1) Actually, many of the weapons he had do just dissapear. Many of the nerve toxins, etc, will degrade over time.
2) As for an imminent threat, Saddam was never a threat, imminent or otherwise.
Time for a little lesson about the concept of mutually assured destruction. The lesson that should have been learned from 9/11 that was not, was that non-state actors can be a serious threat to our country. Saddam has one motivating interest, his own power.
Let's assume, for the moment, that he got himself some nukes, and some how got the ability to deliver them to New York. Like really high tech deliver so that he could track the delivery and see who signed for it. What would he do with it? He can't use them against us because we would wipe him out. He can't use them against any enemies in the area, we would wipe him out. The only thing that they do is keep us from going for the throat when attacking him.
What's that you say? He might have given the weapons to Al Qaeda? Well I'll skip the fact that Al Qaeda hates him, and get to the simple point that it would be fantastically stupid. Let's say he gave the weapons to Al Qaeda and they used them on the US. What then? Remember how well that sort of shit worked out for the Taliban? Hell, the Taliban screwed up so bad that Saddam got dragged in when he had NOTHING to do with it.
We can afford to wait til he points a gun if we know where he is and we can match his gun with a bazooka.
3) "Iraq has known terrorist connections- they have been on the State Dept list of Terror Sponsering States for 15 years." They are at best a retirement home for a few terrorists. The closest they've come to a terrorist attack was a terribly bungled assassination attempt of Bush Sr. Their intelligence service is, notoriously, one of the least effective in the world.
As for the state sponsors of terrorism list, it's utter hogwash. Cuba's on that list. When was the last time they tried to engage in terrorism. The US has conducted more terrorism in Cuba than they have here.
4) "Iraq had just tried to illegally expand their borders" Well, north korea can't really do that since the only borders they have to expand into are China, their only friend, and South Korea, who we back. This would get back into that mutually assured destruction concept I mentioned earlier.
5) "Iraq is sitting on some of the richest natural resources in the world to finance almost anything that they would like" Not if the rest of the world refuses to sell anything to them.
6) As to the state of Bush's cojones, I've got no argument. But frankly I'd like to have a president with the brains to keep his cojones in check. Serial killers have cajones. The 9/11 terrorists had cajones. Cajones are a dangerous thing without a little bit of logic and reason.
You do the math. Being anti-competitive isn't illegal unless you are a monopoly. Nobody cares about Apple because it's easy to choose something other than Apple. It's not easy to choose something other than Windows and it's getting harder every day.
I'm just trying to figure out if Sun did anything wrong here. Yeah they don't give much credit to the Linux/GPL roots of what they are doing, but who cares? As long as they follow the letter of the GPL law, then if they want to be dicks about it, that's their choice. It's up to their customers to decide if that choice is a good one.
If Sun can create something that's valuable to customers, then good for them. I rather doubt that people who are forsaking Microsoft are going to want to get into another oppressive licensing scheme.
Actually, I can attest, from personal experience, that Linux has better support for legacy cards. I tried to put one of my old sound cards in my mother-in-law's computer. It was an Ensoniq soundscape from 1995. I managed to find some legacy drivers for it on Creative's website, but it just would not work under Windows 98. This card works flawlessly under Linux.
Where Linux tends to have problems is with the latest bleeding edge cards that require some sort of funky drivers. Legacy cards are rarely a problem for it.
Some games are really well suited to the console setup and some are really well suited to playing on a PC. I would never want to play an FPS or strategy game on a console because a mouse is the best input for them. I'd also not want to play a fighting game like Mortal Kombat on a PC, especially if I'm going to have a few friends over to join in.
RPG games certainly work well on a console because the inputs required aren't quite as precise or time critical. Playing a twitchy FPS on a game pad is an excercise in frustration. Unless they start building keyboard and mouse platforms into couches, some games are always going to be better on a PC.
If Microsoft's response to OO is a bunch of handwaving and fear mongering, then this is a very good sign. Two reasons:
1) They realistically see OO as a competitor to their product 2) They lack more substantial reasons to stick with Office
It means that enough Microsoft sales folks have been losing sales to OO that they are worried and needed to a PR blitz. You'll recall from similar actions against Linux that these campaigns are perhaps minimally successful, but a waste in the long run.
What I'd like to know is why the Ogg people, or anybody else, for that matter, would care what was chosen? They could have chosen to use morse code for all it matters, since nobody's buying these discs. The fidelity of these discs is indistinguishable to 98% of humanity, and the additional features are irrelevant.
Unlike Al Qaeda, we know where Iran, North Korea, and China live. If they were to ever be traced as the source of a nuclear weapons, we would annihilate them. Nukes are political weapons because no state can actually use them without essentially ending the game.
Yes, you should be able to strike. And they should pay you well enough and give you good enough benefits to insure that you don't want to strike. It sounds like the management of the facility believed that they could get away with less skilled employees. It seems they were wrong.
If you assume for the moment that the workers weren't allowed to strike, then how would they express their unhappiness with the state of their employment? They'd slack off unofficially, and they might passive aggressively due harm to the facilities. Frankly, it's better that they can strike and have an official way to air their displeasure than have it be something that slowly eats away at the facility.
Read this guy's post again, he makes a very good point. Both you and your girlfriend are going to need to be able to seperate your work life from your home life. You both need to be very realistic about this or you are setting yourselves up for disaster in both the business and the relationship.
I think that what you are going to see is that MMO games are going to evolve into an ongoing stable source of revenue for game companies. Ultimately the process of realeasing new games with the same rehashed premises every year is going to end soon. UT2004 is almost the same game as UT2003, the only major difference being in some graphics improvements and some new game play styles.
I look on the market and see Half Life 2, Doom 3, UT 2004, and a few other similar games on the horizon, and none of them really get me that excited. They are all essentially the same thing, and I can get the same joy out of playing counterstrike that I have now, over getting the latest greatest game for $50.
Having said that, I've been religiously playing PlanetSide since it's release. It's by no means a perfect game, but the element of large scale ongoing strategy does not exist in any other FPS game I've played. The closest contenders to this are games like Tribes, etc, but they are always confined to a small group of players fighting on random servers, for short periods of time.
Every night I log into PlanetSide I get a different experience. Some nights, I log in to find all our continents overrun, and some nights we are dominating. Ultimately it's somewhat repetitive in that you keep going through the same process of capturing bases, taking territory, losing territory, etc, but it has a much stronger sense of higher level strategy than any similar game.
Ultimately though I don't think MMO's are going to really boost the industry significantly. I mean, if I pay $12/month for a game, I'll probably not go and buy another game until I've lost interest in this one. If an average game cost $50, if before I bought anything more than 1 game every 4 months, it'd actually be a net loss in revenue for the game industry.
The benefit of the MMO is that, once established, it's a pretty reliable ongoing revenue stream as opposed to the massive swells in revenue from the single purchase games of old.
Likewise, if SCO's FUD turns out to be legally valid, Red Hat goes under as everybody all at once sues Red Hat to make them pay up on their idemnification pledge.
Perhaps not. RedHat if, they are smart, have taken out an insurance policy against the potential indeminification. This would make the cost of the potential indeminification a predictable expense. I have to believe that there's an insurance company out there that would happily take large checks for this given the low proability of a SCO victory.
The problem with Venus is that it is one of the most hostile environments we've yet to find in our searches. It's hot, it's acidic, and so it's hard on equipment, and it's potential for harboring life is low (given what little we know about the subject).
Our first objective in exploring the universe is answering the "are we alone" question. If we can find something as simple as bacteria on another planet, then it sets the groundwork for finding other more highly evolved forms of life. We just need to really prove that life is out there. I have zero doubt that there is, but we still have to proove it.
Once we find aliens, fine, then it might be neat to look at Venus.
With that, the difference comes down to a matter of what OS X is used for versus Linux. OS X hides a lot of the things that get you into trouble.
Though as far as numbers go, on the desktop OS X has a slight numbers advantage (but it's hard to track since nobody can really record my downloading of Fedora off of Bittorrent). But on the server, Linux is on par with windows in installations, and blows away OS X and the other BSD's.
You know why there's more overt hacking of Linux boxes than BSD boxes. Because there are far less BSD boxes out there to be hacked.
You know why there's far more Linux boxes that are being overtly hacked than windows? Because if you are a hacker, what the hell are you going to do with a Windows box? It's just not as interesting or powerful to remotely control a windows box.
I'm not a hacker, but if I was one, I would not waste my time on trying to 0wn windows boxes. I'd go after Linux boxes. Not because they are easier to breach, but because they are more fun to play with when you do.
Not to say your point isn't valid, just that the real question is how do you get more intelligent eyes reading the code looking for this stuff. OSS isn't necessarily better, its just that highly popular projects have lots of eyes. I know plenty of projects that get far fewer eyes and have TONS of bugs. Now that MS is being forced to be secure they are having lots of eyes so we will see in longhorn if this improved anything.
Open source scales well. A small project that few people take an interest in has few users and lots of bugs. It's not a big problem if the bug is exploited because only a handful of people are even using it.
As more people use it and more people get involved more people see the code. As more people see the code, more bugs are eliminated and the code becomes better. Thus the risk of serious bugs declines as more people use the software.
In the case of a closed source product though, the scrutiny does not scale at all. The scrutiny is a fixed value based on the company's internal policies. Given that most companies are far more concerned about time to market and profit margins, extensive security audits are seen as unneeded costs. As the product becomes larger and more complex, the likelyhood of bugs developing increases, but the likelyhood of a thorough review remains constant or even declines.
I had a discussion with somebody the other day about how you could implement an API if the only documentation of the API was in source code. You have the source code available, but it's under terms that do not let you distribute it for whatever reason.
Theoretically, you can do a clean room implementation by having one person read the source code and write a specification for the implementation. Then that person hands the specification over to somebody else to implement. Thus there's no copying and it's still clean.
Oh, and one other thing. There are cheaters, but they are infrequent, and dealt with well by Sony. They'll insist that they catch the person while they are cheating, but I've personally witnessed few obvious cheaters in the game. Most of the "cheaters" are really just good at the game.
There are a couple advantages to Planetside specific to the question here.
First of all, the game involves many different roles that you can fill. You don't have to be a good twitch FPS player to be able to have fun. You can fly aircraft, drive tanks, gun for tanks, be a medic, be an engineer, etc. I started off doing more support work and then as I practiced with the game, I got better and slowly got more into a fighting role.
The only draw back, as far as the original question goes is the cost. You have to pay a monthly fee for it, and if you are only going to play for 30 minutes occasionally, that may not be worthwhile to you.
If the cost isn't such an issue though, there's nothing in the game to make hopping in randomly a problem. It's easy to get involved in a battle just by looking at the map and seeing where the hotspots are. If you want to hook up with a group, there's always people looking for squad members. Sure, if you are only on occasionally you won't work have as much equipment at your disposal, but it doesn't prevent you from succeeding in the game.
It's had it's problems, but over time it's become quite a good game and I would recommend it if you can stomach the price tag. At the very least you can download a free trial and give it a whirl before you commit to it.
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1) Actually, many of the weapons he had do just dissapear. Many of the nerve toxins, etc, will degrade over time.
2) As for an imminent threat, Saddam was never a threat, imminent or otherwise.
Time for a little lesson about the concept of mutually assured destruction. The lesson that should have been learned from 9/11 that was not, was that non-state actors can be a serious threat to our country. Saddam has one motivating interest, his own power.
Let's assume, for the moment, that he got himself some nukes, and some how got the ability to deliver them to New York. Like really high tech deliver so that he could track the delivery and see who signed for it. What would he do with it? He can't use them against us because we would wipe him out. He can't use them against any enemies in the area, we would wipe him out. The only thing that they do is keep us from going for the throat when attacking him.
What's that you say? He might have given the weapons to Al Qaeda? Well I'll skip the fact that Al Qaeda hates him, and get to the simple point that it would be fantastically stupid. Let's say he gave the weapons to Al Qaeda and they used them on the US. What then? Remember how well that sort of shit worked out for the Taliban? Hell, the Taliban screwed up so bad that Saddam got dragged in when he had NOTHING to do with it.
We can afford to wait til he points a gun if we know where he is and we can match his gun with a bazooka.
3) "Iraq has known terrorist connections- they have been on the State Dept list of Terror Sponsering States for 15 years." They are at best a retirement home for a few terrorists. The closest they've come to a terrorist attack was a terribly bungled assassination attempt of Bush Sr. Their intelligence service is, notoriously, one of the least effective in the world.
As for the state sponsors of terrorism list, it's utter hogwash. Cuba's on that list. When was the last time they tried to engage in terrorism. The US has conducted more terrorism in Cuba than they have here.
4) "Iraq had just tried to illegally expand their borders" Well, north korea can't really do that since the only borders they have to expand into are China, their only friend, and South Korea, who we back. This would get back into that mutually assured destruction concept I mentioned earlier.
5) "Iraq is sitting on some of the richest natural resources in the world to finance almost anything that they would like" Not if the rest of the world refuses to sell anything to them.
6) As to the state of Bush's cojones, I've got no argument. But frankly I'd like to have a president with the brains to keep his cojones in check. Serial killers have cajones. The 9/11 terrorists had cajones. Cajones are a dangerous thing without a little bit of logic and reason.
That would explain the missing WMD's quite nicely :)
Microsoft == Monopoly
Apple != Monopoly
You do the math. Being anti-competitive isn't illegal unless you are a monopoly. Nobody cares about Apple because it's easy to choose something other than Apple. It's not easy to choose something other than Windows and it's getting harder every day.
I'm just trying to figure out if Sun did anything wrong here. Yeah they don't give much credit to the Linux/GPL roots of what they are doing, but who cares? As long as they follow the letter of the GPL law, then if they want to be dicks about it, that's their choice. It's up to their customers to decide if that choice is a good one.
If Sun can create something that's valuable to customers, then good for them. I rather doubt that people who are forsaking Microsoft are going to want to get into another oppressive licensing scheme.
Ummm... major ISP's. Tell me one person who's not connected to a major ISP in some fasion. If it only effects BGP, it effects all of us.
Actually, I can attest, from personal experience, that Linux has better support for legacy cards. I tried to put one of my old sound cards in my mother-in-law's computer. It was an Ensoniq soundscape from 1995. I managed to find some legacy drivers for it on Creative's website, but it just would not work under Windows 98. This card works flawlessly under Linux.
Where Linux tends to have problems is with the latest bleeding edge cards that require some sort of funky drivers. Legacy cards are rarely a problem for it.
Some games are really well suited to the console setup and some are really well suited to playing on a PC. I would never want to play an FPS or strategy game on a console because a mouse is the best input for them. I'd also not want to play a fighting game like Mortal Kombat on a PC, especially if I'm going to have a few friends over to join in.
RPG games certainly work well on a console because the inputs required aren't quite as precise or time critical. Playing a twitchy FPS on a game pad is an excercise in frustration. Unless they start building keyboard and mouse platforms into couches, some games are always going to be better on a PC.
If Microsoft's response to OO is a bunch of handwaving and fear mongering, then this is a very good sign. Two reasons:
1) They realistically see OO as a competitor to their product
2) They lack more substantial reasons to stick with Office
It means that enough Microsoft sales folks have been losing sales to OO that they are worried and needed to a PR blitz. You'll recall from similar actions against Linux that these campaigns are perhaps minimally successful, but a waste in the long run.
What I'd like to know is why the Ogg people, or anybody else, for that matter, would care what was chosen? They could have chosen to use morse code for all it matters, since nobody's buying these discs. The fidelity of these discs is indistinguishable to 98% of humanity, and the additional features are irrelevant.
Unlike Al Qaeda, we know where Iran, North Korea, and China live. If they were to ever be traced as the source of a nuclear weapons, we would annihilate them. Nukes are political weapons because no state can actually use them without essentially ending the game.
Yes, you should be able to strike. And they should pay you well enough and give you good enough benefits to insure that you don't want to strike. It sounds like the management of the facility believed that they could get away with less skilled employees. It seems they were wrong.
If you assume for the moment that the workers weren't allowed to strike, then how would they express their unhappiness with the state of their employment? They'd slack off unofficially, and they might passive aggressively due harm to the facilities. Frankly, it's better that they can strike and have an official way to air their displeasure than have it be something that slowly eats away at the facility.
Read this guy's post again, he makes a very good point. Both you and your girlfriend are going to need to be able to seperate your work life from your home life. You both need to be very realistic about this or you are setting yourselves up for disaster in both the business and the relationship.
I think that what you are going to see is that MMO games are going to evolve into an ongoing stable source of revenue for game companies. Ultimately the process of realeasing new games with the same rehashed premises every year is going to end soon. UT2004 is almost the same game as UT2003, the only major difference being in some graphics improvements and some new game play styles.
I look on the market and see Half Life 2, Doom 3, UT 2004, and a few other similar games on the horizon, and none of them really get me that excited. They are all essentially the same thing, and I can get the same joy out of playing counterstrike that I have now, over getting the latest greatest game for $50.
Having said that, I've been religiously playing PlanetSide since it's release. It's by no means a perfect game, but the element of large scale ongoing strategy does not exist in any other FPS game I've played. The closest contenders to this are games like Tribes, etc, but they are always confined to a small group of players fighting on random servers, for short periods of time.
Every night I log into PlanetSide I get a different experience. Some nights, I log in to find all our continents overrun, and some nights we are dominating. Ultimately it's somewhat repetitive in that you keep going through the same process of capturing bases, taking territory, losing territory, etc, but it has a much stronger sense of higher level strategy than any similar game.
Ultimately though I don't think MMO's are going to really boost the industry significantly. I mean, if I pay $12/month for a game, I'll probably not go and buy another game until I've lost interest in this one. If an average game cost $50, if before I bought anything more than 1 game every 4 months, it'd actually be a net loss in revenue for the game industry.
The benefit of the MMO is that, once established, it's a pretty reliable ongoing revenue stream as opposed to the massive swells in revenue from the single purchase games of old.
Likewise, if SCO's FUD turns out to be legally valid, Red Hat goes under as everybody all at once sues Red Hat to make them pay up on their idemnification pledge.
Perhaps not. RedHat if, they are smart, have taken out an insurance policy against the potential indeminification. This would make the cost of the potential indeminification a predictable expense. I have to believe that there's an insurance company out there that would happily take large checks for this given the low proability of a SCO victory.
Do you mean that 95% of people who drive sports cars are driving yugos?
Would this be a vioaltion of their anti-trust agreement? Seems like this could really put the hurt on Norton, etc.
The problem with Venus is that it is one of the most hostile environments we've yet to find in our searches. It's hot, it's acidic, and so it's hard on equipment, and it's potential for harboring life is low (given what little we know about the subject).
Our first objective in exploring the universe is answering the "are we alone" question. If we can find something as simple as bacteria on another planet, then it sets the groundwork for finding other more highly evolved forms of life. We just need to really prove that life is out there. I have zero doubt that there is, but we still have to proove it.
Once we find aliens, fine, then it might be neat to look at Venus.
I'm sure you can tell from my context, what kind of hacker I mean. In the other sense I would consider myself a hacker.
The cracker/hacker shtick has been dead for a while. Get over it.
With that, the difference comes down to a matter of what OS X is used for versus Linux. OS X hides a lot of the things that get you into trouble.
Though as far as numbers go, on the desktop OS X has a slight numbers advantage (but it's hard to track since nobody can really record my downloading of Fedora off of Bittorrent). But on the server, Linux is on par with windows in installations, and blows away OS X and the other BSD's.
You know why there's more overt hacking of Linux boxes than BSD boxes. Because there are far less BSD boxes out there to be hacked.
You know why there's far more Linux boxes that are being overtly hacked than windows? Because if you are a hacker, what the hell are you going to do with a Windows box? It's just not as interesting or powerful to remotely control a windows box.
I'm not a hacker, but if I was one, I would not waste my time on trying to 0wn windows boxes. I'd go after Linux boxes. Not because they are easier to breach, but because they are more fun to play with when you do.
Not to say your point isn't valid, just that the real question is how do you get more intelligent eyes reading the code looking for this stuff. OSS isn't necessarily better, its just that highly popular projects have lots of eyes. I know plenty of projects that get far fewer eyes and have TONS of bugs. Now that MS is being forced to be secure they are having lots of eyes so we will see in longhorn if this improved anything.
Open source scales well. A small project that few people take an interest in has few users and lots of bugs. It's not a big problem if the bug is exploited because only a handful of people are even using it.
As more people use it and more people get involved more people see the code. As more people see the code, more bugs are eliminated and the code becomes better. Thus the risk of serious bugs declines as more people use the software.
In the case of a closed source product though, the scrutiny does not scale at all. The scrutiny is a fixed value based on the company's internal policies. Given that most companies are far more concerned about time to market and profit margins, extensive security audits are seen as unneeded costs. As the product becomes larger and more complex, the likelyhood of bugs developing increases, but the likelyhood of a thorough review remains constant or even declines.
I had a discussion with somebody the other day about how you could implement an API if the only documentation of the API was in source code. You have the source code available, but it's under terms that do not let you distribute it for whatever reason.
:)
Theoretically, you can do a clean room implementation by having one person read the source code and write a specification for the implementation. Then that person hands the specification over to somebody else to implement. Thus there's no copying and it's still clean.
But like I said, THEORETICALLY
Um, I can download it on the Internet. I don't think it's a trade secret anymore.
Oh, and one other thing. There are cheaters, but they are infrequent, and dealt with well by Sony. They'll insist that they catch the person while they are cheating, but I've personally witnessed few obvious cheaters in the game. Most of the "cheaters" are really just good at the game.
There are a couple advantages to Planetside specific to the question here.
First of all, the game involves many different roles that you can fill. You don't have to be a good twitch FPS player to be able to have fun. You can fly aircraft, drive tanks, gun for tanks, be a medic, be an engineer, etc. I started off doing more support work and then as I practiced with the game, I got better and slowly got more into a fighting role.
The only draw back, as far as the original question goes is the cost. You have to pay a monthly fee for it, and if you are only going to play for 30 minutes occasionally, that may not be worthwhile to you.
If the cost isn't such an issue though, there's nothing in the game to make hopping in randomly a problem. It's easy to get involved in a battle just by looking at the map and seeing where the hotspots are. If you want to hook up with a group, there's always people looking for squad members. Sure, if you are only on occasionally you won't work have as much equipment at your disposal, but it doesn't prevent you from succeeding in the game.
It's had it's problems, but over time it's become quite a good game and I would recommend it if you can stomach the price tag. At the very least you can download a free trial and give it a whirl before you commit to it.