Its interesting that in the good old US of A slander and talking about trade secrets, which are both designed to protect the rich elite, are considered a crime
What does slander have to do with being rich?
The standards for libel and slander, in fact, are much higher for many wealthy folks because public figures must prove malicious intent, and many of the "rich" are public figures because of their economic status.
whilst advocating the repression and murder of jews, blacks, and other minorities is "free speech".
You can certainly advocate the repression and murder of wealthy white people if you like. Its not particularly uncommon.
It doesn't matter what frame of mind or what reason the criminal had when he committed the act. But try telling that to a liberal.
Killing in self-defense is not a crime at all, while killing while committing a felony is a capital crime punishable by death (in death penalty states of course).
If I kill you because I am upset you're sleeping with my wife, my punishment will be entirely different than if I kill you because your wife paid me to.
Intent and motivation is a major part of the crime. Mens Rea. This is not a liberal concept.
I've had about 4 different datalink models -- the original, two of the middle ones (the 100?) and one of the newer 150s. I'd break or lose them (had the last one stolen) but only updated the info on them every few months.
Absolutely perfect for things like phone numbers that I would always have handy no matter what i was doing.
Now I'm looking at replacing the stolen one with the Ironman Datalink -- seems to have less memory, but all the regular Ironman features that the Datalink series doesn't normally have. I only need about 50 phone numbers with me 24/7, so it's probably fine...
If you want a state job with total control, go to a University. It's basically anarchy on the networks, because every group has their own research needs that would be impossible to meet centrally.
Get in with a fun group and you can do whatever you like as long as you aren't running an MP3 server and sucking up half the bandwidth of the whole campus.
We've got pretty much every OS under the sun running on different test servers.
There's no debating that at the current time, broadband is a luxury like cable TV or long distance telephone calls. These are the luxuries that you'll probably hang onto until you've already cut back on eating out and movies and other easy to eliminate budget items.
I would imagine just as many people are dumping $50/month cel phone plans as are dumping $50/month DSL plans. If you have less income, or none, its not like you can't survive without the 3000-minute cel plan or unlimited broadband. These are people with serious budget problems (an unfortunately large population).
I doubt folks are going to be dumping broadband (or cel phone, or Cable) unless they have something specific they need that $50 for (like food or rent).
But casinos don't need to store stuff indefinitely -- maybe for a few weeks at most. They know when they've been cheated on, usually before the person leaves the table.
If this guy was building a system with 1000 cameras and 48 hours worth of rotating storage with the ability to archive specific sections, I'd say it was a casino or other normal security.
I didn't ask for specs. Or solutions. Just ideas. What's your problem?
That this is a very bizarre request, and everyone is obviously suspicious of what this is possibly for. Surely you understand this? I said right up front that if this is a theoretical question, then the answer can be whatever you like.
But seeing as how it doesn't seem to be theoretical, you either have clearly conflicting goals, clearly misled customers, or else you are doing something very, very suspicious.
There are few people on earth who would genuinely NEED, as a specification, the permanent archiving of this much arbitrary video data, and fewer still legitimate uses for that data. Its not a reality TV show or a security system if you need permanent storage of it all. Fort Knox doesn't have a need for this much recording capability on a long-term basis. If no one is ever discarding unused data, then either there is no unused data, or someone has the specs wrong.
No unused data means either arbitrary spying/surveillance, or huge-scale scientific research. And NASA or the NOAA aren't particularly secretive about their large projects.
Or else someone has the specs wrong? Forgive me for harping on this possibility, but when in doubt I fall back on occam's razor and assume a middle manager has his specs wrong.
30 fps for 24/7 is what our customer wants. End of discussion.
Hey, I want a lot of things I can't have, either.
Part of your job is to make sure the customer isn't making life harder for himself than it needs to be (at least if you're a good consultant/engineer and not just trying to get the bucks regardless of outcome).
I suspect the end of this particular discussion is going to end up with:
- the customer not getting what they want
or
- the customer spending a hundred million dollars to custom-build a system that in three years will cost ten grand, be available by mail-order, and fit under your desk.
SO, the real answer to your question always has been and still remains to call up someone who has a clue, not slashdot -- we can't spec out custom hardware installations for you. This is not a software problem.
If this really is necessary, then call up a video company and get a VAR in your office to figure out how to build a thousand+ cameras with 100:1 hardware codecs that can transmit video over whatever arbitrary distances to whatever arbitrary equipment you have.
Then get THAT VAR and a storage VAR together and figure out how the hell you can store terabytes a day -- they'll build a nice online/offline disk and tape mixture that will cost enough to fund a third-world country, but it'll work, but you'll probably be able to buy the entire storage company for the budget you'll be spending, so look into building your own company or buying one out in order to save some money.
Then call the contractors to install all the cameras and network links and build a control room with monitoring equipment.
THEN -- figure out how to back up all this data, since its clearly very valuable stuff that you've spent a couple million on already, you don't want to lose it. Have that storage VAR get a system that'll automatically dupe all the tapes before storage for redundant storage.
This is actually a pretty easy question to answer:
Don't Do It.
This is someone either playing a theoretical game (in which case, the answer is "outsource it") or its someone who has no idea what they really want. You have, ultimately, many conflicting specs here.
You may as well ask for a space shuttle that can fly to pluto in two minutes with no fuel.
Any system that is recording a thousand video inputs is unlikely to need 30 fps for 24/7 (I can't think of anything short of national security installations that would even desire to record 30 fps 24/7, and you'd still have trouble justifying 1000 cameras to cover every building in Washington, DC). Not to mention the logistical implications of DELIVERING 1000 full-frame video feeds to a central location -- you could saturate the entire radio spectrum for the eastern seaboard or have to build the largest gigabit LAN ever deployed.
If you have a real question, please ask it, but this is as bad as a pointy-headed boss spouting off insane specs as the "requirements" for a project because he wants to be on the cutting edge.
And BTW, you won't need 300k per frame for a grayscale 640x480 video image (except that you desire insane specs, which point we've already covered). A fine quality image could be stored in 25-50k, even less depending on the real needs (of which this project seems to lack).
I didn't say it would be more valid -- I said that a reader will give ACs less credibility until the AC has shown reason not to.
Your entire example seems to have done more to support my argument than otherwise.
The flip side (which I didn't go into, but has more to do with your example) is that someone with a clearly idiotic name, or with an identity that is known to be unreliable, will be assumed to be even less reliable than an AC (again, until demonstarted otherwise).
This is why anonymous speech is protected by the Supreme Court -- sometimes, its necessary to be anonymous so as not to be "punished" for your speech -- but at other times, your real identity would only serve to prejudice those who would otherwise be receptive to your speech.
Assigning them -2 isn't much good, just remove them all together if you don't like them -2 is just going to make a 5 post a 3 and most people are still going to see it.
I assume from his tone that he is planning on making it customizable -- if you hate "funny", you could disable all "funny" posts, or you could just penalize them a point or whatever.
I think just knocking off a point would be sufficient -- the only time I'm annoyed by funny posts is when they are the TOP posts on an article, while posts that are actually informative are 3 screens down below all the replies to the "funny" ones.
I'd be perfectly happy to just be able to say that a "funny" post will be listed below other equally-rated posts...
There's no contradiction whatsoever -- you have every right to post an an AC, and taco has repeatedly stated that people will always be able to post as AC.
That said, anyone reading will immediately consider anonymous information to be less valid than that which is attributed. In some cases, the inherent value of the information itself will overcome that initial doubtfulness.
But to suggest that/. is somehow making ACs "unacceptable" is simply incorrect. they're letting the individual readers decide whether or not they (as an individual) want to read the Ac or not. He also made pretty clear that he's taking it beyond AC into the realm of other attributes, like modding as "funny". This seems like just another way to let the readers decide what they come to/. for.
there are days when i browse at -1 to laugh at the asinine AC stuff, there are days when i browse at +2 because I don't have much time to spend. There are days where I'm annoyed that the three top rated posts are all "funny" rather than informative or directly on-topic. there are days when I'm not bothered by it at all.
I personally think that Taco is doing as well as could be expected at trying to make everyone happy, which of course he can't. But he can give us more and more options so we can make OURSELVES happy.
That said, the suggested large ads are a PITA, and after being on/. since nearly the beginning I think those will do more to drive off the readership than AC postings ever did.
I suggest that they'd probably do better selling karma than ad space!
Yes, we had bombers capable of going anywhere on earth -- they were to drop nuclear weapons. Not to attack tanks. They were a deterrent, not a tactical weapon. There's a big difference between a B-1 dropping bombs on stationary targets from 40,000 feet and an F-15 attacking hundreds of mobile tanks.
Yes, we were ready to defend against the Soviet Union -- from Western Europe. We had shitloads of equipment in Germany just waiting for russian tanks to show up in the distance. But driving a tank from germany to iraq would piss off a few countries in the middle.
Much of that german-based equipment DID wind up in saudi arabia, but it takes time to load up tanks, crew, equipment, supplies, etc. And of course we had to call up reserves to take their place in germany. We only have so many troop carriers, C130s and transport ships.
It could have happened faster if it was WW3 and 100% of our national energy was going into the effort, but it wasn't -- so we took our time and tried to do it right, rather than just quickly. Nothing we could have done would have had sizable ground forces there winthin the first few days after the attack. After a few weeks, we had enough that we felt confident we could defend. After a few months, we felt confident we could attack.
skipped all that BS and said straight out
Again, for the tenth time, just because it wasn't the EXCLUSIVE reason, doesn't make it BS. There were many reasons, and none of them were very secret. All of them were valid, all of them were discussed. trying to eg it as exclusively a fight for oil is as incorrect as pegging it as exclusively a fight for Kuwaiti independence.
Called them on the fact that ten years ago we were fighting for oil but saying that we were fighting for something else
I didn't think it was a big secret that we were fighting for both. We were also fighting for stability in the region, defense of Saudi Arabia (because they are allies, as well as economically important), and defense of Israel. We had a lot of reasons that individually might not have been worth fighting for, but put together equalled a huge amount of political and economic reasons to get involved.
The UK got involved in WW1 in large part because they were worried about shipping and trade with the continent. Does that mean that they should have let the Germans take over France? I mean, honestly the UK didn't care much about the lives of the average Frenchman, but they were very worried about the notion of Germany taking over all the critical ports in Northern Europe. Does that make their involvement hypocritical because they said they were defending the French? Is it not possible for multiple motivations to coincide?
we should have been bombing the Iraqi columns as they rolled across the border that first day
With what? I mean this seriously, because you don't seem to know what it takes to fight a military invasion. We had very little military infrastructure in the middle east when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Kuwaiti army had more forces than the US did in the region, and they couldn't hold off Iraq -- and they were positioned in the right place to be defending!
Even if we had every fighter and bomber from two aircraft carriers attacking the Iraqi forces on the first day, it would not have been enough to stop several hundred tanks, artillery, personnel carriers, etc. And somebody has to attack the air defenses, as well, or we're going to get all of our planes shot down.
So somehow we'll have to make 60 planes drop a couple hundred missiles and bombs in the span of a few hours. Logistically, that just doesn't work out unless they fly at the speed of light and can be re-armed within seconds (and of course none are shot down). And nobody gets a chance to stop and look at a map to figure out what's going on, because by the time the satellite data is done being interpreted, the Iraqi army would already be done.
It's no secret that it took a LOOOONG time to get permission to build up land forces, and even after that long buildup we had major logistical holes when the fighting started.
This isn't a video game or movie where where if you just click fast enough you can beat the other side. You need a certain amount of support, infrastructure, and equipment to mount an attack (or defense) on the third largest army in the world. It takes time to analyze intelligence, and place equipment where it needs to be.
Called them on what? That there is a possibility we went to war for MORE THAN ONE REASON?
Gosh, i'd hate to consider the possibility that international politics is more complicated than a simple slogan!
The notion that we should defend a soveriegn nation, while ALSO protecting our economic interests sounds like twice the reason to go to war. There's nothing cynical or hypocritical about having more than one reason to get involved. We can't be everywhere, and stop every "bad" thing from happening, so we step in first wherever we can see our own interests at stake.
Does the fact of us having an economic and political interest in the outcome therefore preclude the possibility that defending Kuwait was a good thing to do? Are they mutually exclusive?
In the war against Iraq, many of those at the top of the pyramid (G.H. Bush, Cheney, Schwartzkopf, etc) were found GUILTY [deoxy.org] by the International War Crimes Tribunal
LOL! This is a bunch of people who got together and wrote a report! While politically laudable that they exercise their rights to free speech, it is hardly a "verdict" in any but the most delusional sense.
I hereby call myself the International Brain Crimes Tribunal and find you GUILTY of being extremely gullible (or else of trying to purposely decieve people by presenting this collection of folks as a real court). Please son, step away from the Ayn Rand books, nice and slow.
The war against Iraq was not about Saddam Hussein, but about oil interests. This was never covered in the media
LOL!!! What planet are you from, that none of your newspapers or TV shows said anything about oil interests? Geez, this has got to be the single worst-kept secret in the history of conspiracies! We might have gotten involved in Iraq because of oil? My god, where did you dig up this revolutionary idea!? Why has no one in the country heard mention of it before?!
This was clearly a suppressed notion until the forces of the International War Truth Tribunal met in Todd's basement the other week after band practice! Their verdict of "Let's order pizza" was heard loud and clear, my friend -- and it was delivered in 30 minute or less!
To an experienced digital artist, yes, the changes made to Photoshop in the last 3 years since Macromedia filed their patent are pretty minor.
I would disagree -- i think the implementation of non-linear history and transformation layers count as pretty big deals, along with "automate" and 16-bit image channel improvements.
The vastly improved type handling in the past few years is a night and day change from the 4.x era. Channel mixing is a great tool that simplified a frequently used CHOP technique. The lasso/pen tools have gone through serious supercharging. And thats forgetting about the history brush, or the significant improvements to color handling (spot colors for example). The vector tools in general have seen a big improvement, though I can tell they're nervous about incorporating too much of AI in there.
And while the web features may not be ones you use, that's where a lot of the development is taking place -- dynamic slicing, non-uniform image compression, etc.
Well they would if Adobe had not patented it, but if they had not patented it then where would Adobe be now? Its the only "proffessional" tool used because no-one can make anything too similer out of fear of being sued
There are plenty of other programs that do CMYK seps. Quark and macromedia easily come to mind, as well as the slew of programs that are nothign but software RIPSs, as well as pretty much every postscript print driver for every laser printer on earth.
Its not in the GIMP because its hard to do and the programmers don't care about it. It isn't just a simple color space conversion -- Adobe has been tweaking the LUTs for over a decade now, and its getting better every time.
Saying "tool X sucks because I have seen better graphics made with tool Y" is basically saying "guitar sucks because my brother plays good on violin". That's plain stupid argument
But that's not the argument he's making. Hes saying that perhaps the GIMP is so substandard it isn't possible to make good art with it without fighting the program itself, therefore noone talented enough has ever been able to fight it and succeed in creating good art.
This is NOT in any way a bad argument -- you may not like the fact that a program has to prove itself, but if you're trying to sell to professionals, thats what it has to do. Someone with the GIMP has to create some work that people will say "hmm, the GIMP can do that? that's really nice, I want to find out how it was done". Until someone with an interest in proving the GIMP's capabilities does this (and of course GIMP itself is capable of doing it!) then we as professionals have to assume that the real problem is that GIMP is inadequate as a professional tool.
From my time in GIMP I can definitely say i wouldn't choose it over many other options short of Windows Paint. It has few high-quality features, but lots and lots of time-wasting and idiotic programmer crap that is targetted at people who couldn't come up with a workable color scheme if you put a gun to their head.
Which is fine -- there's nothing wrong with an "image editor for programmers". But don't try to sell it as "Photoshop, but better!" because there is no evidence (final work) to support that.
(as a side tangent to show that this really does apply in real life -- "real artists" stayed away from acrylic paints for decades because they didn't believe they were up to the challenge. It wasn't until a few talented folks actually got around to figuring out how to take advatage of the unique characteristics (and the paints themselves had evolved a lot!) that professionals accepted the medium -- so we're not just picking on the GIMP)
Slashdot Mirror
Its interesting that in the good old US of A slander and talking about trade secrets, which are both designed to protect the rich elite, are considered a crime
What does slander have to do with being rich?
The standards for libel and slander, in fact, are much higher for many wealthy folks because public figures must prove malicious intent, and many of the "rich" are public figures because of their economic status.
whilst advocating the repression and murder of jews, blacks, and other minorities is "free speech".
You can certainly advocate the repression and murder of wealthy white people if you like. Its not particularly uncommon.
It doesn't matter what frame of mind or what reason the criminal had when he committed the act. But try telling that to a liberal.
Killing in self-defense is not a crime at all, while killing while committing a felony is a capital crime punishable by death (in death penalty states of course).
If I kill you because I am upset you're sleeping with my wife, my punishment will be entirely different than if I kill you because your wife paid me to.
Intent and motivation is a major part of the crime. Mens Rea. This is not a liberal concept.
I've had about 4 different datalink models -- the original, two of the middle ones (the 100?) and one of the newer 150s. I'd break or lose them (had the last one stolen) but only updated the info on them every few months.
Absolutely perfect for things like phone numbers that I would always have handy no matter what i was doing.
Now I'm looking at replacing the stolen one with the Ironman Datalink -- seems to have less memory, but all the regular Ironman features that the Datalink series doesn't normally have. I only need about 50 phone numbers with me 24/7, so it's probably fine...
Wow. So they've managed to make a watch with slightly more memory than the Timex Datalink that was available over 5 years ago.
The only difference seems to be the use of IR as the interface.
If you want a state job with total control, go to a University. It's basically anarchy on the networks, because every group has their own research needs that would be impossible to meet centrally.
Get in with a fun group and you can do whatever you like as long as you aren't running an MP3 server and sucking up half the bandwidth of the whole campus.
We've got pretty much every OS under the sun running on different test servers.
There's no debating that at the current time, broadband is a luxury like cable TV or long distance telephone calls. These are the luxuries that you'll probably hang onto until you've already cut back on eating out and movies and other easy to eliminate budget items.
I would imagine just as many people are dumping $50/month cel phone plans as are dumping $50/month DSL plans. If you have less income, or none, its not like you can't survive without the 3000-minute cel plan or unlimited broadband. These are people with serious budget problems (an unfortunately large population).
I doubt folks are going to be dumping broadband (or cel phone, or Cable) unless they have something specific they need that $50 for (like food or rent).
America's funniest home videos is not a standup act, its a TV show. That was kinda Wil's point -- his standup is nothing like th TV gigs he gets.
Similarly, if you ever heard any of Bob Newhart's stuff, it was much rowdier than you'd ever guess from his deadpan middle-america TV sitcoms...
Actually... my guess is that it's for a Casino
But casinos don't need to store stuff indefinitely -- maybe for a few weeks at most. They know when they've been cheated on, usually before the person leaves the table.
If this guy was building a system with 1000 cameras and 48 hours worth of rotating storage with the ability to archive specific sections, I'd say it was a casino or other normal security.
I didn't ask for specs. Or solutions. Just ideas. What's your problem?
That this is a very bizarre request, and everyone is obviously suspicious of what this is possibly for. Surely you understand this? I said right up front that if this is a theoretical question, then the answer can be whatever you like.
But seeing as how it doesn't seem to be theoretical, you either have clearly conflicting goals, clearly misled customers, or else you are doing something very, very suspicious.
There are few people on earth who would genuinely NEED, as a specification, the permanent archiving of this much arbitrary video data, and fewer still legitimate uses for that data. Its not a reality TV show or a security system if you need permanent storage of it all. Fort Knox doesn't have a need for this much recording capability on a long-term basis. If no one is ever discarding unused data, then either there is no unused data, or someone has the specs wrong.
No unused data means either arbitrary spying/surveillance, or huge-scale scientific research. And NASA or the NOAA aren't particularly secretive about their large projects.
Or else someone has the specs wrong? Forgive me for harping on this possibility, but when in doubt I fall back on occam's razor and assume a middle manager has his specs wrong.
30 fps for 24/7 is what our customer wants. End of discussion.
Hey, I want a lot of things I can't have, either.
Part of your job is to make sure the customer isn't making life harder for himself than it needs to be (at least if you're a good consultant/engineer and not just trying to get the bucks regardless of outcome).
I suspect the end of this particular discussion is going to end up with:
- the customer not getting what they want
or
- the customer spending a hundred million dollars to custom-build a system that in three years will cost ten grand, be available by mail-order, and fit under your desk.
SO, the real answer to your question always has been and still remains to call up someone who has a clue, not slashdot -- we can't spec out custom hardware installations for you. This is not a software problem.
If this really is necessary, then call up a video company and get a VAR in your office to figure out how to build a thousand+ cameras with 100:1 hardware codecs that can transmit video over whatever arbitrary distances to whatever arbitrary equipment you have.
Then get THAT VAR and a storage VAR together and figure out how the hell you can store terabytes a day -- they'll build a nice online/offline disk and tape mixture that will cost enough to fund a third-world country, but it'll work, but you'll probably be able to buy the entire storage company for the budget you'll be spending, so look into building your own company or buying one out in order to save some money.
Then call the contractors to install all the cameras and network links and build a control room with monitoring equipment.
THEN -- figure out how to back up all this data, since its clearly very valuable stuff that you've spent a couple million on already, you don't want to lose it. Have that storage VAR get a system that'll automatically dupe all the tapes before storage for redundant storage.
This is actually a pretty easy question to answer:
Don't Do It.
This is someone either playing a theoretical game (in which case, the answer is "outsource it") or its someone who has no idea what they really want. You have, ultimately, many conflicting specs here.
You may as well ask for a space shuttle that can fly to pluto in two minutes with no fuel.
Any system that is recording a thousand video inputs is unlikely to need 30 fps for 24/7 (I can't think of anything short of national security installations that would even desire to record 30 fps 24/7, and you'd still have trouble justifying 1000 cameras to cover every building in Washington, DC). Not to mention the logistical implications of DELIVERING 1000 full-frame video feeds to a central location -- you could saturate the entire radio spectrum for the eastern seaboard or have to build the largest gigabit LAN ever deployed.
If you have a real question, please ask it, but this is as bad as a pointy-headed boss spouting off insane specs as the "requirements" for a project because he wants to be on the cutting edge.
And BTW, you won't need 300k per frame for a grayscale 640x480 video image (except that you desire insane specs, which point we've already covered). A fine quality image could be stored in 25-50k, even less depending on the real needs (of which this project seems to lack).
As if light years was some peculiarly human measurement.
Well, do we know of any other species that uses "light-years" as a form of measurement?
I didn't say it would be more valid -- I said that a reader will give ACs less credibility until the AC has shown reason not to.
Your entire example seems to have done more to support my argument than otherwise.
The flip side (which I didn't go into, but has more to do with your example) is that someone with a clearly idiotic name, or with an identity that is known to be unreliable, will be assumed to be even less reliable than an AC (again, until demonstarted otherwise).
This is why anonymous speech is protected by the Supreme Court -- sometimes, its necessary to be anonymous so as not to be "punished" for your speech -- but at other times, your real identity would only serve to prejudice those who would otherwise be receptive to your speech.
Oh, yes -- Pirates! God, for all the hours I spent on the Mac LC in school playing Pirates!
Assigning them -2 isn't much good, just remove them all together if you don't like them -2 is just going to make a 5 post a 3 and most people are still going to see it.
I assume from his tone that he is planning on making it customizable -- if you hate "funny", you could disable all "funny" posts, or you could just penalize them a point or whatever.
I think just knocking off a point would be sufficient -- the only time I'm annoyed by funny posts is when they are the TOP posts on an article, while posts that are actually informative are 3 screens down below all the replies to the "funny" ones.
I'd be perfectly happy to just be able to say that a "funny" post will be listed below other equally-rated posts...
There's no contradiction whatsoever -- you have every right to post an an AC, and taco has repeatedly stated that people will always be able to post as AC.
/. is somehow making ACs "unacceptable" is simply incorrect. they're letting the individual readers decide whether or not they (as an individual) want to read the Ac or not. He also made pretty clear that he's taking it beyond AC into the realm of other attributes, like modding as "funny". This seems like just another way to let the readers decide what they come to /. for.
/. since nearly the beginning I think those will do more to drive off the readership than AC postings ever did.
That said, anyone reading will immediately consider anonymous information to be less valid than that which is attributed. In some cases, the inherent value of the information itself will overcome that initial doubtfulness.
But to suggest that
there are days when i browse at -1 to laugh at the asinine AC stuff, there are days when i browse at +2 because I don't have much time to spend. There are days where I'm annoyed that the three top rated posts are all "funny" rather than informative or directly on-topic. there are days when I'm not bothered by it at all.
I personally think that Taco is doing as well as could be expected at trying to make everyone happy, which of course he can't. But he can give us more and more options so we can make OURSELVES happy.
That said, the suggested large ads are a PITA, and after being on
I suggest that they'd probably do better selling karma than ad space!
Yes, we had bombers capable of going anywhere on earth -- they were to drop nuclear weapons. Not to attack tanks. They were a deterrent, not a tactical weapon. There's a big difference between a B-1 dropping bombs on stationary targets from 40,000 feet and an F-15 attacking hundreds of mobile tanks.
Yes, we were ready to defend against the Soviet Union -- from Western Europe. We had shitloads of equipment in Germany just waiting for russian tanks to show up in the distance. But driving a tank from germany to iraq would piss off a few countries in the middle.
Much of that german-based equipment DID wind up in saudi arabia, but it takes time to load up tanks, crew, equipment, supplies, etc. And of course we had to call up reserves to take their place in germany. We only have so many troop carriers, C130s and transport ships.
It could have happened faster if it was WW3 and 100% of our national energy was going into the effort, but it wasn't -- so we took our time and tried to do it right, rather than just quickly. Nothing we could have done would have had sizable ground forces there winthin the first few days after the attack. After a few weeks, we had enough that we felt confident we could defend. After a few months, we felt confident we could attack.
skipped all that BS and said straight out
Again, for the tenth time, just because it wasn't the EXCLUSIVE reason, doesn't make it BS. There were many reasons, and none of them were very secret. All of them were valid, all of them were discussed. trying to eg it as exclusively a fight for oil is as incorrect as pegging it as exclusively a fight for Kuwaiti independence.
Called them on the fact that ten years ago we were fighting for oil but saying that we were fighting for something else
I didn't think it was a big secret that we were fighting for both. We were also fighting for stability in the region, defense of Saudi Arabia (because they are allies, as well as economically important), and defense of Israel. We had a lot of reasons that individually might not have been worth fighting for, but put together equalled a huge amount of political and economic reasons to get involved.
The UK got involved in WW1 in large part because they were worried about shipping and trade with the continent. Does that mean that they should have let the Germans take over France? I mean, honestly the UK didn't care much about the lives of the average Frenchman, but they were very worried about the notion of Germany taking over all the critical ports in Northern Europe. Does that make their involvement hypocritical because they said they were defending the French? Is it not possible for multiple motivations to coincide?
we should have been bombing the Iraqi columns as they rolled across the border that first day
With what? I mean this seriously, because you don't seem to know what it takes to fight a military invasion. We had very little military infrastructure in the middle east when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Kuwaiti army had more forces than the US did in the region, and they couldn't hold off Iraq -- and they were positioned in the right place to be defending!
Even if we had every fighter and bomber from two aircraft carriers attacking the Iraqi forces on the first day, it would not have been enough to stop several hundred tanks, artillery, personnel carriers, etc. And somebody has to attack the air defenses, as well, or we're going to get all of our planes shot down.
So somehow we'll have to make 60 planes drop a couple hundred missiles and bombs in the span of a few hours. Logistically, that just doesn't work out unless they fly at the speed of light and can be re-armed within seconds (and of course none are shot down). And nobody gets a chance to stop and look at a map to figure out what's going on, because by the time the satellite data is done being interpreted, the Iraqi army would already be done.
It's no secret that it took a LOOOONG time to get permission to build up land forces, and even after that long buildup we had major logistical holes when the fighting started.
This isn't a video game or movie where where if you just click fast enough you can beat the other side. You need a certain amount of support, infrastructure, and equipment to mount an attack (or defense) on the third largest army in the world. It takes time to analyze intelligence, and place equipment where it needs to be.
Called them on what? That there is a possibility we went to war for MORE THAN ONE REASON?
Gosh, i'd hate to consider the possibility that international politics is more complicated than a simple slogan!
The notion that we should defend a soveriegn nation, while ALSO protecting our economic interests sounds like twice the reason to go to war. There's nothing cynical or hypocritical about having more than one reason to get involved. We can't be everywhere, and stop every "bad" thing from happening, so we step in first wherever we can see our own interests at stake.
Does the fact of us having an economic and political interest in the outcome therefore preclude the possibility that defending Kuwait was a good thing to do? Are they mutually exclusive?
In the war against Iraq, many of those at the top of the pyramid (G.H. Bush, Cheney, Schwartzkopf, etc) were found GUILTY [deoxy.org] by the International War Crimes Tribunal
LOL! This is a bunch of people who got together and wrote a report! While politically laudable that they exercise their rights to free speech, it is hardly a "verdict" in any but the most delusional sense.
I hereby call myself the International Brain Crimes Tribunal and find you GUILTY of being extremely gullible (or else of trying to purposely decieve people by presenting this collection of folks as a real court). Please son, step away from the Ayn Rand books, nice and slow.
The war against Iraq was not about Saddam Hussein, but about oil interests. This was never covered in the media
LOL!!! What planet are you from, that none of your newspapers or TV shows said anything about oil interests? Geez, this has got to be the single worst-kept secret in the history of conspiracies! We might have gotten involved in Iraq because of oil? My god, where did you dig up this revolutionary idea!? Why has no one in the country heard mention of it before?!
This was clearly a suppressed notion until the forces of the International War Truth Tribunal met in Todd's basement the other week after band practice! Their verdict of "Let's order pizza" was heard loud and clear, my friend -- and it was delivered in 30 minute or less!
To an experienced digital artist, yes, the changes made to Photoshop in the last 3 years since Macromedia filed their patent are pretty minor.
I would disagree -- i think the implementation of non-linear history and transformation layers count as pretty big deals, along with "automate" and 16-bit image channel improvements.
The vastly improved type handling in the past few years is a night and day change from the 4.x era. Channel mixing is a great tool that simplified a frequently used CHOP technique. The lasso/pen tools have gone through serious supercharging. And thats forgetting about the history brush, or the significant improvements to color handling (spot colors for example). The vector tools in general have seen a big improvement, though I can tell they're nervous about incorporating too much of AI in there.
And while the web features may not be ones you use, that's where a lot of the development is taking place -- dynamic slicing, non-uniform image compression, etc.
Well they would if Adobe had not patented it, but if they had not patented it then where would Adobe be now? Its the only "proffessional" tool used because no-one can make anything too similer out of fear of being sued
There are plenty of other programs that do CMYK seps. Quark and macromedia easily come to mind, as well as the slew of programs that are nothign but software RIPSs, as well as pretty much every postscript print driver for every laser printer on earth.
Its not in the GIMP because its hard to do and the programmers don't care about it. It isn't just a simple color space conversion -- Adobe has been tweaking the LUTs for over a decade now, and its getting better every time.
Adobe is the print graphics champ.
Macromedia is the web graphics champ.
The users win, because they're both fighting tooth and nail!
Saying "tool X sucks because I have seen better graphics made with tool Y" is basically saying "guitar sucks because my brother plays good on violin". That's plain stupid argument
But that's not the argument he's making. Hes saying that perhaps the GIMP is so substandard it isn't possible to make good art with it without fighting the program itself, therefore noone talented enough has ever been able to fight it and succeed in creating good art.
This is NOT in any way a bad argument -- you may not like the fact that a program has to prove itself, but if you're trying to sell to professionals, thats what it has to do. Someone with the GIMP has to create some work that people will say "hmm, the GIMP can do that? that's really nice, I want to find out how it was done". Until someone with an interest in proving the GIMP's capabilities does this (and of course GIMP itself is capable of doing it!) then we as professionals have to assume that the real problem is that GIMP is inadequate as a professional tool.
From my time in GIMP I can definitely say i wouldn't choose it over many other options short of Windows Paint. It has few high-quality features, but lots and lots of time-wasting and idiotic programmer crap that is targetted at people who couldn't come up with a workable color scheme if you put a gun to their head.
Which is fine -- there's nothing wrong with an "image editor for programmers". But don't try to sell it as "Photoshop, but better!" because there is no evidence (final work) to support that.
(as a side tangent to show that this really does apply in real life -- "real artists" stayed away from acrylic paints for decades because they didn't believe they were up to the challenge. It wasn't until a few talented folks actually got around to figuring out how to take advatage of the unique characteristics (and the paints themselves had evolved a lot!) that professionals accepted the medium -- so we're not just picking on the GIMP)
Actually, a Suzuki SJ310/Samurai, which was later replaced by the Sidekick. Lighter and much more fuel-efficient than the Wrangler, and just as fun.
:P
As a Jeep owner, I have to register my complete aghastness at the notion of a suzuki samurai being even in the same paragraph as my beloved