Ask your father-in-law how long it would take for the drill to hit the ground in ANWR if Congress opened it up for drilling today.
No need to wait, I'll fill you in on how timelines go.
Step 1) Get your leases approved by the BLM. This includes your environmental impact statement, collection and analysis of seismic data, and the auction and award of leases. Generally this is considered a two to three year process. However, since in this particular case there is already a veritable cornucopia of environmental data available, at least 80% of this could be dispensed with completely, and the auction process can be realigned to take into account the parallel proceedings of Step 2), this could be made effectively zero.
Step 2) Drill exploratory well and collect geophysical data. Again, in this particular case the area is so well studied that the trucks could start ferrying stuff out tomorrow, and as leases are guaranteed to be awarded the costs can be made a floor of the auction. Typically, an exploration well on the Alaska North Slope takes two full seasons to reach the desired depth, but fastracking in a well understood area, one very well may be sufficient.
Step 3) Develop a production development plan and obtain BLM approval, if a commercial oil reservoir is discovered. That is pretty much a gimme in this situation, and there is no reason it should take longer than one year, unless what the test well finds is a *massive* surprise, in which case possibly two.
Step 4) Construct feeder pipelines; fabricate separation/treatment plants and ship them up by barge; construct drilling pads; drill to depth; and complete the wells. This is barely possible in two years at great expense, but 3 to 4 years is a more logical timeline.
So, our timeline is:
A) No expense spared, exploration in parallel with auction, no surprises in test drills, all permits expedited to the legal limit: 4 years, flat.
B) No special provisions or expense, but no unexpected delays and promptness of government: 6 years.
C) Upper limit of normal exploration budgeting: 12 years. However, that is not a rational expectation, because the high profile of this project means that at least two years of normal government delays will not happen, moving the baseline directly towards B), and because there is far more extant knowledge than in a normal exploration process, it is really hard to conceive that at least another two year's worth of data gathering and analysis can not be saved easily.
In any case, it takes a lot less time to plant a well than it does to say grow an apple orchard. If we were short on apples, would you go around beaking off that we can't plant ourselves out of an apple crisis? No? Then how do you figure it makes any more sense than that to say that we can't drill ourselves out of an oil crisis?
You can actually go back a lot further in your 'golden ages' than that to trace this.
Pretty much all of what we think of as "great" art/music was produced in a not dissimilar fashion, by being underwritten by King or Church in order to enhance their prestige. The modern version of King and Church is the incorporated company, and the modern version of prestige is, well, still prestige actually, but it's labelled "Goodwill" on balance sheets.
So the Sistine Chapel, for instance, was certainly commissioned as "pimping product" as you so delicately put it, that being the Catholic Church's product offering of salvation amongst the extremely competitive free market in religions, but most people see some intrinsic worth in it despite being a commercial message.
OK... just one more post, since you're so insistent.
Now look here, son, to some of us what you casually stick your blinders on your idiot little head and refer to as "ancient history", we find a personally significant and extremely disturbing memory that there were places in the world where nerve gas and mustard gas were being used in a World War II style war of pure land grab naked aggression against a country's neighbours, while we were trying to sleep.
Add another 15-odd years to that of internal genocide against Kurds and Marsh Arabs, a second war started against a tiny neighbour out of sheer naked aggression, and the continual flouting of UN resolutions the ceasefire was contingent on...... and well, son, there ain't just no way you're going to convince that some of us with a memory that works over the 25 year span in consideration that killing Saddam Hussein's evil ass is anything but a service to international order. No matter how loudly and repeatedly you bleat and whine your hippie talking points.
Now, if you want to make the case that the way it was gone about was insanely expensive and extremely ill prepared indeed and a much better way to go about things do would have been to send a nice big cheque to Israel with a note "Nice work on Gerard Bull! Pity his boss is still around..." sure I can get on side with you on that.
So, you keep telling yourself that all the deaths were necessary.
No, I keep telling myself that when you said
Iraq NEVER had WMD... NEVER had any link to terrorists.
you were, in fact, 100% absolutely and provably wrong, and provably wrong in under a minute at that.
Since lunch break is over in four minutes, I'll take that documented evidence that what you say is, in fact, the exact opposite of the truth, and I will apply that lesson to everything else you say with no further concern.
Perhaps next time you want to try to convince somebody of a position, not starting out with blatant and trivially exposed lies could be an alternative strategy you perhaps could consider employing!
Hmmm, well, I'm on lunch break, let's take a minute and do some quick googling, shall we?
Iraq NEVER had WMD
"In March 1986 UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar formally accused Iraq of using chemical weapons against Iran. Citing the report of four chemical warfare experts whom the UN had sent to Iran in February and March 1986, the secretary general called on Baghdad to end its violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol on the use of chemical weapons. The UN report concluded that "Iraqi forces have used chemical warfare against Iranian forces"; the weapons used included both mustard gas and nerve gas..."
"Turkish intelligence agents told the agency that Baghdad's support of the PKK intensified especially during the last three months when Saddam's arms and equipment were supplied to PKK bases in Iraq by the Iraqi command.."
"Beyond cash and diplomatic help, Saddam Hussein was the Conrad Hilton of the terrorist world. He provided a place for terrorists to kick back, relax, and reflect after killing people for a living...."
"Saddam Hussein's general store for terrorists included medical care, too..."
"According to dissidents, journalists who have visited, and even United Nations weapons inspectors, Saddam Hussein appears to have offered training to terrorists, in addition to funding, diplomatic help, safe haven and medical care. The Associated Press reports that Coalition forces shut down at least three terrorist training camps in Iraq. The most notorious of these was the base at Salman Pak, about 15 miles southeast of Baghdad. Before the war, numerous Iraqi defectors said the camp featured a passenger jet on which terrorists sharpened their air piracy skills...."
Yes, and in the true sense of "conservative," one would want to LIMIT the power of the government.
You misunderstand "conservative". The true sense of "conservative", and the only one it should retain for political discourse to have any objective meaning whatsoever, is to avoid change. Thus it is correct to label as "conservative" those who defended absolute monarchy against its removal, and those who defended the Communist Party of the USSR against its removal, although both of those are as far from limited power as one could imagine.
And, indeed, a great deal of the positions referred to as "liberal" in current U.S. political discourse are, in fact, conservative. A misunderstanding helped not in the slightest by the universal usage of "conservative" as a synonym for "evil" by those self-identifying as "liberal". And vice versa, of course.
Limiting the power of the government is most correctly -- or at least, most understandably -- referred to these days as a "libertarian" policy. This is also referred to as "classical liberal", to distinguish the original philosophy referred to as "liberal" from its current meaning, which it seems in the vast majority of cases works out to "utterly totalitarian, but in service of ends we feel are good, namely stomping out any disparity among individuals".
DirectX development in Wine froze. Years later, Cedega still hasn't returned the code, and Wine just barely came out from it. This is the kind of issues that the GPL addresses.
You mean, the issue that users get functionality years earlier than they would have if the project had been GPL? By making sure that users get stuff more slowly? Hmmmm... from a user point of view that's just plain not a winner. I'm kinda not seeing how it's a win for the GPL in any fashion, actually.
Or are you claiming that it made absolutely not one whit of difference to Cedega's decision that the source was not GPL -- that they would have invested the exact same amount of effort if the source code had, actually, been GPL?
Well, if you assert that... then no need to respond, as you are clearly so out of touch with reality that your opinion is worthless.
If you don't assert that... then you seem to have proven here that the GPL is, in fact, not in the best interests of users. Good job!
Yep; just as whenever somebody says "Trust me!" or "This is the truth!" or "I'm not lying!" you know beyond any reasonable doubt that they are indeed attempting to deceive you.
But, de facto, the suits just haven't been filed and the risk just isn't there; at least, it isn't there yet.
As a further note to this, I happen to be at the moment appropriating some Apple source code for my own project. It strikes me that if their lawyers did not agree with me that pure public domain provision would not indeed involve the same legal risks as public provision of other property does, there would be no need for these provisions.
IN NO EVENT SHALL APPLE BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE, REPRODUCTION, MODIFICATION AND/OR DISTRIBUTION OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE, HOWEVER CAUSED AND WHETHER UNDER THEORY OF CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT LIABILITY OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF APPLE HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
So, de facto there may at this exact moment be no risk, but it surely seems that Apple lawyers recognize an extant de jure risk, yes?
If you think it is expressly OK to take code with complete disregard for the wishes of the person who wrote it, then by all means, stick with public domain.
I'm not making a moral judgment. I'm saying that ability to take with "complete disregard" is the only yardstick by which actual freedom can be judged.
But at the very least, acknowledge the fact that other people might have other motives or goals in mind for the things they create, and respect their wishes.
Ah, but the point here is that I am not "respecting" their wishes. I am forced by the power of the State to do as they say. Whether the end of that usage of force is to make me give up money in advance for the privilege, or give away my own work in turn for the privilege, or lack that privilege completely, there is no difference philosophically; in all of these cases, my conduct is determined by the power of the State. If I ignore it, they will eventually come to apply force to compel it; if I resist, they will shoot me dead, same as any other power of the State I choose to resist.
If your behaviour is compelled by law, and refusal to abide by that law and to resist the judicial consequences of ignoring it will eventually lead to you being shot dead... then there is no freedom.
Truthfully, except in malicious cases, there is de facto indemnity over public domain code--and in malicious cases, no license or lack there of is likely to help. In short, those who use BSD-like licenses are selfishly covering their ass through abuse of state monopoly rights.
Whilst your first paragraph attempting to contort the application of force into a defense of freedom is pure sophistry -- did you help out the Bush administration with justifications for invading Iraq, perchance? -- this deserves some further exposition.
Indeed, if you release source into the public domain you should be held accountable for its use and effects through tort law. An analogy would be that if you allow public access to your private property, you have a duty to ensure a basic standard of safety to those allowed to traverse it. And every so often, indeed, you do hear of some abuse of that, like a burglar who falls through a skylight and successfully sues. But generally, the law of torts functions properly, that if you provide a public service you accept liability for its consequences. Why, indeed, should source code I release be treated any differently than the path through my woods I allow hikers?
RMS's "Free" means that the source can never be locked up in a proprietary prison.
Which is nonsensical. Something placed in the public domain cannot be removed from it.
What you really mean to say is
"RMS's 'Free' means that people are forced under penalty of State-enforced law to give away source they write/modify themselves".
Hard to reconcile that with any definition of "free" that the world at large would recognize.
Re:Political Views
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Free software is the epitome of free market economics; it's the enforcement of absolute competition... proprietary software builds upon state protected monopoly rights and, as is becoming quite obvious, has more in common with former soviet style state factories (you _will_ use Vista and you _will_ like it; no alternate providers here), I'd say comments about socialism are weak.
Er, no. The GPL builds upon state protected monopoly rights as well. Otherwise, how could it be enforced?
If your license is anything other than "public domain" then you are, indeed, forcing your wishes upon others backed by the power of the State.
Source is not truly "free" unless everyone is FREE to disregard your wishes completely. Setting rules they must abide by, which the GPL does, makes it NOT free.
An accurate name for source licensed under GPL and similar licenses would be "Communal" -- or "Community" -- or perhaps "Cooperative" if you want to avoid the philosophically accurate association with "Communism". "Free", however, is not. Only public domain source does not rely on the coercive power of the State, and therefore only public domain source can be claimed with intellectual honesty to truly be "free".
the increased global temperature is a bad thing for us
On the contrary, if you examine the record, optimum biosphere diversity and extent appears to be achieved at around 3 C above current global norms. And sticking to the human species in particular, deaths from a one degree chill exceed deaths from a one degree warm by a factor of around four. Presumably before modern climate-regulating technology that ratio would have been quite a bit more lopsided.
Money quote: "and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming."
Not that this is Scientific American talking here, which is hardly a hotbed of AGW skepticism, to put it extremely mildly.
So "just" clean up all those dirty soot-emitting Chinese factories, and the Arctic will start freezing more.
This policy has the advantage of being A Really Fucking Good Idea(TM) whether you're a true believer in AGW all the way over to denying it completely.
Of course, in the real world, not only do we not discuss China's possible particulate-based contribution to GW, we even exempt them from even discussions about adhering to Kyoto, despite the fact that they've been the largest global C02 emitter two years running now and the rate of increase is accelerating...
You think that -- and it's conventional to do so, I grant you -- because our meaning today of "regulated" is almost the exact opposite of what it meant when this was written.
See, originally, "regulated" meant "operating at a proper rate" or "set to an external standard" and it was applied to machines like windmills and clocks respectively, not to human behaviours at all.
By the time the 2A was drafted, that original meaning had become applied to human organizations in the sense of "functioning smoothly" or "powerful, capable". Couple that with the other part which is unclear to a modern reader of what the drafters really meant by "Free State", and a modern rendition of the 2A would be
"Since if a country's not going to have a standing army then citizen levies are going to be its only defense, nobody can make any law stopping an able-bodied free male between 18 and 45 acquiring whatever weapons they want." Or, more succinctly, "We're Switzerland."
As you may have noticed, that has been rather passed up by events, in that the U.S. does indeed have a standing army. (And in a multitude of other ways is no longer a "Free State" either, but the standing armed forces are the only part relevant to this discussion.) And whilst the militia is generally thought of nowadays as only the organized 'National Guard' as well, that is not legally correct according to either federal or state constitutions, by default all citizens comprise the militia, like Switzerland.
Anyway, getting back to our etymological lesson, once the use of "regulated" had jumped from an engineering term to one applied to human organizations as well, what were previously known as "rules" or "laws" or "directives" began to have the term "regulation" applied to them as a propaganda move -- i.e. this is not a "rule" which would be arbitrary domineering, because following it will result in more regulated behaviour, and "regulated behaviour" at the time uncontroversially meant "better, smoother".
Since that was bullshit and most "regulations" are in fact "rules", and petty and/or silly ones at that, the connotation of "regulation" and "regulated" changed to match over the decades and centuries, and today when we say "regulated" we generally mean "limited, circumscribed, arbitrarily controlled, inflexible, overseen strictly" or something along those lines.
Which is, indeed, almost the precise opposite of the original meaning of "regulated". As is very important in this particular case, we can see from your post. It's fairly self-evident that you are assuming "well regulated militia" means "a militia overseen strictly", when in fact it means "a militia capable of taking on another country's standing army." A rather dramatic difference of interpretation there, no?
If you want to see people without guns, the correct approach would be to argue that now that "United States" is a complete misnomer because now it's a unitary republic, not a federation, and does indeed have a standing army, therefore the intention of the 2A that the U.S. have a citizen militia sufficient to deter any invader, like Switzerland does, is completely obsolete. And therefore a constitutional amendment should be passed to make true in law what most people assume is true in fact, that only members of the State's armed forces are constitutionally recognized as potential combatants, and the existence of federal and state unorganized militias comprising everybody is delegitimized.
I kinda doubt you'd get far with that, but it would be the correct way to address the effectively parachronistic 2nd Amendment's existence.
(For all you Swiss readers, yes, I know the original concept is still working just fine for you, thanks. "Parachronistic" only applying to modern day American sensibilities, I mean.)
Americans often mention that this right must exist so that they can "rise up" against the government. Yet, again, I see little in the way of people inclined to organize themselves to change the status quo.
That's because their ability to rise up has made the status quo such that people are not inclined to change it.
I note with interest that the only nation on the planet that applies the militia concept expressed in this Amendment in its intended function -- that a universally heavily armed populace replaces a standing army -- is Switzerland; and, in what I believe is completely not a coincidence, Switzerland is the only nation on the planet that has possessed a stable constitutional government longer than the United States.
And the militia is everybody. More specifically, able-bodied free male citizens between 18 and 45.
The *organized* militia aka "National Guard" is not the Militia to be well regulated, as you are probably thinking.
Since there was no organized militia when the 2nd Amendment was passed, how could it possibly refer to anything except the unorganized militia, that is, everybody?
If you think otherwise, then you're failing at either #1 or #2.
The only women -- and it's a vanishingly small number -- who put you off with some excuse like that when there's no outside influences are those who treat sex as a bargaining chip in return for money being spent on them. You're better off without those, son.
Sure it does. If they've already decided they're going to. Which they do in, at most, the first three seconds after you make eye contact.
The only three reasons directly asking doesn't work are
1) She's not into you. Which you should be able to pick up on after two exchanged sentences at most. Generally you shouldn't even need to speak though, holding eye contact is almost always a sufficient sign, and the "almost" is pretty much just hedging, I can't recall a single occasion when it wasn't, personally.
2) You fuck up asking. Confident yet detached is correct; nervous or intense will strike you out every time. "So, are we going home now?" is the particular phrasing that works best for me.
3) There's somebody aware of the conversation whom she doesn't want to form the impression she's easy/unfaithful/whatever. Of course, that "somebody" could actually be you, in which case we call it "playing hard to get."
Women generally don't seem to really want what they say they want in a man.
No, they do want exactly what they say.
What you're missing is that they want more to have their offspring be socially and physically dominant. Which leads fairly obviously to mating with what those of lesser social authority call "bad boys", because they'll trade off present happiness for a chance at enhancing their offsprings' dominance at the drop of a hat. If you understand the mathematics of evolution at all, this should be pretty much self-evident, really. But ideally, they'd get both. Since that's rare, we commonly have the whine-to-the-friend syndrome which you relate.
This is why the whole knight-in-shining-armour thing. Somebody who reaps honour and glory off brutally massacring people right and left, then comes back to court and pays chivalric homage to his chosen lady -- that is the veritable apotheosis of what attracts women. The closer you conduct yourself to that, the more women will be attracted to you.
Well, you're kinda close. What you mean is girls like guys who are nice to them. Telling off everybody else as the mood takes you is just fine. If there's any woman who isn't attracted to you for her being the only one you bother being polite to, I haven't met her yet.
Of course, if you *really* want to attract them, the correct approach is to treat most everybody with barely restrained contempt, her with casual indifference, and another prettier girl with impeccably debonair politeness. Once you get those competitive instincts going, whatever qualities you may or may not possess become all but utterly irrelevant. Funny how that works...
The terrorists from the Middle East want to kill all Americans. Why? Because of something our government did decades ago,
Point of information: Whilst you are not actually inaccurate, you are imprecise. By a factor of half a millennium. The "terrorists from the Middle East" got particularly pissed with American troops remaining in Saudi Arabia after the first active phase of the still ongoing Gulf War, true, but long before the nation of America even EXISTED, let alone anything remotely recognizable as "our government" there were fatwas against the West, in particular Spaniards, to reclaim the "Muslim lands" of "Al Andalus". Which most of us know as "Spain", and have since the Reconquista was completed. In 1492.
Or, talk to some Hindus. Whose post-9/11 reaction was basically "Um, guys? We've been battling Muslim terrorists for over a millennium on THIS side of the world? Nice of you to finally get on board?"
However, this kind of historical knowledge and context is not only rare but deemed undesirable by many. "Bush lied, people died" is more suited to their cognitive talents.
OK... I flamebait unreasonably. The actual issue is not people's stupidity. It's that they wish to reduce the problem to one that they can control. Accepting the lessons of history would make that impossible; pretending that the world was a perfect place and Islam spread out of the Arabian peninsula with flower garlands and fluffy bunnies right up to the election of George Bush who is the sole source of evil anywhere in the entire world -- that frames the problem in terms they can affect, and thus empowers them, and therefore all reality which contradicts that is denied.
Indeed, I think that the single best reason for President Obama to be elected is that the shock of these people's delusions running smack into their Messianic Figure dealing with the world as it actually is will be a positive delight to behold...
Slashdot Mirror
Ask your father-in-law how long it would take for the drill to hit the ground in ANWR if Congress opened it up for drilling today.
No need to wait, I'll fill you in on how timelines go.
Step 1) Get your leases approved by the BLM. This includes your environmental impact statement, collection and analysis of seismic data, and the auction and award of leases. Generally this is considered a two to three year process. However, since in this particular case there is already a veritable cornucopia of environmental data available, at least 80% of this could be dispensed with completely, and the auction process can be realigned to take into account the parallel proceedings of Step 2), this could be made effectively zero.
Step 2) Drill exploratory well and collect geophysical data. Again, in this particular case the area is so well studied that the trucks could start ferrying stuff out tomorrow, and as leases are guaranteed to be awarded the costs can be made a floor of the auction. Typically, an exploration well on the Alaska North Slope takes two full seasons to reach the desired depth, but fastracking in a well understood area, one very well may be sufficient.
Step 3) Develop a production development plan and obtain BLM approval, if a commercial oil reservoir is discovered. That is pretty much a gimme in this situation, and there is no reason it should take longer than one year, unless what the test well finds is a *massive* surprise, in which case possibly two.
Step 4) Construct feeder pipelines; fabricate separation/treatment plants and ship them up by barge; construct drilling pads; drill to depth; and complete the wells. This is barely possible in two years at great expense, but 3 to 4 years is a more logical timeline.
So, our timeline is:
A) No expense spared, exploration in parallel with auction, no surprises in test drills, all permits expedited to the legal limit: 4 years, flat.
B) No special provisions or expense, but no unexpected delays and promptness of government: 6 years.
C) Upper limit of normal exploration budgeting: 12 years. However, that is not a rational expectation, because the high profile of this project means that at least two years of normal government delays will not happen, moving the baseline directly towards B), and because there is far more extant knowledge than in a normal exploration process, it is really hard to conceive that at least another two year's worth of data gathering and analysis can not be saved easily.
In any case, it takes a lot less time to plant a well than it does to say grow an apple orchard. If we were short on apples, would you go around beaking off that we can't plant ourselves out of an apple crisis? No? Then how do you figure it makes any more sense than that to say that we can't drill ourselves out of an oil crisis?
You can actually go back a lot further in your 'golden ages' than that to trace this.
Pretty much all of what we think of as "great" art/music was produced in a not dissimilar fashion, by being underwritten by King or Church in order to enhance their prestige. The modern version of King and Church is the incorporated company, and the modern version of prestige is, well, still prestige actually, but it's labelled "Goodwill" on balance sheets.
So the Sistine Chapel, for instance, was certainly commissioned as "pimping product" as you so delicately put it, that being the Catholic Church's product offering of salvation amongst the extremely competitive free market in religions, but most people see some intrinsic worth in it despite being a commercial message.
OK ... just one more post, since you're so insistent.
Now look here, son, to some of us what you casually stick your blinders on your idiot little head and refer to as "ancient history", we find a personally significant and extremely disturbing memory that there were places in the world where nerve gas and mustard gas were being used in a World War II style war of pure land grab naked aggression against a country's neighbours, while we were trying to sleep.
Add another 15-odd years to that of internal genocide against Kurds and Marsh Arabs, a second war started against a tiny neighbour out of sheer naked aggression, and the continual flouting of UN resolutions the ceasefire was contingent on ... ... and well, son, there ain't just no way you're going to convince that some of us with a memory that works over the 25 year span in consideration that killing Saddam Hussein's evil ass is anything but a service to international order. No matter how loudly and repeatedly you bleat and whine your hippie talking points.
Now, if you want to make the case that the way it was gone about was insanely expensive and extremely ill prepared indeed and a much better way to go about things do would have been to send a nice big cheque to Israel with a note "Nice work on Gerard Bull! Pity his boss is still around..." sure I can get on side with you on that.
So, you keep telling yourself that all the deaths were necessary.
No, I keep telling myself that when you said
Iraq NEVER had WMD ... NEVER had any link to terrorists.
you were, in fact, 100% absolutely and provably wrong, and provably wrong in under a minute at that.
Since lunch break is over in four minutes, I'll take that documented evidence that what you say is, in fact, the exact opposite of the truth, and I will apply that lesson to everything else you say with no further concern.
Perhaps next time you want to try to convince somebody of a position, not starting out with blatant and trivially exposed lies could be an alternative strategy you perhaps could consider employing!
So, you can't refute it, just call me a hippie?
Hmmm, well, I'm on lunch break, let's take a minute and do some quick googling, shall we?
Iraq NEVER had WMD
"In March 1986 UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar formally accused Iraq of using chemical weapons against Iran. Citing the report of four chemical warfare experts whom the UN had sent to Iran in February and March 1986, the secretary general called on Baghdad to end its violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol on the use of chemical weapons. The UN report concluded that "Iraqi forces have used chemical warfare against Iranian forces"; the weapons used included both mustard gas and nerve gas..."
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/cw/program.htm
NEVER had any link to terrorists.
"Turkish intelligence agents told the agency that Baghdad's support of the PKK intensified especially during the last three months when Saddam's arms and equipment were supplied to PKK bases in Iraq by the Iraqi command.."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6465/is_199912/ai_n25746892
"Saddam has supplied the PLO] with rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missile launchers and Russian-made anti-aircraft guns..."."
http://www.acpr.org.il/cloakrm/clk100.html
"For instance, how about their support for The Army of Muhammad, a known al-Qaeda subsidiary operating in Bahrain?"
"Nor was that Saddam's only support for an AQ subsidiary. Saddam put money into Egypt's Islamic Jihad."
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/14/saddam-supported-at-least-two-al-qaeda-groups-pentagon/comment-page-1/
"Beyond cash and diplomatic help, Saddam Hussein was the Conrad Hilton of the terrorist world. He provided a place for terrorists to kick back, relax, and reflect after killing people for a living. ..."
"Saddam Hussein's general store for terrorists included medical care, too..."
"According to dissidents, journalists who have visited, and even United Nations weapons inspectors, Saddam Hussein appears to have offered training to terrorists, in addition to funding, diplomatic help, safe haven and medical care. The Associated Press reports that Coalition forces shut down at least three terrorist training camps in Iraq. The most notorious of these was the base at Salman Pak, about 15 miles southeast of Baghdad. Before the war, numerous Iraqi defectors said the camp featured a passenger jet on which terrorists sharpened their air piracy skills...."
http://www.husseinandterror.com/
Apparently your definition of "NEVER" is not one used by the rest of the world!
Yes, and in the true sense of "conservative," one would want to LIMIT the power of the government.
You misunderstand "conservative". The true sense of "conservative", and the only one it should retain for political discourse to have any objective meaning whatsoever, is to avoid change. Thus it is correct to label as "conservative" those who defended absolute monarchy against its removal, and those who defended the Communist Party of the USSR against its removal, although both of those are as far from limited power as one could imagine.
And, indeed, a great deal of the positions referred to as "liberal" in current U.S. political discourse are, in fact, conservative. A misunderstanding helped not in the slightest by the universal usage of "conservative" as a synonym for "evil" by those self-identifying as "liberal". And vice versa, of course.
Limiting the power of the government is most correctly -- or at least, most understandably -- referred to these days as a "libertarian" policy. This is also referred to as "classical liberal", to distinguish the original philosophy referred to as "liberal" from its current meaning, which it seems in the vast majority of cases works out to "utterly totalitarian, but in service of ends we feel are good, namely stomping out any disparity among individuals".
DirectX development in Wine froze. Years later, Cedega still hasn't returned the code, and Wine just barely came out from it.
This is the kind of issues that the GPL addresses.
You mean, the issue that users get functionality years earlier than they would have if the project had been GPL? By making sure that users get stuff more slowly? Hmmmm ... from a user point of view that's just plain not a winner. I'm kinda not seeing how it's a win for the GPL in any fashion, actually.
Or are you claiming that it made absolutely not one whit of difference to Cedega's decision that the source was not GPL -- that they would have invested the exact same amount of effort if the source code had, actually, been GPL?
Well, if you assert that ... then no need to respond, as you are clearly so out of touch with reality that your opinion is worthless.
If you don't assert that ... then you seem to have proven here that the GPL is, in fact, not in the best interests of users. Good job!
Yep; just as whenever somebody says "Trust me!" or "This is the truth!" or "I'm not lying!" you know beyond any reasonable doubt that they are indeed attempting to deceive you.
But, de facto, the suits just haven't been filed and the risk just isn't there; at least, it isn't there yet.
As a further note to this, I happen to be at the moment appropriating some Apple source code for my own project. It strikes me that if their lawyers did not agree with me that pure public domain provision would not indeed involve the same legal risks as public provision of other property does, there would be no need for these provisions.
IN NO EVENT SHALL APPLE BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL OR
CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE
GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE, REPRODUCTION, MODIFICATION AND/OR
DISTRIBUTION OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE, HOWEVER CAUSED AND WHETHER UNDER THEORY OF
CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT LIABILITY OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF
APPLE HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
So, de facto there may at this exact moment be no risk, but it surely seems that Apple lawyers recognize an extant de jure risk, yes?
But, de facto, the suits just haven't been filed and the risk just isn't there; at least, it isn't there yet.
Oh, I'd say that the important word there is indeed "yet". The ambulance-chasing crowd will clue in sooner or later, count on it.
If you think it is expressly OK to take code with complete disregard for the wishes of the person who wrote it, then by all means, stick with public domain.
I'm not making a moral judgment. I'm saying that ability to take with "complete disregard" is the only yardstick by which actual freedom can be judged.
But at the very least, acknowledge the fact that other people might have other motives or goals in mind for the things they create, and respect their wishes.
Ah, but the point here is that I am not "respecting" their wishes. I am forced by the power of the State to do as they say. Whether the end of that usage of force is to make me give up money in advance for the privilege, or give away my own work in turn for the privilege, or lack that privilege completely, there is no difference philosophically; in all of these cases, my conduct is determined by the power of the State. If I ignore it, they will eventually come to apply force to compel it; if I resist, they will shoot me dead, same as any other power of the State I choose to resist.
If your behaviour is compelled by law, and refusal to abide by that law and to resist the judicial consequences of ignoring it will eventually lead to you being shot dead ... then there is no freedom.
Truthfully, except in malicious cases, there is de facto indemnity over public domain code--and in malicious cases, no license or lack there of is likely to help. In short, those who use BSD-like licenses are selfishly covering their ass through abuse of state monopoly rights.
Whilst your first paragraph attempting to contort the application of force into a defense of freedom is pure sophistry -- did you help out the Bush administration with justifications for invading Iraq, perchance? -- this deserves some further exposition.
Indeed, if you release source into the public domain you should be held accountable for its use and effects through tort law. An analogy would be that if you allow public access to your private property, you have a duty to ensure a basic standard of safety to those allowed to traverse it. And every so often, indeed, you do hear of some abuse of that, like a burglar who falls through a skylight and successfully sues. But generally, the law of torts functions properly, that if you provide a public service you accept liability for its consequences. Why, indeed, should source code I release be treated any differently than the path through my woods I allow hikers?
RMS's "Free" means that the source can never be locked up in a proprietary prison.
Which is nonsensical. Something placed in the public domain cannot be removed from it.
What you really mean to say is
"RMS's 'Free' means that people are forced under penalty of State-enforced law to give away source they write/modify themselves".
Hard to reconcile that with any definition of "free" that the world at large would recognize.
Free software is the epitome of free market economics; it's the enforcement of absolute competition ... proprietary software builds upon state protected monopoly rights and, as is becoming quite obvious, has more in common with former soviet style state factories (you _will_ use Vista and you _will_ like it; no alternate providers here), I'd say comments about socialism are weak.
Er, no. The GPL builds upon state protected monopoly rights as well. Otherwise, how could it be enforced?
If your license is anything other than "public domain" then you are, indeed, forcing your wishes upon others backed by the power of the State.
Source is not truly "free" unless everyone is FREE to disregard your wishes completely. Setting rules they must abide by, which the GPL does, makes it NOT free.
An accurate name for source licensed under GPL and similar licenses would be "Communal" -- or "Community" -- or perhaps "Cooperative" if you want to avoid the philosophically accurate association with "Communism". "Free", however, is not. Only public domain source does not rely on the coercive power of the State, and therefore only public domain source can be claimed with intellectual honesty to truly be "free".
the increased global temperature is a bad thing for us
On the contrary, if you examine the record, optimum biosphere diversity and extent appears to be achieved at around 3 C above current global norms. And sticking to the human species in particular, deaths from a one degree chill exceed deaths from a one degree warm by a factor of around four. Presumably before modern climate-regulating technology that ratio would have been quite a bit more lopsided.
That's a possibility, but I don't think it's an overly likely one.
My bet is that the difference between Northern and Southern ice cover trends is a lot more obvious if you care to look for it: Soot.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=impure-as-the-driven-snow
Money quote: "and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming."
Not that this is Scientific American talking here, which is hardly a hotbed of AGW skepticism, to put it extremely mildly.
So "just" clean up all those dirty soot-emitting Chinese factories, and the Arctic will start freezing more.
This policy has the advantage of being A Really Fucking Good Idea(TM) whether you're a true believer in AGW all the way over to denying it completely.
Of course, in the real world, not only do we not discuss China's possible particulate-based contribution to GW, we even exempt them from even discussions about adhering to Kyoto, despite the fact that they've been the largest global C02 emitter two years running now and the rate of increase is accelerating...
You think that -- and it's conventional to do so, I grant you -- because our meaning today of "regulated" is almost the exact opposite of what it meant when this was written.
See, originally, "regulated" meant "operating at a proper rate" or "set to an external standard" and it was applied to machines like windmills and clocks respectively, not to human behaviours at all.
By the time the 2A was drafted, that original meaning had become applied to human organizations in the sense of "functioning smoothly" or "powerful, capable". Couple that with the other part which is unclear to a modern reader of what the drafters really meant by "Free State", and a modern rendition of the 2A would be
"Since if a country's not going to have a standing army then citizen levies are going to be its only defense, nobody can make any law stopping an able-bodied free male between 18 and 45 acquiring whatever weapons they want." Or, more succinctly, "We're Switzerland."
As you may have noticed, that has been rather passed up by events, in that the U.S. does indeed have a standing army. (And in a multitude of other ways is no longer a "Free State" either, but the standing armed forces are the only part relevant to this discussion.) And whilst the militia is generally thought of nowadays as only the organized 'National Guard' as well, that is not legally correct according to either federal or state constitutions, by default all citizens comprise the militia, like Switzerland.
Anyway, getting back to our etymological lesson, once the use of "regulated" had jumped from an engineering term to one applied to human organizations as well, what were previously known as "rules" or "laws" or "directives" began to have the term "regulation" applied to them as a propaganda move -- i.e. this is not a "rule" which would be arbitrary domineering, because following it will result in more regulated behaviour, and "regulated behaviour" at the time uncontroversially meant "better, smoother".
Since that was bullshit and most "regulations" are in fact "rules", and petty and/or silly ones at that, the connotation of "regulation" and "regulated" changed to match over the decades and centuries, and today when we say "regulated" we generally mean "limited, circumscribed, arbitrarily controlled, inflexible, overseen strictly" or something along those lines.
Which is, indeed, almost the precise opposite of the original meaning of "regulated". As is very important in this particular case, we can see from your post. It's fairly self-evident that you are assuming "well regulated militia" means "a militia overseen strictly", when in fact it means "a militia capable of taking on another country's standing army." A rather dramatic difference of interpretation there, no?
If you want to see people without guns, the correct approach would be to argue that now that "United States" is a complete misnomer because now it's a unitary republic, not a federation, and does indeed have a standing army, therefore the intention of the 2A that the U.S. have a citizen militia sufficient to deter any invader, like Switzerland does, is completely obsolete. And therefore a constitutional amendment should be passed to make true in law what most people assume is true in fact, that only members of the State's armed forces are constitutionally recognized as potential combatants, and the existence of federal and state unorganized militias comprising everybody is delegitimized.
I kinda doubt you'd get far with that, but it would be the correct way to address the effectively parachronistic 2nd Amendment's existence.
(For all you Swiss readers, yes, I know the original concept is still working just fine for you, thanks. "Parachronistic" only applying to modern day American sensibilities, I mean.)
Thus, my point stands, and you haven't even offered a reply to it.
Noooo ... I thought I'd just watch for a while.
As you're demonstrating on your own exactly why nobody will have sex with you far more eloquently than I could possibly describe.
They claim that it is a near-perfect legal document, and as such it shouldn't be modified...
Hmmm? That's been done twenty-seven times, and counting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Americans often mention that this right must exist so that they can "rise up" against the government. Yet, again, I see little in the way of people inclined to organize themselves to change the status quo.
That's because their ability to rise up has made the status quo such that people are not inclined to change it.
I note with interest that the only nation on the planet that applies the militia concept expressed in this Amendment in its intended function -- that a universally heavily armed populace replaces a standing army -- is Switzerland; and, in what I believe is completely not a coincidence, Switzerland is the only nation on the planet that has possessed a stable constitutional government longer than the United States.
And the militia is everybody. More specifically, able-bodied free male citizens between 18 and 45.
The *organized* militia aka "National Guard" is not the Militia to be well regulated, as you are probably thinking.
Since there was no organized militia when the 2nd Amendment was passed, how could it possibly refer to anything except the unorganized militia, that is, everybody?
No, they do.
If you think otherwise, then you're failing at either #1 or #2.
The only women -- and it's a vanishingly small number -- who put you off with some excuse like that when there's no outside influences are those who treat sex as a bargaining chip in return for money being spent on them. You're better off without those, son.
Sorry, directly asking for sex doesn't work
Sure it does. If they've already decided they're going to. Which they do in, at most, the first three seconds after you make eye contact.
The only three reasons directly asking doesn't work are
1) She's not into you. Which you should be able to pick up on after two exchanged sentences at most. Generally you shouldn't even need to speak though, holding eye contact is almost always a sufficient sign, and the "almost" is pretty much just hedging, I can't recall a single occasion when it wasn't, personally.
2) You fuck up asking. Confident yet detached is correct; nervous or intense will strike you out every time. "So, are we going home now?" is the particular phrasing that works best for me.
3) There's somebody aware of the conversation whom she doesn't want to form the impression she's easy/unfaithful/whatever. Of course, that "somebody" could actually be you, in which case we call it "playing hard to get."
Women generally don't seem to really want what they say they want in a man.
No, they do want exactly what they say.
What you're missing is that they want more to have their offspring be socially and physically dominant. Which leads fairly obviously to mating with what those of lesser social authority call "bad boys", because they'll trade off present happiness for a chance at enhancing their offsprings' dominance at the drop of a hat. If you understand the mathematics of evolution at all, this should be pretty much self-evident, really. But ideally, they'd get both. Since that's rare, we commonly have the whine-to-the-friend syndrome which you relate.
This is why the whole knight-in-shining-armour thing. Somebody who reaps honour and glory off brutally massacring people right and left, then comes back to court and pays chivalric homage to his chosen lady -- that is the veritable apotheosis of what attracts women. The closer you conduct yourself to that, the more women will be attracted to you.
Naaah, you're wrong.
Well, you're kinda close. What you mean is girls like guys who are nice to them. Telling off everybody else as the mood takes you is just fine. If there's any woman who isn't attracted to you for her being the only one you bother being polite to, I haven't met her yet.
Of course, if you *really* want to attract them, the correct approach is to treat most everybody with barely restrained contempt, her with casual indifference, and another prettier girl with impeccably debonair politeness. Once you get those competitive instincts going, whatever qualities you may or may not possess become all but utterly irrelevant. Funny how that works...
The terrorists from the Middle East want to kill all Americans. Why? Because of something our government did decades ago,
... I flamebait unreasonably. The actual issue is not people's stupidity. It's that they wish to reduce the problem to one that they can control. Accepting the lessons of history would make that impossible; pretending that the world was a perfect place and Islam spread out of the Arabian peninsula with flower garlands and fluffy bunnies right up to the election of George Bush who is the sole source of evil anywhere in the entire world -- that frames the problem in terms they can affect, and thus empowers them, and therefore all reality which contradicts that is denied.
Point of information: Whilst you are not actually inaccurate, you are imprecise. By a factor of half a millennium. The "terrorists from the Middle East" got particularly pissed with American troops remaining in Saudi Arabia after the first active phase of the still ongoing Gulf War, true, but long before the nation of America even EXISTED, let alone anything remotely recognizable as "our government" there were fatwas against the West, in particular Spaniards, to reclaim the "Muslim lands" of "Al Andalus". Which most of us know as "Spain", and have since the Reconquista was completed. In 1492.
Or, talk to some Hindus. Whose post-9/11 reaction was basically "Um, guys? We've been battling Muslim terrorists for over a millennium on THIS side of the world? Nice of you to finally get on board?"
However, this kind of historical knowledge and context is not only rare but deemed undesirable by many. "Bush lied, people died" is more suited to their cognitive talents.
OK
Indeed, I think that the single best reason for President Obama to be elected is that the shock of these people's delusions running smack into their Messianic Figure dealing with the world as it actually is will be a positive delight to behold...