You'll NEVER get something like that. Ever. Why? Because it would get you BOTH into a serious amount of shit- he could get fired for it, his town/city could get sued, etc. You'd certainly get fired.
Obviously. I was kidding. Well, it would be really funny to see, anyway.
What you will get is someone on the force to check on your house on their patrol while you're on vacation, or something similar like that. If he hadn't given you the gift, you could have asked for his business card.
The neighborhood largely gets that now, since he lives in it. We see a larger than normal number of patrols in our neighborhood, despite the fact that our area has the lowest crime rate in the city. The best part is that he works 2nd shift and his wife is at home, and if anything unusual happens, she calls him directly and he and his partner show up patrolling the neighborhood.
We had a dodgy guy with no ID and no supporting materials apparently trying to hard-sell replacement windows. He was a threatening guy, and about 10 minutes after he left the cop's house, they stopped him after he evaded them by cutting through yards. At first they just asked him who he was and what he was doing and if he had ID. He refused to show ID and was belligerent with them, so he spent the next 15 minutes face-down, handcuffed on the hood of the car while they went through his wallet and called the office number he eventually gave them. After they verified he was actually employed with a "sales" company, they released him and followed him to his car and he drove away.
What I might get and what I really want is a cedar fence I have fixed. He does fences on the side, and it's a job I'd rather not tackle myself.
Way too complicated. The overwhelming majority of people we deal with can barely make FTP work, and many of them aren't supportable from an alternative software perspective, since they're at client sites. We're talking PHB/marketing types, not anyone with an ounce of ability.
No, I'm actually thinking more of in a business setting. So many email systems limit the size and content that can be transferred that way. FTP works well enough otherwise, but lacks a user interface and is a kind of ugly protocol to deal with from a firewall/security standpoint.
Thusfar we've gotten by kind of merging FTP and Apache with directory listings enabled, with custom host names for each "server". It's stone-axe simple to set up, but lacks reasonable authentication and that "branding" experience the suits are looking for, and FTP for uploads bites.
IMHO the best solution would have HTTP upload/download with a simple 2-level file layout, basic authentication (read only, read/write, read/write/erase), new file notification, and that's about it.
dotProject looks interesting, but so many of these systems drown you in features that you'll never use.
A cop on our block had his HDD crash and burn. I did the replacement and XP reinstall (yes, including SP and hotfix, XP firewall, unbinding file+print, and autoupdates set to autoinstall).
He bought me a cold bottle of Chimay ale, which was nice, but I was hoping for something a little more cop-like out of him, like maybe harassing the CEO on the street in front of the office. They say "cops got the best stuff", too.
Another neighbor is an interior painter, and he's done some free painting for me, but I'd go to his house to drool over his daughter anyway, which is a tad twisted since she's 17 and I'm...older than that.
MSN shows up as a distinct protocol in the Packetshaper's monitoring and management screens. They're using layer 7 analysis, it's not just port numbers. In fact, many of the protocols (referred to as traffic classes in Packeteerspeak) don't have a port definition they're dependent on.
If I define my web proxy as a class and enable class discovery inside this class, I can see all the various classes it handles -- Windows Media Streams, Real Streams, MPEG, Quicktime over http.
I don't know for sure, but I kind of have to guess that MSN over 443 isn't encrypted (I'd presume the server-end overhead would be crushing), so even MSN over 443 should be detectable as MSN.
The advantage with something like this is you can clamp unwanted protocols hard (or even disable them) and not have to worry about port-hopping. In some cases, setting a 56kbps policy for an unwanted protocol and making it functional but essentially unusable is better than trying to block it, paritcularly for apps that won't hop to other ports if they "work" on their default port.
It's certainly possible to stegonographically embed one protocol in another, use encryption to mask the entire packet, but each incremental step you take to evade becomes harder and harder, and requires more resources (such as outside proxies).
Basically, it's not likely to enforce policies among those who actively want to get around them.
You can raise the marginal cost for getting around them really high, to the point where the labor and possibly diminished performance isn't worth the effort.
We've been demoing a Packeteer 2500 packet shaper, and it's a pretty amazing box. It uses content rules to identify specific protocols (as opposed to content-blind port numbers), which you can then apply bandwidth policies to, including "do not pass".
That may apply to desktop laser printers, but we were stea^H^H^H^H liberating laser output from the local University's high-volume output center in 1982/1983.
I didn't see the laser printer and have no idea how big or how fast it was, but the quality was far superior to the TTY 43s and line printers, and it was xerographic output. I think I had the printed output for the Pascal system until like 1990 or something.
Bush & Co are certainly to be blamed for the appalling lack of planning of this entire operation. The behavior in the prison is a direct result of the intense pressure the Bush administration is under to "solve" the Iraqi problem; it's basically trickled down to military intelligence to get as much out of the prisoners as possible, using whatever means necessary.
As bad as the stuff in prison was, at least we don't resort to live decapitations, like Bergs or Pearl's in Pakistan. There's something about ANY political or religious movement that can endorse that kind of medieval behavior that's sickening, in the same way Nazism is.
Surely his reality was real to him, otherwise he wouldn't have interacted with it, but it's not demonstrable or experiential for anyone else. Reality is only meaningful when there is a functional, shared definition.
Millions of people believe they're communicating with higher powers every day, but since that experience is shared and accepted as valid by multiple people it is considered real and valid -- I think we call it "religion".
When just one guy decides he's talking to a higher power and no one else shares in the experience, we call it "mental illness."
First of all, thats bull crap. Sarin is one of the most toxic substances on earth. 100mg of Sarin will kill you within a few minutes. The 155mm shell found in Iraq had about 6kg of chemical agent. This single weapon, if properly placed, could kill tens of thousands of people.
The reason chemical weapons aren't very popular is that they're only as effective as the weather. If the wind is strong or blowing in the wrong direction, your gas attack is either ineffective or quickly diluted. It takes a large quantity of chemical weapons, carefully deployed with regard to the weather to be effective in outdoor environments. A single artillery shell isn't going to do much besides terrorize the population, unless you define "carefully placed" as "detonated in the ventilation system of a major domed stadium". In fact, chemical artillery shells are a huge threat to the troops firing them, since a change in the wind can gas them, which is another reason they've seen little use since World War I.
And do you think we just found the only chemical shell that Saddam made? Do you honestly think he only made one? Lets ignore the fact that Saddam denied that he had weaponized Sarin in artillery shells- its just another lie that we caught him in. Of course he stockpiled them.
No, he made thousands of them. That he had them in the past doesn't mean he has them now. Why can't we find them? Where are they? Where are the plants for making them? Where are the stockpiles of sarin, VX, and mustard gas? Finding random leftovers from the 1980s is neither suprising nor indicative that Hussein had the quantities of gas weapons it takes to be taken seriously as a threat, especially when the vast majority of those weapons found are artillery shells with a range of only several km, not ballistic missles capable of hitting anything far away.
Of course in blind pursuit of pedantic definitions of "possession of weapons of mass destruction", we've managed to completely trash our diplomatic standing and credibility, kill hundreds of American troops and spend hundreds of billions of dollars, when there are far more dangerous regimes like North Korea, which possess NUCLEAR WEAPONS *and* launch systems capable of delivering them.
The Iraq war remains a fool's errand at the behest of revenge-minded neocons, lacking a sense of proportion and any kind of a plan.
Since sarin and other gasseous nerve agents are worthless as single-instance munitions, they'd have to be stockpiled by the thousands to be considered an effective military weapon. Given Hussein's well-known paranoia and lack of trust of even his own military leadership, he likely moved the stockpiles around, deliberately mislabeled them and, this, coupled with his military's incompetance and corruption likely led a few of them to be overlooked or retained by local commanders, either deliberately or out of fear that they would be punished for destroying them.
Arguing that he "had" weapons of mass destruction simply because a few random shells have turned up is entirely pedantic given the circumstances of Hussein's regime and the nature of the weapons.
Technically it was a weapon (singular) of some destruction. Sarin and most other chemical agents, in a single small munition, in many cases will kill less people (if any) than a standard high explosive munition targeted correctly. Gas and nerve agents disperse uncontrollably. It takes a significant number of them and the right weather to actually be a weapon of mass destruction.
It's a real stretch of the imagination to conclude that billions of dollars needed to be spent and thousands and thousands of people needed to be killed to neutralize the "threat" of a couple of sarin-loaded shells, likely left over from the 1980s.
I was a hesitant supporter of the war's most noble aim eliminating the Hussein clan and building a democracy, and I do think that if sanctions had been lifted on Huessein, he would have been willing to bankroll Islamic terrorists operating outside his borders. I thought the WMD idea was kind of dicey and forced.
Now it appears all to be a hoax, and we're finding out that the Iraqis are by and large like any other Muslim country, held secular by force of arms or turned into frothing Islamists, eagarly and willingly to be led back to the social norms of the 12th century. It's impossible to build a democracy that doesn't become a theocracy there, and in many ways we should have left Saddam in his sanctions box.
It does looks like Elena is wearing different jackets in different pictures. So would she have gone as far as to bring 2 leather jackets, or did she actually go twice?
I forget the details of her jackets, but speaking as a motorcyclist I've frequently worn or brought two jackets when going on long rides, especially in 'border' seasons where the temperature might fluctuate between cool and cold.
As far as I'm concerned, the fact that she went there at all and shot the pictures was pretty amazing. That she did it on a bike doesn't mean much, although it does add a certain flair.
I'll go see Episode III for the same reasons I went to see Episodes I and II. It's there. It's more Star Wars. It's a decent enough story, but deep down it's just schlock.
I mostly agree, however, Episode II was so utterly awful that I don't know if I can be compelled to see it. I actually *fell asleep* during that movie, and the last time I fell asleep during a movie was a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away -- literally; we went to a drive-in to see Episode IV for the third or fourth time when I was 10 and due to a projection problem the movie started late (it's not dark enough in Minnesota for drive-in movies until 9 PM to begin with) and I fell asleep watching it in the station wagon we had.
I always thought a perfect game was 27 strike outs, and a no-hitter covered other variants where players may have gotten to the base (walks, hit by pitches, balks, etc).
I guess I'm wrong, as a quick google suggests that Roger Clemens and Kerry Wood share the record of 20 in a 9 inning game.
The article seemed to indicate that because they use 2 tbsp coffee per cup brewed, you end up with more caffeine than other coffee. Is that all there is to it? "GOURMET COFFEE USES MORE COFFEE AND IS THEREFORE STRONGER." Well, duh. Insert $obligatory_canadian_intelligence_insult.
I thought perhaps there was some conspiracy where they were doping coffee with extra caffeine or something.
I know someone who would directly benefit from this. He's been harvesting off USENET for years (virtually 24x7) and has literally filled a half-dozen 60 gig disks with porn. If you could do a real search on this with some reasonable criteria, it'd be amazing. But it's almost a Turing test to differentiate between many aspects of porn. You might get crude racial tests to work, but beyond that it'd be tough going.
BTW, I'm not sure why you'd want to collect that much porn. I know for a fact that a lot of it he's never seen before, and what I've seen of it suffer's from porn's usual problem, a lot of repetitiveness.
Well no, the U.S. occupation hasn't been particularly humane
Sure it has. Given that the US occupation is largely unwanted by the Iraqis, it is REMARKABLY humane. We've spent literally BILLIONS rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure, health care facilities, schools, and other public facilities. Military action against insurgencies has been by and large a return-fire only situation, with very few offensive military actions. And those few offensive actions have been reliant on precision strike capabilities, NOT scorched earth combat.
As a comparison, look at the Japanese occupations of WW II -- Manchuria and Korea were virtually turned into slave labor camps. The Germans in WW II turned eastern Europe into slave labor and death camps. Prior to WW II, occupation of foreign lands was essentially "give us what we want or we'll kill you." The Romans built an empire with this tactic.
And remember, I've never advocated a scorched earth policy at all. What I advocated was that the US should have pursued a much more aggressive initial stance in Iraq to both intimidate insurgents and create a sense of order. This should have been fairly rapidly tapered off as the situation in the streets normalized.
The Russians had tons of problems, but their biggest problem is the Red Army is a shit military. Lame equipment, terrible leadership, awful training. Because the Russian military is so broke and so corrupt, they almost always use their worst trained, worst equipped, worst led troops.
I was pretty certain that the tax industry was getting congress to run interfernce over something like this so that they can maintain their "business model". What's next, lawsuits against the IRS for patent infringement?
So instead of the government providing a service we basically pay for already that would essentially save the government millions and millions, we've got to prop up a bunch of execs at Intuit and get a much less efficient tax system as a result. That's just great.
By this same logic, the police and military should be disbanded; those wanting law enforcement or military should just contract individually with a security company, Blackpool or the militia/warlord of their choosing, since the police and military are unfairly competing with private business, not to mention their legal monopolies on the use of force and many weapons systems.
I'm pretty un-tinfoil hat on most issues, but the online-tax thing scares the shite out of me. It's not that I worry about my data getting stolen by l33t d00dz with m4d ski11z. What I worry about is it getting used/traded/sold for financial benefit of the tax company.
I don't know if they would or would not do this, but I do know that "financial planning" (ie, high pressure marketing of crap grade securities) is a huge growth target for most tax prep companies.
Besides, doing your taxes isn't all that hard. I own a home, have some minor non-401k investments, make charitable contributions and am married; I do the 1040 long form and some of the supplementals, and with photocopying it took maybe 3 hours, tops.
And besides, we shouldn't make tax collection that easy for the government. If you want to take my money, you should have to deal with a paper bureaucracy.
They (the cracking types) may discover a hole in something that exists only in the Enterprise feature set, leaving most of the exposed routers on the Internet un-compromiseable
That's a good point. The IP code has likely been subjected to many uses, bugs, fixes, reviews and so on.
IPX? DECnet? Appletalk? Those bits are less popular and probably have more potential problems, but have a much lower security exposure.
The debate isn't about whether to go into Iraq or not. We did. Everyone who disagrees with me seems to presume I supported attacking Iraq before we did so (I didn't) or that I bought the Bush rhetoric about 9/11 and terrorism (I don't, but I do think that a non-embargoed Hussein would have bankrolled anti-US terrorists to the extent they wouldn't threaten his own regeime).
The debate is about the occupation of Iraq and the decisions made about how it should be carried out. As it turns out, we mostly did it your way, the "humane" way and didn't crack down on the populace at the end of combat and the beginning of occupation. Thusfar it has accomplished little good but the alienation of Iraqis that want law and order and the encouragement of insurrection. This has led to a no-win situation for us and more than likely will lead to the installation of a theocratic, anti-western government that will only encourage more anti-US terrorism in the name of Islam and Muslim funamentalism.
Since that way isn't working out and will lead to a disasterous foreign policy situatioin for at least a decade, it's reasonable to suggest that the US should have been much harder on the Iraqis for the first 3-6 months of the occupation. Stopped the looting. Disarmed the populace, by lethal force if necessary. Put down rebellions with excessive force.
All of those things, if applied even briefly, may have demonstrated not only our military superiority but out desire for stability and intolerance of dissent. This could have led to civilian leadership willing to lead and a lot less afraid of being killed, which would have in turn lead to the establishment of stable political systems.
As I said in one other message, it's too late now, though. We can't crack down, since we've already alienated most centrist Iraqis with the lack of law and order, and those inflamed at this point will only be more inflamed.
From what I've read of Roman history, the Romans gave "barbarian" peoples two choices -- submit to Rome or be destroyed. And they weren't kidding. I read a book a historian friend had about the Roman conquering of Gaul and the Low Countries. One city/village/tribe was offered a chance and they agreed to it, but secretly kept the weapons and planned to attack the legions outside their town. The Romans found out, offered them one more chance and when they decided to fight it and were conquered, were sold into slavery -- all of them -- as a single unit.
I know that the reason we're "better" than that is that we're less savage than that, but I kind of have to wonder sometimes if maybe it doesn't take that to be successful.
I wasn't advocating an Iron Fisted policy as an ongoing, continuing policy, but something we should have done in the immediate aftermath to both establish our authority and preserve order. It's too late now and would only spiral the conflict way out of control.
The tactics and strategy of occupation are somewhat independant of the reasons or validity for going to war in the first place, as well. I agree that the rationale for going to war was paper thin at best, but whether you or I want it to happen, it's happened, and we have to figure out how to make sure there's something resembling a functional state that's capable of interacting with the rest of the world.
I personally don't think it's going to happen I DO think that the Iraqis themselves will do all the icky things that we can't or won't do to make life livable there.
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You'll NEVER get something like that. Ever. Why? Because it would get you BOTH into a serious amount of shit- he could get fired for it, his town/city could get sued, etc. You'd certainly get fired.
Obviously. I was kidding. Well, it would be really funny to see, anyway.
What you will get is someone on the force to check on your house on their patrol while you're on vacation, or something similar like that. If he hadn't given you the gift, you could have asked for his business card.
The neighborhood largely gets that now, since he lives in it. We see a larger than normal number of patrols in our neighborhood, despite the fact that our area has the lowest crime rate in the city. The best part is that he works 2nd shift and his wife is at home, and if anything unusual happens, she calls him directly and he and his partner show up patrolling the neighborhood.
We had a dodgy guy with no ID and no supporting materials apparently trying to hard-sell replacement windows. He was a threatening guy, and about 10 minutes after he left the cop's house, they stopped him after he evaded them by cutting through yards. At first they just asked him who he was and what he was doing and if he had ID. He refused to show ID and was belligerent with them, so he spent the next 15 minutes face-down, handcuffed on the hood of the car while they went through his wallet and called the office number he eventually gave them. After they verified he was actually employed with a "sales" company, they released him and followed him to his car and he drove away.
What I might get and what I really want is a cedar fence I have fixed. He does fences on the side, and it's a job I'd rather not tackle myself.
Way too complicated. The overwhelming majority of people we deal with can barely make FTP work, and many of them aren't supportable from an alternative software perspective, since they're at client sites. We're talking PHB/marketing types, not anyone with an ounce of ability.
No, I'm actually thinking more of in a business setting. So many email systems limit the size and content that can be transferred that way. FTP works well enough otherwise, but lacks a user interface and is a kind of ugly protocol to deal with from a firewall/security standpoint.
Thusfar we've gotten by kind of merging FTP and Apache with directory listings enabled, with custom host names for each "server". It's stone-axe simple to set up, but lacks reasonable authentication and that "branding" experience the suits are looking for, and FTP for uploads bites.
IMHO the best solution would have HTTP upload/download with a simple 2-level file layout, basic authentication (read only, read/write, read/write/erase), new file notification, and that's about it.
dotProject looks interesting, but so many of these systems drown you in features that you'll never use.
Some of the ones I've looked into (like phpNuke and Geeklog) have download sections, but none are typically oriented towards this.
Are there any like this? I'm thinking basic (.htpasswd) type authentication and a simple file layout.
A cop on our block had his HDD crash and burn. I did the replacement and XP reinstall (yes, including SP and hotfix, XP firewall, unbinding file+print, and autoupdates set to autoinstall).
He bought me a cold bottle of Chimay ale, which was nice, but I was hoping for something a little more cop-like out of him, like maybe harassing the CEO on the street in front of the office. They say "cops got the best stuff", too.
Another neighbor is an interior painter, and he's done some free painting for me, but I'd go to his house to drool over his daughter anyway, which is a tad twisted since she's 17 and I'm...older than that.
MSN shows up as a distinct protocol in the Packetshaper's monitoring and management screens. They're using layer 7 analysis, it's not just port numbers. In fact, many of the protocols (referred to as traffic classes in Packeteerspeak) don't have a port definition they're dependent on.
If I define my web proxy as a class and enable class discovery inside this class, I can see all the various classes it handles -- Windows Media Streams, Real Streams, MPEG, Quicktime over http.
I don't know for sure, but I kind of have to guess that MSN over 443 isn't encrypted (I'd presume the server-end overhead would be crushing), so even MSN over 443 should be detectable as MSN.
The advantage with something like this is you can clamp unwanted protocols hard (or even disable them) and not have to worry about port-hopping. In some cases, setting a 56kbps policy for an unwanted protocol and making it functional but essentially unusable is better than trying to block it, paritcularly for apps that won't hop to other ports if they "work" on their default port.
It's certainly possible to stegonographically embed one protocol in another, use encryption to mask the entire packet, but each incremental step you take to evade becomes harder and harder, and requires more resources (such as outside proxies).
Basically, it's not likely to enforce policies among those who actively want to get around them.
You can raise the marginal cost for getting around them really high, to the point where the labor and possibly diminished performance isn't worth the effort.
We've been demoing a Packeteer 2500 packet shaper, and it's a pretty amazing box. It uses content rules to identify specific protocols (as opposed to content-blind port numbers), which you can then apply bandwidth policies to, including "do not pass".
That may apply to desktop laser printers, but we were stea^H^H^H^H liberating laser output from the local University's high-volume output center in 1982/1983.
I didn't see the laser printer and have no idea how big or how fast it was, but the quality was far superior to the TTY 43s and line printers, and it was xerographic output. I think I had the printed output for the Pascal system until like 1990 or something.
Bush & Co are certainly to be blamed for the appalling lack of planning of this entire operation. The behavior in the prison is a direct result of the intense pressure the Bush administration is under to "solve" the Iraqi problem; it's basically trickled down to military intelligence to get as much out of the prisoners as possible, using whatever means necessary.
As bad as the stuff in prison was, at least we don't resort to live decapitations, like Bergs or Pearl's in Pakistan. There's something about ANY political or religious movement that can endorse that kind of medieval behavior that's sickening, in the same way Nazism is.
Surely his reality was real to him, otherwise he wouldn't have interacted with it, but it's not demonstrable or experiential for anyone else. Reality is only meaningful when there is a functional, shared definition.
Millions of people believe they're communicating with higher powers every day, but since that experience is shared and accepted as valid by multiple people it is considered real and valid -- I think we call it "religion".
When just one guy decides he's talking to a higher power and no one else shares in the experience, we call it "mental illness."
First of all, thats bull crap. Sarin is one of the most toxic substances on earth. 100mg of Sarin will kill you within a few minutes. The 155mm shell found in Iraq had about 6kg of chemical agent. This single weapon, if properly placed, could kill tens of thousands of people.
The reason chemical weapons aren't very popular is that they're only as effective as the weather. If the wind is strong or blowing in the wrong direction, your gas attack is either ineffective or quickly diluted. It takes a large quantity of chemical weapons, carefully deployed with regard to the weather to be effective in outdoor environments. A single artillery shell isn't going to do much besides terrorize the population, unless you define "carefully placed" as "detonated in the ventilation system of a major domed stadium". In fact, chemical artillery shells are a huge threat to the troops firing them, since a change in the wind can gas them, which is another reason they've seen little use since World War I.
And do you think we just found the only chemical shell that Saddam made? Do you honestly think he only made one? Lets ignore the fact that Saddam denied that he had weaponized Sarin in artillery shells- its just another lie that we caught him in. Of course he stockpiled them.
No, he made thousands of them. That he had them in the past doesn't mean he has them now. Why can't we find them? Where are they? Where are the plants for making them? Where are the stockpiles of sarin, VX, and mustard gas? Finding random leftovers from the 1980s is neither suprising nor indicative that Hussein had the quantities of gas weapons it takes to be taken seriously as a threat, especially when the vast majority of those weapons found are artillery shells with a range of only several km, not ballistic missles capable of hitting anything far away.
Of course in blind pursuit of pedantic definitions of "possession of weapons of mass destruction", we've managed to completely trash our diplomatic standing and credibility, kill hundreds of American troops and spend hundreds of billions of dollars, when there are far more dangerous regimes like North Korea, which possess NUCLEAR WEAPONS *and* launch systems capable of delivering them.
The Iraq war remains a fool's errand at the behest of revenge-minded neocons, lacking a sense of proportion and any kind of a plan.
Since sarin and other gasseous nerve agents are worthless as single-instance munitions, they'd have to be stockpiled by the thousands to be considered an effective military weapon. Given Hussein's well-known paranoia and lack of trust of even his own military leadership, he likely moved the stockpiles around, deliberately mislabeled them and, this, coupled with his military's incompetance and corruption likely led a few of them to be overlooked or retained by local commanders, either deliberately or out of fear that they would be punished for destroying them.
Arguing that he "had" weapons of mass destruction simply because a few random shells have turned up is entirely pedantic given the circumstances of Hussein's regime and the nature of the weapons.
Technically it was a weapon (singular) of some destruction. Sarin and most other chemical agents, in a single small munition, in many cases will kill less people (if any) than a standard high explosive munition targeted correctly. Gas and nerve agents disperse uncontrollably. It takes a significant number of them and the right weather to actually be a weapon of mass destruction.
It's a real stretch of the imagination to conclude that billions of dollars needed to be spent and thousands and thousands of people needed to be killed to neutralize the "threat" of a couple of sarin-loaded shells, likely left over from the 1980s.
I was a hesitant supporter of the war's most noble aim eliminating the Hussein clan and building a democracy, and I do think that if sanctions had been lifted on Huessein, he would have been willing to bankroll Islamic terrorists operating outside his borders. I thought the WMD idea was kind of dicey and forced.
Now it appears all to be a hoax, and we're finding out that the Iraqis are by and large like any other Muslim country, held secular by force of arms or turned into frothing Islamists, eagarly and willingly to be led back to the social norms of the 12th century. It's impossible to build a democracy that doesn't become a theocracy there, and in many ways we should have left Saddam in his sanctions box.
It does looks like Elena is wearing different jackets in different pictures. So would she have gone as far as to bring 2 leather jackets, or did she actually go twice?
I forget the details of her jackets, but speaking as a motorcyclist I've frequently worn or brought two jackets when going on long rides, especially in 'border' seasons where the temperature might fluctuate between cool and cold.
As far as I'm concerned, the fact that she went there at all and shot the pictures was pretty amazing. That she did it on a bike doesn't mean much, although it does add a certain flair.
I'll go see Episode III for the same reasons I went to see Episodes I and II. It's there. It's more Star Wars. It's a decent enough story, but deep down it's just schlock.
I mostly agree, however, Episode II was so utterly awful that I don't know if I can be compelled to see it. I actually *fell asleep* during that movie, and the last time I fell asleep during a movie was a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away -- literally; we went to a drive-in to see Episode IV for the third or fourth time when I was 10 and due to a projection problem the movie started late (it's not dark enough in Minnesota for drive-in movies until 9 PM to begin with) and I fell asleep watching it in the station wagon we had.
I always thought a perfect game was 27 strike outs, and a no-hitter covered other variants where players may have gotten to the base (walks, hit by pitches, balks, etc).
I guess I'm wrong, as a quick google suggests that Roger Clemens and Kerry Wood share the record of 20 in a 9 inning game.
The article seemed to indicate that because they use 2 tbsp coffee per cup brewed, you end up with more caffeine than other coffee. Is that all there is to it? "GOURMET COFFEE USES MORE COFFEE AND IS THEREFORE STRONGER." Well, duh. Insert $obligatory_canadian_intelligence_insult.
I thought perhaps there was some conspiracy where they were doping coffee with extra caffeine or something.
I know someone who would directly benefit from this. He's been harvesting off USENET for years (virtually 24x7) and has literally filled a half-dozen 60 gig disks with porn. If you could do a real search on this with some reasonable criteria, it'd be amazing. But it's almost a Turing test to differentiate between many aspects of porn. You might get crude racial tests to work, but beyond that it'd be tough going.
BTW, I'm not sure why you'd want to collect that much porn. I know for a fact that a lot of it he's never seen before, and what I've seen of it suffer's from porn's usual problem, a lot of repetitiveness.
Well no, the U.S. occupation hasn't been particularly humane
Sure it has. Given that the US occupation is largely unwanted by the Iraqis, it is REMARKABLY humane. We've spent literally BILLIONS rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure, health care facilities, schools, and other public facilities. Military action against insurgencies has been by and large a return-fire only situation, with very few offensive military actions. And those few offensive actions have been reliant on precision strike capabilities, NOT scorched earth combat.
As a comparison, look at the Japanese occupations of WW II -- Manchuria and Korea were virtually turned into slave labor camps. The Germans in WW II turned eastern Europe into slave labor and death camps. Prior to WW II, occupation of foreign lands was essentially "give us what we want or we'll kill you." The Romans built an empire with this tactic.
And remember, I've never advocated a scorched earth policy at all. What I advocated was that the US should have pursued a much more aggressive initial stance in Iraq to both intimidate insurgents and create a sense of order. This should have been fairly rapidly tapered off as the situation in the streets normalized.
The Russians had tons of problems, but their biggest problem is the Red Army is a shit military. Lame equipment, terrible leadership, awful training. Because the Russian military is so broke and so corrupt, they almost always use their worst trained, worst equipped, worst led troops.
I was pretty certain that the tax industry was getting congress to run interfernce over something like this so that they can maintain their "business model". What's next, lawsuits against the IRS for patent infringement?
So instead of the government providing a service we basically pay for already that would essentially save the government millions and millions, we've got to prop up a bunch of execs at Intuit and get a much less efficient tax system as a result. That's just great.
By this same logic, the police and military should be disbanded; those wanting law enforcement or military should just contract individually with a security company, Blackpool or the militia/warlord of their choosing, since the police and military are unfairly competing with private business, not to mention their legal monopolies on the use of force and many weapons systems.
I'm pretty un-tinfoil hat on most issues, but the online-tax thing scares the shite out of me. It's not that I worry about my data getting stolen by l33t d00dz with m4d ski11z. What I worry about is it getting used/traded/sold for financial benefit of the tax company.
I don't know if they would or would not do this, but I do know that "financial planning" (ie, high pressure marketing of crap grade securities) is a huge growth target for most tax prep companies.
Besides, doing your taxes isn't all that hard. I own a home, have some minor non-401k investments, make charitable contributions and am married; I do the 1040 long form and some of the supplementals, and with photocopying it took maybe 3 hours, tops.
And besides, we shouldn't make tax collection that easy for the government. If you want to take my money, you should have to deal with a paper bureaucracy.
They (the cracking types) may discover a hole in something that exists only in the Enterprise feature set, leaving most of the exposed routers on the Internet un-compromiseable
That's a good point. The IP code has likely been subjected to many uses, bugs, fixes, reviews and so on.
IPX? DECnet? Appletalk? Those bits are less popular and probably have more potential problems, but have a much lower security exposure.
The debate isn't about whether to go into Iraq or not. We did. Everyone who disagrees with me seems to presume I supported attacking Iraq before we did so (I didn't) or that I bought the Bush rhetoric about 9/11 and terrorism (I don't, but I do think that a non-embargoed Hussein would have bankrolled anti-US terrorists to the extent they wouldn't threaten his own regeime).
The debate is about the occupation of Iraq and the decisions made about how it should be carried out. As it turns out, we mostly did it your way, the "humane" way and didn't crack down on the populace at the end of combat and the beginning of occupation. Thusfar it has accomplished little good but the alienation of Iraqis that want law and order and the encouragement of insurrection. This has led to a no-win situation for us and more than likely will lead to the installation of a theocratic, anti-western government that will only encourage more anti-US terrorism in the name of Islam and Muslim funamentalism.
Since that way isn't working out and will lead to a disasterous foreign policy situatioin for at least a decade, it's reasonable to suggest that the US should have been much harder on the Iraqis for the first 3-6 months of the occupation. Stopped the looting. Disarmed the populace, by lethal force if necessary. Put down rebellions with excessive force.
All of those things, if applied even briefly, may have demonstrated not only our military superiority but out desire for stability and intolerance of dissent. This could have led to civilian leadership willing to lead and a lot less afraid of being killed, which would have in turn lead to the establishment of stable political systems.
As I said in one other message, it's too late now, though. We can't crack down, since we've already alienated most centrist Iraqis with the lack of law and order, and those inflamed at this point will only be more inflamed.
From what I've read of Roman history, the Romans gave "barbarian" peoples two choices -- submit to Rome or be destroyed. And they weren't kidding. I read a book a historian friend had about the Roman conquering of Gaul and the Low Countries. One city/village/tribe was offered a chance and they agreed to it, but secretly kept the weapons and planned to attack the legions outside their town. The Romans found out, offered them one more chance and when they decided to fight it and were conquered, were sold into slavery -- all of them -- as a single unit.
I know that the reason we're "better" than that is that we're less savage than that, but I kind of have to wonder sometimes if maybe it doesn't take that to be successful.
I wasn't advocating an Iron Fisted policy as an ongoing, continuing policy, but something we should have done in the immediate aftermath to both establish our authority and preserve order. It's too late now and would only spiral the conflict way out of control.
The tactics and strategy of occupation are somewhat independant of the reasons or validity for going to war in the first place, as well. I agree that the rationale for going to war was paper thin at best, but whether you or I want it to happen, it's happened, and we have to figure out how to make sure there's something resembling a functional state that's capable of interacting with the rest of the world.
I personally don't think it's going to happen I DO think that the Iraqis themselves will do all the icky things that we can't or won't do to make life livable there.