Actually, they address both sides--the need to encourage innovation as well as the need to reward it. The problem now is that legitimate patents can be too expensive, and too many illegitimate ones get through. The system is buckling under the load of spurious IP speculators. Your likelihood of getting a patent now may have less to do with how good or novel the design or process is, and more to do with how many lawyers you can afford.
The problem with spam is not that people might buy the product. The damage to me has nothing to do with that. It's the time I waste and the bandwidth I pay for that they steal. It's also the fact that spammers are the money behind most of the viruses, spam relays bots, etc, which are jamming the web and costing us billions of dollars. A lot of the large cyber-criminal organizations got their start by working for large spam operations.
And stuff like the Nigerian scam is a crime. The letter itself is evidence of fraud, if they can catch those that sent it.
The solution lies somewhere in the middle: labour involvement in management. The "Union Rep" is actually a member of upper management, how communicates the state of the company accurately to the employees, and carries grievances right to the upper levels of management, and the Board of Directors. Lack of involvement breeds apathy. Eventually you have a business staffed by noobs who don't know what the fuck they are doing, or by burned out veterans who do but couldn't care less. Any company who manages the balance between employee and company needs will do better than EA. The problem is, there were almost none out there in the early days of game development. I worked for one of the oldest game companies in the world before they went down, and it was obvious that they were even more incompetent than EA. The early companies crunched and gouged their people to make their start, and kept on doing it. Others just didn't have the urge to build an empire like EA. Now EA is too big to break easily, and it uses that clout to break up better companies before they can become large enough to be a threat.
Unfortunately, you can hear this same tune in virtually every industry now. Wal-Mart, for example, will open a store in a neighborhood and slash prices to the point that even they don't make any money on it. Once all the local retailers have gone bankrupt, they close the store, having a proviso on the original lease that the space cannot be rented out for retail purposes for a decade or two. The huge box stands empty (there is almost nothing else you can do with it), the contractor who built it loses his shirt, everyone is forced to go to the Wal-Mart across town, which now sells its goods at regular or inflated prices, because it no longer has any competition. And thousands of people are thrown out of work--or forced to work at Wal-Mart for low pay, because the job situation is so desparate. So the behaviour of a company like EA should come as no surprise--it amounts to pretty much the same thing.
Boo hoo. You have a hard job, and would kill to work in the game industry. Okay, jackass, I've worked in the game industry, I've put in 100 hours in a week in shops that have mandatory 80 hour weeks, and here's a newsflash for you: IT DOESN'T WORK! The lead programmer on one of the projects at our company was asked, "How goes the battle?" He said "The battle is lost." Turns out the coders were so damn brain fried that they were adding two more bugs for every one they fixed. Finally, senior management stepped in and ordered everyone to take a week off, and capped hours at 60 per week. Once they did that, they were able to pull it out of the toilet.
It's kind of exciting, in a fucked up, macho, Russian roulette kind of way. It's the camraderie of the battlefield, sometimes complete with a body count. Have you ever worked 100 hours a week, and wondered why your heart is beating 120 beats per minute--when you're sitting down? Extreme exhaustion does that to you. Hell, I was in really good shape at the time. Good thing, or I'd probably be dead. The problem is that it can take as much as 4 hours after work to calm down enough to sleep, so if your job is leaving you 8 hours to sleep, you may only get 4, and eventually, that will kill you. One of my coworkers told me about a company he was at--one of the coders called in sick and never came back. They found him dead on his couch. The smell was pretty bad. His immune system was so depressed that a minor cold turned into galloping pneumonia, and he was dead before he knew how sick he was. Too many hours, too little sleep, too much stress. And none of this is really necessary. I can't count the studies that show that extended crunch time is actually less productive that normal hours.
A lot of people would kill for that job--until they saw what it was doing to them. If they didn't catch on soon enough, they might die for the job. Too many people think that working in a game company is all fun and games. Apparently you're one of them. EA exploits that misperception to rope people into a sweat shop. So do most of the other big game companies. Of course, the people demanding these hours never put them in themselves. They work 9 to 5, if that, take days off when they feel like it, and you'll never see them in on a weekend.
This industry is insane, and it's because of companies like EA, who do their best to screw anyone they come in contact with. There are damn few decent shops to work in anymore. When I leave this job, I'll probably never go back to game development (though I've said that before.) And if you think that working in the games industry is the ideal job, you probably have no fucking idea what you're talking about.
Yeah, because having multiple category 5 hurricanes ripping apart the south-eastern US every year is so much cheaper. Look at what a cost saver it was this year...
I don't get it. Why are you using machines at all? We still do everything by paper ballot in Canada, and the results are in within an hour of the polls closing. The 'voting equipment' consists of a box of paper. It's also very hard to cheat, unless you go into a polling booth and literally take the ballot box away from the scrutineers (and the cop standing nearby.) All the ballots are numbered, the number is written down next to your name, which is then crossed out, and a stub with the same number is put into a separate envelope. All the counts have to match up. If you suspect any funny business, you can go back after the election and challenge your own vote, and they can produce the paper for you. And I've seen news reports about American polling, and you have just as many people on site as we do, which means the machines aren't saving you any money. The machines are no cheaper, no faster, no more reliable, and not necessary, which makes their very use suspicious. So what the hell are the machines for? What, Americans can't count?
It isn't just that one side or the other may have cheated. The votes were being tallied on Windows servers on the internet, and the system still had lots of bugs, holes, and exploits. Some of them are using MS Access databases. Christ, for all you know, Bush may have been elected by a 14 year old Russian kid sitting in his underwear in his bedroom, because he likes watching live reports of foreign wars.
This is too important to trust to a Beta system. It's not like we're late adopters of technology. When it's a trivial matter, we'll try out the machines. Until then, we'll stick with paper. And I suggest you do the same.
Exactly. And lower temperatures mean lower metabolic rates--or zero metabolic rate if the hive freezes, which bees are capable of surviving. So 30 or 40 years becomes centuries, providing the local ecosystem time to adapt to lower temperatures and sunlight. By the time the bees are really in need, the delicate tropical flowers have been replaced by more robust species that thrive in the new environment. All you need are a few hives to be placed in areas prone to temperatures lower than those populated by the new flowers, so that the bees are not active during the recovery period.
This may also be a legal dodge to avoid SCO style predatory litigation. In that scenario, litigators would establish some tenuous claim to some pre-existing protocol, and go directly after Microsoft's major customers in a FUD campaign. The real target is Microsoft's wallet, of course, but by going after customers with harrasment suits rather than Microsoft itself, and thereby avoiding direct engagement with MS's legal department, they would avoid the 900 lb gorilla while creating an incentive for Microsoft to pay out of court to protect it's customer base. This license probably means that any such campaign would have to engage Microsoft directly first, a battle that any shell sham company is likely to lose badly. It also basically tells any prospective SCO type organisation to "Speak now, or forever hold your peace." Microsoft, a master at FUD, would probably be aware of such a vulnerability before anyone else.
Actually, most countries that don't have land line infrastructure are going straight to cel. This means that communication within the country is easy and will be harder to control, but the whole damn place still has firewalls built against the outside world--something that western corporations have been all too willing to help them with.
The rest of the improvements are largely the result of having tons of cheap labour, and a long entrenched social ethic of service. This isn't Chinese government propaganda (the reporter is talking about things he's experienced), but I'm sure there are a lot of things neither he nor any westerner is allowed to see.
China is mellowing, and will probably grow out of its Maoist period. I think the Chinese have had their share of 'glorious revolutions' with astronomical body counts. But it's still a pretty fascistic place, and the amount of money it has been shoveling into the American Fed is cause for alarm. It gives China a big stick to hit America with that few Americans are aware of, and the bigger the deficit, the bigger the stick.
Newbs do not determine content. If you are creating a game for newbs, you will never get subscriptions. People will kill the account after the first free month. The economic survival of these games requires both that they attract new players, and that they hold old players. Newbs are a dime a dozen. And long term bad will pollute the system in a way that descriminates against the newbs most of all.
My first online game was Everquest. I left because I wanted something different. And I have appreciated the differences I've found since in other MMOG's far more than the similarities. I have no interest in playing another Everquest. Like everyone else who leaves, I left for a reason.
Permanent character death is fine, IF you have a perfectly balanced game with no bugs that never suffers from link death. If this doesn't apply(and it's just not possible to achieve all this) characters are going to die through no fault of the player's. No one is going to buy this, not the newbies (who have to rebuild a character a dozen times on the first night) and not the veterans (who have spent 6 months building a character only to have it killed by a bad connection.) And each time a character dies, you lose everything invested in that character, and possibly that game, which is the incentive that keeps the vast majority of the people subscribed, if not actually playing. MUDs can survive this because they're FREE, and they're free because they require little code and no artwork. Once you get into 3D online games, you damn well better have a way to pay for all those expensive assets. Permanent Death might work if you designate opponents who have the power to do this, allow people to choose whether or not to encounter them, and give extra incentive for taking the risk.
Like many a tidy theory, when applied to the real world, this one breaks.
Newbs do not determine content. If you are creating a game for newbs, you will never get subscriptions. People will kill the account after the first free month. The economic survival of these games requires both that they attract new players, and that they hold old players. Newbs are a dime a dozen. And long term bad will pollute the system in a way that descriminates against the newbs most of all.
My first online game was Everquest. I left because I wanted something different. And I have appreciated the differences I've found since in other MMOG's far more than the similarities. I have no interest in playing another Everquest. Like everyone else who leaves, I left for a reason.
Permanent character death is fine, IF you have a perfectly balanced game with no bugs that never suffers from link death. If this doesn't apply(and it's just not possible to achieve all this) characters are going to die through no fault of the player's. No one is going to buy this, not the newbies (who have to rebuild a character a dozen times on the first night) and not the veterans (who have spent 6 months building a character only to have it killed by a bad connection.) And each time a character dies, you lose everything invested in that character, and possibly that game, which is the incentive that keeps the vast majority of the people subscribed, if not actually playing. MUDs can survive this because they're FREE, and they're free because they require little code and no artwork. Once you get into 3D online games, you damn well better have a way to pay for all those expensive assets.
Like many a tidy theory, when applied to the real world, this one breaks.
There are three problems with the Patriot Act. The first is obviously a suspension of due process. Within 6 months of passing it, the Bush administration was boasting that it had been used to to prosecute drug dealers. This has nothing to do with terrorism, and showed the real intent: a law which could be used to suspend normal due process in the investigation and prosecution of anyone, not just terrorists.
Secondly, there is the invasion of privacy. I really could care less if anyone read all my email or searched my computer. There's nothing incriminating. But this lack of concern only applies if the intent is criminal investigation. Political persecution is another matter. The Patriot Act is a perfect cover for a fascistic Star Chamber. If a group within the intelligence community decided that only those with the proper political views should rise to prominent positions, the Patriot Act would give them the clout to find out who does or doesn't hold these views. The persecution part is easy--just call a prospective employer and drop hints about an investigation into your background and affiliation with criminal organizations. The Patriot Act makes the Thought Police a real possibility. This is why law enforcement was required to get permission and provide notification. It permits ordinary citizens to catch the scent of this kind of activity, permitting correction by civil and political action. A crucial part of the checks and balances of the American system has been disabled.
The third danger is high noise and low signal. If the intelligence community becomes involved in the unneccesary surveilance of innocent civilians, the time, expense, and manpower devoted to this is diverted from genuine threats. The end result is less security, not more. In one of the debates, John Kerry mentioned thousands of hourse of surveilance tapes that have never been watched. Who is going to watch all of this? This is noise. In Britain, where cameras have been installed everywhere, their main usage is to bust people for traffic violations. I suppose that if a terrorist attack does occur, they can look at the tapes later and say, "Oh, there go the terrorists."
What the intelligence community needs to do is focus, get people on the ground, and stop the political infighting that is clogging the system. That means that people in the intelligence community should check their political opinions at the door when they come in, and stop pulling stunts like outing CIA operatives for political gain. The draconian measure currently being used won't help either; if you know a guy who is innocent but might have a lead, you're a lot less likely to give his name if you think he might get shipped to Guantanamo Bay just because he might be a couple steps removed from suspicious characters. And finally, they would have to get rid of John Ashcroft, the incompetent git who lost an election to a dead guy, shut down the FBI people who informed him of the suspicious group of Arabs training in a flight school in Florida, and who has detained 6000 people without finding a single terrorist. As long as he's in place, nothing else will matter.
You don't think it's interesting that the Iraqi national paper had predicted the strike and the targets months beforehand?
Yes, it is, but not because the information was unusual. The White House had all the pieces: the timing, that Al Queda was involved, the use of planes as bombs, and the knowledge that a group of Muslims were learning how to fly jets in Florida but had no interest in learning how to land them. The Israeli's knew something was up, and tried to warn the Americans. Alarm bells were ringing in intelligence servics in Europe too. And now your telling me that the Iraqi national paper also predicted it?
Jesus Christ, what would it take to get it through their thick skulls? How dumb can these people be?
And you want these people in charge of your security?
I've been wondering about that--I've been having a hard time connecting to Slashdot too, and to other sites. Anybody else there notice that the web seems to be getting really slow of late? People playing City of Heroes have been complaining of bad lag, even when the servers aren't heavily loaded--an indication of a wider general problem. And it seems to be getting worse we get to the election...
Gee, given that links from this site usually bring down other sites, I had no idea they needed more clicks. So let me get this straight--you're complaining that too many people like this topic? Uh... right... good complaint...
If you've been following the stories on Slashdot over the past three years, you will notice that more and more tech stories have involved politics, until, finally, it was decided to dedicate a topic just to politics. YRO, outsourcing, the politicization of science, stories about NASA, government use or avoidance of Linix, censorship of games, censorship of the web, laws being passed regarding spam and hackers, all have a political aspect, so finally Slashdot bit the bullet and started grouping some of these together. Politics influences technology, and technology influences politics. Whether you like it or not, tech has become politicized, and that wasn't Slashdot's decision.
Pull your head out of your ass. Just because you can't see the connection doesn't mean there isn't one.
Watch CBC newsworld--the choice of documentaries has been... interesting. The CBC 10 PM news has run a few too.
Re:Yeah... Listen to the gov't run media outlets!
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What's Going On in Canada?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, cause Fox does such a better job.
If you think the Canadian government dictates what the CBC can say, you've obviously never listened to the CBC. The same goes for the BBC.
Canadians are very much aware that a government owned news service could be tampered with, so the slightest move to do so is enough to sink a government. It's pure political poison. Nobody fucks with the CBC--not the government, not the courts, not CSIS, not the RCMP, not even the big corporations. They always lose. Ask Monsanto, who had Fox dancing like a trained bear, but who CBC had bent over counting shower tiles and squealing like a pig. This is the 900 lb gorilla that will eat your ass like pate on a cracker. The only thing that matters is good journalism. If the CBC gets the story wrong, it makes the government looks bad.
Want to commit political suicide in Canada? Try to censor the CBC. Wait one hour for the story to break nationwide. Canadians take this very personally. Have your letter of resignation handy. And make sure you have your resumes circulating in the private sector, because you will NEVER work in the public sector again.
I'm a Canadian who is pro-American. I was going through the statistics section of the Economist, looking over the performances of the various countries. Canada's wasn't bad, but the numbers for the U.S. scared the hell out of me: huge numbers for the trade deficit, budget deficit, and debt. All this after just having read that the U.S. Fed is being propped up by large investments from East Asia, and China in particular.
Contrary to Bush's claims about not giving others veto rights regarding America's security, this gives China veto rights on all of America's foreign policy. This is precisely the situation Britain found itself in during the 50's, when Eisenhower ordered Britain out of Suez by threatening to destroy the pound using Britain's massive WWII debt to America. The debt put England's balls in his hand. He gave a little squeeze, and the last of the British empire fell and died with a wimper.
The outsourcing situation doesn't help. The economic theory is that allowing goods to be produced where they are cheapest leverages the relative strengths of various national economies. But when the labour market is nearly infinitely elastic, enforced through totalitatian measures, as it is in China, the result is not the creation of a market for goods that America makes. Wages in China remain at rock bottom, and there is nothing that Americans make that the Chinese can afford. Instead of trickling down, the money is being thrown right back at the Fed in a global Ponzi scheme. The result is the inevitable decline of the standard of living of American workers towards Chinese levels--or massive trade deficits, that can only be sustained through loans, giving China the power to threaten the American economy.
At the same time, China is building a massive industrial infrastructure, which could be redirected to less peaceful uses once established. Combine this is hordes of 'bare branches'--young males with little or no chance of marriage--and you have the perfect environment for massive military mobilization. If the time came that China wanted to flex this muscle (and this is not a given--China does not have a history of expansionism,) it could remove America from the stage by playing its economic ace, after which Bill Gates entire fortune would barely pay for breakfast. The consequence of going through on this would be disastrous for China, but primarily to those at the lowest level of the pyramid. China is run mainly by party aparatchiks and triad gangsters, who aren't renowned for their humanitarian concerns.
Rest assured that the Chinese already know all this.
The solution would be a set of human rights and environmental tarrifs, which would partly cancel the attractiveness of outsourcing and provide strong incentives for businesses in the third world to raise the standard of living and the environmental standards in those countries. Essentially, follow environmental standards and pay your workers, or pay an even larger amount of money in tarrifs. This does not mean that third world workers would have to be paid the same as Americans. It means that they should be paid to achieve essentially the same standard of living as American workers, which may still amount to considerably less money given living expenses in that country. In other words, development in the third world would still be attractive. But the overall effect of this would be to protect job markets and labour rights in the first world while improving conditions in the third world and creating markets for first world goods. And those tarrifs would provide a much needed revenue stream for the government. This is not protectionism per se, so much as a strong incentive on companies, especially western companies, to act responsibly in other countries.
The U.S. is in a unique position to do this because everyone wants to get into American markets. Even if America went alone on this, it would have a tremendous impact on the world. Too bad none of the politicians has thought of this.
Slashdot readers tend to work in scientific or technical fields, are well educated and well read, secular, and take an interest in social and economic matters. There are also a lot of people here with the hacker ethic: make just as much money as you need, and put the rest back into the pool. On all those counts, Bush has scored terribly, by politicising science screwing up the economy, and by blurring the line between church and state. This is a man who goes on instinct rather than reason, is devoid of intellectual curiousity, and fights for the interests of the rich and powerful. When told that someone wrote a book while attending Yale, he quipped "I read a book at Yale." His is the epitome of what Steve Allen called Dumbth.
And you're suprised that the majority of Slashdotters can't stand Bush? I'm amazed that anyone here would support him.
One thing that I've been watching for, and have consistently found on the Republican side, with fewor no occurrences on the Democratic side, is that the fraud, intimidation, etc. are being practiced at an official or organizational level. Disreputable acts by individuals can be expected on both sides, and they really tell you nothing. But when I hear a conservative pundit raving on about a Democratic supporter resorting to violence, it bears nowhere near the weight of the reports of police using pepper balls on protesters. One is an individual lack of control, the other is deliberate policy.
This is what you should be looking for in these reports: what, of any of this, can be traced directly back to the party in question.
By the way, I also find it revealing that Drudge posted an illegible copy of the document. What, he couldn't find a good scanner?
The point here is not whether you oppose Islamo-fascism. Most of the most vehement critics of Islamo-Fascism also opposed the war in Iraq, because it played into the fascists hands. The argument is about strategy, not about the goal. And I am repeatedly astonished by the apparent incapacity of Bush supporters to distinguish between these.
This observation, shared by most of those critical of Bush and his supporters, is the reason we believe that Bush supporters have lost touch with reality. What we see is a rigid adherence to a single, poorly conceived, strategy. This strategy is like trying to perform brain surgery with a pick-axe. The major points of this strategy are:
1. Use of superpower style tactics against guerilla opponents--long range attacks, with large area of effect destructive capabilities--in other words, Shock and Awe. Shock and Awe, however, has high collateral damage, destroys infrastructure, and has very limited success against small mobile guerilla groups. In fact, this strategy is designed for fortified emplacements of mixed units, including tanks, artillery, and infantry, who are committed to holding a position. None of these conditions apply in Iraq. Ultimately, Saddam and the majority of his forces were killed or captured by ground troops, not by cluster bombs and long range strikes. This scorched earth strategy was also used in Vietnam. It didn't work there either.
2. An obsession with Iraq regardless of its connection to Political Islam. This obsession pre-dated 9/11, and 9/11 was only the pretext for for doing what elements of the Bush administration already wanted to do. In fact, Saddam Hussein, however vicious, was the one leader of an Arab country who had no ties to Political Islam, and who had always traditionally been despised by extremist Muslims. 9/11 made invasion of Iraq a lower priority, not a higher one, however much we may have despised Saddam Hussein.
3. The inability to determine between friend, foe, and neutral parties. Robert Fisk, a journalist who was in Iraq during the invasion, noted how American troops called any position not currently occupied by American troops enemy territory. This also underlies Shock and Awe, which had less effect on the Iraqi military and its political leaders than it did on Iraqi civilians. The result is that the Bush administration is firing blindly into the world, missing the target and making a lot of new enemies.
4. Poor comprehension of the enemy. There is a tendency to describe all opponents in the war as terrorists. In fact, actual terrorists of the Al Queda type may be quite rare. Instead, American troops are faced with a combination of criminal gangs, nationalist resistance, foreign agitators, and terrorists, with the majority probably being criminal gangs. The motivation and tactics of each of these groups is quite different, and strategies which work well against one type will actually give advantages to others. For example, diplomacy is best used against nationalists, who can be turned against foreign agitators, and criminals must be hit financially.
5. Predictability and rigidity. Bush is steadfast, no doubt about that--so steadfast that everyone knows what buttons to press and what he'll do when they're pressed. This provides the likes of Al Queda with the opportunity to play him, and to plan long in advance, even before the event that causes him to react. The terrorists are suicidal; they not only have no fear of retaliation, they are counting on it. Their goal is to provoke the most extreme form of retaliation possible, in the hopes that the Americans will offend enough people to gain sympathy for the terrorist cause. They have gotten exactly what they wanted. In fighting terrorism, the target must be the meme itself. Innocent casualties work to spread the meme, and must be avoided. Otherwise the terrorists will replace their numbers faster than they lose them, and the war can never be won.
Jesus told us to love our enemies. Sun Tzu said that we must know our enemies. In fact, they
Rumor is not evidence. The only reason that anyone even suspected Hussein is the conviction that if anything happened in Iraq, it was on his orders. The governemnts Saudi Arabia and Pakistan still have plausible deniability, but there is no doubt that a tremendous amount of support is flowing out of those countries, and their leaders often look the other way. Iran however, is in it up to their eyeballs, is building nuclear weapons (no doubt of that), and yet Bush went after Iraq. So whether Iraq gave support to Al Queda is a complete red herring. The Bush administration didn't really care one way or the other. Stop wasting time on this.
And if you dig deep into the Duelfer report, you will see that there is no question that Saddam was starting to suceed in getting sanctions lifted, and if they were, he was planning to restart his WMD programs. Yes, and he had Dick Cheney's full support on this. All those nasty sanctions were cutting into Haliburton's business. Bush was planning to lift them before 9/11, but the invasion was a much better idea, once they found a way to sell it.
It has a new government with excellent support from the people. Go take a look at the Iraqi blogs out there, please. Most people in Iraq consider the current government to be a branch of the Bush administration, and they despise Bush.
Its new police and military are starting to vigourously attack the Al Queda members in the country. I have heard reports that the Al Queda presence in Iraq is minimal, and some which say that Al Queda has metasticised into a social movement there. Which is interesting either way. If they are Al Queda, where did they come from, given that there were no Al Queda members there prior to invasion? So the invasion has actually paved the way for Al Queda to enter Iraq. If they're not Al Queda, then we are dealing with either groups of heavily armed criminals (which probably accounts for more than half of them), political extremists pouring into the country, or Iraqis who have formed a resistance. All of these are extremely long term, messy problems. Dictatorships are essentially large criminal organizations which run the country. When the big boss goes down, all the little bosses compete for a piece of his action. Look at Russia 15 years after the collapse of its dictatorship. Putin has ties to the Russian mafia. Cleaning it up may take decades. And crooks will deal with anyone who pays them. Al Queda's money is as good to them as any. So now, Al Queda has a recruiting ground, and a number of willing business partners. Lovely.
The economy is booming. With 8 hours of electricity a day, the near total collapse of the phone system, businesses bombed out, and oil production down to little more than half of full production? Please.
By a narrow majority, Iraqis support the presence of our troops until the new military gets up to speed. By a narrow majority? Uh, oh. The polls 6 months ago had that majority at around 75%. The people in Vietnam supported the Americans too... at first.
Even in Fallujah, the natives are getting restless and opposition to the Al Queda foreigners is strong. Opposition to Al Queda foreigners has always been stong. And opposition to the current regime, under which those foreigners have poured into the country, is getting stronger.
But life's getting better for the man on the street, and although we have made plenty of mistakes, it's nothing like the horrors under Saddam. The man in the street is getting bombed, shot at, and had to live without power in the blazing summer heat. They now have a lot of little Saddams kidnapping and killing Iraqis and westerners (you only hear about the westerners.) And not everyone held at Abu Ghraib is a terrorist. In other words, the old terrors are still happening, and the new ones really aren't a welcome addition. I'm really glad that Saddam is gone, and so are the Iraqis, but they're starting to think it's six of one, a half dozen of
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Actually, they address both sides--the need to encourage innovation as well as the need to reward it. The problem now is that legitimate patents can be too expensive, and too many illegitimate ones get through. The system is buckling under the load of spurious IP speculators. Your likelihood of getting a patent now may have less to do with how good or novel the design or process is, and more to do with how many lawyers you can afford.
The problem with spam is not that people might buy the product. The damage to me has nothing to do with that. It's the time I waste and the bandwidth I pay for that they steal. It's also the fact that spammers are the money behind most of the viruses, spam relays bots, etc, which are jamming the web and costing us billions of dollars. A lot of the large cyber-criminal organizations got their start by working for large spam operations.
And stuff like the Nigerian scam is a crime. The letter itself is evidence of fraud, if they can catch those that sent it.
The solution lies somewhere in the middle: labour involvement in management. The "Union Rep" is actually a member of upper management, how communicates the state of the company accurately to the employees, and carries grievances right to the upper levels of management, and the Board of Directors. Lack of involvement breeds apathy. Eventually you have a business staffed by noobs who don't know what the fuck they are doing, or by burned out veterans who do but couldn't care less. Any company who manages the balance between employee and company needs will do better than EA. The problem is, there were almost none out there in the early days of game development. I worked for one of the oldest game companies in the world before they went down, and it was obvious that they were even more incompetent than EA. The early companies crunched and gouged their people to make their start, and kept on doing it. Others just didn't have the urge to build an empire like EA. Now EA is too big to break easily, and it uses that clout to break up better companies before they can become large enough to be a threat.
Unfortunately, you can hear this same tune in virtually every industry now. Wal-Mart, for example, will open a store in a neighborhood and slash prices to the point that even they don't make any money on it. Once all the local retailers have gone bankrupt, they close the store, having a proviso on the original lease that the space cannot be rented out for retail purposes for a decade or two. The huge box stands empty (there is almost nothing else you can do with it), the contractor who built it loses his shirt, everyone is forced to go to the Wal-Mart across town, which now sells its goods at regular or inflated prices, because it no longer has any competition. And thousands of people are thrown out of work--or forced to work at Wal-Mart for low pay, because the job situation is so desparate. So the behaviour of a company like EA should come as no surprise--it amounts to pretty much the same thing.
Boo hoo. You have a hard job, and would kill to work in the game industry. Okay, jackass, I've worked in the game industry, I've put in 100 hours in a week in shops that have mandatory 80 hour weeks, and here's a newsflash for you: IT DOESN'T WORK! The lead programmer on one of the projects at our company was asked, "How goes the battle?" He said "The battle is lost." Turns out the coders were so damn brain fried that they were adding two more bugs for every one they fixed. Finally, senior management stepped in and ordered everyone to take a week off, and capped hours at 60 per week. Once they did that, they were able to pull it out of the toilet.
It's kind of exciting, in a fucked up, macho, Russian roulette kind of way. It's the camraderie of the battlefield, sometimes complete with a body count. Have you ever worked 100 hours a week, and wondered why your heart is beating 120 beats per minute--when you're sitting down? Extreme exhaustion does that to you. Hell, I was in really good shape at the time. Good thing, or I'd probably be dead. The problem is that it can take as much as 4 hours after work to calm down enough to sleep, so if your job is leaving you 8 hours to sleep, you may only get 4, and eventually, that will kill you. One of my coworkers told me about a company he was at--one of the coders called in sick and never came back. They found him dead on his couch. The smell was pretty bad. His immune system was so depressed that a minor cold turned into galloping pneumonia, and he was dead before he knew how sick he was. Too many hours, too little sleep, too much stress. And none of this is really necessary. I can't count the studies that show that extended crunch time is actually less productive that normal hours.
A lot of people would kill for that job--until they saw what it was doing to them. If they didn't catch on soon enough, they might die for the job. Too many people think that working in a game company is all fun and games. Apparently you're one of them. EA exploits that misperception to rope people into a sweat shop. So do most of the other big game companies. Of course, the people demanding these hours never put them in themselves. They work 9 to 5, if that, take days off when they feel like it, and you'll never see them in on a weekend.
This industry is insane, and it's because of companies like EA, who do their best to screw anyone they come in contact with. There are damn few decent shops to work in anymore. When I leave this job, I'll probably never go back to game development (though I've said that before.) And if you think that working in the games industry is the ideal job, you probably have no fucking idea what you're talking about.
Yeah, because having multiple category 5 hurricanes ripping apart the south-eastern US every year is so much cheaper. Look at what a cost saver it was this year...
I don't get it. Why are you using machines at all? We still do everything by paper ballot in Canada, and the results are in within an hour of the polls closing. The 'voting equipment' consists of a box of paper. It's also very hard to cheat, unless you go into a polling booth and literally take the ballot box away from the scrutineers (and the cop standing nearby.) All the ballots are numbered, the number is written down next to your name, which is then crossed out, and a stub with the same number is put into a separate envelope. All the counts have to match up. If you suspect any funny business, you can go back after the election and challenge your own vote, and they can produce the paper for you. And I've seen news reports about American polling, and you have just as many people on site as we do, which means the machines aren't saving you any money. The machines are no cheaper, no faster, no more reliable, and not necessary, which makes their very use suspicious. So what the hell are the machines for? What, Americans can't count?
It isn't just that one side or the other may have cheated. The votes were being tallied on Windows servers on the internet, and the system still had lots of bugs, holes, and exploits. Some of them are using MS Access databases. Christ, for all you know, Bush may have been elected by a 14 year old Russian kid sitting in his underwear in his bedroom, because he likes watching live reports of foreign wars.
This is too important to trust to a Beta system. It's not like we're late adopters of technology. When it's a trivial matter, we'll try out the machines. Until then, we'll stick with paper. And I suggest you do the same.
Exactly. And lower temperatures mean lower metabolic rates--or zero metabolic rate if the hive freezes, which bees are capable of surviving. So 30 or 40 years becomes centuries, providing the local ecosystem time to adapt to lower temperatures and sunlight. By the time the bees are really in need, the delicate tropical flowers have been replaced by more robust species that thrive in the new environment. All you need are a few hives to be placed in areas prone to temperatures lower than those populated by the new flowers, so that the bees are not active during the recovery period.
This may also be a legal dodge to avoid SCO style predatory litigation. In that scenario, litigators would establish some tenuous claim to some pre-existing protocol, and go directly after Microsoft's major customers in a FUD campaign. The real target is Microsoft's wallet, of course, but by going after customers with harrasment suits rather than Microsoft itself, and thereby avoiding direct engagement with MS's legal department, they would avoid the 900 lb gorilla while creating an incentive for Microsoft to pay out of court to protect it's customer base. This license probably means that any such campaign would have to engage Microsoft directly first, a battle that any shell sham company is likely to lose badly. It also basically tells any prospective SCO type organisation to "Speak now, or forever hold your peace." Microsoft, a master at FUD, would probably be aware of such a vulnerability before anyone else.
Actually, most countries that don't have land line infrastructure are going straight to cel. This means that communication within the country is easy and will be harder to control, but the whole damn place still has firewalls built against the outside world--something that western corporations have been all too willing to help them with.
The rest of the improvements are largely the result of having tons of cheap labour, and a long entrenched social ethic of service. This isn't Chinese government propaganda (the reporter is talking about things he's experienced), but I'm sure there are a lot of things neither he nor any westerner is allowed to see.
China is mellowing, and will probably grow out of its Maoist period. I think the Chinese have had their share of 'glorious revolutions' with astronomical body counts. But it's still a pretty fascistic place, and the amount of money it has been shoveling into the American Fed is cause for alarm. It gives China a big stick to hit America with that few Americans are aware of, and the bigger the deficit, the bigger the stick.
Newbs do not determine content. If you are creating a game for newbs, you will never get subscriptions. People will kill the account after the first free month. The economic survival of these games requires both that they attract new players, and that they hold old players. Newbs are a dime a dozen. And long term bad will pollute the system in a way that descriminates against the newbs most of all.
My first online game was Everquest. I left because I wanted something different. And I have appreciated the differences I've found since in other MMOG's far more than the similarities. I have no interest in playing another Everquest. Like everyone else who leaves, I left for a reason.
Permanent character death is fine, IF you have a perfectly balanced game with no bugs that never suffers from link death. If this doesn't apply(and it's just not possible to achieve all this) characters are going to die through no fault of the player's. No one is going to buy this, not the newbies (who have to rebuild a character a dozen times on the first night) and not the veterans (who have spent 6 months building a character only to have it killed by a bad connection.) And each time a character dies, you lose everything invested in that character, and possibly that game, which is the incentive that keeps the vast majority of the people subscribed, if not actually playing. MUDs can survive this because they're FREE, and they're free because they require little code and no artwork. Once you get into 3D online games, you damn well better have a way to pay for all those expensive assets. Permanent Death might work if you designate opponents who have the power to do this, allow people to choose whether or not to encounter them, and give extra incentive for taking the risk.
Like many a tidy theory, when applied to the real world, this one breaks.
Doh, sorry, clicked on the story above the one I was resonding to!
Newbs do not determine content. If you are creating a game for newbs, you will never get subscriptions. People will kill the account after the first free month. The economic survival of these games requires both that they attract new players, and that they hold old players. Newbs are a dime a dozen. And long term bad will pollute the system in a way that descriminates against the newbs most of all.
My first online game was Everquest. I left because I wanted something different. And I have appreciated the differences I've found since in other MMOG's far more than the similarities. I have no interest in playing another Everquest. Like everyone else who leaves, I left for a reason.
Permanent character death is fine, IF you have a perfectly balanced game with no bugs that never suffers from link death. If this doesn't apply(and it's just not possible to achieve all this) characters are going to die through no fault of the player's. No one is going to buy this, not the newbies (who have to rebuild a character a dozen times on the first night) and not the veterans (who have spent 6 months building a character only to have it killed by a bad connection.) And each time a character dies, you lose everything invested in that character, and possibly that game, which is the incentive that keeps the vast majority of the people subscribed, if not actually playing. MUDs can survive this because they're FREE, and they're free because they require little code and no artwork. Once you get into 3D online games, you damn well better have a way to pay for all those expensive assets.
Like many a tidy theory, when applied to the real world, this one breaks.
There are three problems with the Patriot Act. The first is obviously a suspension of due process. Within 6 months of passing it, the Bush administration was boasting that it had been used to to prosecute drug dealers. This has nothing to do with terrorism, and showed the real intent: a law which could be used to suspend normal due process in the investigation and prosecution of anyone, not just terrorists.
Secondly, there is the invasion of privacy. I really could care less if anyone read all my email or searched my computer. There's nothing incriminating. But this lack of concern only applies if the intent is criminal investigation. Political persecution is another matter. The Patriot Act is a perfect cover for a fascistic Star Chamber. If a group within the intelligence community decided that only those with the proper political views should rise to prominent positions, the Patriot Act would give them the clout to find out who does or doesn't hold these views. The persecution part is easy--just call a prospective employer and drop hints about an investigation into your background and affiliation with criminal organizations. The Patriot Act makes the Thought Police a real possibility. This is why law enforcement was required to get permission and provide notification. It permits ordinary citizens to catch the scent of this kind of activity, permitting correction by civil and political action. A crucial part of the checks and balances of the American system has been disabled.
The third danger is high noise and low signal. If the intelligence community becomes involved in the unneccesary surveilance of innocent civilians, the time, expense, and manpower devoted to this is diverted from genuine threats. The end result is less security, not more. In one of the debates, John Kerry mentioned thousands of hourse of surveilance tapes that have never been watched. Who is going to watch all of this? This is noise. In Britain, where cameras have been installed everywhere, their main usage is to bust people for traffic violations. I suppose that if a terrorist attack does occur, they can look at the tapes later and say, "Oh, there go the terrorists."
What the intelligence community needs to do is focus, get people on the ground, and stop the political infighting that is clogging the system. That means that people in the intelligence community should check their political opinions at the door when they come in, and stop pulling stunts like outing CIA operatives for political gain. The draconian measure currently being used won't help either; if you know a guy who is innocent but might have a lead, you're a lot less likely to give his name if you think he might get shipped to Guantanamo Bay just because he might be a couple steps removed from suspicious characters. And finally, they would have to get rid of John Ashcroft, the incompetent git who lost an election to a dead guy, shut down the FBI people who informed him of the suspicious group of Arabs training in a flight school in Florida, and who has detained 6000 people without finding a single terrorist. As long as he's in place, nothing else will matter.
You don't think it's interesting that the Iraqi national paper had predicted the strike and the targets months beforehand?
Yes, it is, but not because the information was unusual. The White House had all the pieces: the timing, that Al Queda was involved, the use of planes as bombs, and the knowledge that a group of Muslims were learning how to fly jets in Florida but had no interest in learning how to land them. The Israeli's knew something was up, and tried to warn the Americans. Alarm bells were ringing in intelligence servics in Europe too. And now your telling me that the Iraqi national paper also predicted it?
Jesus Christ, what would it take to get it through their thick skulls? How dumb can these people be?
And you want these people in charge of your security?
I've been wondering about that--I've been having a hard time connecting to Slashdot too, and to other sites. Anybody else there notice that the web seems to be getting really slow of late? People playing City of Heroes have been complaining of bad lag, even when the servers aren't heavily loaded--an indication of a wider general problem. And it seems to be getting worse we get to the election...
Gee, given that links from this site usually bring down other sites, I had no idea they needed more clicks. So let me get this straight--you're complaining that too many people like this topic? Uh... right... good complaint...
If you've been following the stories on Slashdot over the past three years, you will notice that more and more tech stories have involved politics, until, finally, it was decided to dedicate a topic just to politics. YRO, outsourcing, the politicization of science, stories about NASA, government use or avoidance of Linix, censorship of games, censorship of the web, laws being passed regarding spam and hackers, all have a political aspect, so finally Slashdot bit the bullet and started grouping some of these together. Politics influences technology, and technology influences politics. Whether you like it or not, tech has become politicized, and that wasn't Slashdot's decision.
Pull your head out of your ass. Just because you can't see the connection doesn't mean there isn't one.
Watch CBC newsworld--the choice of documentaries has been... interesting. The CBC 10 PM news has run a few too.
Yeah, cause Fox does such a better job.
If you think the Canadian government dictates what the CBC can say, you've obviously never listened to the CBC. The same goes for the BBC.
Canadians are very much aware that a government owned news service could be tampered with, so the slightest move to do so is enough to sink a government. It's pure political poison. Nobody fucks with the CBC--not the government, not the courts, not CSIS, not the RCMP, not even the big corporations. They always lose. Ask Monsanto, who had Fox dancing like a trained bear, but who CBC had bent over counting shower tiles and squealing like a pig. This is the 900 lb gorilla that will eat your ass like pate on a cracker. The only thing that matters is good journalism. If the CBC gets the story wrong, it makes the government looks bad.
Want to commit political suicide in Canada? Try to censor the CBC. Wait one hour for the story to break nationwide. Canadians take this very personally. Have your letter of resignation handy. And make sure you have your resumes circulating in the private sector, because you will NEVER work in the public sector again.
I'm a Canadian who is pro-American. I was going through the statistics section of the Economist, looking over the performances of the various countries. Canada's wasn't bad, but the numbers for the U.S. scared the hell out of me: huge numbers for the trade deficit, budget deficit, and debt. All this after just having read that the U.S. Fed is being propped up by large investments from East Asia, and China in particular.
Contrary to Bush's claims about not giving others veto rights regarding America's security, this gives China veto rights on all of America's foreign policy. This is precisely the situation Britain found itself in during the 50's, when Eisenhower ordered Britain out of Suez by threatening to destroy the pound using Britain's massive WWII debt to America. The debt put England's balls in his hand. He gave a little squeeze, and the last of the British empire fell and died with a wimper.
The outsourcing situation doesn't help. The economic theory is that allowing goods to be produced where they are cheapest leverages the relative strengths of various national economies. But when the labour market is nearly infinitely elastic, enforced through totalitatian measures, as it is in China, the result is not the creation of a market for goods that America makes. Wages in China remain at rock bottom, and there is nothing that Americans make that the Chinese can afford. Instead of trickling down, the money is being thrown right back at the Fed in a global Ponzi scheme. The result is the inevitable decline of the standard of living of American workers towards Chinese levels--or massive trade deficits, that can only be sustained through loans, giving China the power to threaten the American economy.
At the same time, China is building a massive industrial infrastructure, which could be redirected to less peaceful uses once established. Combine this is hordes of 'bare branches'--young males with little or no chance of marriage--and you have the perfect environment for massive military mobilization. If the time came that China wanted to flex this muscle (and this is not a given--China does not have a history of expansionism,) it could remove America from the stage by playing its economic ace, after which Bill Gates entire fortune would barely pay for breakfast. The consequence of going through on this would be disastrous for China, but primarily to those at the lowest level of the pyramid. China is run mainly by party aparatchiks and triad gangsters, who aren't renowned for their humanitarian concerns.
Rest assured that the Chinese already know all this.
The solution would be a set of human rights and environmental tarrifs, which would partly cancel the attractiveness of outsourcing and provide strong incentives for businesses in the third world to raise the standard of living and the environmental standards in those countries. Essentially, follow environmental standards and pay your workers, or pay an even larger amount of money in tarrifs. This does not mean that third world workers would have to be paid the same as Americans. It means that they should be paid to achieve essentially the same standard of living as American workers, which may still amount to considerably less money given living expenses in that country. In other words, development in the third world would still be attractive. But the overall effect of this would be to protect job markets and labour rights in the first world while improving conditions in the third world and creating markets for first world goods. And those tarrifs would provide a much needed revenue stream for the government. This is not protectionism per se, so much as a strong incentive on companies, especially western companies, to act responsibly in other countries.
The U.S. is in a unique position to do this because everyone wants to get into American markets. Even if America went alone on this, it would have a tremendous impact on the world. Too bad none of the politicians has thought of this.
Slashdot readers tend to work in scientific or technical fields, are well educated and well read, secular, and take an interest in social and economic matters. There are also a lot of people here with the hacker ethic: make just as much money as you need, and put the rest back into the pool. On all those counts, Bush has scored terribly, by politicising science screwing up the economy, and by blurring the line between church and state. This is a man who goes on instinct rather than reason, is devoid of intellectual curiousity, and fights for the interests of the rich and powerful. When told that someone wrote a book while attending Yale, he quipped "I read a book at Yale." His is the epitome of what Steve Allen called Dumbth.
And you're suprised that the majority of Slashdotters can't stand Bush? I'm amazed that anyone here would support him.
Yeah, this is hoot! Well done!
:)
Nice to see law enforcement doing it's job. And it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch.
Can you imagine the member's reactions to this when they first hit it? Oh... fuck... me...
One thing that I've been watching for, and have consistently found on the Republican side, with fewor no occurrences on the Democratic side, is that the fraud, intimidation, etc. are being practiced at an official or organizational level. Disreputable acts by individuals can be expected on both sides, and they really tell you nothing. But when I hear a conservative pundit raving on about a Democratic supporter resorting to violence, it bears nowhere near the weight of the reports of police using pepper balls on protesters. One is an individual lack of control, the other is deliberate policy.
This is what you should be looking for in these reports: what, of any of this, can be traced directly back to the party in question.
By the way, I also find it revealing that Drudge posted an illegible copy of the document. What, he couldn't find a good scanner?
The point here is not whether you oppose Islamo-fascism. Most of the most vehement critics of Islamo-Fascism also opposed the war in Iraq, because it played into the fascists hands. The argument is about strategy, not about the goal. And I am repeatedly astonished by the apparent incapacity of Bush supporters to distinguish between these.
This observation, shared by most of those critical of Bush and his supporters, is the reason we believe that Bush supporters have lost touch with reality. What we see is a rigid adherence to a single, poorly conceived, strategy. This strategy is like trying to perform brain surgery with a pick-axe. The major points of this strategy are:
1. Use of superpower style tactics against guerilla opponents--long range attacks, with large area of effect destructive capabilities--in other words, Shock and Awe. Shock and Awe, however, has high collateral damage, destroys infrastructure, and has very limited success against small mobile guerilla groups. In fact, this strategy is designed for fortified emplacements of mixed units, including tanks, artillery, and infantry, who are committed to holding a position. None of these conditions apply in Iraq. Ultimately, Saddam and the majority of his forces were killed or captured by ground troops, not by cluster bombs and long range strikes. This scorched earth strategy was also used in Vietnam. It didn't work there either.
2. An obsession with Iraq regardless of its connection to Political Islam. This obsession pre-dated 9/11, and 9/11 was only the pretext for for doing what elements of the Bush administration already wanted to do. In fact, Saddam Hussein, however vicious, was the one leader of an Arab country who had no ties to Political Islam, and who had always traditionally been despised by extremist Muslims. 9/11 made invasion of Iraq a lower priority, not a higher one, however much we may have despised Saddam Hussein.
3. The inability to determine between friend, foe, and neutral parties. Robert Fisk, a journalist who was in Iraq during the invasion, noted how American troops called any position not currently occupied by American troops enemy territory. This also underlies Shock and Awe, which had less effect on the Iraqi military and its political leaders than it did on Iraqi civilians. The result is that the Bush administration is firing blindly into the world, missing the target and making a lot of new enemies.
4. Poor comprehension of the enemy. There is a tendency to describe all opponents in the war as terrorists. In fact, actual terrorists of the Al Queda type may be quite rare. Instead, American troops are faced with a combination of criminal gangs, nationalist resistance, foreign agitators, and terrorists, with the majority probably being criminal gangs. The motivation and tactics of each of these groups is quite different, and strategies which work well against one type will actually give advantages to others. For example, diplomacy is best used against nationalists, who can be turned against foreign agitators, and criminals must be hit financially.
5. Predictability and rigidity. Bush is steadfast, no doubt about that--so steadfast that everyone knows what buttons to press and what he'll do when they're pressed. This provides the likes of Al Queda with the opportunity to play him, and to plan long in advance, even before the event that causes him to react. The terrorists are suicidal; they not only have no fear of retaliation, they are counting on it. Their goal is to provoke the most extreme form of retaliation possible, in the hopes that the Americans will offend enough people to gain sympathy for the terrorist cause. They have gotten exactly what they wanted. In fighting terrorism, the target must be the meme itself. Innocent casualties work to spread the meme, and must be avoided. Otherwise the terrorists will replace their numbers faster than they lose them, and the war can never be won.
Jesus told us to love our enemies. Sun Tzu said that we must know our enemies. In fact, they
Ha ha ha! Very funny. And here I am with no mod points left!
Uh... you are kidding, right?
If not, put your analyst on danger pay, baby. And stay away from sharp things.
Rumor is not evidence. The only reason that anyone even suspected Hussein is the conviction that if anything happened in Iraq, it was on his orders. The governemnts Saudi Arabia and Pakistan still have plausible deniability, but there is no doubt that a tremendous amount of support is flowing out of those countries, and their leaders often look the other way. Iran however, is in it up to their eyeballs, is building nuclear weapons (no doubt of that), and yet Bush went after Iraq. So whether Iraq gave support to Al Queda is a complete red herring. The Bush administration didn't really care one way or the other. Stop wasting time on this.
And if you dig deep into the Duelfer report, you will see that there is no question that Saddam was starting to suceed in getting sanctions lifted, and if they were, he was planning to restart his WMD programs.
Yes, and he had Dick Cheney's full support on this. All those nasty sanctions were cutting into Haliburton's business. Bush was planning to lift them before 9/11, but the invasion was a much better idea, once they found a way to sell it.
It has a new government with excellent support from the people. Go take a look at the Iraqi blogs out there, please. Most people in Iraq consider the current government to be a branch of the Bush administration, and they despise Bush.
Its new police and military are starting to vigourously attack the Al Queda members in the country.
I have heard reports that the Al Queda presence in Iraq is minimal, and some which say that Al Queda has metasticised into a social movement there. Which is interesting either way. If they are Al Queda, where did they come from, given that there were no Al Queda members there prior to invasion? So the invasion has actually paved the way for Al Queda to enter Iraq. If they're not Al Queda, then we are dealing with either groups of heavily armed criminals (which probably accounts for more than half of them), political extremists pouring into the country, or Iraqis who have formed a resistance. All of these are extremely long term, messy problems. Dictatorships are essentially large criminal organizations which run the country. When the big boss goes down, all the little bosses compete for a piece of his action. Look at Russia 15 years after the collapse of its dictatorship. Putin has ties to the Russian mafia. Cleaning it up may take decades. And crooks will deal with anyone who pays them. Al Queda's money is as good to them as any. So now, Al Queda has a recruiting ground, and a number of willing business partners. Lovely.
The economy is booming. With 8 hours of electricity a day, the near total collapse of the phone system, businesses bombed out, and oil production down to little more than half of full production? Please.
By a narrow majority, Iraqis support the presence of our troops until the new military gets up to speed.
By a narrow majority? Uh, oh. The polls 6 months ago had that majority at around 75%. The people in Vietnam supported the Americans too... at first.
Even in Fallujah, the natives are getting restless and opposition to the Al Queda foreigners is strong.
Opposition to Al Queda foreigners has always been stong. And opposition to the current regime, under which those foreigners have poured into the country, is getting stronger.
But life's getting better for the man on the street, and although we have made plenty of mistakes, it's nothing like the horrors under Saddam.
The man in the street is getting bombed, shot at, and had to live without power in the blazing summer heat. They now have a lot of little Saddams kidnapping and killing Iraqis and westerners (you only hear about the westerners.) And not everyone held at Abu Ghraib is a terrorist. In other words, the old terrors are still happening, and the new ones really aren't a welcome addition. I'm really glad that Saddam is gone, and so are the Iraqis, but they're starting to think it's six of one, a half dozen of