D'oh! Forgot to add something: Most of the time I didn't bother sending any initial contacts unless there were were several pictures. The choice of pictures gave me a little more insight into what someone found important.
I almost missed out on my wife for this reason. I kept passing over my wife's profile initially because she only had one picture up. Cute as she was, it was just too generic a picture to figure out who she really was. She changed her profile to something odd and intriguing for one day. I happened to catch it when I was browsing a little deeper than usual and sent her an email.
So, if you really want to get contacts from guys who might actually fit your lifestyle, include a few pictures of you doing stuff that you like; vacation photos, out with your friends or family, with your prized car, dog, horse, etc.. See who responds then.
Hey, we're visually oriented. We can't help it, it's the way that we're hard wired.:)
I was one of the lucky ones, I guess. I was on Match.com for a grand total of 2 months. I sent initial contacts to maybe 6 women. I got contacts from maybe 3 women. I exchanged several e-mails with two women. One led to a first date, and the next thing I knew I was getting married. 20 months later, we've been married just over a year and we couldn't be happier.:)
One yardstick that doesn't fail is how well the kids handle a remarriage. In our case, our kids (all four of 'em) are doing much better than they were before we met. Better grades, more polite, more considerate of others, you name it.
The best way to stop these things, is to either write large amounts of handwritten mail to your senator / rep (not other peoples), or simply vote them out during elections time.
(sarcasm) Will someone please tell me why on earth politicians continue to count handwritten mail more critically than e-mail? Shouldn't the fact that someone hasn't bothered to waste their time going through the time consuming process of attempting to write a clean, legible letter and get it mailed off count as well? (/sarcasm)
Seriously, though. Why do you guys on the Hill care so much about the medium? Why don't you just care about the message?
I haven't hand written anything more complex than a thank you note in nearly 30 years. My handwriting has never been all that great. Worse, I've always been prone to making mistakes because my mind was generally well ahead of my ability to put things on paper. Not a big deal when typing on a screen, because I can always back up and fix my mistakes as I'm going along (like I'm doing constantly in this post! lol). I never had that luxury handwriting anything. It normally took me/at least/ four drafts to get anything close to acceptable for my high school teachers.
True story. My dad taught at the local high school, so he knew most of my teachers. One time he asked one of my English teachers how I was doing.
"Well, I had to give him a C on his last paper." he replied.
"Why?" my dad asked.
"The content was great! Definitely A material. But it was so illegible that it should have gotten an F."
See what I mean?:)
I quit wasting my time trying to write a perfect letter about 1 second after I discovered word processors. I quit wasting paper and money on stamps about 2 seconds after I discovered e-mail. I started using HTML e-mail almost exclusively about 3 seconds after I realised that I could refer people directly to my sources as part of the email.
I'm generally considered well read and reasonably thoughtful by the people who know me. When I've taken the time to state my position to my elected representatives, I always put a fair amount of thought into making sure that it was clearly stated and backed up by all the facts that I could marshal. I always list my references so that they could be checked out by the rep or his/her staff. Now I find out that even now, in this day and age, I was probably just wasting my time? That some ill considered notion with no backing except an emotional reaction to a situation that someone chose to jot down on a piece of paper will always carry more weight???
You're right about one thing. You guys on the Hill do have a somewhat strange view of what's important.
Do not use anything from a company that patents software.
Not a workable solution. Virtually the entire software industry is taking out patents for defensive reasons if nothing else. Even companies that otherwise are FOSS friendly are. Who on earth, for example, would you recommend that we buy highly specialized trust account software from?
Chapman: Well here at Luton it's a three-cornered contest between, from left to right, Alan Jones (Sensible Party), Tarquin Fin-tim-lim-bim-lim-bin- bim-bin-bim bus stop F'tang F'tang Olé Biscuitbarrel (Silly Party), and Kevin Phillips Bong, who is running on the Slightly Silly ticket. And here's the result.
Woman: Alan Jones...
Cleese: Sensible
Woman:...9,112. Kevin Phillips Bong...
Cleese: Slightly Silly
Woman: Nought. Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim bus stop F'tang F'tang Olé Biscuitbarrel...
Cleese: Silly
Woman: 12,441. (applause)
Cleese: Well there you have it, the first result of the election as the Silly Party take Luton. Norman.
Palin: Well this is a very significant result. Luton, normally a very sensible constituency with a high proportion of people who aren't a bit silly, has gone completely ga-ga.
You're getting a tad selective in your choices. When you throw in places like Grenada and Panama, I can point at similar conflicts that the US has been involved in since the country was founded.
I'll go further and make this bet with you: You name a country and a period of history when it was a major player on the world political stage, and I'll/guarantee/ you'll find that country was involved in military conflicts more or less continuously throughout that period. In fact, I'll bet that except for the occasional exception like Switzerland from about 1860 or so, virtually every country in the world shares at least the odd border conflict with a neighbor that still becomes bloody occasionally.
Lawsuits? Yah think maybe the investors will notice when the BoD has to hold their meetings on visitor's day at a Federal PMITA prison so they can have a quorum?
I read David Brin's article/rant when the other dupe showed up. Frankly, I think he's the one who doesn't get it. He thinks Basic is a good first language???? (shudder) It took me years to unlearn all my bad habits.
Brin dismisses Python (along with Perl) out of hand:
The "scripting" languages that serve as entry-level tools for today's aspiring programmers -- like Perl and Python -- don't make this experience accessible to students in the same way. BASIC was close enough to the algorithm that you could actually follow the reasoning of the machine as it made choices and followed logical pathways. Repeating this point for emphasis: You could even do it all yourself, following along on paper, for a few iterations, verifying that the dot on the screen was moving by the sheer power of mathematics, alone. Wow!
Jeebus! If any language is easy to follow, it's Python! And entry-level???? Someone better tell all those guys at Google that they're using a toy to run their Website, huh?
Python even comes with a cross platform GUI toolkit that lets anybody build up a small Windows style app with a minimal amount of hassle. Granted, I wouldn't want to use Tcl/Tk for anything huge, but a kid would still learn the basics of event driven programming without pain.
I really wish that Python was around when I was first learning to program. It's a much, MUCH nicer first language than Basic. I even convinced one of the math teachers at my son's high school to put together a small module for his advanced math class because I felt so strongly about it. He was looking at C++ or C# until I emailed him some Python links. He was very excited to see it, as its use as a teaching tool was immediately obvious to him.
I love David Brin's books, but boy, is he doing himself and his son a disservice not looking closer at Python.
No, but you pick a good example. For baseball, I'd love to see:
A center view of the whole field. A close up cam of the batter. Another of the pitcher. Isolation shots of baserunners. The usual closeup shots of the crowd. etc.
Better yet, I'd love to have a means of choosing which view I'd have in the center and which should be around the edges. It's not really feasible to broadcast that much data for a live action video stream, but it should be doable for a computer game broadcast.
The truth is there is not guarantee to anonymity in the US constitution out side of voting.
This is so wrong!
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
What part(s) of the ninth and tenth amendments are so hard for people to understand?
While IBM is still a huge company that no longer dominates computing in general, there's no doubt that they are pretty much the only game in town if you need a mainframe's OLTP capabilities. In that sense, IBM's domination has not changed. There are several key differences between IBM and Microsoft, though.
IBM learned from the horrendous mess that was the System 360 and has continually improved upon their base OS ever since.
IBM has followed a far more ethical business practice than Microsoft since at least the '80s. (That's not to say that they are lily white, but they're certainly cleaner than Microsoft over the same time frame.)
IBM has not relied upon their domination of the mainframe hardware market to force sales elsewhere for a long time.
IBM has successfully reinvented itself (in the sense that the majority of their revenue comes from new sources) at least twice since the '80s. Microsoft still gets virtually all of their profit from the same two sources now that they did shortly after they were founded.
It depends upon both the game engine and how it's filmed. Flying spectator cameras that were either independent of a person or would follow individuals have been around since at least Quake. Anyone else here ever log in on the old Online Gaming League to watch live ladder matches?
Personally, I'd be happy with some sort of split screen view. Say, a center overview map with smaller cameras following the action around the edges of it. Maybe bounce one of the edge camera views into the middle if a producer sees something developing.
Never going to happen in my lifetime, though. Broadcast media seems to be stuck on single viewpoints at a time. They've forgotten that the whole reason sports was filmed from single viewpoints in the past was because of technical limitations.
You know, that's not a bad idea. I took a small business class back in the Stone Age. One case study that we did of a small print company did exactly that; moved from a default display type with an intimidating array of options to a half-dozen or so basic layouts with limited options for each. Their business tripled overnight because people could get a much better feel for the benefits of each layout.
While this isn't exactly a perfect analogy, I think that it's close enough to at least consider. For example, how about FF with AdBlock and NoScript as one package? Now,/there's/ a winning combination!:)
OK, how about a few other authors that I've read? Shakespeare? Benvenuto Cellini? Dante? Machiavelli? Jane Austen? Edward Gibbon? Samuel Pepys? Alexandre Dumas? Rudyard Kipling?
The point is that depression in and of itself is/not/ necessary as a spur to creativity. A depressed person has difficulty in functioning at any task. Shields himself pointed out that he was only able to write about his periods of depression when he was in a healthier frame of mind.
If an author chooses to write a story about his own depression, then he is certainly more capable if he's actually experienced it. You could even argue that writing about someone else's depression would be easier if s/he had actually experienced it. However, as has been amply demonstrated by authors like Stephen Crane, direct experience isn't absolutely necessary to write truly classic material.
David Shields doesn't know what he's talking about. The most prolific, successful authors that I can think of off the top of my head never had major periods of depression: Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov.
Re:I'm reminded of what Colnel Kurtz said
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Kurtz was wrong on several counts. "Apocalypse Now" was a hell of a movie, but it disregarded a hell of a lot of facts to tell a story.
Let me state for the record that I think the war in Iraq should have been fought, but we fought it for all the wrong reasons. Saddam needed to be booted out, and should have been in '91 when we had a better force for the purpose on the ground. Failing that, Saddam's wilful flaunting of all of the UN sanctions combined with the wholesale slaughter of his own people demanded that he be removed. By force if necessary. Realistically, that was the only way he was leaving office.
In any case, a better model for Iraq post 2003 should have been Germany at the end of WWII. Our senior leadership should have recognized that we were going to be seen as an occupying force,/not/ liberators. The British, French, Russian, and American forces on the ground in 1945 faced several years of sabotage, assasination attempts, etc. IOW, guerilla warfare at its worst.
Why did we eventually win the peace? Because we had enough boots on the ground from the beginning to provide true security throughout the country (and to act as unofficial US ambassadors with the locals), we were in place for at least a decade to make sure that the last of the Hitler's fanatical supporters had been run to ground, and we had the Marshall Plan in place from the beginning to begin rebuilding the infrastructure of Europe.
Contrast that with Iraq and our current leadership. Before the war started, Rumsfeld fired the generals who told him the real scale of what he really needed on the ground, Bush&Co. were clearly surprised that we weren't welcomed with open arms by the locals, Rumsfeld had no plan to deal with the inevitable insurgency, Rumsfeld/still/ doesn't have anywhere/near/ the number of troops in Iraq that we really need (IMO he needs at least triple or quadruple the current number in country just to begin restabilizing things), Cheney let Halliburton leech off the federal teat instead of making sure that dollars spent on Iraqi infrastructure were actually fixing things.
So what has 3+ years in Iraq gotten us? Bogged down, spending money and lives like a drunken sailor, and we can't even keep the capitol secure for people to buy groceries. The relatively few Iraqis who do come in contact with US forces frequently end up with a negative impression of us because the only time they see us face to face is when they're at the wrong end of an M16. And I haven't even mentioned this administration's apparent complete disregard for anything remotely resembling moral, ethical, or legal treatment of prisoners.
I could see much of this coming in 2002. Although I never would have predicted Abu Ghraib or transferring prisoners to Egypt for torture! I thought Bush understood what country he represented.
I consider myself to be a small 'c' conservative and generally vote an independent or split ticket. I tried to warn my friends who consider themselves to be Republicans that they were being sold a bill of goods by their party's leadership. I warned them then that we were in Iraq for at least 8 years if we were going to really win. Most scoffed. A couple of them believed me. Even the believers felt that what I thought was necessary to win wasn't going to be politically possible. My response then was that we'd end up looking at another Vietnam if we didn't.
You're kidding, right? I hope? I read someplace that the publishing industry started pushing some pretty draconian contracts on authors five or ten years ago, but they typically caved if the author showed any backbone at all.
Umm, no, they're not. You/cannot/ change people's attitudes by throwing money at problems. Nor can you "fix" war if your military budget is zero and people's attitudes remain unchanged.
So, prejudice and war still exist if the US military budget is zero. What's next? How about poverty? Poverty is a function of so many variables that we have yet to completely eliminate it after tens of thousands of years trying. I will assert, though, that we are far closer today than at any time in history. In any case, it hasn't been money necessarily that has helped reduce poverty. Education, science, technology, reducing prejudice so people outside the privileged group(s) get a hand up (/not/ a handout), and a sense of wonder about the world have done far more to increase the well being of all people living today than any other combination of factors.
Finally, there's pollution. I'm willing to stipulate that as a general rule we can always do more to reduce pollution. However, doing so the way that Greenpeace and other groups would like us to means a drastic reduction in one of the very factors that are helping to reduce poverty; the use of technology. I would argue that increased funding in cleaning up pollution, combined with funding to produce energy and material goods cleaner are far more useful ways of dealing with pollution while still allowing us to tackle poverty.
I'm even willing to stipulate that if we weren't quite so wasteful in how we spent that $450 billion, we would have funds available to spend on ways to resolve pollution issues. However, I don't think we have to reduce it by much to have an immediate, long term affect on pollution, as most funding that we would get from the Feds should probably be spent in two ways; more tax credits for industry to use technology already designed, and basic research in to cleanup and cleaner fuels.
Heck, IMO a good chunk of that cash should be spent instead on developing bio-diesel from algae (sp?) breeding plants similar to what some town in New Zealand is doing. That would have the long term goal of weaning us off oil, which would have the long term impact of starving the money pipeline from the Saudis to the crazies in the Moslem world. That would have been a far healthier response to 9/11 than anything else. Well, that, combined with taking out Al Queada on the ground in Afghanistan instead of letting the leadership escape.
No wonder you have a dependency nightmare! All the programs on your hard drive are probably whimpering stuff like, "I hope he doesn't pick me. He changed the xine-media.lib.so last week, and I just/know/ I won't like the new one. (sob)":lol:
every time you do an app install. Bad plan. Really,/really/ bad plan. How do I know? Because that's exactly what I used to do.:) You end up creating situations where your libraries match just the new app. Everything else gets broken that way.
Another possibility is that you've chosen packages that require a lot of installs of the unstable branches. These would be marked as tilde architecture in/etc/portage/package/keywords; e.g. ~x86 or ~amd64.
Another one is getting too aggressive in your compilation options. I've seen that create havoc that looked like dependency problems.
In any case, I'd strongly recommend searching forums.gentoo.org and bugs.gentoo.org. Just about every possible problem that you might come across has already been hit by someone else, and very frequently there's already an answer waiting for you.
Try forums first. Most Gentoo users are a pretty helpful bunch, and there are a lot of regulars who are good at narrowing down problems in a hurry.
BTW, , I recommend just doing the following for general system maintenance:
emerge --verbose (-v) packagename
Once a week, month, or whatever trips your trigger, do the following;
emerge --sync emerge --fetch --update --verbose (-fuv) world emerge -uv system revdep-rebuild (checks, then rebuilds your toolchain, then your core system. Some people recommend doing it twice to guarantee that your entire core system is rebuilt with a clean toolchain. IME it's not critical most of the time.)
Slashdot Mirror
D'oh! Forgot to add something: Most of the time I didn't bother sending any initial contacts unless there were were several pictures. The choice of pictures gave me a little more insight into what someone found important.
I almost missed out on my wife for this reason. I kept passing over my wife's profile initially because she only had one picture up. Cute as she was, it was just too generic a picture to figure out who she really was. She changed her profile to something odd and intriguing for one day. I happened to catch it when I was browsing a little deeper than usual and sent her an email.
So, if you really want to get contacts from guys who might actually fit your lifestyle, include a few pictures of you doing stuff that you like; vacation photos, out with your friends or family, with your prized car, dog, horse, etc.. See who responds then.
Hey, we're visually oriented. We can't help it, it's the way that we're hard wired. :)
:)
I was one of the lucky ones, I guess. I was on Match.com for a grand total of 2 months. I sent initial contacts to maybe 6 women. I got contacts from maybe 3 women. I exchanged several e-mails with two women. One led to a first date, and the next thing I knew I was getting married. 20 months later, we've been married just over a year and we couldn't be happier.
One yardstick that doesn't fail is how well the kids handle a remarriage. In our case, our kids (all four of 'em) are doing much better than they were before we met. Better grades, more polite, more considerate of others, you name it.
(sarcasm)
Will someone please tell me why on earth politicians continue to count handwritten mail more critically than e-mail? Shouldn't the fact that someone hasn't bothered to waste their time going through the time consuming process of attempting to write a clean, legible letter and get it mailed off count as well?
(/sarcasm)
Seriously, though. Why do you guys on the Hill care so much about the medium? Why don't you just care about the message?
I haven't hand written anything more complex than a thank you note in nearly 30 years. My handwriting has never been all that great. Worse, I've always been prone to making mistakes because my mind was generally well ahead of my ability to put things on paper. Not a big deal when typing on a screen, because I can always back up and fix my mistakes as I'm going along (like I'm doing constantly in this post! lol). I never had that luxury handwriting anything. It normally took me
True story. My dad taught at the local high school, so he knew most of my teachers. One time he asked one of my English teachers how I was doing.
"Well, I had to give him a C on his last paper." he replied.
"Why?" my dad asked.
"The content was great! Definitely A material. But it was so illegible that it should have gotten an F."
See what I mean?
I quit wasting my time trying to write a perfect letter about 1 second after I discovered word processors. I quit wasting paper and money on stamps about 2 seconds after I discovered e-mail. I started using HTML e-mail almost exclusively about 3 seconds after I realised that I could refer people directly to my sources as part of the email.
I'm generally considered well read and reasonably thoughtful by the people who know me. When I've taken the time to state my position to my elected representatives, I always put a fair amount of thought into making sure that it was clearly stated and backed up by all the facts that I could marshal. I always list my references so that they could be checked out by the rep or his/her staff. Now I find out that even now, in this day and age, I was probably just wasting my time? That some ill considered notion with no backing except an emotional reaction to a situation that someone chose to jot down on a piece of paper will always carry more weight???
You're right about one thing. You guys on the Hill do have a somewhat strange view of what's important.
Not a workable solution. Virtually the entire software industry is taking out patents for defensive reasons if nothing else. Even companies that otherwise are FOSS friendly are. Who on earth, for example, would you recommend that we buy highly specialized trust account software from?
DRM on media files may be here to stay /for some vendors/, but it doesn't automatically imply that I'll be buying it, does it?
Chapman: Well here at Luton it's a three-cornered contest between, from left to right, Alan Jones (Sensible Party), Tarquin Fin-tim-lim-bim-lim-bin- bim-bin-bim bus stop F'tang F'tang Olé Biscuitbarrel (Silly Party), and Kevin Phillips Bong, who is running on the Slightly Silly ticket. And here's the result.
...9,112. Kevin Phillips Bong...
Woman: Alan Jones...
Cleese: Sensible
Woman:
Cleese: Slightly Silly
Woman: Nought. Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim bus stop F'tang F'tang Olé Biscuitbarrel...
Cleese: Silly
Woman: 12,441. (applause)
Cleese: Well there you have it, the first result of the election as the Silly Party take Luton. Norman.
Palin: Well this is a very significant result. Luton, normally a very sensible constituency with a high proportion of people who aren't a bit silly, has gone completely ga-ga.
You're getting a tad selective in your choices. When you throw in places like Grenada and Panama, I can point at similar conflicts that the US has been involved in since the country was founded.
/guarantee/ you'll find that country was involved in military conflicts more or less continuously throughout that period. In fact, I'll bet that except for the occasional exception like Switzerland from about 1860 or so, virtually every country in the world shares at least the odd border conflict with a neighbor that still becomes bloody occasionally.
I'll go further and make this bet with you: You name a country and a period of history when it was a major player on the world political stage, and I'll
Lawsuits? Yah think maybe the investors will notice when the BoD has to hold their meetings on visitor's day at a Federal PMITA prison so they can have a quorum?
Brin dismisses Python (along with Perl) out of hand:
Jeebus! If any language is easy to follow, it's Python! And entry-level???? Someone better tell all those guys at Google that they're using a toy to run their Website, huh?
Python even comes with a cross platform GUI toolkit that lets anybody build up a small Windows style app with a minimal amount of hassle. Granted, I wouldn't want to use Tcl/Tk for anything huge, but a kid would still learn the basics of event driven programming without pain.
I really wish that Python was around when I was first learning to program. It's a much, MUCH nicer first language than Basic. I even convinced one of the math teachers at my son's high school to put together a small module for his advanced math class because I felt so strongly about it. He was looking at C++ or C# until I emailed him some Python links. He was very excited to see it, as its use as a teaching tool was immediately obvious to him.
I love David Brin's books, but boy, is he doing himself and his son a disservice not looking closer at Python.
He probably meant "adult" life. You know, as in voting age?
No, but you pick a good example. For baseball, I'd love to see:
A center view of the whole field. A close up cam of the batter. Another of the pitcher. Isolation shots of baserunners. The usual closeup shots of the crowd. etc.
Better yet, I'd love to have a means of choosing which view I'd have in the center and which should be around the edges. It's not really feasible to broadcast that much data for a live action video stream, but it should be doable for a computer game broadcast.
This is so wrong!
What part(s) of the ninth and tenth amendments are so hard for people to understand?
Good points. I would argue that they're specialized cases of a couple of the broader points that I was trying to make, but still. Good points, indeed.
IBM learned from the horrendous mess that was the System 360 and has continually improved upon their base OS ever since.
IBM has followed a far more ethical business practice than Microsoft since at least the '80s. (That's not to say that they are lily white, but they're certainly cleaner than Microsoft over the same time frame.)
IBM has not relied upon their domination of the mainframe hardware market to force sales elsewhere for a long time.
IBM has successfully reinvented itself (in the sense that the majority of their revenue comes from new sources) at least twice since the '80s. Microsoft still gets virtually all of their profit from the same two sources now that they did shortly after they were founded.
Have I forgotten anything?
It depends upon both the game engine and how it's filmed. Flying spectator cameras that were either independent of a person or would follow individuals have been around since at least Quake. Anyone else here ever log in on the old Online Gaming League to watch live ladder matches?
Personally, I'd be happy with some sort of split screen view. Say, a center overview map with smaller cameras following the action around the edges of it. Maybe bounce one of the edge camera views into the middle if a producer sees something developing.
Never going to happen in my lifetime, though. Broadcast media seems to be stuck on single viewpoints at a time. They've forgotten that the whole reason sports was filmed from single viewpoints in the past was because of technical limitations.
I, for one, welcome our Kiwi sewage to oil overlords. :)
You know, that's not a bad idea. I took a small business class back in the Stone Age. One case study that we did of a small print company did exactly that; moved from a default display type with an intimidating array of options to a half-dozen or so basic layouts with limited options for each. Their business tripled overnight because people could get a much better feel for the benefits of each layout.
/there's/ a winning combination! :)
While this isn't exactly a perfect analogy, I think that it's close enough to at least consider. For example, how about FF with AdBlock and NoScript as one package? Now,
OK, how about a few other authors that I've read? Shakespeare? Benvenuto Cellini? Dante? Machiavelli? Jane Austen? Edward Gibbon? Samuel Pepys? Alexandre Dumas? Rudyard Kipling?
/not/ necessary as a spur to creativity. A depressed person has difficulty in functioning at any task. Shields himself pointed out that he was only able to write about his periods of depression when he was in a healthier frame of mind.
The point is that depression in and of itself is
If an author chooses to write a story about his own depression, then he is certainly more capable if he's actually experienced it. You could even argue that writing about someone else's depression would be easier if s/he had actually experienced it. However, as has been amply demonstrated by authors like Stephen Crane, direct experience isn't absolutely necessary to write truly classic material.
David Shields doesn't know what he's talking about. The most prolific, successful authors that I can think of off the top of my head never had major periods of depression: Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov.
Kurtz was wrong on several counts. "Apocalypse Now" was a hell of a movie, but it disregarded a hell of a lot of facts to tell a story.
/not/ liberators. The British, French, Russian, and American forces on the ground in 1945 faced several years of sabotage, assasination attempts, etc. IOW, guerilla warfare at its worst.
/still/ doesn't have anywhere /near/ the number of troops in Iraq that we really need (IMO he needs at least triple or quadruple the current number in country just to begin restabilizing things), Cheney let Halliburton leech off the federal teat instead of making sure that dollars spent on Iraqi infrastructure were actually fixing things.
Let me state for the record that I think the war in Iraq should have been fought, but we fought it for all the wrong reasons. Saddam needed to be booted out, and should have been in '91 when we had a better force for the purpose on the ground. Failing that, Saddam's wilful flaunting of all of the UN sanctions combined with the wholesale slaughter of his own people demanded that he be removed. By force if necessary. Realistically, that was the only way he was leaving office.
In any case, a better model for Iraq post 2003 should have been Germany at the end of WWII. Our senior leadership should have recognized that we were going to be seen as an occupying force,
Why did we eventually win the peace? Because we had enough boots on the ground from the beginning to provide true security throughout the country (and to act as unofficial US ambassadors with the locals), we were in place for at least a decade to make sure that the last of the Hitler's fanatical supporters had been run to ground, and we had the Marshall Plan in place from the beginning to begin rebuilding the infrastructure of Europe.
Contrast that with Iraq and our current leadership. Before the war started, Rumsfeld fired the generals who told him the real scale of what he really needed on the ground, Bush&Co. were clearly surprised that we weren't welcomed with open arms by the locals, Rumsfeld had no plan to deal with the inevitable insurgency, Rumsfeld
So what has 3+ years in Iraq gotten us? Bogged down, spending money and lives like a drunken sailor, and we can't even keep the capitol secure for people to buy groceries. The relatively few Iraqis who do come in contact with US forces frequently end up with a negative impression of us because the only time they see us face to face is when they're at the wrong end of an M16. And I haven't even mentioned this administration's apparent complete disregard for anything remotely resembling moral, ethical, or legal treatment of prisoners.
I could see much of this coming in 2002. Although I never would have predicted Abu Ghraib or transferring prisoners to Egypt for torture! I thought Bush understood what country he represented.
I consider myself to be a small 'c' conservative and generally vote an independent or split ticket. I tried to warn my friends who consider themselves to be Republicans that they were being sold a bill of goods by their party's leadership. I warned them then that we were in Iraq for at least 8 years if we were going to really win. Most scoffed. A couple of them believed me. Even the believers felt that what I thought was necessary to win wasn't going to be politically possible. My response then was that we'd end up looking at another Vietnam if we didn't.
You're kidding, right? I hope? I read someplace that the publishing industry started pushing some pretty draconian contracts on authors five or ten years ago, but they typically caved if the author showed any backbone at all.
Umm, no, they're not. You /cannot/ change people's attitudes by throwing money at problems. Nor can you "fix" war if your military budget is zero and people's attitudes remain unchanged.
So, prejudice and war still exist if the US military budget is zero. What's next? How about poverty? Poverty is a function of so many variables that we have yet to completely eliminate it after tens of thousands of years trying. I will assert, though, that we are far closer today than at any time in history. In any case, it hasn't been money necessarily that has helped reduce poverty. Education, science, technology, reducing prejudice so people outside the privileged group(s) get a hand up (/not/ a handout), and a sense of wonder about the world have done far more to increase the well being of all people living today than any other combination of factors.
Finally, there's pollution. I'm willing to stipulate that as a general rule we can always do more to reduce pollution. However, doing so the way that Greenpeace and other groups would like us to means a drastic reduction in one of the very factors that are helping to reduce poverty; the use of technology. I would argue that increased funding in cleaning up pollution, combined with funding to produce energy and material goods cleaner are far more useful ways of dealing with pollution while still allowing us to tackle poverty.
I'm even willing to stipulate that if we weren't quite so wasteful in how we spent that $450 billion, we would have funds available to spend on ways to resolve pollution issues. However, I don't think we have to reduce it by much to have an immediate, long term affect on pollution, as most funding that we would get from the Feds should probably be spent in two ways; more tax credits for industry to use technology already designed, and basic research in to cleanup and cleaner fuels.
Heck, IMO a good chunk of that cash should be spent instead on developing bio-diesel from algae (sp?) breeding plants similar to what some town in New Zealand is doing. That would have the long term goal of weaning us off oil, which would have the long term impact of starving the money pipeline from the Saudis to the crazies in the Moslem world. That would have been a far healthier response to 9/11 than anything else. Well, that, combined with taking out Al Queada on the ground in Afghanistan instead of letting the leadership escape.
No wonder you have a dependency nightmare! All the programs on your hard drive are probably whimpering stuff like, "I hope he doesn't pick me. He changed the xine-media.lib.so last week, and I just /know/ I won't like the new one. (sob)" :lol:
Wow. And I thought I had it bad with three desktops, all with all the KDE bells and whistles, plus other addons. lol
Then you're probably waaayyy out on the bleeding edge and don't know it. Either that, or you're doing something like;
/really/ bad plan. How do I know? Because that's exactly what I used to do. :) You end up creating situations where your libraries match just the new app. Everything else gets broken that way.
/etc/portage/package/keywords; e.g. ~x86 or ~amd64.
emerge --Deep --update --verbose (-Duv) packagename
every time you do an app install. Bad plan. Really,
Another possibility is that you've chosen packages that require a lot of installs of the unstable branches. These would be marked as tilde architecture in
Another one is getting too aggressive in your compilation options. I've seen that create havoc that looked like dependency problems.
In any case, I'd strongly recommend searching forums.gentoo.org and bugs.gentoo.org. Just about every possible problem that you might come across has already been hit by someone else, and very frequently there's already an answer waiting for you.
Try forums first. Most Gentoo users are a pretty helpful bunch, and there are a lot of regulars who are good at narrowing down problems in a hurry.
BTW, , I recommend just doing the following for general system maintenance:
emerge --verbose (-v) packagename
Once a week, month, or whatever trips your trigger, do the following;
emerge --sync
emerge --fetch --update --verbose (-fuv) world
emerge -uv system
revdep-rebuild (checks, then rebuilds your toolchain, then your core system. Some people recommend doing it twice to guarantee that your entire core system is rebuilt with a clean toolchain. IME it's not critical most of the time.)
fix whatever problems might show up, then
emerge -uv world
revdep-rebuild
That'll keep your system clean.