True -- and the next question would be, why is militant Islam gaining such popularity and support from so many parts of the world? What does militant Islam offer them that other belief systems (such as moderate Islam) do not? Why is militant Islam growing more quickly now than it did in the past?
Who else would help stop an invasion of Kuwait, Israel or China or for that matter any other country?
As far as I can tell, the new major development in militant Islam isn't in the form of governments but rather in the form of non-government terrorist organizations. Given that, I don't think traditional-style invasions are very likely -- terrorist mayhem is the bigger risk.
Or, would you secretly hope the U.S. military would answer the call of duty, to spite the fact that you've protested their government and foreign policy your whole life?
There's not necessarily an inconsistency there -- if the U.S. government and foreign policy contribute to the conditions lead to invasions/terrorism/etc, then it's reasonable to protest them. If the problem then boils over to the point where military action is necessary, it's also reasonable to support the US military in taking action.
What I'd like to see is US foreign policy that is far-sighted enough that it leads to an environment where military action is rarely necessary. I think the U.S. government makes a lot of decisions without considering the long-term effects, and then looks to the military to bail them out when the shit hits the fan later on.
As for Hummers having a good reason to exist...How about their being an important part of our military's mobility?
I think you must be confused... the Hummers being discussed here are the faux-military luxury vehicles sold to and driven by pretentious civilians, not the Humvees driven by soldiers.
Maybe the car companies should get government funding to develop more energy-concious cars?
They did, and they didn't. Car companies are happy to take government money, but when it comes time to actually market energy-conscious cars they dig in their heels and file lawsuits until the government gives up and goes away.
I find it amusing that liberals are the only ones who say we went to Iraq for oil. We were big customers of Iraq before the war, and we still are. We don't really care all that much about the regime of a country we buy from.
Then why did we go to Iraq? Every reason the Bush administration gave as a justification (WMDs, ties to Al-Quaeda, Iraqis wanted to be 'liberated') turned out to be false, so what does that leave? Was it all really just a colossal mistake? Or did Bush have a deep burning need to "save" the Iraqi people from their government -- so much that he felt the need to distort intelligence and fabricate exaggerated threats to in order to justify his actions? If that is the case, why aren't we "liberating" Sudan right now? (The genocide there is arguably worse, and unlike Saddam's past genocides, there is still time to do something about it)
I don't know the real reasons why we invaded Iraq, and neither do you. All I know is that the official reasons given by the Bush administration don't pass the sniff test, and therefore the real reasons must be something else. Given the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy and doublespeak, and their incestuous ties to the oil industry, it's not a surprise that oil comes to mind.
As for WMDs, the millions of Iraqi dead during Husseins reign as 'president' of Iraq don't bother you? Oh right - malevolent dictators can do no wrong!
The Bush administration claimed that Iraq possessed WMDs that could give America "a day of horror such as it has never known", and that "the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud". Saddam slaughtering Kurds is a terrible thing, but it has nothing to do with cities being destroyed in the United States. If Bush wanted to invade Iraq based solely on humanitarian grounds, he should have made that argument and let the people decide whether it was worth it. But that was not the argument he made, so it's disingenuous to pretend now that it was.
Anyone remember DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education)? The idea was to keep kids from using drugs by having a police officer visit the classroom, show them confiscated drug paraphenalia, and tell them scary stories about that bad things that happen to drug users.
The main problem with the program is that drug use among the participating students actually went UP. Apparently the program sparked the kids' curiosity more than it innoculated them against experimentation.
To get back to the topic at hand: I fully expect this program to have a similar effect. I can just imagine a roomful of third graders all listening to the guy in the ferret suit talking about the evils of piracy, and thinking to themselves "You mean I can use my computer to get free copies of music and movies and stuff whenever I want? Cool!"
Bush and his administration are complete madmen. But the more I learn the more I think that Kerry is just as bad.
Do you really think that Kerry would/will spend the next four years trashing treaties, alienating our allies, and invading marginally relevant countries for no valid reason? That a man with a 94% positive voting record on the environment will suddenly become the best friend of polluting industries? That he will give embarrassingly large tax cuts to the rich while letting the budget deficit balloon? That he will make social policy and science decisions based mainly on the ignorant prejudices of the fundamentalist right? Despite Kerry's shortcomings, I don't believe he'll do anything like that.
Even if everybody did as you say and voted third party, the only thing that would change is that the most popular third-party would become one of the two major parties, and one of the current two major parties would drop out and either become a third party or disappear. In a few years, the new majority party would deteriorate into the same sort of corrupt mess that we see today, and we'd be right back where we started.
Simply voting third party is not going to have any effect, other than preventing your vote from having any effect on the 2004 outcome. What's needed is changes to the system itself -- we need to adopt an electoral system that can support more than two parties, without significant "spoiler effects" or other perversities.
The problem with that strategy is that it assumes we can afford to "let it burn". Don't forget that whoever is control of the US government is in control of the world's largest stockpile of WMDs, and the world's largest military. As nice as it might be to imagine letting the US government completely destroy itself, I think the reality could be much uglier than you are counting on. You might not live long enough to rebuild.
I've been thinking the same thing. Trying to address the complex realities of modern politics with a two-party political system is like a trying to operate my computer with a lightswitch.
That is exactly right. The job of an electoral system is to fairly represent the will of the electorate, and our current system utterly fails at that task whenever there are more than two significant candidates. The fact that people cannot in good conscience vote for their (third-party) candidate of choice is a glaring indication that the process simply does not work.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is short-sighted. The first step to a long term solution is to vote third party now.
I have to disagree here. The situation may suck, but allowing the greater evil to be elected will only make the situation suck worse. Do you really think that George W. is going to champion electoral reform for you? Perhaps you think that losing will inspire the Democratic Party to do so, and it might -- except that they won't be in power, so they won't have the ability to help you. And frankly, at the rate we're going, four more years of W might cost us even the limited democratic freedoms we enjoy now.
IMHO, the best course of action is to minimize the damage on the national level by voting for the lesser of two evils (and I'd say Kerry isn't even evil so much as mediocre -- but compared to Bush he's a breath of fresh air), while at the same time pushing for electoral reforms at the local and state levels. Reform is much easier to accomplish there, and once the benefits of better electoral systems have been well demonstrated, it will be much less difficult to get similar reforms passed nationally.
I say vote your conscience man. Do it, do it, do it. Don't listen to the naysayers.
I say vote intelligently. I'm a bigger fan of electoral reform than anyone, but the facts are this: (a) it ain't gonna happen this election, and (b) we can't afford another four years of corruption and incompetence on the scale we've seen since 2000. To quote Arianna Huffington, "When your house is on fire, it's not the time to talk about remodeling."
VVAW wanted the U.S. to pull out of Vietnam and hand it over to the communists in Hanoi. Kerry was one of the higher-up leaders and organizers for VVAW. How much more pro-Hanoi, pro-communist does he need to be?
By your reasoning, anyone who is against a US invasion of Cuba must be pro-Castro. Honestly, this whole "if you're not with us, you're against us" logic is just idiotic -- the real world is much more complicated than that. There were plenty of valid reasons to pull out of Vietnam that had nothing to do with "supporting Hanoi".
Has anyone ever made a door game that simulates hacking into a network?
Never mind that, the real question is: have any of these games ever done the "Ender's Game" trick and set up one of the levels to be a proxy server forwarding to the real world? (say, to SCO's legal department's file server?)
Because there aren't any software developers for BeOS?
Right -- and there aren't any, because BeOS didn't have enough market share to make BeOS software development profitable.
More marketshare would not improve my computing experience.
True, but less marketshare could definitely hurt your experience. You may have all the apps you need for now, but when the next killer apps come out and you want to run them, Apple's marketshare will determine whether or not you get to run them on your Mac. Therefore marketshare (at least above some minimum threshold) is very important.
But it will never happen, because Apple is too fond of their own hardware solutions to see the bigger picture
Actually, I think Apple sees the bigger picture very clearly (the thousands of flakey, low-margin, made-in-Taiwan chipsets, each with its own set of hardware bugs to work around, the risk inherent in competing directly with Microsoft, the inevitable mass piracy eating most of the profits, and the fact that every resulting problem would be blamed on Apple) and they want no part of it.
Regardless, marketshare is irrelevant. My Powerbook works just fine regardless of what computer you might like to use.
If marketshare is irrelevant, why am I finding it so hard to obtain software for my BeOS machine?
It "works just fine", but it's not terribly useful to me if it doesn't run the software I need it to run -- and people only bother to write/port that software if there is sufficient marketshare!
If solar panels could have a lifetime of about 20-30 years of use (right now you'd be lucky to get the things to last 5 years without breaking), then that momentary expenditure of oil will more than pay for itself.
Congratulations, you've discovered the second law of thermodynamics!
You know what will release the world from dependence on oil? The oil running out. The only question is, will the replacement energy technology be ready by then, or will we be caught unprepared and reduced to Mad Max style barbarism for a few centuries?
The favorite hardware story at my company involves a 66MHz BeBox -- we used to sell BeBoxes (remounted in a custom rackmount case) as part of our show control system.
One day the show operators called our tech support to tell us that the BeBox was acting a bit sluggish (BeOS, as you may know, is normally quite snappy). On his next visit, our tech took a look inside the case, and found that the fan responsible for cooling one of the two PowerPC 603 CPUs had stopped turning, causing that CPU to overheat and desolder itself from its socket. The BeBox had survived the self-destruction (and self-extraction) of a CPU and continued to run shows for nearly a week without complaint.
The other story involves a piece of hardware surviving impalement on a forklift fork and continuing to function with no apparent ill effects...
I think many people are imagining Marvin based on his radio-series voice, which is melancholy and deep-pitched. It's natural to associate a deep-pitched voice with a large person -- hence people's surprise at seeing Marvin visualized a dwarf-sized robot (which they would expect to have a high, squeaky voice)
A news feed is copyright, audio and visual and altering a copyrighted work is grounds for legal action (and TV companies tend to be litigious). IANAL but this seems like very shaky ground.
Ah, but they aren't altering any news feeds. They are just downloading and presenting only the portions of the newsfeed that the webjay-user specifies. Sort of like a TV set with a smart remote that automatically changes the channel every few seconds to string together content from different stations.
The Democrats could have made November a slam dunk against Little George but no, just to make it a nail biting cliff hanger all the way through they nominated a candidate so bad no one wants to vote for him even when he's up against the most dangerous president the U.S. has probably had in its history.
Actually, any candidate the Democrats nominated would quickly become considered "so bad no one wants to vote for him even blah blah blah".... simply because that is what the Republican Party's advertising is designed to do. John Kerry is a fine, upstanding politician and as good a choice as any other contender you could name -- if he's looking a bit muddy, it's because of the $80 million in mud that has been thrown at him by the spin machine.
Winning an election against that much entrenched money and power is simply not an easy task. Given the situation, I'd say Kerry is doing a great job and (barring any unforseen disasters, knock on wood), will very likely be elected in November.
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True -- and the next question would be, why is militant Islam gaining such popularity and support from so many parts of the world? What does militant Islam offer them that other belief systems (such as moderate Islam) do not? Why is militant Islam growing more quickly now than it did in the past?
Who else would help stop an invasion of Kuwait, Israel or China or for that matter any
other country?
As far as I can tell, the new major development in militant Islam isn't in the form of governments but rather in the form of non-government terrorist organizations. Given that, I don't think traditional-style invasions are very likely -- terrorist mayhem is the bigger risk.
Or, would you secretly hope the U.S. military would answer the call of duty, to spite the fact that you've protested their government and foreign policy your whole life?
There's not necessarily an inconsistency there -- if the U.S. government and foreign policy contribute to the conditions lead to invasions/terrorism/etc, then it's reasonable to protest them. If the problem then boils over to the point where military action is necessary, it's also reasonable to support the US military in taking action.
What I'd like to see is US foreign policy that is far-sighted enough that it leads to an environment where military action is rarely necessary. I think the U.S. government makes a lot of decisions without considering the long-term effects, and then looks to the military to bail them out when the shit hits the fan later on.
telling you the real reason because you don't have a need to know.
Could be, but I'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt. If they can't be straightforward about their motivations, they don't get my vote.
I think you must be confused... the Hummers being discussed here are the faux-military luxury vehicles sold to and driven by pretentious civilians, not the Humvees driven by soldiers.
They did, and they didn't. Car companies are happy to take government money, but when it comes time to actually market energy-conscious cars they dig in their heels and file lawsuits until the government gives up and goes away.
Then why did we go to Iraq? Every reason the Bush administration gave as a justification (WMDs, ties to Al-Quaeda, Iraqis wanted to be 'liberated') turned out to be false, so what does that leave? Was it all really just a colossal mistake? Or did Bush have a deep burning need to "save" the Iraqi people from their government -- so much that he felt the need to distort intelligence and fabricate exaggerated threats to in order to justify his actions? If that is the case, why aren't we "liberating" Sudan right now? (The genocide there is arguably worse, and unlike Saddam's past genocides, there is still time to do something about it)
I don't know the real reasons why we invaded Iraq, and neither do you. All I know is that the official reasons given by the Bush administration don't pass the sniff test, and therefore the real reasons must be something else. Given the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy and doublespeak, and their incestuous ties to the oil industry, it's not a surprise that oil comes to mind.
As for WMDs, the millions of Iraqi dead during Husseins reign as 'president' of Iraq don't bother you? Oh right - malevolent dictators can do no wrong!
The Bush administration claimed that Iraq possessed WMDs that could give America "a day of horror such as it has never known", and that "the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud". Saddam slaughtering Kurds is a terrible thing, but it has nothing to do with cities being destroyed in the United States. If Bush wanted to invade Iraq based solely on humanitarian grounds, he should have made that argument and let the people decide whether it was worth it. But that was not the argument he made, so it's disingenuous to pretend now that it was.
The main problem with the program is that drug use among the participating students actually went UP. Apparently the program sparked the kids' curiosity more than it innoculated them against experimentation.
To get back to the topic at hand: I fully expect this program to have a similar effect. I can just imagine a roomful of third graders all listening to the guy in the ferret suit talking about the evils of piracy, and thinking to themselves "You mean I can use my computer to get free copies of music and movies and stuff whenever I want? Cool!"
See my last paragraph in this post.
Bush and his administration are complete madmen. But the more I learn the more I think that Kerry is just as bad.
Do you really think that Kerry would/will spend the next four years trashing treaties, alienating our allies, and invading marginally relevant countries for no valid reason? That a man with a 94% positive voting record on the environment will suddenly become the best friend of polluting industries? That he will give embarrassingly large tax cuts to the rich while letting the budget deficit balloon? That he will make social policy and science decisions based mainly on the ignorant prejudices of the fundamentalist right? Despite Kerry's shortcomings, I don't believe he'll do anything like that.
Simply voting third party is not going to have any effect, other than preventing your vote from having any effect on the 2004 outcome. What's needed is changes to the system itself -- we need to adopt an electoral system that can support more than two parties, without significant "spoiler effects" or other perversities.
The problem with that strategy is that it assumes we can afford to "let it burn". Don't forget that whoever is control of the US government is in control of the world's largest stockpile of WMDs, and the world's largest military. As nice as it might be to imagine letting the US government completely destroy itself, I think the reality could be much uglier than you are counting on. You might not live long enough to rebuild.
That is exactly right. The job of an electoral system is to fairly represent the will of the electorate, and our current system utterly fails at that task whenever there are more than two significant candidates. The fact that people cannot in good conscience vote for their (third-party) candidate of choice is a glaring indication that the process simply does not work.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is short-sighted. The first step to a long term solution is to vote third party now.
I have to disagree here. The situation may suck, but allowing the greater evil to be elected will only make the situation suck worse. Do you really think that George W. is going to champion electoral reform for you? Perhaps you think that losing will inspire the Democratic Party to do so, and it might -- except that they won't be in power, so they won't have the ability to help you. And frankly, at the rate we're going, four more years of W might cost us even the limited democratic freedoms we enjoy now.
IMHO, the best course of action is to minimize the damage on the national level by voting for the lesser of two evils (and I'd say Kerry isn't even evil so much as mediocre -- but compared to Bush he's a breath of fresh air), while at the same time pushing for electoral reforms at the local and state levels. Reform is much easier to accomplish there, and once the benefits of better electoral systems have been well demonstrated, it will be much less difficult to get similar reforms passed nationally.
I say vote intelligently. I'm a bigger fan of electoral reform than anyone, but the facts are this: (a) it ain't gonna happen this election, and (b) we can't afford another four years of corruption and incompetence on the scale we've seen since 2000. To quote Arianna Huffington, "When your house is on fire, it's not the time to talk about remodeling."
By your reasoning, anyone who is against a US invasion of Cuba must be pro-Castro. Honestly, this whole "if you're not with us, you're against us" logic is just idiotic -- the real world is much more complicated than that. There were plenty of valid reasons to pull out of Vietnam that had nothing to do with "supporting Hanoi".
Never mind that, the real question is: have any of these games ever done the "Ender's Game" trick and set up one of the levels to be a proxy server forwarding to the real world? (say, to SCO's legal department's file server?)
I'd say we need to go to another planet precisely because of the reasons you state. Having all of our eggs in one basket like this is too risky.
Right -- and there aren't any, because BeOS didn't have enough market share to make BeOS software development profitable.
More marketshare would not improve my computing experience.
True, but less marketshare could definitely hurt your experience. You may have all the apps you need for now, but when the next killer apps come out and you want to run them, Apple's marketshare will determine whether or not you get to run them on your Mac. Therefore marketshare (at least above some minimum threshold) is very important.
Actually, I think Apple sees the bigger picture very clearly (the thousands of flakey, low-margin, made-in-Taiwan chipsets, each with its own set of hardware bugs to work around, the risk inherent in competing directly with Microsoft, the inevitable mass piracy eating most of the profits, and the fact that every resulting problem would be blamed on Apple) and they want no part of it.
If marketshare is irrelevant, why am I finding it so hard to obtain software for my BeOS machine?
It "works just fine", but it's not terribly useful to me if it doesn't run the software I need it to run -- and people only bother to write/port that software if there is sufficient marketshare!
be lucky to get the things to last 5 years without breaking), then that momentary expenditure of oil will more than pay for itself.
Um, solar panels do in fact last that 20-30 years.
You know what will release the world from dependence on oil? The oil running out. The only question is, will the replacement energy technology be ready by then, or will we be caught unprepared and reduced to Mad Max style barbarism for a few centuries?
One day the show operators called our tech support to tell us that the BeBox was acting a bit sluggish (BeOS, as you may know, is normally quite snappy). On his next visit, our tech took a look inside the case, and found that the fan responsible for cooling one of the two PowerPC 603 CPUs had stopped turning, causing that CPU to overheat and desolder itself from its socket. The BeBox had survived the self-destruction (and self-extraction) of a CPU and continued to run shows for nearly a week without complaint.
The other story involves a piece of hardware surviving impalement on a forklift fork and continuing to function with no apparent ill effects...
I think many people are imagining Marvin based on his radio-series voice, which is melancholy and deep-pitched. It's natural to associate a deep-pitched voice with a large person -- hence people's surprise at seeing Marvin visualized a dwarf-sized robot (which they would expect to have a high, squeaky voice)
Or perhaps it is the size of a very small planet.
en*gen*der ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-jndr)
v. en*gen*dered, en*gen*der*ing, en*gen*ders
v. tr.
To bring into existence; give rise to: "Every cloud engenders not a storm" (Shakespeare).
To procreate; propagate.
v. intr.
To come into existence; originate.
Ah, but they aren't altering any news feeds. They are just downloading and presenting only the portions of the newsfeed that the webjay-user specifies. Sort of like a TV set with a smart remote that automatically changes the channel every few seconds to string together content from different stations.
Actually, any candidate the Democrats nominated would quickly become considered "so bad no one wants to vote for him even blah blah blah".... simply because that is what the Republican Party's advertising is designed to do. John Kerry is a fine, upstanding politician and as good a choice as any other contender you could name -- if he's looking a bit muddy, it's because of the $80 million in mud that has been thrown at him by the spin machine.
Winning an election against that much entrenched money and power is simply not an easy task. Given the situation, I'd say Kerry is doing a great job and (barring any unforseen disasters, knock on wood), will very likely be elected in November.