if the Bush administration had such clear intelligence that Saddam had the WMDs, why couldn't they share that information with the Weapon inspectors?
Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors when Clinton was president. From 1998 until the war began in 2003, there were no inspectors in the country. Further, he didn't offer to bring them back until the invasion was imminent with a carrier group in the persian gulf.
"After the war began?" The inspections resumed in 2003, under the threat of war. Sure, we now realize that the White House had by that point decided that there would be an invasion, but it's the basis for that decision that's controversial. Thus, the original question stands: the inspectors were there, the world was watching, what was the rush?
(In answering that question, the contemporary pro-war mindset concentrated on two general points: one was that the UN inspectors wouldn't find anything anyway because the UN is a pack of America-hating sissies so can't we hurry up and have our war; the second was the 45 MINUTES FROM DOOM baloney. The first point effectively begged the question; the second was more of that brilliant intelligence analysis that's been such a hallmark of the War on Terra.)
Because we all know that Bill Clinton left Iraq alone. [see parent for links to CNN articles discussion Clinton-era strikes on Iraq]
And then there's the cruise missile he launched into Afghanistan in 1998. There's a rumour that it annoyed the Taliban enough to make them side with Osama rather than hand him over to Saudi Arabia.
if he'd been a man about it and owned up (and IMO the only person he really should have had to answer to was his wife)
Don't forget the sexual harassment accusations that he was trying to duck. He wasn't lying to keep out of trouble with his wife, he was lying to prevent his fooling around being used as evidence against him.
(think about how often you charge your current car battery via AC to save fuel!).
The batteries in contemporary hybrids are a bit bigger than the 12 V Motomaster Eliminator under the hood of your 1983 Dodge Aries. It is in fact possible to tootle around the neighbourhood just drawing down the battery -- giddy Prius owners call it stealth mode.
How praytell do we get all this H2 without making it by electrolysis?
Just as you're making a sunny assumption about the energy density of future batteries, hydrogen fans are quietly assuming the availabilty of abundant, too-cheap-to-meter electricity from future nuke plants.
Your point about flexible fuels is valid, even if we can't get away with only a lawnmower-sized engine in next year's hybrids.
The Slashdot summary, with its delightful spelling innovations, asserts that the books were sold from a Real Canadian Superstore, which is a giant Loblaws with Wal*Martian asperations.
If that's true, then the person stocking the bookshelves had probably just finished stocking the cookies and crackers aisle: a mistake is plausible.
I ate what I wanted and tossed the rest. Then the garbage man gets paid to haul it away. Whee!
And there's no such thing as pollution.
More generally, as a point of interest, I must ask: if I were to pay you to hunt endangered species to extinction, or to destroy great works of art, would the commercial transaction render the whole business desirable?
And with the relative birth rates of Muslims vs. the native populations of Europe, the time is rapidly approaching when Europe will have to decide whether to submit to Sharia law, or expel their Muslim population by force. I'm not kidding.
No, but you are a joke.
You assume that:
all Muslims are cultural imperialists, keen to impose a particular set of rules on everyone
their children and their children's children will be, too
Neither of these ludicrous assumptions is supportable. The fact is that while Osama and his friends and colleagues may be big on conquering the world and digging far into the past to justify their belligerance, they use current events to recruit their foot-soldiers. If the amount of justice in the world goes up, the number of radicalizable recruits goes down.
brood mares producing five or six little jihadis each.
Sounds like you disrespect women almost as much as the homicidal, scraggly-bearded, Koran-thumping fiends that you're so sure are hiding under your bed.
Also the use of 'impetuously' is completely incongruent
"Impetuously" is not really a supportable adverb, here, regardless of characterization. Would a telephone in this world ring recklessly? Would a siren have a cavalier wail?
Another thing that bugged me was the way the narration insisted on explaining the "pocket assistant" so much -- just refer to "my Phoenix hand-held" as though it's really something the character would be carrying around as a matter of course. Context makes it clear that it's a PDA-style communications device. There are plenty of clues here, and surely the reader deserves some credit in the dot-connecting department. It even flips open like a classic 1990s Palm Pilot!
I've gone a few paragraphs farther in, and this thing reads like notes, not a story. The protagonist's hacker network is being rolled up, he's lost a pile of money, and we're talking about shopping habits and the decline in singles bars?
The first chapter or so of Neuromancer gets a lot of this stuff right, by the way. Snow Crash, I found, suffered more from the didactic tone that we're hearing in Escapist.
...where accidents of history were presented as inevitabilities? No, I was there, but I didn't necessarily buy it.
And you were missing all the diplomacy that's occurred in history when you decided to bold-face your groundless declaration about "naked force" and how it solves so many problems.
WE (western nations) POSSESS THE CAPABILITY TO KILL EVERYONE THAT STANDS IN OUR WAY, with both nuclear and conventional methods. That we haven't already speaks volumes about our restraint. We fight with one hand behind our back.
What speaks volumes is that you can carry on thus:
westerners can slaughter the entire continent of africa, the middle east, many asian countries, etc, if we so choose?
...as though this would ever be a desirable or advantageous course of action. "One hand behind our back?" If you can think of even one problem in the world today that would be solved by a good regional nuking, I can point to a problem that you don't understand.
If it is AQ, I'm scared that all of the heavy anti-terrorist legislation appears to have had no effect...
Does your fear arise from an unmet expectation that the legislation would prevent terrorism, or from an anticipation of even worse measures now that a continuing vulnerability has been demonstrated?
The subtext in that statement is that programmers want clear cut answers. They can't or don't want to handle ideas or notions that have no answer or require some thoughtful reflection.
If your a programmer, you should be insulted.
I agree, but I think it's even more insulting than that, really, because even reading the thing by its own internal logic (in which programmer = tiresome Boolean-loving dickhead), the only advantage to this bulk purchase is that you get to buy a lot at once. The implication is that the hardest thing about literature is picking which book to read, and that afterward you just sit down and, presumably, become cultured as a matter of course.
The real problem being solved is "How can I buy more?", and the presumption behind the offering of such a solution is offensive in itself.
We think the collection is a perfect fit for more than a few software engineers we've known -- smart, self-directed people who are eternally curious, yet abhor wasting time intellectually and can't hide their impatience with the fuzziness of liberal arts. For them, here's a pre-selected, pretty comprehensive list of Western classics, assembled for purchase with a single mouse-click...
"[C]an't hide their impatience with the fuzziness of liberal arts"? I don't get it. What does this de-fuzz? The selection process? Someone else has made the fuzzy choices, but there's still no Classicometer that you point at a book to decide if it's worth reading. And if you're so impatient with the arts, what are you doing reading literature -- skimming the filler in Moby Dick to get to the juicy technical details of whaling?
Bah. The only thing that's simplified and streamlined here is the process of buying a whole bunch of stuff. Has consumerism reached such grim intensity that it's no longer more fun to browse and shop for yourself?
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I encountered this variation as the punch-line of a short story published in a science fiction magazine (Analog? Asimov's?) in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
Appropriately enough to the discussion we're having, the story was about a group of people who were able to manufacture arbitrary products by some mysterious, one-step method. I think that it ended up having something to do with Navajo magic, unless I'm mixing it up with another story.
It seems to me that it should be possible to get all of the information that they need by taking multiple, overlapping pictures (say, video frames). Image analysis could get the various scale and perspective issues worked out after the fact, and save them the time and hassle of the laser measurements.
Or maybe the image processing would take so long that the laser turns out to be faster anyway. But is there an eye-safety issue, lasering arbitary objects on the street?
..what COULD be if we all band together and work hard to make the future a better place for everyone...
[snip] ...Philip K. Dick!!!!
Yikes, thanks for the warning.
(I know I took them out of their context, but I loved the way those two fragments clashed. Of course there's room in futuristic fiction for positive and negative visions, and we can find both engaging.)
Freezes at -20 C? A good reason not to leave your computer in the car in January if you live in Alberta Canada.
It wouldn't even be worth risking in Southern Ontario. I wonder how they'd deal with shipping these things during the winter months -- in heated trucks?
The only difference is battery storage and scale (the alternator in a hybrid is a generator). I was pointing out that it is not a new idea and not a silly idea.
And more hybrid-like locomotives are on the way. Consider the Green Goat switcher from RailPower. Someone with the Flash plugin may be able to navigate RailPower's site and find their demo videos, but the basic idea is about what you'd expect: smaller engine, monster batteries, and enough smarts to make it all work as expected through the traditional controls.
It seems that they run the engine in its "happy" range and use the battery bank to supply surges in power that, in traditional locomotives, would involve revving up the engine and belching out great black clouds of soot.
Less pithily, though more charitably to jurors, I might venture to ask why you place such faith in the decision of "your peers" when they are required to make that decision based on lies told to them by "one government official".
You: Didn't do it.
The State: Yes he did. Kill 'im.
Jury: If only we'd seen the suppressed evidence of your innocence. Now you get to die.
Slashdot Mirror
"After the war began?" The inspections resumed in 2003, under the threat of war. Sure, we now realize that the White House had by that point decided that there would be an invasion, but it's the basis for that decision that's controversial. Thus, the original question stands: the inspectors were there, the world was watching, what was the rush?
(In answering that question, the contemporary pro-war mindset concentrated on two general points: one was that the UN inspectors wouldn't find anything anyway because the UN is a pack of America-hating sissies so can't we hurry up and have our war; the second was the 45 MINUTES FROM DOOM baloney. The first point effectively begged the question; the second was more of that brilliant intelligence analysis that's been such a hallmark of the War on Terra.)
And then there's the cruise missile he launched into Afghanistan in 1998. There's a rumour that it annoyed the Taliban enough to make them side with Osama rather than hand him over to Saudi Arabia.
Don't forget the sexual harassment accusations that he was trying to duck. He wasn't lying to keep out of trouble with his wife, he was lying to prevent his fooling around being used as evidence against him.
The batteries in contemporary hybrids are a bit bigger than the 12 V Motomaster Eliminator under the hood of your 1983 Dodge Aries. It is in fact possible to tootle around the neighbourhood just drawing down the battery -- giddy Prius owners call it stealth mode.
Just as you're making a sunny assumption about the energy density of future batteries, hydrogen fans are quietly assuming the availabilty of abundant, too-cheap-to-meter electricity from future nuke plants.
Your point about flexible fuels is valid, even if we can't get away with only a lawnmower-sized engine in next year's hybrids.
The Slashdot summary, with its delightful spelling innovations, asserts that the books were sold from a Real Canadian Superstore, which is a giant Loblaws with Wal*Martian asperations.
If that's true, then the person stocking the bookshelves had probably just finished stocking the cookies and crackers aisle: a mistake is plausible.
And there's no such thing as pollution.
More generally, as a point of interest, I must ask: if I were to pay you to hunt endangered species to extinction, or to destroy great works of art, would the commercial transaction render the whole business desirable?
No, but you are a joke.
You assume that:
Neither of these ludicrous assumptions is supportable. The fact is that while Osama and his friends and colleagues may be big on conquering the world and digging far into the past to justify their belligerance, they use current events to recruit their foot-soldiers. If the amount of justice in the world goes up, the number of radicalizable recruits goes down.
Sounds like you disrespect women almost as much as the homicidal, scraggly-bearded, Koran-thumping fiends that you're so sure are hiding under your bed.
"Impetuously" is not really a supportable adverb, here, regardless of characterization. Would a telephone in this world ring recklessly? Would a siren have a cavalier wail?
Another thing that bugged me was the way the narration insisted on explaining the "pocket assistant" so much -- just refer to "my Phoenix hand-held" as though it's really something the character would be carrying around as a matter of course. Context makes it clear that it's a PDA-style communications device. There are plenty of clues here, and surely the reader deserves some credit in the dot-connecting department. It even flips open like a classic 1990s Palm Pilot!
I've gone a few paragraphs farther in, and this thing reads like notes, not a story. The protagonist's hacker network is being rolled up, he's lost a pile of money, and we're talking about shopping habits and the decline in singles bars?
The first chapter or so of Neuromancer gets a lot of this stuff right, by the way. Snow Crash, I found, suffered more from the didactic tone that we're hearing in Escapist.
I love this reasoning. "It's too expensive to be worthwhile, so please pay a private firm to do it."
...where accidents of history were presented as inevitabilities? No, I was there, but I didn't necessarily buy it.
And you were missing all the diplomacy that's occurred in history when you decided to bold-face your groundless declaration about "naked force" and how it solves so many problems.
What speaks volumes is that you can carry on thus:
...as though this would ever be a desirable or advantageous course of action. "One hand behind our back?" If you can think of even one problem in the world today that would be solved by a good regional nuking, I can point to a problem that you don't understand.
s/progress/more enemies/
Or so it seems to many of us who don't go around spouting nonsense like:
I'm sorry to say that I have no idea how that's supposed to correspond to facts in the real world.
Does your fear arise from an unmet expectation that the legislation would prevent terrorism, or from an anticipation of even worse measures now that a continuing vulnerability has been demonstrated?
I agree, but I think it's even more insulting than that, really, because even reading the thing by its own internal logic (in which programmer = tiresome Boolean-loving dickhead), the only advantage to this bulk purchase is that you get to buy a lot at once. The implication is that the hardest thing about literature is picking which book to read, and that afterward you just sit down and, presumably, become cultured as a matter of course.
The real problem being solved is "How can I buy more?", and the presumption behind the offering of such a solution is offensive in itself.
"[C]an't hide their impatience with the fuzziness of liberal arts"? I don't get it. What does this de-fuzz? The selection process? Someone else has made the fuzzy choices, but there's still no Classicometer that you point at a book to decide if it's worth reading. And if you're so impatient with the arts, what are you doing reading literature -- skimming the filler in Moby Dick to get to the juicy technical details of whaling?
Bah. The only thing that's simplified and streamlined here is the process of buying a whole bunch of stuff. Has consumerism reached such grim intensity that it's no longer more fun to browse and shop for yourself?
This line is heard in War Games, but is also quoted in the rather curious Dark Side of the Moon (a 1990 film, not the Pink Floyd album).
What, you want the examiners to do a thorough evaluation of my application and deny me an easy monopoly? You can't do that -- that's Big Goverment!
(Note that granting me a monopoly based on a scammy patent isn't Big Government -- it's Law and Order.)
I encountered this variation as the punch-line of a short story published in a science fiction magazine (Analog? Asimov's?) in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
Appropriately enough to the discussion we're having, the story was about a group of people who were able to manufacture arbitrary products by some mysterious, one-step method. I think that it ended up having something to do with Navajo magic, unless I'm mixing it up with another story.
It seems to me that it should be possible to get all of the information that they need by taking multiple, overlapping pictures (say, video frames). Image analysis could get the various scale and perspective issues worked out after the fact, and save them the time and hassle of the laser measurements.
Or maybe the image processing would take so long that the laser turns out to be faster anyway. But is there an eye-safety issue, lasering arbitary objects on the street?
Yikes, thanks for the warning.
(I know I took them out of their context, but I loved the way those two fragments clashed. Of course there's room in futuristic fiction for positive and negative visions, and we can find both engaging.)
It wouldn't even be worth risking in Southern Ontario. I wonder how they'd deal with shipping these things during the winter months -- in heated trucks?
Was your browser sold to you as a complete replacement for your home phone?
And more hybrid-like locomotives are on the way. Consider the Green Goat switcher from RailPower. Someone with the Flash plugin may be able to navigate RailPower's site and find their demo videos, but the basic idea is about what you'd expect: smaller engine, monster batteries, and enough smarts to make it all work as expected through the traditional controls.
It seems that they run the engine in its "happy" range and use the battery bank to supply surges in power that, in traditional locomotives, would involve revving up the engine and belching out great black clouds of soot.
I see that you've misspelled "idiots", above.
Less pithily, though more charitably to jurors, I might venture to ask why you place such faith in the decision of "your peers" when they are required to make that decision based on lies told to them by "one government official".
You: Didn't do it.
The State: Yes he did. Kill 'im.
Jury: If only we'd seen the suppressed evidence of your innocence. Now you get to die.
Yeah, they do all of this useful stuff for him, and he doesn't live in fear of poverty. He's such a slave.