When the John WcCain campaign turns to the current wave of "open sourcing" movements, spurred by Internet culture, what he thinks you're good for is free astroturfing labor.
If you're not getting a check for that kind of work, you're nothing but a hypocrite posing as a "Conservative".
If you are getting a check for that kind of work, you're nothing but a sockpuppet posing as a "Conservative".
The fact that I have never heard of xournal, if it is a direct competition to Adobe's complete PDF suite, shows that something like IBM is needed to make it into that direct competition. Acrobat doesn't own the marketshare: Adobe does.
And I said
GNU's Gnash player for SWF is all some Linux distros, like for PowerPC, have for playing YouTube and all the other Flash web content.
, which Adobe doesn't offer competition to on PowerPC. And several other people have also ignored that clear statement.
Because that's what works for you. You are asking the entire business market to do it your limited way, just in order to use Linux. Tell me that you're in marketing.
Adobe sells a lot of PDF tools to their Windows and Mac business customers. Linux business users can't do what those businesses do. In business, that's known as "bringing a knife to a gunfight".
How do I edit an existing PDF, then save it, on Linux? The mere fact that I don't know indicates that this common business operation isn't a default practice among business Linux users.
Adobe sells many tools for the PDF lifecycle/ecosystem. There's no Linux equivalent to that offering, which means that Linux can't compete with the Windows and Mac (x86) platforms in that essential business arena.
Video editing is still specialized, and not part of the basic business desktop toolbox. But certainly viewing YouTube is important at most businesses. Even if just to give employees a way to take a break when the boss isn't looking. Without which, lots of employees won't use their computers, and will just hang around someoene else's whose works.
GNU's Gnash player for SWF is all some Linux distros, like for PowerPC, have for playing YouTube and all the other Flash web content.
Tell me how to apt-get Firefox to play YouTube pages properly on an iBook G4. There's no Adobe Flash product for Linux/PPC (just Shockwave and Authorware, and not for Firefox at all)
Just because I mentioned exactly that scenario, you don't have to address it. Just like Adobe.
If IBM, or some other similarly capable org, got involved in Gnash development, the next couple versions of Ubuntu would have this problem beat. Though Ubuntu itself has already abandoned PPC support, and supports only x86 (including AMD) now. Kinda like some other OS vendor named "Microsoft". Since IBM sells a lot of PowerPC (and similar, and dissimilar) machines with Linux, the IBM investment in their preferred distros could be used by either Canonical or the Ubuntu community. Such is the power of open source.
GNU's Gnash player for SWF is all some Linux distros, like for PowerPC, have for playing YouTube and all the other Flash web content.
Tell me how to apt-get Firefox to play YouTube pages properly on an iBook G4.
See, that's why it takes an org like an IBM to get this stuff polished. "It'll work on my PC, but arbitrary other PCs that run Linux might not work 100%" means that a business won't support it on any PCs, because they can't know ahead of time over the next 5-10 years whether it will run (and be cheap to support) on 100% of the PCs they might want to use for other reasons.
"100% IBM Compatible" was the advance that made PCs mass market, and have kept them there even as IBM has got out of the PC HW business. IBM has the experience, the skills and the interest to make Linux "100% Web Compatible", even more than is Microsoft's proprietary lockin universe. In a way that individual developers, testers and users have not yet pulled off for Linux. It's overdue, and IBM is just sitting there with extra time on its hands.
Your Republicans have violated every right they've touched. Just because you haven't got the memo from Limbo, that just means they're shutting down the office now that there's nothing left to steal.
I look forward to your future posts where you say "Democrats are the same as Republicans", and then whine about how Democrats are only in it for the money.
If you Republicans weren't so monotonous and archaic, you'd be funny. Like an Oliver and Hardy movie. Pssst - you're Oliver.
As I said, the problem with PDF isn't reading it, or storing it. The problem is the rest of the tools. Adobe's got all kinds of tools for managing the lifecycle of Acrobats. But Linux can generate a new one from scratch, and read them (most of them). But all the other stuff is out of reach, which makes Linux not an option for lots of businesses. Corporations are document ecosystems, and Windows (or Macs) are necessary for a lot of it.
BTW, "ps2pdf inputfile.ps" isn't making businesses adopt Linux as much as the Adobe suite is helping Windows.
If IBM really wants to help replace Windows PCs with Linux PCs, it can do a lot more than just partner with Canonical. IBM could help fix the two biggest gaps in Linux's ability to "do what Windows does": full PDF and SWF suites that "just work".
PDF is a standard format that Adobe dominates with Acrobat. It's the favorite way for offices to send around read only documents that will have no chance of problems. Unless you send it to someone with Linux, in which case something funny can happen. Not so much in reading it, but if they do indeed want to make changes anyway. The SW for editing and managing PDF docs isn't so reliable on Linux, and not at all widely available. It's probably easy for IBM to fix that problem, because PDF availability for Linux isn't so bad, just needs some more "formalizing". Getting a brand name, but still open source, edition from IBM with support and training will help.
The real problem that needs engineering is Flash. GNU's Gnash player for SWF is all some Linux distros, like for PowerPC, have for playing YouTube and all the other Flash web content. More and more Flash is used for commercial sites, especially as Flash starts to run on mobile phones. But Gnash barely works, and often doesn't work with YouTube. IBM could really level the playing field by making enough contributions to Gnash that it "just works", even as Flash evolves and other players have to keep up with it. It takes a place like IBM to do that to Adobe's dominance without Adobe either winning or even killing the competitor. Gnash is also pretty close, so IBM's investment in it would be the finishing touches that make all the difference in corporate IT strategy decisions.
PDF and SWF are still Windows territory. With a little investment, IBM could not only make Linux a first class business platform, but also take (and deserve) credit for it under an IBM logo.
And if Novell paid a little more attention to Evolution, which competes with Outlook, the whole Desktop could be a Windows killer in the right hands.
Republicans are the public face of corporate power. The main problem for corporate power is that government power can protect the people from the corporations. So yes, when Republicans get government power, they do what they can to destroy it. Permanently - they usually eventually have to let go at least some of their power as political pendulums swing back and forth, especially under the pressure of the political tricks and contrivances Republicans use to get power. While they're in power, they squander as much government money and power to benefit their corporate cronies as either can bear - and usually more.
Proving their mantra "government cannot work" is just the way they keep their echo chamber intact, believing their own BS because it's all they will listen to. Which helps them screw up representative government that has to listen to the people's grievances and ideas for how government must work to protect our rights.
They're not stupid. At least, not so stupid that they screw up getting rich on the catastrophes they create.
That might be the reason that the government attempts succeed where private ones fail.
But reasons why something is true aren't proof that it's false.
You just proved that the government is better at some big things than private corps are.
And since just spending $billions on complex projects isn't any way to do anything but a lot of expensive work, there's clearly more to success than just a big budget. Even the government knows that.
Steves Wozniak and Jobs were working for HP, and tried to pitch them on their PC. HP refused, in no way related to any space program reconfig. That's why the Steves went entrepreneurial.
The electronics they used to make their PC were all subidized by the Federal government. Partly the NASA program, though primarily the Minuteman missle programme for which ICs were invented. And in fact all of both California and Texas (TI and Intel invented the microprocessor) were completely subsidized by the Federal government. First in "pioneer" days breaking away from Spain/Mexico, all the way through the 1960s-70s as public investors in universities and think tanks (like Stanford and SRI, Berkeley) that found civilian use in the PC, and then the Internet.
Even Bell Labs in NJ depended on Federal grants for its most groundbreaking research. Most of its physicists were supported by government contracts, and its large scale systems technology was developed to comply with government reliability and quality requirements.
Without Federal investment in technology, this country would be as competitive as Brazil. The periodic "cold turkey" by government, whether Nixon's or Bush Sr's, are setbacks in our development. There are some darwinian benefits in pressuring some people to do something desperate. But the entire private sector technology industry has always relied on government leadership, organization and subsidy.
No, the Qaeda's strategy has been not to attack the US because it's much more successful in its strategy to attack our enemies. And to let the US blunder through the wrong war, in Iraq. Those "Qaeda" in Iraq aren't the Qaeda who attacked the US or wrote that strategy any more than Bush's Republicans are Lincoln's Republicans. They're copycats, who use the name because it makes them look serious and scary. There's nothing at all stopping them from getting inside the US and bombing a building with a fertilizer and oil bomb, the way Timothy McVeigh and the 1993 WTC bombers both did. I live in NYC, and it's obvious that these expensive security measures aren't protecting anything but Bush and Bloomberg's reputation.
Which is why Bush is losing the Terror War he invented, everywhere he touches it.
Of course, this is a Sunday. On a Tuesday, you'll claim that we're winning the Terror War, because we haven't been attacked in the US. Because you haven't bothered to even read that Qaeda document. If you did, you'd see exactly why they aren't attacking us here, which wouldn't do anything to our global alliances except make them stronger. Of course, Bush and his fake security apparatus likely hasn't read it either, though they've had it in front of them for years.
Let's kill off some more of the Republican lies you heard on Rush Limbo's show, because they're so easy. Like how Clinton "fired all the US Attorneys". Yes, he replaced most of them, at the beginning of his term, exactly like every president does. But Bush's US Attorney purge is unprecedented: he fired a whole load of them because they weren't pursuing political witchhunts hard enough during an election year. And because Bush replaced them not with qualified prosecutors, but with political crony hacks, just like he installed at FEMA. All of which leaves the US undefended from terrorists, natural disasters and all kinds of other threats we create our government to protect us from. But which makes operating it extremely expensive, requiring $TRILLIONS in outsourcing to Bush's cronies.
As for Waco, the ATF (not the FBI) managed to kill a bunch of religious fanatics who were armed to the teeth and committed to killing and dying for their "messiah". But, like Timothy McVeigh, you Bush apologists never find them responsible for the deaths they cause when their "right to bear arms" goes horribly wrong. I guess it's because you think Jesus can't protect you from lesbians, er, "bulldykes". For some reason, though, Jesus loves Bush when he looks tough by torturing prisoners, most of whom were rounded up to meet quotas or score bounties, rather than any connection to any action against the US.
You Republicans have destroyed everything you've touched. I show you the Qaeda memo that renders the entire Bush Terror War unnecessary, and all you've got is "But Clinton..." Americans are tired of your lies, your incompetence, your hating America. Just pipe down already while the adults among us shovel us out of the mountain of shit you've rained down on us. We'll protect you, too, the way you never would anyone, let alone your "ideological" enemies. Just don't press it, or it might take longer to restore some liberties that you'll need before they're back.
The FBI failed to catch Capone through 1931 when the Treasury Department finally nailed him.
During that period, Republicans Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover were president (1921-1933). The 67th through 72nd Congresses (1921-1933) were all Republican majorities in both chambers.
The FBI, like all police agencies, is corrupt and incompetent, largely by design. The "anthrax bomber" investigation has produced nothing after 6.5 years but a dropped investigation of suspect #1 because of incompetence and zero evidence (but lots of wasted work and time), and now the (apparent) suicide of suspect #2. But I didn't just single out the FBI as blowing it. What I said was
Yet another terrorism investigation blown by Bush's agencies ignoring the most basic and trivial due process.
Bush deserves special blame for an FBI incompetent to handle terrorist investigations without blowing them. The main effect that the 9/11/2001 planebombings had on the US government was giving Bush free rein (with his Republican Congress - just like the 1920s) to remake the FBI, and all of the Federal government, into a new system primarily targeting terrorism. The FBI, like the rest of Bush's agencies, has done little but blow every investigation by ignoring or screwing up basic requirements to establish who is a terrorist, and what they actually do to qualify for punishment or legitimate exploitation. The latest news was that Bush's "Justice" Department had Monica Goodling rejecting critical counterterrorism applicants who were supremely qualified, but perhaps married to a Democrat, and giving the job to totally unexperienced and useless Republicans. The rest of the US Attorneys purge for the same reasons is also pretty well documented. As is its unprecedented depths and scope.
Now before you go and cite the mysterious "effectiveness" of this hellishly damaging incompetence at every level (from Lyndie England and company at Abu Ghraib, through Alberto Gonzales and now Mukasey, all the way up through Scooter Libby to Cheney and Bush), citing how the US hasn't been successfully attacked again since 9/11/2001, let's look at the facts that the Bush regime has known since at latest 2003 that the Qaeda's strategy has been to not attack the US, and instead concentrate on attacking allies like Spain and the UK. I'm sure even the geniuses at the FBI got that memo. Though maybe they got it earlier, since they seemed to know they should ignore their field office's warnings that Qaeda terrorists were learning to fly planes but not to land them.
The FBI has never been very good, but under Bush it is unprecedentedly worse. Despite Bush getting unchecked powers to remake the FBI into as effective a force as it needs to be. Which Bush has evidently used to at best keep the FBI, and his other counterterrorism agencies, at least as bad as they were when our country's survival wasn't supposed to depend on them daily.
Until they're proven terrorists, they're not "terrorists" under the law, whether legal or commonsensical. And who are these "terrorists"? The dozens to thousands of people who used those computers, along with any suspect? We're not rounding up losers from Afghani villages, we're invading the rights of lots of Marylanders.
You might have stopped paying attention when Democrats took control of Congress from Republicans, but since then, the courts have been consistently ruling what America was established on: that rights are inalienable, including the right to be secure in our persons, homes, papers and effects. And that these rights come from our creator, for all people, not from some government whim.
I know "Conservatives" don't believe humans have rights. That "Conservatives" think that authorities bestow rights on people lucky enough to get them, like if they're US citizens. Foreigners have their own governments they create to protect their rights, but the US government has no power created to violate people's rights - only to sometimes compromise with them after due process applying all their rights. "Conservatives" might think that US citizenship magically endows people with rights, rather than entitles them to insist our government protect them. But despite generations of transformation by "Conservatives" in government, we still all have rights. And now the "Conservatives" have blown the grip on power, that kind of un-American tyranny is getting rolled back.
Any evidence that the accused's defense can show, with a reasonable doubt, originated in info on those illegally seized computers is legally "fruit of the poisoned tree". Even if other sources could have led the cops to new, "untainted" evidence, if the tainted evidence can raise reasonable doubt that it was the source, then the other evidence is thrown out, too.
And if those computers do indeed have evidence that one or more of their users are criminals, even "terrorists", then the FBI just destroyed whatever case that evidence could connect to, by converting it into a way to throw out other evidence.
Which, considering the FBI's record in investigating terrorism cases, is not surprising. But still unacceptable. Maybe once their boss, Bush's pet Attorney General Mukasey, is out of a job in January, we can start expecting justice out of the department that inherited that name.
Cops don't need a warrant to search a private citizen who gives their permission. But of course that citizen has to know they have the right to refuse, and then they have to have the guts to use that right. The Constitution doesn't emit alarm bells from its Smithsonian alcove whenever a government worker violates it.
That library director isn't acting as a private citizen. They're acting as the custodian of that equipment, working for the public. People have an expectation of some privacy when using library records. Courts held for generations that library records, though recorded and kept by a public institution, require due process - like a warrant or court order, based on evidence and probable cause - until Bush's Republican Era started relegislating those rights protections away with Patriot Acts and their ilk.
If those government employees colluded to expose private records without a warrant, whether through "incompetence" or disdain for their obligations (or, as has been the fad this decade, through both), then the evidence they seized is worthless. Yet another terrorism investigation blown by Bush's agencies ignoring the most basic and trivial due process.
Biometric databases aren't as dehumanizing as tattoed serial numbers like Nazis abused Jewish (and other) concentration camp prisoners with. But they have the same bureaucratic effect: reducing the person to a number.
Biometric database technology has been within Israel's capacity for 20 or more years. I've known several Holocaust survivors, some with the tattoos, some who were Israelis. If more of that generation were alive to fight this kind of neocon roundup, it wouldn't stand a chance of getting through. Which is probably why it's taken this long to roll out.
Consider the entire US space program, starting immediately after Sputnik. It reached space, orbit, then the Moon in 7 years (on schedule "by the end of the decade"). Then returned to the Moon many times. Then continued to operate a shuttle to orbit for decades.
Factor in everything, and private enterprise hasn't achieved any of that. Even with that proven effort to start with.
My conclusion is correct. However, factor in your Ron Paul.sig, and the US merely wasted taxpayer money on a Capricorn One movie studio.
Do you know how many private corporation projects there are launching into space?
None.
What do those test subjects have to do with the superiority of government space programmes over private ones? Private efforts can kill all the monkeys they need, too. But they don't have to, since government already sacrificed the required amount. The private efforts still can't get there.
The US Apollo Program suffered only two major setbacks: Apollo 1 killed 3 astronauts, and Apollo 13, already in space, nearly killed its 3 astronauts, but didn't. That programme went from nearly nothing to the Moon in 7 years. With no precedents, with a much lower technology level than today, feeding on a much smaller pool of scientists and engineers, managing a vastly more complex project from scratch.
Not bad for government work.
Today, we watch as several parallel teams take decades just to reach orbit. With much higher base technology, and also knowing it can be done, because the Apollo Program (and other government programmes) proved it before.
Government might be better at some kinds of undertakings. At the very least, government is at least as good as private enterprise in some undertakings. And some undertakings that government has achieved are the greatest accomplishments humans have ever achieved.
Slashdot Mirror
When the John WcCain campaign turns to the current wave of "open sourcing" movements, spurred by Internet culture, what he thinks you're good for is free astroturfing labor.
If you're not getting a check for that kind of work, you're nothing but a hypocrite posing as a "Conservative".
If you are getting a check for that kind of work, you're nothing but a sockpuppet posing as a "Conservative".
All aboard the Straight Talk Express trainwreck!
The fact that I have never heard of xournal, if it is a direct competition to Adobe's complete PDF suite, shows that something like IBM is needed to make it into that direct competition. Acrobat doesn't own the marketshare: Adobe does.
And I said
,
which Adobe doesn't offer competition to on PowerPC. And several other people have also ignored that clear statement.
Because that's what works for you. You are asking the entire business market to do it your limited way, just in order to use Linux. Tell me that you're in marketing.
Adobe sells a lot of PDF tools to their Windows and Mac business customers. Linux business users can't do what those businesses do. In business, that's known as "bringing a knife to a gunfight".
How do I edit an existing PDF, then save it, on Linux? The mere fact that I don't know indicates that this common business operation isn't a default practice among business Linux users.
Adobe sells many tools for the PDF lifecycle/ecosystem. There's no Linux equivalent to that offering, which means that Linux can't compete with the Windows and Mac (x86) platforms in that essential business arena.
Video editing is still specialized, and not part of the basic business desktop toolbox. But certainly viewing YouTube is important at most businesses. Even if just to give employees a way to take a break when the boss isn't looking. Without which, lots of employees won't use their computers, and will just hang around someoene else's whose works.
Like I said,
Tell me how to apt-get Firefox to play YouTube pages properly on an iBook G4. There's no Adobe Flash product for Linux/PPC (just Shockwave and Authorware, and not for Firefox at all)
Just because I mentioned exactly that scenario, you don't have to address it. Just like Adobe.
If IBM, or some other similarly capable org, got involved in Gnash development, the next couple versions of Ubuntu would have this problem beat. Though Ubuntu itself has already abandoned PPC support, and supports only x86 (including AMD) now. Kinda like some other OS vendor named "Microsoft". Since IBM sells a lot of PowerPC (and similar, and dissimilar) machines with Linux, the IBM investment in their preferred distros could be used by either Canonical or the Ubuntu community. Such is the power of open source.
Like I said,
Tell me how to apt-get Firefox to play YouTube pages properly on an iBook G4.
See, that's why it takes an org like an IBM to get this stuff polished. "It'll work on my PC, but arbitrary other PCs that run Linux might not work 100%" means that a business won't support it on any PCs, because they can't know ahead of time over the next 5-10 years whether it will run (and be cheap to support) on 100% of the PCs they might want to use for other reasons.
"100% IBM Compatible" was the advance that made PCs mass market, and have kept them there even as IBM has got out of the PC HW business. IBM has the experience, the skills and the interest to make Linux "100% Web Compatible", even more than is Microsoft's proprietary lockin universe. In a way that individual developers, testers and users have not yet pulled off for Linux. It's overdue, and IBM is just sitting there with extra time on its hands.
It's not IBM's responsibility. It's their opportunity. Just like the opportunity they're exploiting in the story we're discussing in these threads.
Your Republicans have violated every right they've touched. Just because you haven't got the memo from Limbo, that just means they're shutting down the office now that there's nothing left to steal.
I look forward to your future posts where you say "Democrats are the same as Republicans", and then whine about how Democrats are only in it for the money.
If you Republicans weren't so monotonous and archaic, you'd be funny. Like an Oliver and Hardy movie. Pssst - you're Oliver.
As I said, the problem with PDF isn't reading it, or storing it. The problem is the rest of the tools. Adobe's got all kinds of tools for managing the lifecycle of Acrobats. But Linux can generate a new one from scratch, and read them (most of them). But all the other stuff is out of reach, which makes Linux not an option for lots of businesses. Corporations are document ecosystems, and Windows (or Macs) are necessary for a lot of it.
BTW, "ps2pdf inputfile.ps" isn't making businesses adopt Linux as much as the Adobe suite is helping Windows.
If IBM really wants to help replace Windows PCs with Linux PCs, it can do a lot more than just partner with Canonical. IBM could help fix the two biggest gaps in Linux's ability to "do what Windows does": full PDF and SWF suites that "just work".
PDF is a standard format that Adobe dominates with Acrobat. It's the favorite way for offices to send around read only documents that will have no chance of problems. Unless you send it to someone with Linux, in which case something funny can happen. Not so much in reading it, but if they do indeed want to make changes anyway. The SW for editing and managing PDF docs isn't so reliable on Linux, and not at all widely available. It's probably easy for IBM to fix that problem, because PDF availability for Linux isn't so bad, just needs some more "formalizing". Getting a brand name, but still open source, edition from IBM with support and training will help.
The real problem that needs engineering is Flash. GNU's Gnash player for SWF is all some Linux distros, like for PowerPC, have for playing YouTube and all the other Flash web content. More and more Flash is used for commercial sites, especially as Flash starts to run on mobile phones. But Gnash barely works, and often doesn't work with YouTube. IBM could really level the playing field by making enough contributions to Gnash that it "just works", even as Flash evolves and other players have to keep up with it. It takes a place like IBM to do that to Adobe's dominance without Adobe either winning or even killing the competitor. Gnash is also pretty close, so IBM's investment in it would be the finishing touches that make all the difference in corporate IT strategy decisions.
PDF and SWF are still Windows territory. With a little investment, IBM could not only make Linux a first class business platform, but also take (and deserve) credit for it under an IBM logo.
And if Novell paid a little more attention to Evolution, which competes with Outlook, the whole Desktop could be a Windows killer in the right hands.
Moderation -2
100% Flamebait
Mention that Israel's neocon government is betraying the memory of Holocaust victims and survivors, and TrollMods will suppress you. Never forget.
Yes, that is indeed the joke (not an inside academia one, either).
"All artists borrow. Great artists steal." - Picasso (who stole the line from Dali)
Republicans are the public face of corporate power. The main problem for corporate power is that government power can protect the people from the corporations. So yes, when Republicans get government power, they do what they can to destroy it. Permanently - they usually eventually have to let go at least some of their power as political pendulums swing back and forth, especially under the pressure of the political tricks and contrivances Republicans use to get power. While they're in power, they squander as much government money and power to benefit their corporate cronies as either can bear - and usually more.
Proving their mantra "government cannot work" is just the way they keep their echo chamber intact, believing their own BS because it's all they will listen to. Which helps them screw up representative government that has to listen to the people's grievances and ideas for how government must work to protect our rights.
They're not stupid. At least, not so stupid that they screw up getting rich on the catastrophes they create.
"It is better to be feared than loved." - Machiavelli's instructions to the prince, in _The Prince_.
That might be the reason that the government attempts succeed where private ones fail.
But reasons why something is true aren't proof that it's false.
You just proved that the government is better at some big things than private corps are.
And since just spending $billions on complex projects isn't any way to do anything but a lot of expensive work, there's clearly more to success than just a big budget. Even the government knows that.
Steves Wozniak and Jobs were working for HP, and tried to pitch them on their PC. HP refused, in no way related to any space program reconfig. That's why the Steves went entrepreneurial.
The electronics they used to make their PC were all subidized by the Federal government. Partly the NASA program, though primarily the Minuteman missle programme for which ICs were invented. And in fact all of both California and Texas (TI and Intel invented the microprocessor) were completely subsidized by the Federal government. First in "pioneer" days breaking away from Spain/Mexico, all the way through the 1960s-70s as public investors in universities and think tanks (like Stanford and SRI, Berkeley) that found civilian use in the PC, and then the Internet.
Even Bell Labs in NJ depended on Federal grants for its most groundbreaking research. Most of its physicists were supported by government contracts, and its large scale systems technology was developed to comply with government reliability and quality requirements.
Without Federal investment in technology, this country would be as competitive as Brazil. The periodic "cold turkey" by government, whether Nixon's or Bush Sr's, are setbacks in our development. There are some darwinian benefits in pressuring some people to do something desperate. But the entire private sector technology industry has always relied on government leadership, organization and subsidy.
No, the Qaeda's strategy has been not to attack the US because it's much more successful in its strategy to attack our enemies. And to let the US blunder through the wrong war, in Iraq. Those "Qaeda" in Iraq aren't the Qaeda who attacked the US or wrote that strategy any more than Bush's Republicans are Lincoln's Republicans. They're copycats, who use the name because it makes them look serious and scary. There's nothing at all stopping them from getting inside the US and bombing a building with a fertilizer and oil bomb, the way Timothy McVeigh and the 1993 WTC bombers both did. I live in NYC, and it's obvious that these expensive security measures aren't protecting anything but Bush and Bloomberg's reputation.
Which is why Bush is losing the Terror War he invented, everywhere he touches it.
Of course, this is a Sunday. On a Tuesday, you'll claim that we're winning the Terror War, because we haven't been attacked in the US. Because you haven't bothered to even read that Qaeda document. If you did, you'd see exactly why they aren't attacking us here, which wouldn't do anything to our global alliances except make them stronger. Of course, Bush and his fake security apparatus likely hasn't read it either, though they've had it in front of them for years.
Let's kill off some more of the Republican lies you heard on Rush Limbo's show, because they're so easy. Like how Clinton "fired all the US Attorneys". Yes, he replaced most of them, at the beginning of his term, exactly like every president does . But Bush's US Attorney purge is unprecedented: he fired a whole load of them because they weren't pursuing political witchhunts hard enough during an election year. And because Bush replaced them not with qualified prosecutors, but with political crony hacks, just like he installed at FEMA. All of which leaves the US undefended from terrorists, natural disasters and all kinds of other threats we create our government to protect us from. But which makes operating it extremely expensive, requiring $TRILLIONS in outsourcing to Bush's cronies.
As for Waco, the ATF (not the FBI) managed to kill a bunch of religious fanatics who were armed to the teeth and committed to killing and dying for their "messiah". But, like Timothy McVeigh, you Bush apologists never find them responsible for the deaths they cause when their "right to bear arms" goes horribly wrong. I guess it's because you think Jesus can't protect you from lesbians, er, "bulldykes". For some reason, though, Jesus loves Bush when he looks tough by torturing prisoners, most of whom were rounded up to meet quotas or score bounties, rather than any connection to any action against the US.
You Republicans have destroyed everything you've touched. I show you the Qaeda memo that renders the entire Bush Terror War unnecessary, and all you've got is "But Clinton..." Americans are tired of your lies, your incompetence, your hating America. Just pipe down already while the adults among us shovel us out of the mountain of shit you've rained down on us. We'll protect you, too, the way you never would anyone, let alone your "ideological" enemies. Just don't press it, or it might take longer to restore some liberties that you'll need before they're back.
The FBI failed to catch Capone through 1931 when the Treasury Department finally nailed him.
During that period, Republicans Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover were president (1921-1933). The 67th through 72nd Congresses (1921-1933) were all Republican majorities in both chambers.
The FBI, like all police agencies, is corrupt and incompetent, largely by design. The "anthrax bomber" investigation has produced nothing after 6.5 years but a dropped investigation of suspect #1 because of incompetence and zero evidence (but lots of wasted work and time), and now the (apparent) suicide of suspect #2. But I didn't just single out the FBI as blowing it. What I said was
Bush deserves special blame for an FBI incompetent to handle terrorist investigations without blowing them. The main effect that the 9/11/2001 planebombings had on the US government was giving Bush free rein (with his Republican Congress - just like the 1920s) to remake the FBI, and all of the Federal government, into a new system primarily targeting terrorism. The FBI, like the rest of Bush's agencies, has done little but blow every investigation by ignoring or screwing up basic requirements to establish who is a terrorist, and what they actually do to qualify for punishment or legitimate exploitation. The latest news was that Bush's "Justice" Department had Monica Goodling rejecting critical counterterrorism applicants who were supremely qualified, but perhaps married to a Democrat, and giving the job to totally unexperienced and useless Republicans. The rest of the US Attorneys purge for the same reasons is also pretty well documented. As is its unprecedented depths and scope.
Now before you go and cite the mysterious "effectiveness" of this hellishly damaging incompetence at every level (from Lyndie England and company at Abu Ghraib, through Alberto Gonzales and now Mukasey, all the way up through Scooter Libby to Cheney and Bush), citing how the US hasn't been successfully attacked again since 9/11/2001, let's look at the facts that the Bush regime has known since at latest 2003 that the Qaeda's strategy has been to not attack the US, and instead concentrate on attacking allies like Spain and the UK. I'm sure even the geniuses at the FBI got that memo. Though maybe they got it earlier, since they seemed to know they should ignore their field office's warnings that Qaeda terrorists were learning to fly planes but not to land them.
The FBI has never been very good, but under Bush it is unprecedentedly worse. Despite Bush getting unchecked powers to remake the FBI into as effective a force as it needs to be. Which Bush has evidently used to at best keep the FBI, and his other counterterrorism agencies, at least as bad as they were when our country's survival wasn't supposed to depend on them daily.
Until they're proven terrorists, they're not "terrorists" under the law, whether legal or commonsensical. And who are these "terrorists"? The dozens to thousands of people who used those computers, along with any suspect? We're not rounding up losers from Afghani villages, we're invading the rights of lots of Marylanders.
You might have stopped paying attention when Democrats took control of Congress from Republicans, but since then, the courts have been consistently ruling what America was established on: that rights are inalienable, including the right to be secure in our persons, homes, papers and effects. And that these rights come from our creator, for all people, not from some government whim.
I know "Conservatives" don't believe humans have rights. That "Conservatives" think that authorities bestow rights on people lucky enough to get them, like if they're US citizens. Foreigners have their own governments they create to protect their rights, but the US government has no power created to violate people's rights - only to sometimes compromise with them after due process applying all their rights. "Conservatives" might think that US citizenship magically endows people with rights, rather than entitles them to insist our government protect them. But despite generations of transformation by "Conservatives" in government, we still all have rights. And now the "Conservatives" have blown the grip on power, that kind of un-American tyranny is getting rolled back.
Any evidence that the accused's defense can show, with a reasonable doubt, originated in info on those illegally seized computers is legally "fruit of the poisoned tree". Even if other sources could have led the cops to new, "untainted" evidence, if the tainted evidence can raise reasonable doubt that it was the source, then the other evidence is thrown out, too.
And if those computers do indeed have evidence that one or more of their users are criminals, even "terrorists", then the FBI just destroyed whatever case that evidence could connect to, by converting it into a way to throw out other evidence.
Which, considering the FBI's record in investigating terrorism cases, is not surprising. But still unacceptable. Maybe once their boss, Bush's pet Attorney General Mukasey, is out of a job in January, we can start expecting justice out of the department that inherited that name.
Cops don't need a warrant to search a private citizen who gives their permission. But of course that citizen has to know they have the right to refuse, and then they have to have the guts to use that right. The Constitution doesn't emit alarm bells from its Smithsonian alcove whenever a government worker violates it.
That library director isn't acting as a private citizen. They're acting as the custodian of that equipment, working for the public. People have an expectation of some privacy when using library records. Courts held for generations that library records, though recorded and kept by a public institution, require due process - like a warrant or court order, based on evidence and probable cause - until Bush's Republican Era started relegislating those rights protections away with Patriot Acts and their ilk.
If those government employees colluded to expose private records without a warrant, whether through "incompetence" or disdain for their obligations (or, as has been the fad this decade, through both), then the evidence they seized is worthless. Yet another terrorism investigation blown by Bush's agencies ignoring the most basic and trivial due process.
Feel safer?
Biometric databases aren't as dehumanizing as tattoed serial numbers like Nazis abused Jewish (and other) concentration camp prisoners with. But they have the same bureaucratic effect: reducing the person to a number.
Biometric database technology has been within Israel's capacity for 20 or more years. I've known several Holocaust survivors, some with the tattoos, some who were Israelis. If more of that generation were alive to fight this kind of neocon roundup, it wouldn't stand a chance of getting through. Which is probably why it's taken this long to roll out.
Consider the entire US space program, starting immediately after Sputnik. It reached space, orbit, then the Moon in 7 years (on schedule "by the end of the decade"). Then returned to the Moon many times. Then continued to operate a shuttle to orbit for decades.
Factor in everything, and private enterprise hasn't achieved any of that. Even with that proven effort to start with.
My conclusion is correct. However, factor in your Ron Paul .sig, and the US merely wasted taxpayer money on a Capricorn One movie studio.
Do you know how many private corporation projects there are launching into space?
None.
What do those test subjects have to do with the superiority of government space programmes over private ones? Private efforts can kill all the monkeys they need, too. But they don't have to, since government already sacrificed the required amount. The private efforts still can't get there.
No, I meant that in the 1960s there was a much smaller pool of scientists and engineers in the US/world from which to recruit than there is now.
FWIW, that 400,000 people was overwhelmingly not scientists or engineers. Still necessary, but entirely besides my point.
The US Apollo Program suffered only two major setbacks: Apollo 1 killed 3 astronauts, and Apollo 13, already in space, nearly killed its 3 astronauts, but didn't. That programme went from nearly nothing to the Moon in 7 years. With no precedents, with a much lower technology level than today, feeding on a much smaller pool of scientists and engineers, managing a vastly more complex project from scratch.
Not bad for government work.
Today, we watch as several parallel teams take decades just to reach orbit. With much higher base technology, and also knowing it can be done, because the Apollo Program (and other government programmes) proved it before.
Government might be better at some kinds of undertakings. At the very least, government is at least as good as private enterprise in some undertakings. And some undertakings that government has achieved are the greatest accomplishments humans have ever achieved.