The US didn't not kick over Saddam during Gulf War I because it feared a civil war. You need to recall that this was before anyone really understood just how ugly the ethnic tension was. Hell, very few people (including the most outspoken war critics) knew that there might be ethnic fighting before Gulf War II. The US and its allies stopped short of kicking over Saddam in Gulf War I because the UN coalition was in the process of falling apart and Bush I didn't want to slug out alone.
The civil war thing was something that extremely few people saw coming. Some for of resistance was pretty much expected by most people with a brain on their heads, but very few voice were warning of such sever ethnic violence. In hind sight it is obvious, but at the time it was not. Hell, I'll challenge anyone to go find a quote from any US or British politician arguing against war because of fear of a genocidal ethnic war.
Serbia should have taught us this lesson, but as current events, no one seemed to get it. What is scary is that the various foreign intelligence agencies didn't catch on that kicking over a strongman who had spent his career brutalizing a majority ethnic group might lead to some violence.
We call them 'insurgents' because that is the correct term that describes all the fighters in Iraq.
A resistance movement is seeking to oust a foreign occupying power to restore the previous ruling power. Now, it is true that Iraq has resistance movements trying to kick out Americans and restore the Baathist to power, but they do not actually make up all or even a majority of the fighters in Iraq. Shiite militias and Al-qaeda are not seeking to restore the Baathist.
Insurgent is a broader term. An insurgent on the other hand is someone who takes up arms against the current governments authority. That is a term that describes almost all of the fighters in Iraq. Iraq fighters are not just fighting occupation. They are fighting other militia groups, the government, and some times just indulging in good old fashion ethnic cleansing. Doing any of the above is defying the authority of the current government, hence they are insurgents.
As far as to why we don't call them freedom fighters, it is because Blair and Bush (and most Western folks for that matter) don't consider Baathist trying to restore an Arab fascist government, Shiites trying to ethnically cleanse the Sunnis, or Al-qaeda trying to create a theocratic state and ethnically cleanse Shiites on the side to really fall under any (western) definition of "freedom fighting".
If it makes you feel better, and I am sure it will because you are clearly suffering from a sever case of moral relativism, I imagine that if the Soviets had invaded the US or Britain, they would have called us insurgents and not freedom fighters also.
The UN actually works. Remember the Korean War? The UN getting into the Korean war was a pure accident. The US put forward a bill to get the UN involved. The USSR SHOULD have vetoed it. They didn't veto the bill because they had just walked out for the day in protest of something or another. As a result, Russia was not there to throw down a veto. If the USSR had just stayed in their seats, instead of scores of American military with a few UN logos slapped around and a handful of allies, it would have been scores of American military without any UN logos with a handful of allies.
The UN is good for a lot of things like emergency aid, negotiating peace between waring sides, humanitarian missions, observations of ceasefires, broad health initiatives, environmental treaties, and even occasionally setting up international standards. The UN is utterly worthless at protecting/enforcing freedom and liberty, conducting military action, or enforcing even the most basic morals like don't genocide thy neighbor.
No, bits and pieces of the source code have been leaked. Small bits and pieces. No one (other then Microsoft) has anything other then a few code fragments. Microsoft keeps its source code closed not through copyright, but through secrecy, Copyright is just the legal hammer they used to whack people when they manage to sneak off with a small chunk of the code.
I think GPs larger point is that there are two ways to "solve" global warming. The first way is to revert is to reduce our output of green house gases immensely. The other way is to find a technological solution. Now, some times these two solutions go hand in hand. A solar panel both reduce green house gas output (over time at least, you still need to build the damn things) and it is a technological solution. A large government tax on gas might reduce total output, but have strong negative economic and technological consequences.
It is like, imagine if during the industrial revolution everyone saw how ugly coal power was and decided not to use it for the health of the planet. Where would we be right now? We would still be in a preindustrial society utilizing primitive windmills and water power. Humans would be living much shorter and far more miserable lives that don't reach much farther past 30 years. Now, you could claim that this be a prettier world, but it wouldn't be a better world to live in for humans. It took an ugly and messy industrial revolution to get us to the point where people expect to live into their 70's and giving birth to a child isn't a game of Russian roulette.
I am all for reduction of our green house gas output. I think things like the Kyoto protocol are not a bad idea. The answer isn't reduction though. Reduction and self restraint is a temporary measure that delays bad things from happening. The final solution is a technological one. If we recognize that as a society we can't/won't reduce enough to 'solve' the problem and that there needs to be a technological solution, regardless if it is some form of terraforming, better solar panels, fusion, or all of the above, then we need to ensure that the steps we take in reduction don't stunt our future ability to actually solve the problem.
Yeah, and some video games portray Germans as evil villains, but we still love Germans and their beer.
You can't help but expect video games to imitate reality. The reality is that people that the US conflicts with the most often are from the Middle East. The majority of our terror threats come from Arabs. If we were fighting over Taiwan with China I am sure that piles of games where you beat on Chinese would be out the next day.
Games want to imitate reality. They want to give us the chance to play as our heroes and anti-heroes. The reality is that our 'heroes' are fighting Middle Easterners right now. It shouldn't come as a big shock that our games reflect this. Now, it certainly sucks if you live in the Middle East and are a gamer because the US is the Mecca of gaming.
All of that said, I think that the gaming community has been pretty even handed. Considering the nature of the conflict that we are in, I am surprised that so few games try and tackle it directly. At best, we have piles of World War II games and handful of games against faceless 'terrorist'.
If anyone has anything to bitch about in how they are portrayed in video games, it is the Germans. Man, 60 years latter and they are still villain #1 in half of all games.
Dude this is evil inc, they're making huge profits from investments in socially irresponsible corps while maintaining a good public image through their donations(and keeping uncle sam out of their pockets.) "They" are not making any money. The foundation is making money. That money is then used to either invest more or do all those happy and good things that it does. Bill Gates doesn't get any money from the foundation. In fact, Bill Gates GIVES money to the foundation. The foundation makes him POORER.
Believe me, the people coming into the US illegally are NOT engineers. You can rest safely know for a fact that they are not immigrating here to take your job, eat your babies, and have sex with your wife.
The US is currently suffering from less then 5% unemployment. When you have under 5% unemployment it means that you have a labor shortage. The only things corporations, especially ones that work at the fringes of profitability, can do is hire illegals or go out of business. We have a finite amount of labor in this nation. Once it is used up, it is gone. If a farm needs 300 people do manual labor and can't get them without offering enough money to put them out of business, then it goes out of business. Now, I am all for businesses going out of business, but not when there is an ample supply of people willing to work just across the border. Little is gained when a corporation goes out of business in a full employment market. Cutting off immigration just murders a pile of US industries that are out merrily providing us with cheap goods and services.
Don't get me wrong, I am against illegal immigration. However, the solution is not build better fences or waste billions of dollars trying to root out every single smuggler and forcing people into more dangerous methods of crossing. The solution is to make it so that a poor Mexican who will happily work for close to minimum wage in some marginal industry can legally cross. We want to know these people are here. Want to run background checks and make them come in through legal points of entry. So long as our immigration system is so badly fucked up where it takes a decade a pile of money to get across, people are going to illegally immigrate.
As much as I hate a lot of what Bush does, he had a damn good immigration plan that the Republican congress (and a few Dems) murdered. He opened up legal ways for guest workers and immigrants to come here. Allowing legal crossing would have shut down smugglers, saved lives, and resulted in collecting tax money, better health and safety oversight, and all the benefits you receive when workers work legally.
Black markets (even in labor) create crime, poverty, and misery. The only way to bring down a black market is to legalize and regulate the market. This is what we need to do with immigration.
Do you know what I would do if I REALLY wanted to drive drunk in one of these things? Put on a pair of gloves that prevent my alcohol filled sweat from activating the alcohol detector.
Do you know what I would do if my car decided it was going to slow me down while blasting down a busy Boston highway with traffic moving at 70 mph due to a false positive? I would be utterly fucked and have a few seconds to act before getting plowed into twenty times by cars moving twice my speed.
Anyone who wants to defeat this system will defeat it. The only thing this is going to do is potentially kill utterly innocent people. I am all for the car blaring warnings that you are driving funny or intoxicated. I am utterly against the car deciding that the middle of a highway is a good place to stop because its pattern recognition system has failed or my intoxicated passenger gets some alcohol laced fluid on my steering wheel or hands.
Over coming the alcohol sensor is a simple matter of putting on a pair of gloves. Any drunk who is sober enough to get his key in the ignition is also going to be sober enough to know he can defeat his car with a pair of gloves.
As far as the 'features' of this car, I don't want them. I can prevent myself from drive drunk without my cars help, thank you very much. The last thing in the world do I want three separate systems to disable my car. The alcohol sensor could be triggered by other sources of alcohol. More scary, the erratic driving and the lack of pupil focusing could be triggered by poor pattern recognition. The last thing in the world I want is for the car to decide is that I am not focusing enough due to a glitch and try and slow me down on in the middle of a Boston highway during heavy traffic chugging along at 70 mph.
If Toyota wants put in a safety feature that I would actually want, give me a system to warn me that I am falling asleep THAT I CAN TURN OFF. I don't mind my car warning me that my driving is looking funny or that it seems like I am not focused, but I want to be able to disable the warning should it become clear that there is a glitch. The last thing in the world I want is for it to take control away from me. I would rather veer off the road and hit a treat then come to a dead stop in the middle of a highway. Trees only hit you ounce.
No, I don't utterly miss the point. I was replying to the original posters comments which were:
We should all see how horrible an execution is, just like we should all see how horrible a war is in graphic detail. If you wake up in the night with a sweat, good because these things should have that effect on you and perhaps that will influence the people we vote for. He wakes up in cold sweat thinking about how terrible and inhuman execution is. I don't.
As to your point that this was a failure of the Shiite government due to its hurried nature...
There is some argument that quickly disposing of Saddam will help cut the cancer away and allow healing to begin quicker and crush the hopes of those who would otherwise never agree to live with a unity government. For me personally, I would be curious to see how the speed of justice presented in the Saddam case compared to the speed of justice served out for the Nuremberg Trials. The Nuremberg Trials were an excellent example of how this sort of thing could have been done and started towards the path of healing the nation. Of course, the circumstances were wildly different, so perhaps the comparison is unfounded.
We should all see how horrible an execution is, just like we should all see how horrible a war is in graphic detail. If you wake up in the night with a sweat, good because these things should have that effect on you and perhaps that will influence the people we vote for.
Oh yeah, I wake up covered in sweat thinking about how badly Saddam suffered. That poor man endured seconds worth of insults followed by a quick and clean death. That poor man received no justice. I think I will cry myself to sleep.
Seriously. If it is some how "unjust" to kill Saddam... who exactly is it just to kill? What do you have to do before you deserve to die for your actions? Scoop out baby brains on camera and laugh with malevolent glee, then rape the corpses? The guy was a really bad human. Get this through your fuzzy relativistic sense of morality that could justify mass rape and genocide without flinching.
In this world, I swear that people would throw a hissy fit if they were transported back and found someone making plans to kill Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Bad people exist in the world. It is okay to kill them.
"Mad cow" disease is a basically a media hoax. How many people in this world have died to mad cow disease? Less the a hundred? You have a better chance of dying in a swimming pool, driving a car, riding a bike, or being struck by lightening. Seriously, you are far more likely to be eaten by a shark then killed by mad cow disease. People's sense of danger has been completely fucked over by mass media. The stuff that you should worry about is ignored, while stupid shit that isn't even worth noticing is treated like a sign of the apocalypses. Get a grip. If safety is what you really are worried about, you should be far more terrified of crossing the street, riding a bike, or taking a swim in a swimming pool, then worries about feeding sheep brains to cows.
As far as cloning goes... you are not going to die eating a cloned animal. It is going to taste delicious and tasty just like all the other cows. It is like eating a twin. "Unnatural"? Eh, maybe. Tender and delicious? Absolutely.
You are right in that it has to do with 'fantasy', but it has nothing to do with "dark Gothic horror and sex". The youth of today know that Mars is a barren and desolate wasteland that makes the most hellish inhospitable places on Earth look pleasant. The youth of today realize that Venus is not a steamy jungle teeming with life, but a hellish world where the atmosphere will rend even the most hardened probes into a pile of molten goo.
The youth of today know damn well that the chances of NASA some how blazing a trail that they can follow behind is slim to nil. Who wants to shell out piles of money so that the government can stick a dozen people on the barren vacuum of the moon or send a multi-trillion dollar spaceship to Mars to collect rock samples?
If there was a viable way to get your average Joe into space, I think people would be extremely excited. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but many Americans are frothing at the mouth for another frontier. It is almost comical to see thousands of Americans switching costs in some hopeless attempt to keep pushing forward. There is a generation of pioneers waiting for their chance. The issue is that rocket fueled spaceships are certainly not going to be the means by which they get there.
We are stuck in a gravity well and everyone realizes it. No amount of fantasy where we send a dozen people to the Moon and Mars is going to change the fact that it takes millions to get in space, and millions more to make even short stays. Perhaps when someone strings up a space elevator things will change as space is opened up to the public. Until then, the pubic is wisely covering their own asses and telling the government to fuck off with consuming their resources to dump a handful people onto barren vacuum worlds for a month or two before returning with rock samples.
Don't forget - hot korean chick who hangs out with hundreds of copies of herself, naked, on cylon flight decks. You would think they would have figured out she was a Cylon pretty damn quickly when they noticed that she was the only Asian woman in their entire civilization.
Airplanes are safe. Mile for mile, they are about the safest way you can possibly travel. We are really good at putting around at 500 mpg or so without exploding. Even when there are problems, the airlines are damn good about making sure that no one dies. In the last couple of decades, US airlines average well under 1 crash per 5 years (if you subtract out that whole 9/11 thing). Airplanes are about as safe as travel gets. You are not dramatically increasing your odds to die by getting on one.
When you go from putting around at 500 MPH to mach 25 (that is 19,000 mph), you make a pretty damn big jump. A mistake that in a normal airline is of no consequence results in your airplane/spaceship tearing itself apart in a fraction of a second. The thermal stress on the airframe goes from the 100 degree swing airplanes see to a 1000+ degree swing. Loss of cabin pressure changes from being a pain in the ass where everyone needs to breath through a mask, to killing everyone in a very horrible and painful way in under a minute (a mask isn't going to save your eyes, skin, ears, or keep the temperature up in a vacuum).
This is like going from making a workable biplane to proposing that someone build the concord.
Does a working scramjet hold lots of possibilities? Hell yes, but most of them are either military possibilities or space exploration possibilities because both of these ventures accept human casualties. Corporations and employees on the other hand are far more unlikely to risk death on one of these things just to save a few hours of travel time, especially in this age of communication.
I really doubt that this thing is going to take off (ha ha, pun) in the near future for two reasons.
First, scramjets have been talked about forever. No one has yet to do anything more interesting then blow up a few scramjet drones and waste millions. Certainly we are going to get it 'right' at some point, but I am deeply skeptical that it is going to be in the near future. Even if it was in the near future, I am even more skeptical that it would be cost effective enough to operate as a commercial airliner for such a small nitch market.
Second, who the fuck would be willing to fly these things other then an astronaut? When an astronaut goes up in the space shuttle, they realize that they basically have a significant chance of dying. When your average business man takes a flight, he doesn't expect to be risking his life on an airplane that suffers massive extremes of hot, cold, acceleration, and air pressure. You don't go out of control at mach 25... you just disintegrate.
I am deeply skeptical that this company is going to make a scramjet, make it economical, and then make it safe enough for commercial use. I am not holding my breath on this one. I give Duke Nukem Forever a better chance of seeing the light of day in this decade then I give to this thing.
He was doing more then getting free wifi. He launched a DOS against his former companies customers. This guy got exactly what he deserved. The moral of the story? Don't break into your former employer's wireless and start locking DOS attacks or else you get thrown in jail. If anything, I think the guy got off light.
Stars get death threats all the time. I can promise you that Limbaugh gets death threats daily. You might not get death threats, but I am sure some left wing nut job sends them out daily in the same way some right wing nut job sends them out to the Dixie Chicks. Death threats are a fact of life when you are a public figure. I mean seriously, someone made an entire movie about killing Bush. There is a website called killbush.net. If you are not a society that embraces free speech, unless no one makes death threats, then there is not a free society in the world.
So, is it sad that a few hundred dumb red necks sent death threats to the Dixie Chicks? Sure. Does the fact that the US has a few hundred dumb red necks willing to send empty threats to the Dixie Chicks out of 300,000,000 other people prove that US is some how fascist state that doesn't allow free speech? No. Get 300,000,000 people together in one nation and someone is going to act like a douche. That is life.
Lets pretend I am a Republican. Let us also pretend that I am an awesome punk rocker that all the punks love. One day I get up on stage and start railing against how stupid it is to be pro-choice, let gays merry, or have weak drug laws. What do you think happens? My fans would get pissed off, no matter how much they like my music.
Look, if you are a celebrity, you are taking a risk every time you come out and make a political statement. It isn't like you are analyst with access to CIA intelligence or an economist whose understands the deep inner workings of the economy. You are one stupid person in 6 billion who just so happens to perform some form of art good enough (or at least marketed enough) that a lot of people appreciate. You are not an authority on anything other than your art. If you take an invitation to express your art as an invitation to express your political opinions, fans will rightfully we get pissed off that you are wasting their time spewing your self righteous stuck up opinion. They don't like you for your opinion, they like you for your art. Get over it.
The Dixie Chicks took the stage, looked their fan base in the eye, and told them all that they were stupid for liking Bush. Now, I might not agree with the stupid red necks, and I might not like Bush, but I am unsurprised and unsympathetic about the treatment Dixie Chicks received. If they want to be politicians, they should be politicians. If they want to be well loved stars, they should work on maintaining the love. Part of maintaining the love is not preaching to your fans the exact opposite of what they believe. The moral of the story is that if you make a living by having millions of red necks loving you, don't call them stupid. Either accept that they are going to stop liking you and make your speeches, or in the words of our fine internet generation STFU.
Finally, free speech is just that; free speech. Free speech means that I can turn to a democrat and call him a pussy ass terrorist lover with the fighting constitution of a Frenchman because he wants to pull out of Iraq. I can turn to a Republican and call him a racist, women hating, vile little bigot who won't be happy until every black person is back on a plantation and women have their feet bound and clits circumcised. I can also flick off the Dixie Chicks, call their music pure shit, and swear to never listen to their crap again because they are a bunch of flaming liberals who want queers and terrorist running around the street.
This is free speech.
People need to harden themselves up a little and get over it. Free speech includes name calling and telling people who disagree with you to fuck off. Free speech does not imply rational debate or a thoughtful and open mind (though free speech certainly helps those things). Free speech is for racist KKK shit heads, neonazis, stupid red necks, whiny little pop punk bands, brain dead pop artist, self righteous actors living in mansions hypocritical to their beliefs, and all the people who hate all the above and would sooner plug their ears with their fingers if they were not busy using them to give a big two handed New York hello.
This is mother fucking free speech. No one said that it was nice.
"Managed" democracy" has nothing to do with their economic system. It has everything to do with their electoral system. For instance, when Russia uses the state run media to smear political opponents and praise Putin, that is "managed democracy". When providence governors are go from being elected officials to officials appointed by the Kremlin without vote, that is "managed democracy". If that is the sort of stuff you are in favor of, well, what you really want is not the silly doublespeak "managed democracy", but a non-democratic authoritarian government.
Oh please, Putin is not a shining star of socialist values. Hell, a sizable block of his opposition are communist. The only thing that unites the opposition to Putin is the fact that he is tearing apart the nations democratic institutions piece by piece. You can ignore the fact all you want, but it won't change that governors who were once elected are now appointed, nor that the state owned TV stations (which is pretty much all the TV stations) are blatantly is used as a mechanism one sided political promotion mechanism.
If Putin were to somehow succeed in realizing his ideals, Russia would be a much better place to live than North America. Great. And if Dick Chaney was to realize his dreams the Middle East would be one big happy democracy with bustling markets and a love for the US that rivals Japan's post World War II infatuation. If Kim Jong Il had his dream realized, the Koreas would be happily united, full of happy Kim Jong loving people, and the US would be begging them to be their friends. If Hitler's dream was realized we would live in a happy utopia where there is peace, harmony, no nasty Jews, no moral corruption, and we would be on year 60 of a glorious 1000 reich. So? Who cares? These people were all delusional, and their delusions all resulted in the suffering of millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions. Putin will never see his ideals reached because he is a brutal autocrat, just like every other high minded asshole in history who made up one excuse or another to deprive his people of basic liberties.
As far as your ranting about socialism... when in the hell did I even mention socialism? What exactly are you arguing against? I spoke only of democracy. If Russia wanted to implement European styled socialism, good for them. Plenty of European nations have managed to be both socialistic and democratic to greater and lesser degrees without becoming a (in Putin's own doublespeak words) "managed democracy". Contrary to the popular beliefs of some socialist heroes, you can have both socialism AND democracy. It is okay to let the people vote and conduct politics in the open without developing a totalitarian dictatorship built around a cult of personality.
Stop defending these assholes because they speak pretty words that fall in line with your politics. A dictator is a dictator, regardless if he hides behind divine right, military power, fascist ideals, capitalist ideals, or even socialist ideals.
Putin's approval ratings are mostly real. Russia's transition to democracy (well, it isn't one any more) was rough. The people went from full bellies and empty souls to being hungry and confused. Russia was pillaged in its transition to a market democracy due to some awesomely bad economic policy (which the west does indeed share some blame for). By the time Putin came to power the people just wanted stability and anything other then a rapid economic plummet. Putin has given that to them, and they love him for it.
The problem is that in stabilizing Russia Putin also gobbled up all the power he could find and has set Russia on course to look more like Russia of old then Europe of the US. Hell, Putin calls the Russian style of government "managed democracy". Putin has pooled all of the power of the state into his own hands. Russia suspended elections for governors and now simply appoints them with an old skool nod to the USSR. Russian TV is now almost entirely state and blatantly used for propaganda, making campaigning against Putin and his allies all but impossible. The government, while not throwing people in Siberian slave labor camps Stalin style, happily detain activists by the thousands before any attempt to hold a protest.
Russia hasn't caught up with their old Soviet ways yet but they are headed that way. Russia still maintains a relatively free printed press, and Putin has so far refrained from writing himself as dictator into the constitution. That said, the direction Russia is headed isn't pretty, and I really doubt that Putin is going to appoint a successor who is going to be a champion of liberalization and democracy.
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The US didn't not kick over Saddam during Gulf War I because it feared a civil war. You need to recall that this was before anyone really understood just how ugly the ethnic tension was. Hell, very few people (including the most outspoken war critics) knew that there might be ethnic fighting before Gulf War II. The US and its allies stopped short of kicking over Saddam in Gulf War I because the UN coalition was in the process of falling apart and Bush I didn't want to slug out alone.
The civil war thing was something that extremely few people saw coming. Some for of resistance was pretty much expected by most people with a brain on their heads, but very few voice were warning of such sever ethnic violence. In hind sight it is obvious, but at the time it was not. Hell, I'll challenge anyone to go find a quote from any US or British politician arguing against war because of fear of a genocidal ethnic war.
Serbia should have taught us this lesson, but as current events, no one seemed to get it. What is scary is that the various foreign intelligence agencies didn't catch on that kicking over a strongman who had spent his career brutalizing a majority ethnic group might lead to some violence.
We call them 'insurgents' because that is the correct term that describes all the fighters in Iraq.
A resistance movement is seeking to oust a foreign occupying power to restore the previous ruling power. Now, it is true that Iraq has resistance movements trying to kick out Americans and restore the Baathist to power, but they do not actually make up all or even a majority of the fighters in Iraq. Shiite militias and Al-qaeda are not seeking to restore the Baathist.
Insurgent is a broader term. An insurgent on the other hand is someone who takes up arms against the current governments authority. That is a term that describes almost all of the fighters in Iraq. Iraq fighters are not just fighting occupation. They are fighting other militia groups, the government, and some times just indulging in good old fashion ethnic cleansing. Doing any of the above is defying the authority of the current government, hence they are insurgents.
As far as to why we don't call them freedom fighters, it is because Blair and Bush (and most Western folks for that matter) don't consider Baathist trying to restore an Arab fascist government, Shiites trying to ethnically cleanse the Sunnis, or Al-qaeda trying to create a theocratic state and ethnically cleanse Shiites on the side to really fall under any (western) definition of "freedom fighting".
If it makes you feel better, and I am sure it will because you are clearly suffering from a sever case of moral relativism, I imagine that if the Soviets had invaded the US or Britain, they would have called us insurgents and not freedom fighters also.
The UN is good for a lot of things like emergency aid, negotiating peace between waring sides, humanitarian missions, observations of ceasefires, broad health initiatives, environmental treaties, and even occasionally setting up international standards. The UN is utterly worthless at protecting/enforcing freedom and liberty, conducting military action, or enforcing even the most basic morals like don't genocide thy neighbor.
No, bits and pieces of the source code have been leaked. Small bits and pieces. No one (other then Microsoft) has anything other then a few code fragments. Microsoft keeps its source code closed not through copyright, but through secrecy, Copyright is just the legal hammer they used to whack people when they manage to sneak off with a small chunk of the code.
I think GPs larger point is that there are two ways to "solve" global warming. The first way is to revert is to reduce our output of green house gases immensely. The other way is to find a technological solution. Now, some times these two solutions go hand in hand. A solar panel both reduce green house gas output (over time at least, you still need to build the damn things) and it is a technological solution. A large government tax on gas might reduce total output, but have strong negative economic and technological consequences.
It is like, imagine if during the industrial revolution everyone saw how ugly coal power was and decided not to use it for the health of the planet. Where would we be right now? We would still be in a preindustrial society utilizing primitive windmills and water power. Humans would be living much shorter and far more miserable lives that don't reach much farther past 30 years. Now, you could claim that this be a prettier world, but it wouldn't be a better world to live in for humans. It took an ugly and messy industrial revolution to get us to the point where people expect to live into their 70's and giving birth to a child isn't a game of Russian roulette.
I am all for reduction of our green house gas output. I think things like the Kyoto protocol are not a bad idea. The answer isn't reduction though. Reduction and self restraint is a temporary measure that delays bad things from happening. The final solution is a technological one. If we recognize that as a society we can't/won't reduce enough to 'solve' the problem and that there needs to be a technological solution, regardless if it is some form of terraforming, better solar panels, fusion, or all of the above, then we need to ensure that the steps we take in reduction don't stunt our future ability to actually solve the problem.
Yeah, and some video games portray Germans as evil villains, but we still love Germans and their beer.
You can't help but expect video games to imitate reality. The reality is that people that the US conflicts with the most often are from the Middle East. The majority of our terror threats come from Arabs. If we were fighting over Taiwan with China I am sure that piles of games where you beat on Chinese would be out the next day.
Games want to imitate reality. They want to give us the chance to play as our heroes and anti-heroes. The reality is that our 'heroes' are fighting Middle Easterners right now. It shouldn't come as a big shock that our games reflect this. Now, it certainly sucks if you live in the Middle East and are a gamer because the US is the Mecca of gaming.
All of that said, I think that the gaming community has been pretty even handed. Considering the nature of the conflict that we are in, I am surprised that so few games try and tackle it directly. At best, we have piles of World War II games and handful of games against faceless 'terrorist'.
If anyone has anything to bitch about in how they are portrayed in video games, it is the Germans. Man, 60 years latter and they are still villain #1 in half of all games.
Believe me, the people coming into the US illegally are NOT engineers. You can rest safely know for a fact that they are not immigrating here to take your job, eat your babies, and have sex with your wife.
The US is currently suffering from less then 5% unemployment. When you have under 5% unemployment it means that you have a labor shortage. The only things corporations, especially ones that work at the fringes of profitability, can do is hire illegals or go out of business. We have a finite amount of labor in this nation. Once it is used up, it is gone. If a farm needs 300 people do manual labor and can't get them without offering enough money to put them out of business, then it goes out of business. Now, I am all for businesses going out of business, but not when there is an ample supply of people willing to work just across the border. Little is gained when a corporation goes out of business in a full employment market. Cutting off immigration just murders a pile of US industries that are out merrily providing us with cheap goods and services.
Don't get me wrong, I am against illegal immigration. However, the solution is not build better fences or waste billions of dollars trying to root out every single smuggler and forcing people into more dangerous methods of crossing. The solution is to make it so that a poor Mexican who will happily work for close to minimum wage in some marginal industry can legally cross. We want to know these people are here. Want to run background checks and make them come in through legal points of entry. So long as our immigration system is so badly fucked up where it takes a decade a pile of money to get across, people are going to illegally immigrate.
As much as I hate a lot of what Bush does, he had a damn good immigration plan that the Republican congress (and a few Dems) murdered. He opened up legal ways for guest workers and immigrants to come here. Allowing legal crossing would have shut down smugglers, saved lives, and resulted in collecting tax money, better health and safety oversight, and all the benefits you receive when workers work legally.
Black markets (even in labor) create crime, poverty, and misery. The only way to bring down a black market is to legalize and regulate the market. This is what we need to do with immigration.
Do you know what I would do if I REALLY wanted to drive drunk in one of these things? Put on a pair of gloves that prevent my alcohol filled sweat from activating the alcohol detector.
Do you know what I would do if my car decided it was going to slow me down while blasting down a busy Boston highway with traffic moving at 70 mph due to a false positive? I would be utterly fucked and have a few seconds to act before getting plowed into twenty times by cars moving twice my speed.
Anyone who wants to defeat this system will defeat it. The only thing this is going to do is potentially kill utterly innocent people. I am all for the car blaring warnings that you are driving funny or intoxicated. I am utterly against the car deciding that the middle of a highway is a good place to stop because its pattern recognition system has failed or my intoxicated passenger gets some alcohol laced fluid on my steering wheel or hands.
Over coming the alcohol sensor is a simple matter of putting on a pair of gloves. Any drunk who is sober enough to get his key in the ignition is also going to be sober enough to know he can defeat his car with a pair of gloves.
As far as the 'features' of this car, I don't want them. I can prevent myself from drive drunk without my cars help, thank you very much. The last thing in the world do I want three separate systems to disable my car. The alcohol sensor could be triggered by other sources of alcohol. More scary, the erratic driving and the lack of pupil focusing could be triggered by poor pattern recognition. The last thing in the world I want is for the car to decide is that I am not focusing enough due to a glitch and try and slow me down on in the middle of a Boston highway during heavy traffic chugging along at 70 mph.
If Toyota wants put in a safety feature that I would actually want, give me a system to warn me that I am falling asleep THAT I CAN TURN OFF. I don't mind my car warning me that my driving is looking funny or that it seems like I am not focused, but I want to be able to disable the warning should it become clear that there is a glitch. The last thing in the world I want is for it to take control away from me. I would rather veer off the road and hit a treat then come to a dead stop in the middle of a highway. Trees only hit you ounce.
As to your point that this was a failure of the Shiite government due to its hurried nature...
There is some argument that quickly disposing of Saddam will help cut the cancer away and allow healing to begin quicker and crush the hopes of those who would otherwise never agree to live with a unity government. For me personally, I would be curious to see how the speed of justice presented in the Saddam case compared to the speed of justice served out for the Nuremberg Trials. The Nuremberg Trials were an excellent example of how this sort of thing could have been done and started towards the path of healing the nation. Of course, the circumstances were wildly different, so perhaps the comparison is unfounded.
We should all see how horrible an execution is, just like we should all see how horrible a war is in graphic detail. If you wake up in the night with a sweat, good because these things should have that effect on you and perhaps that will influence the people we vote for.
Oh yeah, I wake up covered in sweat thinking about how badly Saddam suffered. That poor man endured seconds worth of insults followed by a quick and clean death. That poor man received no justice. I think I will cry myself to sleep.
Seriously. If it is some how "unjust" to kill Saddam... who exactly is it just to kill? What do you have to do before you deserve to die for your actions? Scoop out baby brains on camera and laugh with malevolent glee, then rape the corpses? The guy was a really bad human. Get this through your fuzzy relativistic sense of morality that could justify mass rape and genocide without flinching.
In this world, I swear that people would throw a hissy fit if they were transported back and found someone making plans to kill Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Bad people exist in the world. It is okay to kill them.
"Mad cow" disease is a basically a media hoax. How many people in this world have died to mad cow disease? Less the a hundred? You have a better chance of dying in a swimming pool, driving a car, riding a bike, or being struck by lightening. Seriously, you are far more likely to be eaten by a shark then killed by mad cow disease. People's sense of danger has been completely fucked over by mass media. The stuff that you should worry about is ignored, while stupid shit that isn't even worth noticing is treated like a sign of the apocalypses. Get a grip. If safety is what you really are worried about, you should be far more terrified of crossing the street, riding a bike, or taking a swim in a swimming pool, then worries about feeding sheep brains to cows.
As far as cloning goes... you are not going to die eating a cloned animal. It is going to taste delicious and tasty just like all the other cows. It is like eating a twin. "Unnatural"? Eh, maybe. Tender and delicious? Absolutely.
Let me put that football measurement into something a slashdotter can relate to. It had the area of screen on a 728,000 inch monitor.
You are right in that it has to do with 'fantasy', but it has nothing to do with "dark Gothic horror and sex". The youth of today know that Mars is a barren and desolate wasteland that makes the most hellish inhospitable places on Earth look pleasant. The youth of today realize that Venus is not a steamy jungle teeming with life, but a hellish world where the atmosphere will rend even the most hardened probes into a pile of molten goo.
The youth of today know damn well that the chances of NASA some how blazing a trail that they can follow behind is slim to nil. Who wants to shell out piles of money so that the government can stick a dozen people on the barren vacuum of the moon or send a multi-trillion dollar spaceship to Mars to collect rock samples?
If there was a viable way to get your average Joe into space, I think people would be extremely excited. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but many Americans are frothing at the mouth for another frontier. It is almost comical to see thousands of Americans switching costs in some hopeless attempt to keep pushing forward. There is a generation of pioneers waiting for their chance. The issue is that rocket fueled spaceships are certainly not going to be the means by which they get there.
We are stuck in a gravity well and everyone realizes it. No amount of fantasy where we send a dozen people to the Moon and Mars is going to change the fact that it takes millions to get in space, and millions more to make even short stays. Perhaps when someone strings up a space elevator things will change as space is opened up to the public. Until then, the pubic is wisely covering their own asses and telling the government to fuck off with consuming their resources to dump a handful people onto barren vacuum worlds for a month or two before returning with rock samples.
Airplanes are safe. Mile for mile, they are about the safest way you can possibly travel. We are really good at putting around at 500 mpg or so without exploding. Even when there are problems, the airlines are damn good about making sure that no one dies. In the last couple of decades, US airlines average well under 1 crash per 5 years (if you subtract out that whole 9/11 thing). Airplanes are about as safe as travel gets. You are not dramatically increasing your odds to die by getting on one.
When you go from putting around at 500 MPH to mach 25 (that is 19,000 mph), you make a pretty damn big jump. A mistake that in a normal airline is of no consequence results in your airplane/spaceship tearing itself apart in a fraction of a second. The thermal stress on the airframe goes from the 100 degree swing airplanes see to a 1000+ degree swing. Loss of cabin pressure changes from being a pain in the ass where everyone needs to breath through a mask, to killing everyone in a very horrible and painful way in under a minute (a mask isn't going to save your eyes, skin, ears, or keep the temperature up in a vacuum).
This is like going from making a workable biplane to proposing that someone build the concord.
Does a working scramjet hold lots of possibilities? Hell yes, but most of them are either military possibilities or space exploration possibilities because both of these ventures accept human casualties. Corporations and employees on the other hand are far more unlikely to risk death on one of these things just to save a few hours of travel time, especially in this age of communication.
I really doubt that this thing is going to take off (ha ha, pun) in the near future for two reasons.
First, scramjets have been talked about forever. No one has yet to do anything more interesting then blow up a few scramjet drones and waste millions. Certainly we are going to get it 'right' at some point, but I am deeply skeptical that it is going to be in the near future. Even if it was in the near future, I am even more skeptical that it would be cost effective enough to operate as a commercial airliner for such a small nitch market.
Second, who the fuck would be willing to fly these things other then an astronaut? When an astronaut goes up in the space shuttle, they realize that they basically have a significant chance of dying. When your average business man takes a flight, he doesn't expect to be risking his life on an airplane that suffers massive extremes of hot, cold, acceleration, and air pressure. You don't go out of control at mach 25... you just disintegrate.
I am deeply skeptical that this company is going to make a scramjet, make it economical, and then make it safe enough for commercial use. I am not holding my breath on this one. I give Duke Nukem Forever a better chance of seeing the light of day in this decade then I give to this thing.
He was doing more then getting free wifi. He launched a DOS against his former companies customers. This guy got exactly what he deserved. The moral of the story? Don't break into your former employer's wireless and start locking DOS attacks or else you get thrown in jail. If anything, I think the guy got off light.
Stars get death threats all the time. I can promise you that Limbaugh gets death threats daily. You might not get death threats, but I am sure some left wing nut job sends them out daily in the same way some right wing nut job sends them out to the Dixie Chicks. Death threats are a fact of life when you are a public figure. I mean seriously, someone made an entire movie about killing Bush. There is a website called killbush.net. If you are not a society that embraces free speech, unless no one makes death threats, then there is not a free society in the world.
So, is it sad that a few hundred dumb red necks sent death threats to the Dixie Chicks? Sure. Does the fact that the US has a few hundred dumb red necks willing to send empty threats to the Dixie Chicks out of 300,000,000 other people prove that US is some how fascist state that doesn't allow free speech? No. Get 300,000,000 people together in one nation and someone is going to act like a douche. That is life.
Lets pretend I am a Republican. Let us also pretend that I am an awesome punk rocker that all the punks love. One day I get up on stage and start railing against how stupid it is to be pro-choice, let gays merry, or have weak drug laws. What do you think happens? My fans would get pissed off, no matter how much they like my music.
Look, if you are a celebrity, you are taking a risk every time you come out and make a political statement. It isn't like you are analyst with access to CIA intelligence or an economist whose understands the deep inner workings of the economy. You are one stupid person in 6 billion who just so happens to perform some form of art good enough (or at least marketed enough) that a lot of people appreciate. You are not an authority on anything other than your art. If you take an invitation to express your art as an invitation to express your political opinions, fans will rightfully we get pissed off that you are wasting their time spewing your self righteous stuck up opinion. They don't like you for your opinion, they like you for your art. Get over it.
The Dixie Chicks took the stage, looked their fan base in the eye, and told them all that they were stupid for liking Bush. Now, I might not agree with the stupid red necks, and I might not like Bush, but I am unsurprised and unsympathetic about the treatment Dixie Chicks received. If they want to be politicians, they should be politicians. If they want to be well loved stars, they should work on maintaining the love. Part of maintaining the love is not preaching to your fans the exact opposite of what they believe. The moral of the story is that if you make a living by having millions of red necks loving you, don't call them stupid. Either accept that they are going to stop liking you and make your speeches, or in the words of our fine internet generation STFU.
Finally, free speech is just that; free speech. Free speech means that I can turn to a democrat and call him a pussy ass terrorist lover with the fighting constitution of a Frenchman because he wants to pull out of Iraq. I can turn to a Republican and call him a racist, women hating, vile little bigot who won't be happy until every black person is back on a plantation and women have their feet bound and clits circumcised. I can also flick off the Dixie Chicks, call their music pure shit, and swear to never listen to their crap again because they are a bunch of flaming liberals who want queers and terrorist running around the street.
This is free speech.
People need to harden themselves up a little and get over it. Free speech includes name calling and telling people who disagree with you to fuck off. Free speech does not imply rational debate or a thoughtful and open mind (though free speech certainly helps those things). Free speech is for racist KKK shit heads, neonazis, stupid red necks, whiny little pop punk bands, brain dead pop artist, self righteous actors living in mansions hypocritical to their beliefs, and all the people who hate all the above and would sooner plug their ears with their fingers if they were not busy using them to give a big two handed New York hello.
This is mother fucking free speech. No one said that it was nice.
"Managed" democracy" has nothing to do with their economic system. It has everything to do with their electoral system. For instance, when Russia uses the state run media to smear political opponents and praise Putin, that is "managed democracy". When providence governors are go from being elected officials to officials appointed by the Kremlin without vote, that is "managed democracy". If that is the sort of stuff you are in favor of, well, what you really want is not the silly doublespeak "managed democracy", but a non-democratic authoritarian government.
As far as your ranting about socialism... when in the hell did I even mention socialism? What exactly are you arguing against? I spoke only of democracy. If Russia wanted to implement European styled socialism, good for them. Plenty of European nations have managed to be both socialistic and democratic to greater and lesser degrees without becoming a (in Putin's own doublespeak words) "managed democracy". Contrary to the popular beliefs of some socialist heroes, you can have both socialism AND democracy. It is okay to let the people vote and conduct politics in the open without developing a totalitarian dictatorship built around a cult of personality.
Stop defending these assholes because they speak pretty words that fall in line with your politics. A dictator is a dictator, regardless if he hides behind divine right, military power, fascist ideals, capitalist ideals, or even socialist ideals.
Putin's approval ratings are mostly real. Russia's transition to democracy (well, it isn't one any more) was rough. The people went from full bellies and empty souls to being hungry and confused. Russia was pillaged in its transition to a market democracy due to some awesomely bad economic policy (which the west does indeed share some blame for). By the time Putin came to power the people just wanted stability and anything other then a rapid economic plummet. Putin has given that to them, and they love him for it.
The problem is that in stabilizing Russia Putin also gobbled up all the power he could find and has set Russia on course to look more like Russia of old then Europe of the US. Hell, Putin calls the Russian style of government "managed democracy". Putin has pooled all of the power of the state into his own hands. Russia suspended elections for governors and now simply appoints them with an old skool nod to the USSR. Russian TV is now almost entirely state and blatantly used for propaganda, making campaigning against Putin and his allies all but impossible. The government, while not throwing people in Siberian slave labor camps Stalin style, happily detain activists by the thousands before any attempt to hold a protest.
Russia hasn't caught up with their old Soviet ways yet but they are headed that way. Russia still maintains a relatively free printed press, and Putin has so far refrained from writing himself as dictator into the constitution. That said, the direction Russia is headed isn't pretty, and I really doubt that Putin is going to appoint a successor who is going to be a champion of liberalization and democracy.