefore still something resembling police. This, so far, is not a case of "government overreaching", but rather "police overreaching". The police are part of the government, but ultimately they are individuals. It becomes a case of "government overreaching" if and only if the young man is prosecuted and found guilty. I wouldn't be half surprised if the the Crown Prosecutors drop this like a hot potato.
"And eventually it gets down to the fact that if we faithfully preserved every place that anything interesting had ever happened at it wouldn't be long before our entire society would be static."
Slightly off topic, but this reminded me of the funny signs you used to see in the French Quarter and other historical sites in New Orleans. Often on someone's front gate would be a little plaque that said something like "On February 19, 1789 Napoleon pick his nose on this spot." So some of the more humorous, and less research inclined residents starting posting small brass "On this spot on May 15th 1857, absolutely nothing happened." plaques.
Places like New Orleans do demonstrate that History can be preserved without the result being stagnation. Most big, old cities in both the US and Europe have found a compromise between moving forward and preserving history, perhaps compromise can be made here as well?
You know... I almost meta-moderated this post to try and get the "Troll" removed. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that he accused the editor, rather than the story. I don't know enough about the editor's history to support calling everything he does a troll. This particular story, on the other hand, is about as trolling and biased as I've seen. One could certainly argue that Google's share holders made the wrong decision here, but there's a pretty good argument the other way too. From the headline you'd think Google's board voted in favor of genoncide or something.
They had exactly two choices, both of them with potentially "evil" outcomes, and they chose what they considered the lesser evil. Disagree with them? Fine. That hardly qualifies them as heartlessly evil. Did profit come into the question? Probably... If I have exactly two choices, both with good and bad possible outcomes, but one is likely to make me a few bucks at least... Well, I know I'd probably choose that one.
Take a look at your power or water bill sometime. They both charge graduated rates based on over usage.
I'm not going to weigh in one way or the other on whether this cap is evil or not, however comparing bandwidth to water or power is kind of silly. Water and power are metered because they are produced and have a fixed production cost. Water is a thing, if I use three gallons of water, it's three gallons someone else cannot use. I buy water by the gallon from the water company just as I buy food or orange juice (or, amusingly enough, water) from the grocery store. It just happens to come through pipes and require a bit less driving on my part. Electricity is not a physical thing, but it has a direct per kilowatt production cost. Depending on where you are, it costs the power company X amount of coal, water, nuclear material, whatever to make that power and force it down the lines to your house. You are buying one unit of power for X dollars.
Bandwidth isn't produced, its value is more along the lines of a service. You pay someone to ship your packages between X and Y, you pay someone to ship your packet between X and Y. Like UPS, Comcast has some costs associated with shipping your stuff on their lines, but also like UPS they are able to aggregate those cost much more easily than an actual producer by using economies of scale. It would cost a LOT to connect your personal house to the Internet, but it cost a lot less on a person by person basis to connect your neighborhood, less still for your town. Similarly, it would cost a fortune to ship your package, all by itself, to China, but that cost is aggregated with all the other people doing the same thing.
This is not to say that Comcast could not, or even should not, meter Internet service (I think they'd be foolish, but I'm not going to go into a whole separate argument here on that), rather it is to say that if they do it will not be the same as power and water. Comcast has spent their infrastructure money, and upgrades and maintenance are not the same as production costs. The power company makes money off of you with the formula:
(("Cost of one Kilowatt" - "Cost to Produce one Kilowatt") * "Number of Kilowatts Used") - "Cost of Maintenance and Overhead"
Comcast would look like:
("Cost of one Gigabyte" * "Number of Gigabytes Used") - "Cost of Maintenance and Overhead"
I know we are a spread-out nation here in the US, but there is no reason why cities with people living on top of each other (LA, Boston, New York, etc) can't easily have the infrastructure that the rest of the world has.
I think we could go a lot farther than that. We probably couldn't run fiber to every farm in West Virginia or every ranch in South Dakota, but even small cities and suburbs would be doable if it were a priority. Here in Lafayette, LA we are running fiber to every household in the city via our municipal power company. We're not quite small town America, but we don't even come close to New Orleans levels of population density, let alone New York or Boston.
Is it a perfect solution? Well, it's not implemented yet, so it's hard to say. Probably not. LUS' website still requires Internet Explorer to pay your electric bill, so I can't imagine this project will go off without a few hitches; but they're trying. So far they're showing every sign of succeeding. At any rate the conduit to my house has been laid for several weeks, so something is working.
The federal government has already shown itself to be largely uninterested in fixing this country's broadband problems... Maybe it's time for local government to step in. They'll have to make it a priority (as Lafayette did), but it can be done. Towns far smaller and more rural than Lafayette have done it too.
*Disclaimer: I don't know if EATEL offers fiber to every home in Ascension Parish, but it is definitely a strong push by a very small local business/government alliance to take their digital future into their own hands.
No that any of this is horribly likely, but stark is a billionaire personally and has all the resources of top secret weapons research company behind him. If it's "technically" possible, the "politically" possible is mostly immaterial to a guy like that. Between what he can do with his personal fortune and rerouting company resources (IIRC Stark Enterprises is a Sole Proprietorship not answerable to any investors) into his new "secret project", who's going to stop him?
Then again, if you do go to a technical school, I can tell you from quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that you're going to get preferential treatment in the hiring process with a huge name engineering school. I've personally had two interviewers confide in me post-selection that I was picked over (to me) obviously more qualified candidates because they didn't believe that someone from [X. State] could be better qualified than a person from [ABC] and that they had just assumed that I flubbed the interviews. So if you're truly unsure of your ability to make a name for yourself at a liberal arts college, you could at least leverage the branding power that the engineering school has.
There is definitely something here, but my (equally anecdotal) experience is that it's a short term thing. I have a degree from a liberal arts university (actually I have a liberal arts degree, I majored in history and only minored in CS). Certainly, out of college, I would have had no chance against an MIT grad trying to get a job at Microsoft or Google. 12 years on though, I make close to 6 figures (in an area of the country where that's a pretty hefty chunk of money) doing challenging work. I am fairly certain that I could work for one of the big time California companies if I wanted to. I'll never be a lead developer at Google, but I'm happy doing systems and network engineering on clusters and massively parallel SMP machines. I make good money (and could probably make more if I moved out to a more high tech area), and get to play with machines that most people never see on a regular basis.
After a certain point in your career, management tends to care a lot more about the things you've done than where you went to school. Certainly, once you earn a master's degree or PhD it tends to almost totally erase your undergrad experience to all but the most careful HR drone. One thing the questioner might do is to earn his BS at a liberal arts school, then get a grad degree from a tech school (grad school tends to be soul killing no matter where you do it, why not enjoy undergrad:-)).
I've also found that my liberal arts education gives me some advantages that a pure tech degree wouldn't have. I can talk to people, you know? I know a bit about art, religion, literature and philosophy. If I'm at a party with the higher ups I can have conversation that they can follow, and leaves them with the impression that read a book or two that doesn't have code samples. Plus I actually enjoy the party because I don't feel like I'm out of my element every time the subject leaves regular expressions. I don't want to imply that all technical school grads are technical savants, it's certainly not true, they just didn't have a lot of time in school to study Zen or hear conflicting opinions on what Plato meant by "Eros" in the The Republic. Hell they probably didn't even have time to play drunken D&D, check out the local band scene or watch stupid comedies and make fun of them in company... All the staples that most of us think of as "college life", and which we use to relate to others with a similar experience (maybe they did though... somehow college students always seem to find SOME time for that kind of thing).
Essential point being though.. I think that the advantages of the major tech school degree, while substantial in your early career, tend to fade over time. I may be a few years behind the guy with the Cal Tech degree, but I'm still on the same flight path.. and if he dies young from all the stress I'll catch up:-)
Actually, the binary blobs contain an encrypted tarball of the source which they untar and custom compile. When you run the installer, it checks to see if it has an availabel precompiled drive for your precise architecture. 90% of the time it doesn't and just compiles from source.
Legally they aren't. In theory they don't have to be. In practice they pretty much are. The pay day loan industry is predatory beyond belief, victimizing the poorest and least educated members of society. Unfortunately in most states there isn't actually a LAW against convincing some poor schmuck with a middle school education that a loan with an effective interest rate of 25-50% a week is in his best interest.
Diablo II also had... saved games. I mean, seriously. Permadeath is OK when you can save the game and try again. Imagine every time your character died you had to start over again from level 1. Most people would never even see the stage 4 area Diablo lived in, let alone fight him if they had to restart the WHOLE thing every time they died. If you're talking about the multiplayer hardcore ladders, well a) I always thought those people were nuckin' futs, and b) the whole point of the ladders was to get as far as possible before dying. Hardly anyone ever beat the game that way. You played single player and/or non-permadeath multiplayer to see the content and get good at the fights before you ever tried the ladders.
Like ya know, World of Warcraft? Uses OpenGL to make the Mac and PC versions easier to support. I'm sure it's not the only game that does, but it's pretty popular I'm told.
There's a bit more to it. At least I thought there was. Supposedly they can do things like recognize and access Bluetooth devices placed on them, and read bar codes or even image data from objects placed on them. What you're describing sounds like a table sized iPhone. Is that all they are?
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That's actually mostly true, but their was never the kind of intelligentsia class that the Germans had. There were a lot more skilled people than we chose to use though, for sure. I briefly touched on this in my original post. Debathification was the stupidest idea ever, or at least carrying to the extremes it was taken to was.
I respectfully call Bullshit on this one. I've been a soldier, and I remember the lead up to the war (no I wasn't involved in the lead up or initial hostilities. I watched it on TV like most people). Did we win faster than expected? Yes. But not a lot faster. Whether it took a week, two weeks, or a month, we were going to defeat the Iraqi Army, and we were going to do it in short order. It was a total failure of the political leadership that there was a not a post-hostilities plan in place before the first shots were fired. Period. It was an even more egregious failure that there was essentially no serious post-hostilities plan for months after hostilities ended. I know of guys who were trading the illicit porn their family support groups sent them for weapons, because there was no plan for disarming the militias. There was not a properly resourced, serious attempt at fortifying and rebuilding until this last year. 5 years after the end of "hostilities". If we had done what we've done over the last year or so, 5 years ago, we might be talking about a peaceful withdrawal from a stable nation right now.
The failure to have a cohesive, worst case scenario, plan for how we were going to rebuild Iraq and make its people our bestest friends is the single biggest failure of an administration fraught with colossal failures. Since impeachment of the president is impossible given the current layout of Senate, the best I an hope for is that this administration is simply remembered by history as the worst in modern history.
I served in a New Orleans, Louisiana based National Guard Field Artillery Battalion. We went over to Iraq to fight in the war that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence reports to justify and failed to properly plan for. In our last month in country we watched from satellite television as a hurricane tore our city apart, and that same administration failed to provide relief. I then spent a year living in the city that the administration all but abandoned. At this point, if George W. Bush says the sky is blue, I'm walking outside to make sure it hasn't turned purple while I was typing this post.
Yeah, the list goes on and on. There's also the fact that the Germans and the Americans has very similar cultures and customs, the fact that nearly the entire male population of Germany was dead or injured so there was almost no one left to run an insurgent campaign even had they wanted to, the fact that Germans are culturally predisposed to follow instruction from people who sound like they know what their doing...
I picked the four biggest ones off the top of my head but I came up with at least 5 or 6 more.
I think the biggest single factor was the planning and execution; despite everything, had we gone into Iraq with a level of planning equal to the Marshall Plan it might have worked. Even then I don't think we could have had a "rebuilding Europe" level of success, but we might at least have a generally stable country with an infrastructure. Now though... Like I said, likely too little, certainly too late.
Good point, but from the "why is rebuilding so hard" point of view they aren't quite as important as the Sunnis and Shiites. Mainly because they are virtually autonomous in their own region, and are avoiding the "let's see who can make the other's life most miserable" game that the other two are playing.
Yes and no. My understanding (and limited experience, I got to talk to locals occasionally, but wasn't really friendly with any) is that Saddam did look out for his clan quite a bit, but not so much for the entire Sunni sect. Essentially, while most of the people in power were Sunnis, being a Sunni was hardly a ticket to power. Plenty of Sunnis had miserable lives under Saddam, but more Sunnis had good lives than any other ethnic group. The majority of Sunnis didn't care any more for Saddam than their Shiite neighbors.
(I'm basing this almost entirely on the cultural sensitivity classes the Army gave me, discussing religion or sect with Local Nationals was more or less verboten while in country)
Yes, well, to do something like the Marshall plan in Iraq presupposes... a plan. Speaking as someone who spent a year in Iraq with the US military, our plan was essentially "build some stuff and be nice to people, unless they annoy us in some way, then be rude." "Rude" had definitions that varied from simple rudeness in conversation, to firing warning shots without sufficient provocation to, in some of the most extreme cases, stuff like Abu Ghraib. In defense of the soldiers, "annoy us" could vary from roadside bombs, to being cut off in traffic (more serious than it sounds since in a minority of cases those sorts of cut offs were followed by planned ambushes and the afore mentioned roadside bombs).
The number of differences between Iraq and Postwar Germany are staggering:
1) The Bush Administration had no coherent post was plan. The Marshall Pan was very well thought out was being implemented even before the end of hostilities. We finished the war already prepared for, and in some cases already implementing, the rebuilding plan. What we're doing in Iraq may be to little and is certainly too late.
2) The Germans had a long tradition of self government, and the allies forgave former Nazi's who could reasonably show that they had not been involved in war crimes. This meant that the new German government could rely on the experience of life long government administrators. Most had worked for the Weimars before the Nazis, some had even worked for the Kaiser before that. It was simple enough to build a new government that more or less mirrored the old structure, just without the evil dictator at the top. By contrast the Iraqis have no real tradition of self government, having been under a series of colonial governors, hereditary kings and various strongmen for the last hundred or so years at least. We also "de-bathified" what experienced government officials existed, without giving them any chance to show whether or not they deserved it.
3) Germany did not have two (three if you count the Kurds) major ethnic groups that never really liked each other and only tolerated each other because they could agree on a mutual dislike of Saddam. Tragically this was at least partly because all of the other ethnic groups in Germany had been decimated by concentration camps, but it all the same it did make make post war integration easier.
4) Germany, the US and most of the other Axis and Allied powers could see, almost immediately after the War, that it was in all of their best interests to rebuild everything they could and stick together, because there was a serious mutual threat sitting off to the east. However much Germans mistrusted Brits and Americans or vice versa, they were all mutually terrified of what the USSR was doing. There is no such powerful motivator acting in Iraq.
The list goes on of course. Comparing the current situation to post War Europe is completely ridiculous. We are NEVER going to turn Iraq into the "Germany" of the Middles East. 6 years on, the best we can say is that the government is less oppressive that the old one, mostly because it's too damned incompetent to impose its will. The worst we can say is that in all ways other than a less oppressive government, the life of Ali the average Iraqi is worse than it was when we started. Who hoo.
I used to think that it was our moral obligation to leave Iraq at least as nice as we found it (though I thought we never should have invaded in the first place), but given that after all of these years it's obvious that:
a) we're incompetent boobs who screwed up the first 4 years of rebuilding and
b) The Iraqis themselves no longer seem to want our help
I think it's time to move on.
There is an alternative, Sprial Scouts. I'm not saying it's a great alternative, they're a small organization with a fairly limited number of troops at local levels, but they are an alternative. It was founded as kind of a Wiccan/Pagan alternative to BS and GS, but they are explicitly unbiased on any points of religion, race, sex, or sexuality.
My understanding is that they're a fairly crunchy granola sort of organization (makes sense, given their origins), but the few people I've known who worked with them (all online friends) said the national organization was nice to work with and helped as much as possible. YMMV, and I've never personally been involved with them in any way.
As a semantic matter, Jindal did not win a "special election". It was a regular plain old election. The only oddity was that the incumbent decided not to seek re-election. Mainly because she handled Katrina so poorly that she had popularity numbers in line with GWB.
And yet, all the major oil companies have reported record profits for last five years. Amazing how that can do that with low profit margins and all the evil government regulation. Also, who's fault do you suppose it is that we haven't built any refineries in the last 30 years?
That's only partially true. The last time my cable Internet went down I called Tech Support. They only support out to the router, but they want a computer plugged into the router to test everything. I was constantly telling the guy I had a Mac, and thus no "Control Panel", that my network dialog didn't look like his, and that in general, "No, I didn't do EXACTLY what you told me, I'm on a Mac."
And Macs are SUPPORTED. Hate to see this dude trying to troubleshoot a connection where the only available computer to test was a Linux box. Now you might say that I should have just translated what he said to "Mac", and that's basically what I did, but in the end the troubleshooting is almost certainly less effective if the troubleshooter doesn't understand the client.
Fact is, cops can write you tickets and even arrest you with no better reason than "because I said so". There might not be charges, and the cop might even get in trouble after the fact, but s/he can do it. We rely on the fact that they usually don't try to screw people, and the fact that if they screw very many people, or even one person really badly, they're usually fired. It's not a perfect system, but we hope it's as reasonable as possible.
The problem is that the British Government doesn't really have a foundational document of the type one thinks of when looking at the Constitution of the US, or the various constitutions and charters that have founded most modern states. Britain has one of the oldest (if not THE oldest, I don't know) contiguous governments in the world. Don't misunderstand, there are countries that are as old or older, but most of them have, at one point or another, had a complete change of government. The British government is essentially the same one as was established by William the Conquerer in 1066. During the intervening 1000 or so years there have been changes in monarchs, changes in rights and privileges available to various classes of people, even briefly a complete revolutionary change (during the English Civil War there was a very brief period where the monarchy was abolished), but in general it has been a thousand year evolutionary process of change.
What this means is that there are many documents (the Magna Carta is the first and most famous) that establish the rights and privileges of various classes of people through the history of English government. To further complicate matters, some rights and privileges are enshrined in Common Law and Judicial precedent (Similar to the same concepts here in the US, but more so). Then there is the EU Charter, which the British Government is more or less bound to.
So the simple answer is: "Yes, basic human rights are enshrined in more than law in England." The complicated answer is: "If you want to know where, exactly, a given right is codified, you might wanna talk to a solicitor specializing in the appropriate type of law." I'm sure someone more familiar with recent (last 200 or so years) British history could tell you where the big ones (speech, expression, etc) are, my detailed knowledge stops at around 1600 (I was a medievalist in college).
I don't honestly know that I want the people to decide how the people are governed in a broad sort of way. In general, people as groups tend to panic. Things like the Constitution and UK Common Law may be fragile protection, but they are protection. If you'd actually asked them, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a majority of Americans would have favored an even more knee jerk reaction to 9/11 than actually occurred.
Besides, I'm not sure how it would help in this case. Even if "the people" were making the laws there would still be a need for enforcement therefore still something resembling police. This, so far, is not a case of "government overreaching", but rather "police overreaching". The police are part of the government, but ultimately they are individuals. It becomes a case of "government overreaching" if and only if the young man is prosecuted and found guilty. I wouldn't be half surprised if the the Crown Prosecutors drop this like a hot potato.
"And eventually it gets down to the fact that if we faithfully preserved every place that anything interesting had ever happened at it wouldn't be long before our entire society would be static."
Slightly off topic, but this reminded me of the funny signs you used to see in the French Quarter and other historical sites in New Orleans. Often on someone's front gate would be a little plaque that said something like "On February 19, 1789 Napoleon pick his nose on this spot." So some of the more humorous, and less research inclined residents starting posting small brass "On this spot on May 15th 1857, absolutely nothing happened." plaques.
Places like New Orleans do demonstrate that History can be preserved without the result being stagnation. Most big, old cities in both the US and Europe have found a compromise between moving forward and preserving history, perhaps compromise can be made here as well?
You know... I almost meta-moderated this post to try and get the "Troll" removed. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that he accused the editor, rather than the story. I don't know enough about the editor's history to support calling everything he does a troll. This particular story, on the other hand, is about as trolling and biased as I've seen. One could certainly argue that Google's share holders made the wrong decision here, but there's a pretty good argument the other way too. From the headline you'd think Google's board voted in favor of genoncide or something.
They had exactly two choices, both of them with potentially "evil" outcomes, and they chose what they considered the lesser evil. Disagree with them? Fine. That hardly qualifies them as heartlessly evil. Did profit come into the question? Probably... If I have exactly two choices, both with good and bad possible outcomes, but one is likely to make me a few bucks at least... Well, I know I'd probably choose that one.
Take a look at your power or water bill sometime. They both charge graduated rates based on over usage.
I'm not going to weigh in one way or the other on whether this cap is evil or not, however comparing bandwidth to water or power is kind of silly. Water and power are metered because they are produced and have a fixed production cost. Water is a thing, if I use three gallons of water, it's three gallons someone else cannot use. I buy water by the gallon from the water company just as I buy food or orange juice (or, amusingly enough, water) from the grocery store. It just happens to come through pipes and require a bit less driving on my part. Electricity is not a physical thing, but it has a direct per kilowatt production cost. Depending on where you are, it costs the power company X amount of coal, water, nuclear material, whatever to make that power and force it down the lines to your house. You are buying one unit of power for X dollars.
Bandwidth isn't produced, its value is more along the lines of a service. You pay someone to ship your packages between X and Y, you pay someone to ship your packet between X and Y. Like UPS, Comcast has some costs associated with shipping your stuff on their lines, but also like UPS they are able to aggregate those cost much more easily than an actual producer by using economies of scale. It would cost a LOT to connect your personal house to the Internet, but it cost a lot less on a person by person basis to connect your neighborhood, less still for your town. Similarly, it would cost a fortune to ship your package, all by itself, to China, but that cost is aggregated with all the other people doing the same thing.
This is not to say that Comcast could not, or even should not, meter Internet service (I think they'd be foolish, but I'm not going to go into a whole separate argument here on that), rather it is to say that if they do it will not be the same as power and water. Comcast has spent their infrastructure money, and upgrades and maintenance are not the same as production costs. The power company makes money off of you with the formula:
(("Cost of one Kilowatt" - "Cost to Produce one Kilowatt") * "Number of Kilowatts Used") - "Cost of Maintenance and Overhead"
Comcast would look like:
("Cost of one Gigabyte" * "Number of Gigabytes Used") - "Cost of Maintenance and Overhead"
Which seems a lot less fair.
I know we are a spread-out nation here in the US, but there is no reason why cities with people living on top of each other (LA, Boston, New York, etc) can't easily have the infrastructure that the rest of the world has.
I think we could go a lot farther than that. We probably couldn't run fiber to every farm in West Virginia or every ranch in South Dakota, but even small cities and suburbs would be doable if it were a priority. Here in Lafayette, LA we are running fiber to every household in the city via our municipal power company. We're not quite small town America, but we don't even come close to New Orleans levels of population density, let alone New York or Boston.
Is it a perfect solution? Well, it's not implemented yet, so it's hard to say. Probably not. LUS' website still requires Internet Explorer to pay your electric bill, so I can't imagine this project will go off without a few hitches; but they're trying. So far they're showing every sign of succeeding. At any rate the conduit to my house has been laid for several weeks, so something is working.
The federal government has already shown itself to be largely uninterested in fixing this country's broadband problems... Maybe it's time for local government to step in. They'll have to make it a priority (as Lafayette did), but it can be done. Towns far smaller and more rural than Lafayette have done it too.
*Disclaimer: I don't know if EATEL offers fiber to every home in Ascension Parish, but it is definitely a strong push by a very small local business/government alliance to take their digital future into their own hands.
No that any of this is horribly likely, but stark is a billionaire personally and has all the resources of top secret weapons research company behind him. If it's "technically" possible, the "politically" possible is mostly immaterial to a guy like that. Between what he can do with his personal fortune and rerouting company resources (IIRC Stark Enterprises is a Sole Proprietorship not answerable to any investors) into his new "secret project", who's going to stop him?
Then again, if you do go to a technical school, I can tell you from quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that you're going to get preferential treatment in the hiring process with a huge name engineering school. I've personally had two interviewers confide in me post-selection that I was picked over (to me) obviously more qualified candidates because they didn't believe that someone from [X. State] could be better qualified than a person from [ABC] and that they had just assumed that I flubbed the interviews. So if you're truly unsure of your ability to make a name for yourself at a liberal arts college, you could at least leverage the branding power that the engineering school has.
:-)).
:-)
There is definitely something here, but my (equally anecdotal) experience is that it's a short term thing. I have a degree from a liberal arts university (actually I have a liberal arts degree, I majored in history and only minored in CS). Certainly, out of college, I would have had no chance against an MIT grad trying to get a job at Microsoft or Google. 12 years on though, I make close to 6 figures (in an area of the country where that's a pretty hefty chunk of money) doing challenging work. I am fairly certain that I could work for one of the big time California companies if I wanted to. I'll never be a lead developer at Google, but I'm happy doing systems and network engineering on clusters and massively parallel SMP machines. I make good money (and could probably make more if I moved out to a more high tech area), and get to play with machines that most people never see on a regular basis.
After a certain point in your career, management tends to care a lot more about the things you've done than where you went to school. Certainly, once you earn a master's degree or PhD it tends to almost totally erase your undergrad experience to all but the most careful HR drone. One thing the questioner might do is to earn his BS at a liberal arts school, then get a grad degree from a tech school (grad school tends to be soul killing no matter where you do it, why not enjoy undergrad
I've also found that my liberal arts education gives me some advantages that a pure tech degree wouldn't have. I can talk to people, you know? I know a bit about art, religion, literature and philosophy. If I'm at a party with the higher ups I can have conversation that they can follow, and leaves them with the impression that read a book or two that doesn't have code samples. Plus I actually enjoy the party because I don't feel like I'm out of my element every time the subject leaves regular expressions. I don't want to imply that all technical school grads are technical savants, it's certainly not true, they just didn't have a lot of time in school to study Zen or hear conflicting opinions on what Plato meant by "Eros" in the The Republic. Hell they probably didn't even have time to play drunken D&D, check out the local band scene or watch stupid comedies and make fun of them in company... All the staples that most of us think of as "college life", and which we use to relate to others with a similar experience (maybe they did though... somehow college students always seem to find SOME time for that kind of thing).
Essential point being though.. I think that the advantages of the major tech school degree, while substantial in your early career, tend to fade over time. I may be a few years behind the guy with the Cal Tech degree, but I'm still on the same flight path.. and if he dies young from all the stress I'll catch up
Actually, the binary blobs contain an encrypted tarball of the source which they untar and custom compile. When you run the installer, it checks to see if it has an availabel precompiled drive for your precise architecture. 90% of the time it doesn't and just compiles from source.
Legally they aren't. In theory they don't have to be. In practice they pretty much are. The pay day loan industry is predatory beyond belief, victimizing the poorest and least educated members of society. Unfortunately in most states there isn't actually a LAW against convincing some poor schmuck with a middle school education that a loan with an effective interest rate of 25-50% a week is in his best interest.
Diablo II also had... saved games. I mean, seriously. Permadeath is OK when you can save the game and try again. Imagine every time your character died you had to start over again from level 1. Most people would never even see the stage 4 area Diablo lived in, let alone fight him if they had to restart the WHOLE thing every time they died. If you're talking about the multiplayer hardcore ladders, well a) I always thought those people were nuckin' futs, and b) the whole point of the ladders was to get as far as possible before dying. Hardly anyone ever beat the game that way. You played single player and/or non-permadeath multiplayer to see the content and get good at the fights before you ever tried the ladders.
Like ya know, World of Warcraft? Uses OpenGL to make the Mac and PC versions easier to support. I'm sure it's not the only game that does, but it's pretty popular I'm told.
There's a bit more to it. At least I thought there was. Supposedly they can do things like recognize and access Bluetooth devices placed on them, and read bar codes or even image data from objects placed on them. What you're describing sounds like a table sized iPhone. Is that all they are?