That ass hole. Did he want to know the time? What an ass. A cool president would just sit there looking all clam and collected and shit and not check the time. I bet that jerk also went to the bathroom to piss like a human.
Uh, I hate Bush like the other 90% of the world does too... but get a grip.
Guess, take a breath. Yes, NBC altered the video. They do the same thing when you see movies. They take your beloved movie and ALTER IT!!!!!! They do this to squish down time and show more things.
Now, before we freak out shit out and panic that they are hiding something from you, realize that this stuff is filmed by more cameras then you can even begin to contemplate AND is filled with people from all around the world to serve as witnesses. What does this mean? It is really frigging unlikely that NBC is hiding "the truth" from you. Far more likely, they are trying to shrink a 4+ hour opening ceremony into something that will better fit their schedule.
Worrying that they some how were altering the live feed is so dumb and inane that I can't even respond. People, take a frigging collective deep breath.
I know that Lucas thinks that everyone 'relies on him" to come up with good ideas... but seriously, Lucus is a one trick pony. He makes exactly one good movie in a series, then he either hands it off to someone who is talented or makes a crapfest. I personally hope he does what he did with the Empire Strikes Back. Give some writer and director WHO IS NOT LUCUS a rough outline of what he wants, and let them make a good movie. I can just see him directing a love scene...
Lucus: "No! Less emotion! Like you are a fucking robot! No, not like a robot, like a god damn lumb of coal! Yes yes! You have it, look vacant and repeat those lines more mono ton! Brilliant! Quick, someone get some comic relief in here. Give me a funny like black man or something. The audience can't handle too much heavy shit like that or their brains will explode in contemplate of MY GENIUS!!!! AHAHAHAHHAHAH!
I don't really disagree. Some times you need to put a corporation down. My only argument is that it is better to error on the side of going after people who violate the law, than it is to go after the artificial organization that house them, especially when you can trace the illegal action to only a handful of people.
I don't know the case well enough to really comment, but if the illegal acts could all be traced to a few people performing a cover-up, it would have been much for all parties to toss them in jail and leave the company. As it was, they probably ended up punishing a few hundred thousand people to various degrees in terms of innocent employees that lost their jobs and investors that were hurt when the company tanked.
I think that the distance thing is an important point. In many ways, a UAV pilot is about as close as one can come to the killing. Even a Marine killing someone with a knife is, in many respects, more "distant" from his target.
In the heat of combat, it is easy to let instinct and training take over. See target, shoot target. The threat to your life over rides all, and you can go about doing your duty with little thought of the consequences.
Now consider a UAV pilot. His life is not in danger. There are no distractions to his work. If he points a weapon and fires, he can watch the weapon impact without having to take any steps to preserve his own life. He can entirely concentrate and ponder his actions. With a zoomed in camera, night vision, and infrared, he can see the details of his handy work.
In many ways, from a psychological point of view, I think a knife fight would be better than a UAV kill. A knife fight could be over in seconds and you end feeling fully justified in saving your own life. A UAV kill is a deliberate act with full premeditation.
Personally, I think that the use of UAVs is going to lead to less slaughter. Yeah, you can fear the "video game" syndrome where people disassociate, but I think that the fact that all actions are premeditated and not blurred by fear or anger means that more rational decisions are made. As an added bonus, with a UAV, everything you do is recorded to the last detail, AND you can have a lawyer standing over your shoulder. Not sure what to do, holler for someone with more authority than you tell you what to do. UAVs let you error on the side of caution. At worst, you junk a UAV. Error on the side of caution when in combat on the ground, and you could die.
No, I am pretty sure that intent matters. If someone's tire blows and as a result the careen into a sidewalk killing a little boy, it is an entirely different instance than if someone sees a little boy and intentionally runs him down to kill him.
Intent matters a lot.
American soldiers surrounding a wedding party and then putting a bullet into each and every person's head as they beg and plead not to die is a whole hell of a lot more horrific than a pilot seeing a bunch of gun fire and assuming that has found a bunch of insurgents and dropping a high explosive bomb.
In the same regards, Americans mistakenly killing civilians is seen as a failure. Each time an American kills a civilian, it is considered a failure because it strengthens the enemy and does nothing good for the US. Terrorist on the other hand see killing civilians as victory. Blowing up in a crowded market killing civilians is the goal, not an accident.
You are the idiot. The nationality of the people in question is beside the point. By your fucked up logic, if a Mexican-American serving in the US army is ordered to guns down some civilians, it is Mexico's fault. Well shit, lets the Americans should just pay a Mexican 20 bucks to hit the big red button and end this silliness... it wouldn't be the fault of the US... Mexico did it.
Saudi nationals they might have been, but they were trained and given sanctuary in Afghanistan. Further, when the US pointed out the guilty party (Osama and his crew) they made the very reasonable demand that the Taliban hand him over.
And now we come to why the US beat up on the Taliban. The Taliban refused. They not only refused, but offered Osama protection and integrated his merrily little band into the government of the Taliban. It was at this point when the US rightfully invaded.
Moral of the story?
1) Don't integrate a terrorist organization into your government.
2) If you do, and this terrorist organization kills a few thousand people, hand him over to the offended party.
3) If the offended party demands you hand him over or face destruction, hand him over.
Fail all three of these (as the Taliban did), and you get what you get. Iraq might have been an unjustified clusterfuck, but Afghanistan was entirely the right thing to do.
No, it's not - the computer is running an algorithm designed by at least one nerd. By designing that algorithm, not the computer, but the programmer beat the other player, by using his intelligence for writing a program that plays for him.
By that sort of logic, we humans are not responsible for our actions. All the credit goes to a very crafty set of chemicals that one day reproduced... it did an absurd number of calculations and bang, you have humans which are just another step along the path.
Granted, in this case I'll hand over the credit to the programmer. That said, at some point the line back to the programmer is going to become obscure. When algorithms make algorithms that make algorithms on into infinity... well, props to the original programmer, but he is about as involved in the process as some proto-human a few hundred million years ago is involved in making skyscrapers.
You miss the point. The "company" is made up of thousands and thousands of people. Companies are just people who have organized for a purpose. Personally, I think it is far better to hold PEOPLE accountable instead of companies. Slay a company and you destroy the entire organization, innocent and guilty. Go after people within the company who have broken the law, and the innocent people remain. It is the difference between removing cancer from a person and shooting them in the head.
I am not saying that there isn't a place for going after "companies". I am saying that, in general, going after people is better. If you send a CEO to jail for violating the law, everyone keeps their job and the company moves on. Trash the company, and the CEO collects his severance and finds a new job while everyone else is out of work.
When you go after a company, you tend to punish the most innocent people in the company the harshest while letting the most guilty (generally the guys on top) suffer the least punishment.
Well, clearly it is your system, but I think you are just trading an improbable and hard attack (dictionary attack) for a trivial attack that your janitor can perform. If someone starts hammering away with a dictionary attack, you can detect it and respond.
Telling people to remember qB3r7, while eliciting a lol from a l337 slashdot user, is just going to blow over the heads of the average idiot user. They will shrug, write it down, and leave it in their desk, making your biggest security vulnerability not an improbable and detectable dictionary attack, but a janitor emptying the trash cans.
I personally think poor threat assessment is something that is striking our society from top to bottom. Sys admins demanding 10 character passwords that change every 30 days are pocket change to the foolishness of money spent defending against pin-prick terrorist attacks. You can't even put my chances of dying a terrorist attack on the same chart as the chance of me dying by accidental drowning... yet I would bet my soul that we are going to dump far more money making sure that some ass hole doesn't blow up a suicide pack killing a yawnable dozen people.
Asking people to memorize a random 10 character password is pretty much futile. You make brute force attack harder, sure, but you just made social engineering attacks trivial. What is better, a user whose password is jesussaves1 or the user whose password is Dj7lasJ82k, but has it written on a piece of paper in his desk drawer? One requires a lucky guess or a detectable brute force attack, while the other just requires a janitor to open the desk drawer and copy the password.
People in security get to obsessed over the unlikely attacks (brute forcing or guessing a 6 letters + character and capital password) and utterly ignore it when they make social attacks trivial (minimum wage janitor paid to open the desk drawer and copy the password and name of the person who owns the office).
Ask your users to do something stupid and inconvenient, and they are going to respond by doing something stupid and convenient.
Let me expand a little. There is a fundimental difference in that currently you go out and kill stuff. It never comes to you. You go over to the goblin camp, beat on it for a few hours. Stuff spawns, you beat on the stuff as it spawns in, and then leave. Further, you do silly things like kill goblins within sight of each other. You attack the goblin tribe and the tribe doesn't respond unless you practically run into them. I mean hell, the entire idea behind a "dungeon crawl" revolves around slowly moving through an area, mowing down all the stuff you see, as the stuff just around the corner happily ignores you.
The respawn is not really the issue. I don't care if NPCs magically appear off screen or not. It is instead the idea of the world living, versus the world being a big exp farm put there to give you l3wt and exp. If you marched into a town with zombies (or goblins, or whatever), and they all responded to you, it would be radically different in feel then slowly picking your way killing one or two at a time in sight of others who ignore you. If when they "respawn" it is a horde that slowly mobilizes and threatens to overwhelm instead of random monsters dropping in from nowhere and them promptly ignoring you unless you run face first into them, you would get a sense that this world has a purpose.
Games like WoW feel pointless. It feels like on big exp farm. Things are not there for a rational reason, and certainly for not any reason that you can affect. They are sitting there to be mindlessly killed for exp.
Imagine a game where the world isn't one big exp farm. Hell, kill exp all together. Imagine a world where you do things for a reason. Imagine a world that responds in a reasonable way. It doesn't have to be "realistic", it should just make sense in the context of the world. Instead farming NPCs (and "farming" really is the right word for most MMORPGs), imagine if killing NPCs has a purpose other than scoring exp. Why do you kill zombies? You kill zombies because you need to kill the zombies to loot the ruined town for supplies. You don't go there to farm them. Killing is something you do to achieve a goal, it isn't a goal in it of itself. It is like fighting a war. You don't fight a war to kill people. You fight a way to achieve some political end, and you get that end by killing people.
Games like WoW suffering from a complete lack of purpose beyond the next crack like fix on making your character stronger. Guilds can extend purpose a little, but it is done in a game where the basic game play revolves around making the numbers on your character's score card go up through exp and loot.
Like I said, in all the sci-fi I ever read that had MMORPGs before there were MMORPGs, they never sat around killing goblins as they spawn in for l3wt. No sci-fi writer could even contemplate online worlds being so mindless and devoid of meaning... and for good reason.
Someone needs to grow a pair and try something new. Shift the game away from the "kill shit to be stronger to kill more shit" model to something else. Personally, I think that there is a massive untapped market for MMORPGs. Just because a few million crack addicts love current MMORPGs doesn't mean that a few hundred million people wouldn't love something else.
That is only true if your game is very poorly designed. Taking WoW and then making it so that when creatures die they stay dead would be a very crappy game. I am not suggesting a WoW rip off with a silly gameplay tweak. I am talking about striking out in an entirely new direction.
There is a core gameplay in MMORPGs. The core gameplay of MMORPGs is that you kill shit, killing shit makes you stronger, you kill strong shit shit, rinse and repeat. This is the central core of an MMORPG. If the above doesn't appeal to you, you will never find MMORPGs satisfying. Whatever glitz MMORPGs throw on top of that game play doesn't change what is at the core. I am saying, someone needs to grow a pair and toss that core in the trash.
A few people have actually tried. EvE online breaks the mold somewhat. You still run the "kill shit to get stronger", but they have slightly under emphasized it by taking out experience for killing things. Instead, your power is based upon time and money, and money can potentially be gained in ways other than by killing things. That game isn't my cup of tea, but I give them respect for shifting the mold a little.
So, you want to envision a game where things stay dead? Imagine a game where there are only a couple of cities. Imagine that the rest of the world is extremely hostile and only gets more hostile. Hell, lets make this a zombie game. The plot is that a zombie apocalypse happens and a few humans manage to build a few hold outs in this game world. The world is teaming with billions of zombies and a few humans (players). If you kill a zombie, it stays dead, but well, more zombies wander in from other places.
So, imagine you and a group jump in a truck armed to the teeth and clear out a ruined town. You collect resources from the town (food, ammo, whatever). No zombies respawn. Instead, over time zombies start to head to the town from other places that are far more infested. At first, only a few wander in that are easily dispatched. As time goes on, more and more wander in from other places. If you stick around long enough, you have a wandering zombie horde trying to tear you apart. The core gameplay of this game could be about resource collection instead of grinding for mad exp. It could be FPS like instead of quasi turn based combat.
I am not arguing that this is THE game that needs to be built. Hell, I am not even arguing that it would work and make good game play. I am saying that "OMG there is no way to make an MMORPG other than to rip of Everquest for the next few decades" is silly. There are alternatives, it is just that major developers that can really dump the resources into making them work don't have the balls to try. Instead, they keep shoveling rehashed versions of Everquest and we get unoriginal crap like WoW.
Certainly WoW fills a niche and a demand, but I think that there are other tastes out there that are yet to be satisfied. It is like if someone opened a restaurant that served pasta, it was a hit, and then all of a sudden lots of other places opened that also serve pasta. Yeah, those places might be a hit, but that doesn't mean that there are not people out there bored to death by pasta who want some god damn pizza.
...actually, I take that back. I can just imagine the horrible WoW grind-fest clone they could make out of a Fallout MMORPG.
Personally, every single time someone announces that some franchise that I really like is getting an MMORPG, I am sad. Right now we are in the "Doom clone" phase of MMORPG design. Doom was original for its time. It knocked people's socks off. Then out came thirty thousand Doom clones that add nothing except cosmetic changes and slight refinements of gameplay. MMORPG design is in the same mode right now. Everquest was made. It was a big success, and now everyone has copied that game to death, tossing basic formulation tweaks onto the same boring well worn game play.
I personally am waiting for someone to break some new ground with MMORPGs. A good FPSMMORPG (I stipulated good, so don't tell me about Planetside) would be a nice start. Imagine an MMORPGFPS that is more than a glorified game of capture the flag. Imagine a FPSMMORPG that of course has fighting, but has more things to do than just fight. I think the Warhammer 40K and Fallout universes both scream out to be quality FPSMMORPGs. Hell, if someone really felt like they had a pair of balls that needed a wheelbarrow to lug around, they could try to simply copy the original Ultima Online design for a "sandbox" world (which has almost nothing to do with that UO was released after beta, and even less with what it is now).
There is a ton of room for innovation in the MMORPG world. I don't know about you, but when I was a kid and I dreamed of MMORPGs (before there were MMORPGs), I sure as hell didn't envision playing 'whack-a-mole' grinding away killing mindless NPCs in the tens of thousands to score more l00t and exp. I personally envisioned fighting through living worlds where clearing out the goblin cave means the bastards stay dead, where undead attacking your city means the city is defended or burns, and where there are no "levels" that stratify the game into gods and peons who couldn't kill a high level even with a small army backing them up.
I spoke with a bit of hyperbole, in saying that "every single legal scholar", but once you take a step outside of partisan politics, the issue clears up very quickly. Roe vs Wade is defended on the grounds of what it did, not based upon the method of its ruling. Wikipedia has a nice little section on liberal criticism of Roe vs Wade. There is even a sizable portion that think that the basic idea behind Roe vs Wade is right (abortions should be okay), but that the ruling itself came about it in a crappy manner. Whatever the case, there can be absolutely NO argument made that Roe vs Wade comes from an originalist reading of constitution.
Please. If you're as open minded as you profess to be, then it's time to drop these various fallacies that the conservatives have imprinted on your mind.
I don't stew in my own beliefs. I don't mentally jerk off by reading and listening to only people that agree with me. I can think that abortion is a-okay (and I do), and still agree that magically pulling "abortions are protected by the constitution because of the due process clause" out my ass is a little silly. There is no contradiction here, only intellectual honesty.
If there is anything that makes politics truly nauseating these days it is how we stew in our own beliefs. Liberals listen to liberal radio, read liberal blogs, and read liberal books. Conservatives like wise jerk off to their conservative forms media.
The person who shows me a bookshelf full of books that back up their ideology doesn't impress me. They just prove that they have the wonderful ability to self brainwash. The person who shows me a bookshelf that is mixed with violently contradictory ideas and beliefs impresses me because it shows enough intellectual honesty to expose their beliefs to criticism. They might not buy it all, but at least they can hear and consider it.
So, to you, stacking the Supreme Court with anti-abortion zealots
Abortions or not, Bush would have stuck those same guys on Supreme Court. The reason why Bush's appointees would all universally strike down Roe vs Wad is because they all believe that the constitution means what it actually says and tend to avoid getting creative with their interpretations. The fact that they are anti-abortion has nothing to do with it.
Why? Roe vs Wad was a bad (legally speaking) decision. Seriously, every single legal scholar out there agrees that in terms of legality, Roe vs Wad was an extreme stretching of the constitution. The basic logic behind Roe vs Wad is that the constitution kinda-sorta implies a right to privacy, and that right to privacy kinda-sorta maybe could apply to being able to have an abortion... 'cause that is private.
Look, I am completely and 100% pro-choice, but I can see the difference between "anti-abortion judges" and judges that simply take a literal interpretation of the constitution.
Hey, the Democrats are about to sweep the government, maybe they will grow a pair, write a law making abortion legal, and toss this entire battle in the courts out of the window and stop relying on sketchy rulings from the Supreme Court to do their dirty work. I wouldn't hold your breath though. Democrats wouldn't want to piss off "them rural white voters".
I fully expect democrats to sweep government, pull their waist straps out a little, peek into their pants, and realize they don't have pair. If it is any consolation, neither do Republicans. Did you know that Bush went into office on a platform of NOT doing nation building like the Evil Clinton's and shrinking the size of government? Yeah. That is a good laugh.
Moral of the story? Politicians are spineless hacks. Expect nothing from them.
Uh, no. It would just show (to them) that God... err the "intelligent designer" dropped some life on Mars and made it occasional change by magic in ways different from the way the "intelligent designer" uses magic on the creatures on Earth to make them change.
ID doesn't argue that we don't evolve. It just argues that evolution happens by magic, or as they put it "non-evolutionary means". I can safely say that nothing from finding living life on Mars to having UFOs drop in are going to convince the ID folks anything other than what they believe. It is a crappy theory that makes no predictions and argues that the medium being used is magic. No amount of reason is going to get through to people who believe in magic.
I think the GPs point wasn't that if we saw life appear twice independently that the universe has life stuffed in every single nook and cranny, just that because the universe is so damn big it means that there is a ton of life out there, even if most of the universe is dead.
Basically, if you boil down Drake's equation, you start with an absurd number of stars. The next pieces of Drake's equation all deal with finding the "right" stars with the "right" planets. We have very good reason to believe that all of these conditions for finding the "right" planet are non-zero numbers. We know that there are lots of planets out there, that some have Earth like orbits, and we are getting very close to detecting ones with Earth like mass (and suspect strongly that they exist).
What makes Drake's equation interesting, is that if you drop a non-zero number into all of the assumptions, no matter how small that non-zero number is, you get billions and billions of life harboring planets. 0.000001% of a really frigging big number is still a really big number.
The big show stopping "zero" that Drake's equation always runs into is the chance that life can spontaniously arise. We know that the conditions for life to appear are very much non-zero, but life actually appearing is much more tricky. You could reasonably believe that life on Earth was a one a universe fluke. Showing that it isn't a once in a universe fluke makes the rest of Drake's equation spit out billions and billions of life bearing planets. They might be too far away to reach, and we might never see them, but they would exist.
I think that Bush sucks, but he isn't much of a religious fanatic. He had control of the executive branch and had allies in the legislative branch for 6 solid years. In that time, while he managed to break a lot of things, grow the size of the government to the point that socialist were left wondering WTF he was doing, and took a nice long piss on civil liberties, but he didn't do much to push the "religious" agenda.
Republicans pander to the religious right in verbiage, but have never had a president in the past half century that actually did anything for them. Hell, Regan, the guy who supposedly started the pandering doesn't mention abortion once in his autobiography.
I personally would expect to see the trend continue. McCain is going to verbally pander just enough to get them on board without alienating the Americans who don't believe in magic and then promptly ignore them for his presidency should he actually manage to beat Obama.
The Republican party should be dragged out back and shot, but it has nothing to do with the verbal pandering to the religious right. Their sin has been that they just flat out suck and can't even hold to their own basic ideals. When Bush entered office he promised to 1) not do nation building like Clinton did and 2) control the size of government. Yeah, we can all have a good long hard laugh over that one.
It is actually more like sending a probe to the antarctic during the winter and concluding that there is no life there. NASA actually did exactly this. What did they find? They found that they couldn't detect life in the antarctic with the instruments that they had.
Basically, I would look at it like this. If they find evidence of life, that is a pretty positive sign that life might be there (or have once been there). If they find nothing, well, it means almost nothing. Without a more thorough investigation of the planet, one or two negatives really means little. If there is life on Mars, it almost certainly isn't going to be easy to spot and it will exist in very low densities. Nothing short of a good exhaustive search is going to rule out life.
The idea that going to Mars is a good way to prevent mass extinction is flat out silly. There is absolutely NOTHING that could happen in a few hundred years to make Earth more inhabitable than Mars. Even the absolutely worst imagined meteorite strike would leave Earth a better place to live than Mars.
If fear over the survival of humanity is really the reason to go to space, I suggest looking MUCH closer to home. A simple undersea colony would weather any conceivable humanity ending disaster. As an added bonus, if you decide that your sea colony needs air/water/whatever, it is already there. You can go visit your family on the weekends. The idea that Mars is a better place to be is utterly absurd. It is a frigging near vacuum with no radiation shielding that is too cold and has minimal water. The only things that could make Earth that hostile to life would wipe out life in the entire solar system (a supernova too close to this solar system for instance), Mars included.
There might be reasons to toss humans into space other than proving how massive human balls are, but the survival of the species is not one of them.
Honestly, I think the whole thing is moot. The only value of space exploration is exploration. Outside of that, there is a slim chance that their exists some mineral off world that is collecting even after you add in the terrible cost of space travel. Otherwise, space travel is a waste. We are going to be uploaded into a computer long before we have anything but a token population in space.
Eh, if you can turn 15 mortars into 5, if have done yourself pretty good. On top of that, realize that the longer you fire mortars (especially against Americans or Israelis), the far more likely an artillery shell is going to come your way. Every time you toss up a mortar, a radar station is tracking it. The Israelis have gotten so good at it, that they can practically return fire before the rocket/mortar has hit the ground. These days, the only way Hamas and the like can take a pop shot across the border is to do it from a place of high civilian density, and then seriously run like hell the second they have unloaded.
Personally, I am kind of surprised that Israel hasn't put something like a phalanx in spots that are prone to rocket attack... though I suppose a few thousand bullets coming down into civilian areas might have something to do with it.
Corporate entities will run all over us and then want to be friends. Must we lie down and take it or resist and be defiant because we are the movement? I know what I am saying is controversial but I say it with a reason.
You rebel! An open source person with an anti-corporate message!? I don't believe it. You must have massive balls. This reminds me of the time when Greenday stood up against the evils of Bush. A pop-punk band speaking out against conservatives was pretty progressive and unusual at the time, but they to pererviered and finally won the community to their side. Your fight will be long and hard, but I hope that in the end you too convince the wider open source community that Microsoft is the devil.
You are a brave soul to be so bold with such a hostile pro-corporate crowd. Standing up for what you believe in, with no fear that the open source community might respond with hostility and skepticism is a bold act. I salute you for going against the grain and taking such a controversial "Microsoft is bad" stand. If only there were more brave men like you.
Yeah, there is a difference. In one instance, European NATO members are free to nanny away their citizenry if that is what they really want. On the other hand, when it comes to invading countries, as a member of NATO, a mutual defense pact that stood down the combined nuclear armed Warsaw Pact, they are required to respond if one member state gets attacked. In this case, it wasn't one member state that got attacked. It was three without foiled plots in the forth.
Britain, Spain, and of course the US were all attacked by Al-qaeda. Germany foiled a major plot. The guilty party was clear. The Taliban government clearly and openly sheltered the group that launched those attacks. In fact, Al-qaeda was integrated into the government of the Taliban. So here we have three member nations being attacked, and not just attacked, but having their civilians attacked, and what is NATOs response?
Pussy footing and trying to sneak out the back door.
Don't want to be apart of a mutual pact with the US? Great. Get out. Otherwise, Europe's NATO members need to grow a pair and do their part to uphold the pact. The US has always met its NATO obligations.
The US stood by fully and completely willing to engage in nuclear self destruction to keep the Soviets out of west Europe. The US stood down the Soviets when they tried to seal off Berlin, risking all out war to come to an allyâ(TM)s aid. Not once did the US even hint that they would fail to come and defense of a NATO member, irregardless of the near assurance of their own nuclear destruction in the process.
Now that the big danger is passed and war doesn't mean hundreds of millions of people dead in the aftermath, and the US and fellow NATO allies have been attacked by a government just barely out of the stone age. And what does the US have to do? It has to beg and plead with its European "allies" to send anything more than a token force to guard the most desolate and peaceful regions as they take on all of the serious fighting with vastly more soldiers. I mean, the frigging peace loving Canadians with their tiny population have sent a force bigger proportionally to its population then France, Germany, and England⦠combined.
Love or hate the US, the US stood by the NATO pact with fanatical and unbending devotion throughout the darkest days in human history. Now we turn the corner and Europe canâ(TM)t spare a few troops to take on Taliban whose collective power is pocket change next to just one the Soviet tank divisions that used to be poised in East Germany. It is sad, it is pathetic, and it speaks volumes about the character of the NATOâ(TM)s European members these days.
Buddy, Iraq wasn't what I was talking about. Want to let the Americans dive head first into that cluster fuck? That is a rational response. Kosovo though? That went on what, 10 years before the Americans beat NATO over the head and the Americans with a few Brits (with some NATO decals hastily slapped onto their airplanes) cleaned that mess up in about a month. In Lebanon the Italians had the shame the French to send even a token observation (not even "peacekeeping") force.
Let's not even get started with Afghanistan. Osama has hit three NATO members (Spain, US, Britain) and had serious plots at least in a forth (Germany). Despite this, beside the occasional burst of enthusiasm from the Brits, the US is doing all the fighting while everyone else (who are stationed in the quiet parts) try and sneak out the back door looking guilty. Hell, even Obama called out the Germans to grow a pair, pick up their god damn guns, and give a little love back for all hat Cold War fun the US and Germany had together. When you have a peacenik democrat running on an anti-war campaign calling the Germans a bunch of pansies who need to grow a pair, you know the world has flipped on its head.
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That ass hole. Did he want to know the time? What an ass. A cool president would just sit there looking all clam and collected and shit and not check the time. I bet that jerk also went to the bathroom to piss like a human.
Uh, I hate Bush like the other 90% of the world does too... but get a grip.
Guess, take a breath. Yes, NBC altered the video. They do the same thing when you see movies. They take your beloved movie and ALTER IT!!!!!! They do this to squish down time and show more things.
Now, before we freak out shit out and panic that they are hiding something from you, realize that this stuff is filmed by more cameras then you can even begin to contemplate AND is filled with people from all around the world to serve as witnesses. What does this mean? It is really frigging unlikely that NBC is hiding "the truth" from you. Far more likely, they are trying to shrink a 4+ hour opening ceremony into something that will better fit their schedule.
Worrying that they some how were altering the live feed is so dumb and inane that I can't even respond. People, take a frigging collective deep breath.
I know that Lucas thinks that everyone 'relies on him" to come up with good ideas... but seriously, Lucus is a one trick pony. He makes exactly one good movie in a series, then he either hands it off to someone who is talented or makes a crapfest. I personally hope he does what he did with the Empire Strikes Back. Give some writer and director WHO IS NOT LUCUS a rough outline of what he wants, and let them make a good movie. I can just see him directing a love scene...
Lucus: "No! Less emotion! Like you are a fucking robot! No, not like a robot, like a god damn lumb of coal! Yes yes! You have it, look vacant and repeat those lines more mono ton! Brilliant! Quick, someone get some comic relief in here. Give me a funny like black man or something. The audience can't handle too much heavy shit like that or their brains will explode in contemplate of MY GENIUS!!!! AHAHAHAHHAHAH!
I don't really disagree. Some times you need to put a corporation down. My only argument is that it is better to error on the side of going after people who violate the law, than it is to go after the artificial organization that house them, especially when you can trace the illegal action to only a handful of people.
I don't know the case well enough to really comment, but if the illegal acts could all be traced to a few people performing a cover-up, it would have been much for all parties to toss them in jail and leave the company. As it was, they probably ended up punishing a few hundred thousand people to various degrees in terms of innocent employees that lost their jobs and investors that were hurt when the company tanked.
I think that the distance thing is an important point. In many ways, a UAV pilot is about as close as one can come to the killing. Even a Marine killing someone with a knife is, in many respects, more "distant" from his target.
In the heat of combat, it is easy to let instinct and training take over. See target, shoot target. The threat to your life over rides all, and you can go about doing your duty with little thought of the consequences.
Now consider a UAV pilot. His life is not in danger. There are no distractions to his work. If he points a weapon and fires, he can watch the weapon impact without having to take any steps to preserve his own life. He can entirely concentrate and ponder his actions. With a zoomed in camera, night vision, and infrared, he can see the details of his handy work.
In many ways, from a psychological point of view, I think a knife fight would be better than a UAV kill. A knife fight could be over in seconds and you end feeling fully justified in saving your own life. A UAV kill is a deliberate act with full premeditation.
Personally, I think that the use of UAVs is going to lead to less slaughter. Yeah, you can fear the "video game" syndrome where people disassociate, but I think that the fact that all actions are premeditated and not blurred by fear or anger means that more rational decisions are made. As an added bonus, with a UAV, everything you do is recorded to the last detail, AND you can have a lawyer standing over your shoulder. Not sure what to do, holler for someone with more authority than you tell you what to do. UAVs let you error on the side of caution. At worst, you junk a UAV. Error on the side of caution when in combat on the ground, and you could die.
No, I am pretty sure that intent matters. If someone's tire blows and as a result the careen into a sidewalk killing a little boy, it is an entirely different instance than if someone sees a little boy and intentionally runs him down to kill him.
Intent matters a lot.
American soldiers surrounding a wedding party and then putting a bullet into each and every person's head as they beg and plead not to die is a whole hell of a lot more horrific than a pilot seeing a bunch of gun fire and assuming that has found a bunch of insurgents and dropping a high explosive bomb.
In the same regards, Americans mistakenly killing civilians is seen as a failure. Each time an American kills a civilian, it is considered a failure because it strengthens the enemy and does nothing good for the US. Terrorist on the other hand see killing civilians as victory. Blowing up in a crowded market killing civilians is the goal, not an accident.
Intention matters.
You are the idiot. The nationality of the people in question is beside the point. By your fucked up logic, if a Mexican-American serving in the US army is ordered to guns down some civilians, it is Mexico's fault. Well shit, lets the Americans should just pay a Mexican 20 bucks to hit the big red button and end this silliness... it wouldn't be the fault of the US... Mexico did it.
Saudi nationals they might have been, but they were trained and given sanctuary in Afghanistan. Further, when the US pointed out the guilty party (Osama and his crew) they made the very reasonable demand that the Taliban hand him over.
And now we come to why the US beat up on the Taliban. The Taliban refused. They not only refused, but offered Osama protection and integrated his merrily little band into the government of the Taliban. It was at this point when the US rightfully invaded.
Moral of the story?
1) Don't integrate a terrorist organization into your government.
2) If you do, and this terrorist organization kills a few thousand people, hand him over to the offended party.
3) If the offended party demands you hand him over or face destruction, hand him over.
Fail all three of these (as the Taliban did), and you get what you get. Iraq might have been an unjustified clusterfuck, but Afghanistan was entirely the right thing to do.
No, it's not - the computer is running an algorithm designed by at least one nerd. By designing that algorithm, not the computer, but the programmer beat the other player, by using his intelligence for writing a program that plays for him.
By that sort of logic, we humans are not responsible for our actions. All the credit goes to a very crafty set of chemicals that one day reproduced... it did an absurd number of calculations and bang, you have humans which are just another step along the path.
Granted, in this case I'll hand over the credit to the programmer. That said, at some point the line back to the programmer is going to become obscure. When algorithms make algorithms that make algorithms on into infinity... well, props to the original programmer, but he is about as involved in the process as some proto-human a few hundred million years ago is involved in making skyscrapers.
You miss the point. The "company" is made up of thousands and thousands of people. Companies are just people who have organized for a purpose. Personally, I think it is far better to hold PEOPLE accountable instead of companies. Slay a company and you destroy the entire organization, innocent and guilty. Go after people within the company who have broken the law, and the innocent people remain. It is the difference between removing cancer from a person and shooting them in the head.
I am not saying that there isn't a place for going after "companies". I am saying that, in general, going after people is better. If you send a CEO to jail for violating the law, everyone keeps their job and the company moves on. Trash the company, and the CEO collects his severance and finds a new job while everyone else is out of work.
When you go after a company, you tend to punish the most innocent people in the company the harshest while letting the most guilty (generally the guys on top) suffer the least punishment.
Well, clearly it is your system, but I think you are just trading an improbable and hard attack (dictionary attack) for a trivial attack that your janitor can perform. If someone starts hammering away with a dictionary attack, you can detect it and respond.
Telling people to remember qB3r7, while eliciting a lol from a l337 slashdot user, is just going to blow over the heads of the average idiot user. They will shrug, write it down, and leave it in their desk, making your biggest security vulnerability not an improbable and detectable dictionary attack, but a janitor emptying the trash cans.
I personally think poor threat assessment is something that is striking our society from top to bottom. Sys admins demanding 10 character passwords that change every 30 days are pocket change to the foolishness of money spent defending against pin-prick terrorist attacks. You can't even put my chances of dying a terrorist attack on the same chart as the chance of me dying by accidental drowning... yet I would bet my soul that we are going to dump far more money making sure that some ass hole doesn't blow up a suicide pack killing a yawnable dozen people.
Asking people to memorize a random 10 character password is pretty much futile. You make brute force attack harder, sure, but you just made social engineering attacks trivial. What is better, a user whose password is jesussaves1 or the user whose password is Dj7lasJ82k, but has it written on a piece of paper in his desk drawer? One requires a lucky guess or a detectable brute force attack, while the other just requires a janitor to open the desk drawer and copy the password.
People in security get to obsessed over the unlikely attacks (brute forcing or guessing a 6 letters + character and capital password) and utterly ignore it when they make social attacks trivial (minimum wage janitor paid to open the desk drawer and copy the password and name of the person who owns the office).
Ask your users to do something stupid and inconvenient, and they are going to respond by doing something stupid and convenient.
Let me expand a little. There is a fundimental difference in that currently you go out and kill stuff. It never comes to you. You go over to the goblin camp, beat on it for a few hours. Stuff spawns, you beat on the stuff as it spawns in, and then leave. Further, you do silly things like kill goblins within sight of each other. You attack the goblin tribe and the tribe doesn't respond unless you practically run into them. I mean hell, the entire idea behind a "dungeon crawl" revolves around slowly moving through an area, mowing down all the stuff you see, as the stuff just around the corner happily ignores you.
The respawn is not really the issue. I don't care if NPCs magically appear off screen or not. It is instead the idea of the world living, versus the world being a big exp farm put there to give you l3wt and exp. If you marched into a town with zombies (or goblins, or whatever), and they all responded to you, it would be radically different in feel then slowly picking your way killing one or two at a time in sight of others who ignore you. If when they "respawn" it is a horde that slowly mobilizes and threatens to overwhelm instead of random monsters dropping in from nowhere and them promptly ignoring you unless you run face first into them, you would get a sense that this world has a purpose.
Games like WoW feel pointless. It feels like on big exp farm. Things are not there for a rational reason, and certainly for not any reason that you can affect. They are sitting there to be mindlessly killed for exp.
Imagine a game where the world isn't one big exp farm. Hell, kill exp all together. Imagine a world where you do things for a reason. Imagine a world that responds in a reasonable way. It doesn't have to be "realistic", it should just make sense in the context of the world. Instead farming NPCs (and "farming" really is the right word for most MMORPGs), imagine if killing NPCs has a purpose other than scoring exp. Why do you kill zombies? You kill zombies because you need to kill the zombies to loot the ruined town for supplies. You don't go there to farm them. Killing is something you do to achieve a goal, it isn't a goal in it of itself. It is like fighting a war. You don't fight a war to kill people. You fight a way to achieve some political end, and you get that end by killing people.
Games like WoW suffering from a complete lack of purpose beyond the next crack like fix on making your character stronger. Guilds can extend purpose a little, but it is done in a game where the basic game play revolves around making the numbers on your character's score card go up through exp and loot.
Like I said, in all the sci-fi I ever read that had MMORPGs before there were MMORPGs, they never sat around killing goblins as they spawn in for l3wt. No sci-fi writer could even contemplate online worlds being so mindless and devoid of meaning... and for good reason.
Someone needs to grow a pair and try something new. Shift the game away from the "kill shit to be stronger to kill more shit" model to something else. Personally, I think that there is a massive untapped market for MMORPGs. Just because a few million crack addicts love current MMORPGs doesn't mean that a few hundred million people wouldn't love something else.
That is only true if your game is very poorly designed. Taking WoW and then making it so that when creatures die they stay dead would be a very crappy game. I am not suggesting a WoW rip off with a silly gameplay tweak. I am talking about striking out in an entirely new direction.
There is a core gameplay in MMORPGs. The core gameplay of MMORPGs is that you kill shit, killing shit makes you stronger, you kill strong shit shit, rinse and repeat. This is the central core of an MMORPG. If the above doesn't appeal to you, you will never find MMORPGs satisfying. Whatever glitz MMORPGs throw on top of that game play doesn't change what is at the core. I am saying, someone needs to grow a pair and toss that core in the trash.
A few people have actually tried. EvE online breaks the mold somewhat. You still run the "kill shit to get stronger", but they have slightly under emphasized it by taking out experience for killing things. Instead, your power is based upon time and money, and money can potentially be gained in ways other than by killing things. That game isn't my cup of tea, but I give them respect for shifting the mold a little.
So, you want to envision a game where things stay dead? Imagine a game where there are only a couple of cities. Imagine that the rest of the world is extremely hostile and only gets more hostile. Hell, lets make this a zombie game. The plot is that a zombie apocalypse happens and a few humans manage to build a few hold outs in this game world. The world is teaming with billions of zombies and a few humans (players). If you kill a zombie, it stays dead, but well, more zombies wander in from other places.
So, imagine you and a group jump in a truck armed to the teeth and clear out a ruined town. You collect resources from the town (food, ammo, whatever). No zombies respawn. Instead, over time zombies start to head to the town from other places that are far more infested. At first, only a few wander in that are easily dispatched. As time goes on, more and more wander in from other places. If you stick around long enough, you have a wandering zombie horde trying to tear you apart. The core gameplay of this game could be about resource collection instead of grinding for mad exp. It could be FPS like instead of quasi turn based combat.
I am not arguing that this is THE game that needs to be built. Hell, I am not even arguing that it would work and make good game play. I am saying that "OMG there is no way to make an MMORPG other than to rip of Everquest for the next few decades" is silly. There are alternatives, it is just that major developers that can really dump the resources into making them work don't have the balls to try. Instead, they keep shoveling rehashed versions of Everquest and we get unoriginal crap like WoW.
Certainly WoW fills a niche and a demand, but I think that there are other tastes out there that are yet to be satisfied. It is like if someone opened a restaurant that served pasta, it was a hit, and then all of a sudden lots of other places opened that also serve pasta. Yeah, those places might be a hit, but that doesn't mean that there are not people out there bored to death by pasta who want some god damn pizza.
If only...
...actually, I take that back. I can just imagine the horrible WoW grind-fest clone they could make out of a Fallout MMORPG.
Personally, every single time someone announces that some franchise that I really like is getting an MMORPG, I am sad. Right now we are in the "Doom clone" phase of MMORPG design. Doom was original for its time. It knocked people's socks off. Then out came thirty thousand Doom clones that add nothing except cosmetic changes and slight refinements of gameplay. MMORPG design is in the same mode right now. Everquest was made. It was a big success, and now everyone has copied that game to death, tossing basic formulation tweaks onto the same boring well worn game play.
I personally am waiting for someone to break some new ground with MMORPGs. A good FPSMMORPG (I stipulated good, so don't tell me about Planetside) would be a nice start. Imagine an MMORPGFPS that is more than a glorified game of capture the flag. Imagine a FPSMMORPG that of course has fighting, but has more things to do than just fight. I think the Warhammer 40K and Fallout universes both scream out to be quality FPSMMORPGs. Hell, if someone really felt like they had a pair of balls that needed a wheelbarrow to lug around, they could try to simply copy the original Ultima Online design for a "sandbox" world (which has almost nothing to do with that UO was released after beta, and even less with what it is now).
There is a ton of room for innovation in the MMORPG world. I don't know about you, but when I was a kid and I dreamed of MMORPGs (before there were MMORPGs), I sure as hell didn't envision playing 'whack-a-mole' grinding away killing mindless NPCs in the tens of thousands to score more l00t and exp. I personally envisioned fighting through living worlds where clearing out the goblin cave means the bastards stay dead, where undead attacking your city means the city is defended or burns, and where there are no "levels" that stratify the game into gods and peons who couldn't kill a high level even with a small army backing them up.
I spoke with a bit of hyperbole, in saying that "every single legal scholar", but once you take a step outside of partisan politics, the issue clears up very quickly. Roe vs Wade is defended on the grounds of what it did, not based upon the method of its ruling. Wikipedia has a nice little section on liberal criticism of Roe vs Wade. There is even a sizable portion that think that the basic idea behind Roe vs Wade is right (abortions should be okay), but that the ruling itself came about it in a crappy manner. Whatever the case, there can be absolutely NO argument made that Roe vs Wade comes from an originalist reading of constitution.
Please. If you're as open minded as you profess to be, then it's time to drop these various fallacies that the conservatives have imprinted on your mind.
I don't stew in my own beliefs. I don't mentally jerk off by reading and listening to only people that agree with me. I can think that abortion is a-okay (and I do), and still agree that magically pulling "abortions are protected by the constitution because of the due process clause" out my ass is a little silly. There is no contradiction here, only intellectual honesty.
If there is anything that makes politics truly nauseating these days it is how we stew in our own beliefs. Liberals listen to liberal radio, read liberal blogs, and read liberal books. Conservatives like wise jerk off to their conservative forms media.
The person who shows me a bookshelf full of books that back up their ideology doesn't impress me. They just prove that they have the wonderful ability to self brainwash. The person who shows me a bookshelf that is mixed with violently contradictory ideas and beliefs impresses me because it shows enough intellectual honesty to expose their beliefs to criticism. They might not buy it all, but at least they can hear and consider it.
So, to you, stacking the Supreme Court with anti-abortion zealots
Abortions or not, Bush would have stuck those same guys on Supreme Court. The reason why Bush's appointees would all universally strike down Roe vs Wad is because they all believe that the constitution means what it actually says and tend to avoid getting creative with their interpretations. The fact that they are anti-abortion has nothing to do with it.
Why? Roe vs Wad was a bad (legally speaking) decision. Seriously, every single legal scholar out there agrees that in terms of legality, Roe vs Wad was an extreme stretching of the constitution. The basic logic behind Roe vs Wad is that the constitution kinda-sorta implies a right to privacy, and that right to privacy kinda-sorta maybe could apply to being able to have an abortion... 'cause that is private.
Look, I am completely and 100% pro-choice, but I can see the difference between "anti-abortion judges" and judges that simply take a literal interpretation of the constitution.
Hey, the Democrats are about to sweep the government, maybe they will grow a pair, write a law making abortion legal, and toss this entire battle in the courts out of the window and stop relying on sketchy rulings from the Supreme Court to do their dirty work. I wouldn't hold your breath though. Democrats wouldn't want to piss off "them rural white voters".
I fully expect democrats to sweep government, pull their waist straps out a little, peek into their pants, and realize they don't have pair. If it is any consolation, neither do Republicans. Did you know that Bush went into office on a platform of NOT doing nation building like the Evil Clinton's and shrinking the size of government? Yeah. That is a good laugh.
Moral of the story? Politicians are spineless hacks. Expect nothing from them.
Uh, no. It would just show (to them) that God... err the "intelligent designer" dropped some life on Mars and made it occasional change by magic in ways different from the way the "intelligent designer" uses magic on the creatures on Earth to make them change.
ID doesn't argue that we don't evolve. It just argues that evolution happens by magic, or as they put it "non-evolutionary means". I can safely say that nothing from finding living life on Mars to having UFOs drop in are going to convince the ID folks anything other than what they believe. It is a crappy theory that makes no predictions and argues that the medium being used is magic. No amount of reason is going to get through to people who believe in magic.
I think the GPs point wasn't that if we saw life appear twice independently that the universe has life stuffed in every single nook and cranny, just that because the universe is so damn big it means that there is a ton of life out there, even if most of the universe is dead.
Basically, if you boil down Drake's equation, you start with an absurd number of stars. The next pieces of Drake's equation all deal with finding the "right" stars with the "right" planets. We have very good reason to believe that all of these conditions for finding the "right" planet are non-zero numbers. We know that there are lots of planets out there, that some have Earth like orbits, and we are getting very close to detecting ones with Earth like mass (and suspect strongly that they exist).
What makes Drake's equation interesting, is that if you drop a non-zero number into all of the assumptions, no matter how small that non-zero number is, you get billions and billions of life harboring planets. 0.000001% of a really frigging big number is still a really big number.
The big show stopping "zero" that Drake's equation always runs into is the chance that life can spontaniously arise. We know that the conditions for life to appear are very much non-zero, but life actually appearing is much more tricky. You could reasonably believe that life on Earth was a one a universe fluke. Showing that it isn't a once in a universe fluke makes the rest of Drake's equation spit out billions and billions of life bearing planets. They might be too far away to reach, and we might never see them, but they would exist.
I think that Bush sucks, but he isn't much of a religious fanatic. He had control of the executive branch and had allies in the legislative branch for 6 solid years. In that time, while he managed to break a lot of things, grow the size of the government to the point that socialist were left wondering WTF he was doing, and took a nice long piss on civil liberties, but he didn't do much to push the "religious" agenda.
Republicans pander to the religious right in verbiage, but have never had a president in the past half century that actually did anything for them. Hell, Regan, the guy who supposedly started the pandering doesn't mention abortion once in his autobiography.
I personally would expect to see the trend continue. McCain is going to verbally pander just enough to get them on board without alienating the Americans who don't believe in magic and then promptly ignore them for his presidency should he actually manage to beat Obama.
The Republican party should be dragged out back and shot, but it has nothing to do with the verbal pandering to the religious right. Their sin has been that they just flat out suck and can't even hold to their own basic ideals. When Bush entered office he promised to 1) not do nation building like Clinton did and 2) control the size of government. Yeah, we can all have a good long hard laugh over that one.
It is actually more like sending a probe to the antarctic during the winter and concluding that there is no life there. NASA actually did exactly this. What did they find? They found that they couldn't detect life in the antarctic with the instruments that they had.
Basically, I would look at it like this. If they find evidence of life, that is a pretty positive sign that life might be there (or have once been there). If they find nothing, well, it means almost nothing. Without a more thorough investigation of the planet, one or two negatives really means little. If there is life on Mars, it almost certainly isn't going to be easy to spot and it will exist in very low densities. Nothing short of a good exhaustive search is going to rule out life.
The idea that going to Mars is a good way to prevent mass extinction is flat out silly. There is absolutely NOTHING that could happen in a few hundred years to make Earth more inhabitable than Mars. Even the absolutely worst imagined meteorite strike would leave Earth a better place to live than Mars.
If fear over the survival of humanity is really the reason to go to space, I suggest looking MUCH closer to home. A simple undersea colony would weather any conceivable humanity ending disaster. As an added bonus, if you decide that your sea colony needs air/water/whatever, it is already there. You can go visit your family on the weekends. The idea that Mars is a better place to be is utterly absurd. It is a frigging near vacuum with no radiation shielding that is too cold and has minimal water. The only things that could make Earth that hostile to life would wipe out life in the entire solar system (a supernova too close to this solar system for instance), Mars included.
There might be reasons to toss humans into space other than proving how massive human balls are, but the survival of the species is not one of them.
Honestly, I think the whole thing is moot. The only value of space exploration is exploration. Outside of that, there is a slim chance that their exists some mineral off world that is collecting even after you add in the terrible cost of space travel. Otherwise, space travel is a waste. We are going to be uploaded into a computer long before we have anything but a token population in space.
Eh, if you can turn 15 mortars into 5, if have done yourself pretty good. On top of that, realize that the longer you fire mortars (especially against Americans or Israelis), the far more likely an artillery shell is going to come your way. Every time you toss up a mortar, a radar station is tracking it. The Israelis have gotten so good at it, that they can practically return fire before the rocket/mortar has hit the ground. These days, the only way Hamas and the like can take a pop shot across the border is to do it from a place of high civilian density, and then seriously run like hell the second they have unloaded.
Personally, I am kind of surprised that Israel hasn't put something like a phalanx in spots that are prone to rocket attack... though I suppose a few thousand bullets coming down into civilian areas might have something to do with it.
Corporate entities will run all over us and then want to be friends. Must we lie down and take it or resist and be defiant because we are the movement? I know what I am saying is controversial but I say it with a reason.
You rebel! An open source person with an anti-corporate message!? I don't believe it. You must have massive balls. This reminds me of the time when Greenday stood up against the evils of Bush. A pop-punk band speaking out against conservatives was pretty progressive and unusual at the time, but they to pererviered and finally won the community to their side. Your fight will be long and hard, but I hope that in the end you too convince the wider open source community that Microsoft is the devil.
You are a brave soul to be so bold with such a hostile pro-corporate crowd. Standing up for what you believe in, with no fear that the open source community might respond with hostility and skepticism is a bold act. I salute you for going against the grain and taking such a controversial "Microsoft is bad" stand. If only there were more brave men like you.
Yeah, there is a difference. In one instance, European NATO members are free to nanny away their citizenry if that is what they really want. On the other hand, when it comes to invading countries, as a member of NATO, a mutual defense pact that stood down the combined nuclear armed Warsaw Pact, they are required to respond if one member state gets attacked. In this case, it wasn't one member state that got attacked. It was three without foiled plots in the forth.
Britain, Spain, and of course the US were all attacked by Al-qaeda. Germany foiled a major plot. The guilty party was clear. The Taliban government clearly and openly sheltered the group that launched those attacks. In fact, Al-qaeda was integrated into the government of the Taliban. So here we have three member nations being attacked, and not just attacked, but having their civilians attacked, and what is NATOs response?
Pussy footing and trying to sneak out the back door.
Don't want to be apart of a mutual pact with the US? Great. Get out. Otherwise, Europe's NATO members need to grow a pair and do their part to uphold the pact. The US has always met its NATO obligations.
The US stood by fully and completely willing to engage in nuclear self destruction to keep the Soviets out of west Europe. The US stood down the Soviets when they tried to seal off Berlin, risking all out war to come to an allyâ(TM)s aid. Not once did the US even hint that they would fail to come and defense of a NATO member, irregardless of the near assurance of their own nuclear destruction in the process.
Now that the big danger is passed and war doesn't mean hundreds of millions of people dead in the aftermath, and the US and fellow NATO allies have been attacked by a government just barely out of the stone age. And what does the US have to do? It has to beg and plead with its European "allies" to send anything more than a token force to guard the most desolate and peaceful regions as they take on all of the serious fighting with vastly more soldiers. I mean, the frigging peace loving Canadians with their tiny population have sent a force bigger proportionally to its population then France, Germany, and England⦠combined.
Love or hate the US, the US stood by the NATO pact with fanatical and unbending devotion throughout the darkest days in human history. Now we turn the corner and Europe canâ(TM)t spare a few troops to take on Taliban whose collective power is pocket change next to just one the Soviet tank divisions that used to be poised in East Germany. It is sad, it is pathetic, and it speaks volumes about the character of the NATOâ(TM)s European members these days.
Buddy, Iraq wasn't what I was talking about. Want to let the Americans dive head first into that cluster fuck? That is a rational response. Kosovo though? That went on what, 10 years before the Americans beat NATO over the head and the Americans with a few Brits (with some NATO decals hastily slapped onto their airplanes) cleaned that mess up in about a month. In Lebanon the Italians had the shame the French to send even a token observation (not even "peacekeeping") force.
Let's not even get started with Afghanistan. Osama has hit three NATO members (Spain, US, Britain) and had serious plots at least in a forth (Germany). Despite this, beside the occasional burst of enthusiasm from the Brits, the US is doing all the fighting while everyone else (who are stationed in the quiet parts) try and sneak out the back door looking guilty. Hell, even Obama called out the Germans to grow a pair, pick up their god damn guns, and give a little love back for all hat Cold War fun the US and Germany had together. When you have a peacenik democrat running on an anti-war campaign calling the Germans a bunch of pansies who need to grow a pair, you know the world has flipped on its head.