I fear, it was much more disturbing. I firmly believe that G.W.Bush and his administration didn't intend to lie to us, at least not about the single fact they were sure to be true. I rather think they were so convinced that there were WMDs in Iraq, and that al Qaeda was somehow the fifth platoon of Saddam Hussein, that they saw a necessity to reveal those dark and hidden plans with all means, even with deceit and lies. I think they thought that the end was justifying the means, and that somehow the truth at the end was making them holy again.
I had always that eerie feeling to be in one of those criminal novels where the lonely private eye is convinced that Person A is the murderer, even though all evidence points to Person B or even suggests suicide. And then the lonely eye tries to trick everyone (by planting false evidence or by lying to police men or whatever) into finally giving him access to Person A's privatest and intimest places to finally find that evidence to finally prove Person A's guilt.
The problem was twofold:
1) The president of the United States is no lonely private eye. He is the single most powerful military commander of the world. So when he screws up because his gut feeling is misleading him, then he screws up really big time. But he never asked himself: What if we are all wrong? Everyone actually asking this or at least asking for some evidence was just a hindrance for him to reveal the truth he was so strongly believing in. And he and his administration felt justified to remove those road blocks at all cost, even at the price of the Constitution.
2) The administration got it terribly wrong. There was no hidden truth to reveal. It was exactly as it seemed at the beginning: al Qaeda is fundamentalist network, and Saddam Hussein was a grotesk dictator. And both were detesting and mistrusting each other: For al Qaeda Iraq was much too secular, and for Saddam Bin Ladin was too fundamentalist, too independent to be controlled and thus a danger to Saddam's own powers. And the WMDs were really destroyed and all attempts to restart the weapon program were thwarted by the inspectors, by the embargo, and by the normal incompetence of a dictatorial bureaucracy. The zigzagging was just to keep some street cred with the neighbours, and making them think there would be at least some military power left with the local bully, so they wouldn't start the war.
Saddam probably wasn't expecting the world greatest power to be so naive and to fall for his stunt. In the end his little deceitment and the stubborn naivety paired with a feeling of a higher mission of a bunch of hillbillies in power was costing at least the life of 30.000 Iraqi soldiers and 4000 U.S. soldiers. It put Iraq in the most serious political instability since World War I when the Turkish Empire was dying, and this instability killed another 250.000 Iraqis. So the last five years were as devastating to the Iraqis as the 30 years of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship before.
You can try to automatize parts of the voting process, for instance registering of voters (go trough lists of residents and subtract those not entitled to vote, because they are in another list, e.g. felons or non citizen residents or whatever...) or counting of tallies. That's an automatized voting method.
With this type of voting it's easy to sell your vote. If everyone can see how you have voted there is a way to check if you voted the way you sold your vote.
A voting machine need only verify the integrity of the data contained therein. This is a software problem, and one which has been solved many times over the years. The problem is still unsolved, as far as I know. There is no way to make sure, that all votes are counted free and equal, and that the individual voter can make sure that his individual vote is counted correctly, without making it obvious to someone else which single vote was his.
(The same is for instance unsolved for mechanical voting machines.)
The integrity that can be achieved by publicly sealing of the voting box, by publicly putting in the votes into the box and by publicly counting the ballots after the seal was broken in public is (for very fundamental theoretical reasons) non achieveable with automatized voting methods.
But I always wondered: If God goes through all this effort just to conceal his workings and lead us to false conclusions, why shouldn't He be able to just wait for 4.6 billion years and have it develop for itself?
If I was God and if I knew that just sitting there for 4.6 billion years would turn a dusty cloud of stellar debris into a home for people adoring me and believing I had created the whole thing in six days, I would just sit there and play on my godly game console until the time is ripe, humanity has risen, and then drop some hints into the brains of some of the people that all they are sensing is just a big fake. It's so much easier than to actually fake it.
If you are married to a pharmacist you learn to make a difference between hallucinogetics and drugs, and moreso you learn that MDMA for instance can't be a drug because it's synthetic and thus doesn't fit into the definition of "drug":)
It is exactly vice versa: It might be morally ok, because the cop in question may be really very integer and able to make a difference between the case in question and the futural job. But in every case it is technically not ok, because we never know if the cop has this personal integrity.
And that's the whole crux behind the affair: It might taint the investigation, because the investigator has a personal interest in a certain outcome of the case. It doesn't necessarily have to bias the investigation, but just because it could do so, it is technically wrong.
Even being in the grocery business makes you a seller of drugs. Sugar, pepper, salt, coffee, tea... they are all drugs (from the old anglosaxon-old german word "dryg" = "dried").
If you don't have much fusion, and not very much convection within the star, then the heat gets to the surface very slowly (it can take up to billions of years!), and distributed along the while surface the energy stream is low.
If you operate electromagnetic waves yourself and find your own electromagnetic waves contaminated by your neighbors, of course you are allowed to do something about. There are special licenses and lots of governmental regulations in place to minimize this problem.
So if Monsanto or a Monsanto planting farmer gets a public auctioned license to pollute the environment of his farm with patented pollen, I am fine. If he doesn't, neither he nor Monsanto has any right to complain if other people make use of those pollen.
Differently than in the U.S. most EU parlamentarians don't have an individual mandate, but are sent to the parliament by their party, which has to win the necessary seats in the parliament in the elections (so called list mandates).
So, Heidi Ruehle (if you don't have Umlauts, use 'ue' instead) doesn't have individual campaign contributors, more to the contrary, the rules of the Green Party demand a strict differentiation between "being in office" and "having a mandate".
As a matter of fact I ordered one computer to be without any soundcard at all, and in the most games I play I turn the sound off. And I never use the computer to play music. So what's the point in spending money on a sound card?
An instruction manual with, say, 200 contributors (like the service manual for a Boeing 737).
Each of those 200 content creators would have a share of the copyright. To print a new copy of the manual, you'd need to get permission from each of them -- or their descendants. That's exactly how the Berne Convention works. But luckily you can derive licenses from the natural right of the author (or Author's right) and sell those. In this case each of the 200 contributors to Boeing's service manual sells Boeing an exclusive right to print copies of the service manual, and another exclusive right to change the contents (so updated versions can be written by other authors and be printed without violating the Author's Right).
But Boeing for instance would not be allowed to hire an author, actors and a director to create a movie based on the service manual without getting permissions from each of the 200 contributors.
My mother is an actual typograph and did typesetting with scissors and paste when I was a child. When I was sick, she stayed at home and did her typesetting there. So I have an idea what manual typesetting looks like (even thought the actual text was already done by a linotype typesetting machine).
I estimate Desktop Publishing has increased the output of a normal typesetter at least twentyfold (not to mention the ease of error correction you get with a computer!).
Slashdot Mirror
I fear, it was much more disturbing. I firmly believe that G.W.Bush and his administration didn't intend to lie to us, at least not about the single fact they were sure to be true. I rather think they were so convinced that there were WMDs in Iraq, and that al Qaeda was somehow the fifth platoon of Saddam Hussein, that they saw a necessity to reveal those dark and hidden plans with all means, even with deceit and lies. I think they thought that the end was justifying the means, and that somehow the truth at the end was making them holy again.
I had always that eerie feeling to be in one of those criminal novels where the lonely private eye is convinced that Person A is the murderer, even though all evidence points to Person B or even suggests suicide. And then the lonely eye tries to trick everyone (by planting false evidence or by lying to police men or whatever) into finally giving him access to Person A's privatest and intimest places to finally find that evidence to finally prove Person A's guilt.
The problem was twofold:
1) The president of the United States is no lonely private eye. He is the single most powerful military commander of the world. So when he screws up because his gut feeling is misleading him, then he screws up really big time. But he never asked himself: What if we are all wrong? Everyone actually asking this or at least asking for some evidence was just a hindrance for him to reveal the truth he was so strongly believing in. And he and his administration felt justified to remove those road blocks at all cost, even at the price of the Constitution.
2) The administration got it terribly wrong. There was no hidden truth to reveal. It was exactly as it seemed at the beginning: al Qaeda is fundamentalist network, and Saddam Hussein was a grotesk dictator. And both were detesting and mistrusting each other: For al Qaeda Iraq was much too secular, and for Saddam Bin Ladin was too fundamentalist, too independent to be controlled and thus a danger to Saddam's own powers. And the WMDs were really destroyed and all attempts to restart the weapon program were thwarted by the inspectors, by the embargo, and by the normal incompetence of a dictatorial bureaucracy. The zigzagging was just to keep some street cred with the neighbours, and making them think there would be at least some military power left with the local bully, so they wouldn't start the war.
Saddam probably wasn't expecting the world greatest power to be so naive and to fall for his stunt. In the end his little deceitment and the stubborn naivety paired with a feeling of a higher mission of a bunch of hillbillies in power was costing at least the life of 30.000 Iraqi soldiers and 4000 U.S. soldiers. It put Iraq in the most serious political instability since World War I when the Turkish Empire was dying, and this instability killed another 250.000 Iraqis. So the last five years were as devastating to the Iraqis as the 30 years of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship before.
You can try to automatize parts of the voting process, for instance registering of voters (go trough lists of residents and subtract those not entitled to vote, because they are in another list, e.g. felons or non citizen residents or whatever...) or counting of tallies. That's an automatized voting method.
With this type of voting it's easy to sell your vote. If everyone can see how you have voted there is a way to check if you voted the way you sold your vote.
(The same is for instance unsolved for mechanical voting machines.)
The integrity that can be achieved by publicly sealing of the voting box, by publicly putting in the votes into the box and by publicly counting the ballots after the seal was broken in public is (for very fundamental theoretical reasons) non achieveable with automatized voting methods.
But I always wondered: If God goes through all this effort just to conceal his workings and lead us to false conclusions, why shouldn't He be able to just wait for 4.6 billion years and have it develop for itself?
If I was God and if I knew that just sitting there for 4.6 billion years would turn a dusty cloud of stellar debris into a home for people adoring me and believing I had created the whole thing in six days, I would just sit there and play on my godly game console until the time is ripe, humanity has risen, and then drop some hints into the brains of some of the people that all they are sensing is just a big fake. It's so much easier than to actually fake it.
(wasting moderator points)
The parent is correct. Books have a reduced VAT of 7% in Germany, thus the 1.40 figure is right.
I choosed to be not on Facebook at all. Problem solved.
... and you have to forbid all your friends to add that application too.
At least nobody visiting my homepage uses Alexa either. "No data". I guess I am somewhat unpopular.
If you are married to a pharmacist you learn to make a difference between hallucinogetics and drugs, and moreso you learn that MDMA for instance can't be a drug because it's synthetic and thus doesn't fit into the definition of "drug" :)
It is exactly vice versa: It might be morally ok, because the cop in question may be really very integer and able to make a difference between the case in question and the futural job. But in every case it is technically not ok, because we never know if the cop has this personal integrity.
And that's the whole crux behind the affair: It might taint the investigation, because the investigator has a personal interest in a certain outcome of the case. It doesn't necessarily have to bias the investigation, but just because it could do so, it is technically wrong.
Even being in the grocery business makes you a seller of drugs. Sugar, pepper, salt, coffee, tea... they are all drugs (from the old anglosaxon-old german word "dryg" = "dried").
As opposed to the U.S. where terrorists just learn to fly commercial airplanes?
ad b) no 13 year old German kid calculates impact probabilities for asteroids either.
If Nico Marquardt is the one single German kid who does those calculations, he might even be able to use the German conjunctive correctly.
If you don't have much fusion, and not very much convection within the star, then the heat gets to the surface very slowly (it can take up to billions of years!), and distributed along the while surface the energy stream is low.
Don't underestimate the additional weight gained by larger window sizes!
If you operate electromagnetic waves yourself and find your own electromagnetic waves contaminated by your neighbors, of course you are allowed to do something about. There are special licenses and lots of governmental regulations in place to minimize this problem.
So if Monsanto or a Monsanto planting farmer gets a public auctioned license to pollute the environment of his farm with patented pollen, I am fine. If he doesn't, neither he nor Monsanto has any right to complain if other people make use of those pollen.
But hey - charm quark. What the heck a name is that?
(Especially for a German like me... where quark means white cheese.)
God particle is not much worse.
Why? Because now older, less efficient and smaller, but more planes carry the passengers?
Differently than in the U.S. most EU parlamentarians don't have an individual mandate, but are sent to the parliament by their party, which has to win the necessary seats in the parliament in the elections (so called list mandates).
So, Heidi Ruehle (if you don't have Umlauts, use 'ue' instead) doesn't have individual campaign contributors, more to the contrary, the rules of the Green Party demand a strict differentiation between "being in office" and "having a mandate".
As a matter of fact I ordered one computer to be without any soundcard at all, and in the most games I play I turn the sound off. And I never use the computer to play music. So what's the point in spending money on a sound card?
Each of those 200 content creators would have a share of the copyright. To print a new copy of the manual, you'd need to get permission from each of them -- or their descendants. That's exactly how the Berne Convention works. But luckily you can derive licenses from the natural right of the author (or Author's right) and sell those. In this case each of the 200 contributors to Boeing's service manual sells Boeing an exclusive right to print copies of the service manual, and another exclusive right to change the contents (so updated versions can be written by other authors and be printed without violating the Author's Right).
But Boeing for instance would not be allowed to hire an author, actors and a director to create a movie based on the service manual without getting permissions from each of the 200 contributors.
My mother is an actual typograph and did typesetting with scissors and paste when I was a child. When I was sick, she stayed at home and did her typesetting there. So I have an idea what manual typesetting looks like (even thought the actual text was already done by a linotype typesetting machine).
I estimate Desktop Publishing has increased the output of a normal typesetter at least twentyfold (not to mention the ease of error correction you get with a computer!).
This was when the southern coast of the Lac Leman became french, right?