> The idea here is to do to SCO what they are trying to do to the OS movement - make the public afraid to touch them. I mean, if buying SCO stock means you risk getting a subpeana, who is going to do it?
Yet another reason we should buy it: get a close-up view of the trial that will be the envy of your peers!
Once you said that you weren't in Hell, you didn't have to add that you weren't a lawyer...
> it seems like IBM is trying to determine whether something much of Slashdot suspects is verifiably true: that some sort of sinister third party (Microsoft comes to mind) is morally and financially behind SCO's actions.
IABNMIHALEither, but I suspect that the court will put serious limitations on what IBM's lawyers can ask shareholders. However, if those SCO rants are a funded Linux sabatoge or a pump-n-dump scheme (as so many of us think), SCO / Canopy Group is now at some risk of having extremely damaging facts come out.
A very smart move on IBM's part. We may hear of an SCO offer to settle in the very near future.
> I always thought it amusing that his administration fought so hard again UoM's affirmative action policy, when he benefitted tremendously from another form of affirmative action known as "legacy." There's NO WAY that idiot would've gotten into Yale or Harvard any other way.
His actions are very consistent, once you learn to view them as "preserving the system of privilege".
> I always thought the whole conservative/liberal difference was in how much control the governemnt should have on the lives of the citizens. Republicans traditionally favored government at the state level while democrats have favored governemt at the federal level. I could be wrong, but that's the way I have always understood it.
> On a side note, if I am interpreting this corectly, it's a bit ironic that the republicans are pushing the patriot act. I guess in these times it's not so clear cut.
If you watch carefully, you'll notice that for the past generation or so about the only time the Republicans harp on "let the states decide" is when they want to get around a constitutional limitation on the government.
A better way of understanding the two parties is that they differ on whether the middle class' tax money should be spent for the advantage of the very poor or the very rich. (Not 100% accurate, but ISTM a pretty good first approximation.)
> What nature? You mean the "make as much money as is possible for their shareholders at all costs" nature? Like every publically traded company on the planet?
It's the "at all costs" part that some of us balk at. There are limits to acceptable behavior, even when money is at stake.
> However, when the troops leave, you WILL see an attempt to setup Iran II in southern Iraq, just like GHW Bush predicted.
Yes, the Administration has set up a real tiger-by-the-tail situation, which doesn't seem to have any workable solution at all. I suspect hostility will increase the longer we stay there, but you'll get an instant revolution the day they pull out.
However, there are indications that the neocons behind this don't have any anticipation of pulling the US troops out ever, letting Iraq serve as the regional hot-spot troop depot the way Germany did throughout the Cold War.
> well we Brits may be the only other major contributor of troops in Iraq, but that doesn't mean to say the British people support the war. In fact, according to this article at the Times newspaper (A generally conservative UK paper) only 1 in 4 Brits support the shrub's handling of Iraq, and he can expect to meet significant protests when he comes to see us next week.
Yes, the late-night US telemedia were reporting on this last night. They said the plan was for him to drive across town in a motorcade with the Queen, but they may have to cancel that due to security concerns amid the anticipated protests, which may involve "hundreds of thousands" of protesters.
One British commentator said that part of the outrage was that the British public didn't want to "serve as a colorful backdrop to his re-election campaign", as most of them hope like hell he doesn't get re-elected.
Also, if you haven't seen the stories, the Secret Service has been carefully shielding him from seeing any protesters when he's out and about in the USA, so I would guess there's some concern about shocking him with the sight of such massive protests in the streets of the capital of our closest ally.
I won't be at all surprised if the motorcade is cancelled.
> Oh, yeah...the liberal media "Myth". Right. The only reason you think it's a "myth" is that you agree with the editorializing they pass off as "news".
Nope. The reason I know that most of the US media is conservative is that I don't agree with the editorializing they pass off as "news".
> It's not fantasy, it's fact. Read the book, stop making wild accusations. Carter negotiated the disarmament, not the treaty. These are two different things.
So what was his athority for negotiating concessions on the part of the US, unbeknownst to the the US government?
The most notorious example was Beria, Stalin's right-hand man before he became an unperson for some reason or other. Supposedly Stalin had letters sent to everyone who had bought the state-sponsored encyclopedia, telling them to remove the pages that contained the article about him.
> Education has changed a lot of the past decade. It used to be about educating someone to think about the problem but now we teach them how to pass an exam.
And I wonder, in 50 years what will be the exam's "right" answer for questions about the history of the Iraq war?
> Clearly this article was ++ungood, and needed to be edited by one of the historians at the Ministry of Truth...err, Department of Homeland Security. I'm sure that this article will re-appear shortly in it's correct form, proving George Bush Sr. desperately wanted to invade Iraq and capture Sadaam during the first Gulf War, but was thwarted by the evil schemings of Eastasia...err, the Liberals.
<bartinfetalposture> Must repress memories again, must repress memories again, must repress memories again,... </bartinfetalposture>
> Oh, and I say all of this as a moderate. I'm neither rightwing nor left. I was willing to go along with the invasion of Iraq because I believed that there was no way a president could engage in such a move without massive amounts of intelligence indicating a clear and present threat. [...] Oops.
One thing that all this has left me wondering... even if you factor out the political "sexing up" of the intelligence, do our vaunted intelligence agencies really know much of anything about what's going on around the world?
If you followed the media in the years before 9/11 you got the impression that our spy agencies knew exactly what Russia, China, etc. were up to, knew the details of their most secret weapons programs, knew who was pulling strings around the world, etc. But after all the maybes, don't-knows, and not-reliables cropping up regarding pre-war Iraq, I now wonder whether our intelligence picture of the world is much better than a random guess.
> This is yet another reason why the Iraq debacle and similar right-wing tactics are doomed and stupid. They apply force in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, and end up making things worse.
The interesting question is whether or not some of the decision makers want things that way. We know darn well that some of them would like to wreck the UN, and the political advantages of having an ongoing war are well known.
Presumably not everyone who read 1984 took the intended lesson away from it.
> In 1994, Clinton was planning on bombing North Korea. However, he received a call from Jimmy Carter saying "hey I'm going to North Korea tomorrow to negotiate a disarmament". Clinton, who didn't have the hear to say no to the great Jimmy Carter, said OK. The next day, Clinton saw on CNN that Jimmy Carter had done just what he said he was going to do... negotiate a disarmament with North Korea. However, what Clinton did not expect, was that Carter's agreement made all kinds of concessions of the U.S. side and none of the North Korean side.
Nice fantasy, but in 1994 Carter didn't have any authority to negotiate treaties or concessions on his own.
> I do not no why this story was approved by slashdot admins.
So you don't think historical revisionism on our favorite source of information, the WWW, is relevant to Slashdot?
> But no matter what anyone says, things have changed since September 11
Yep, and they have jack-all to do with whether it was a good idea to institute regime change in Iraq. (Notice how close George I call it on the consequences, without any knowledge of 9/11.)
The common assesment outside the Bush Administration and its suckups is that the war in Iraq has drawn resources away from the war on terrorism.
> The arguements will come in that 9/11 has nothing to do with Iraq.. and Al Qaeda has nothing to do with Iraq, but current news would disagree with that assessment.
No, that news merely shows that the "bring 'em on" challenge has been taken up. Al Qaeda did not operate freely in Iraq while Saddam was in power, and the fact that they do now simply reinforces the folly of our actions.
> In that vein, here's an interesting piece on the so-called liberal media. This is a study of the bias of sources used by the major broadcast media in the run-up to the Iraq war.
In a similar vein, somewhere out there on the interweb there's a chart showing what percentage of viewers have a specific misconception about whether Iraq was involved in 9/11 vs. what their preferred newsteat is. (As you can imagine, FAUX watchers were the worst of the lot, but even PBS didn't rate all that well.)
Unfortunately I can't seem to find the site again, but maybe someone can cough it up for us.
> It is still upheld that Al Qaeda training camps existed in northern Iraq before the war. They have proof the camp was being used even 1 month before the beginning of the invasion.
Yep, Ansar al-Islam, which came in to being under the protection of the US/British no-fly zone in Northern Iraq after 1991, in the de facto autonomous Kurdish region, and with no ties to the Baath regime whatsoever.
You're merely blaming Saddam for our fuck-up.
> Secondly, Iraqi disposed commanders are now in charge of these Al Qaeda cells which are in Iraq.
That is, as yet, pure speculation.
> If Saddam had no ties with Al Qaeda, why would Iraqi officials be "leading" Al Qaeda members to attack civilians and U.S. soldiers?
Supposing it were actually true rather than speculative, it would probably be because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" has strong sway in the Muslim world, and we have provided them with something very tangible to agree on.
> How on earth can anyone define value of an artistic medium?... Is the Mona Lisa a good painting?
That's a good question, but if you examine what fraction of the money you spend on a CD ends up in the artist's hands, you immediately see that most of what you are paying for is services of more prosaic value, in this case grossly overpriced.
Slashdot Mirror
> The idea here is to do to SCO what they are trying to do to the OS movement - make the public afraid to touch them. I mean, if buying SCO stock means you risk getting a subpeana, who is going to do it?
Yet another reason we should buy it: get a close-up view of the trial that will be the envy of your peers!
> But this knife cuts both ways -- OSS trolls like ESR could receive subpeonas from SCO in retailation.
Who cares. He'll show up dressed like Darth Vader, everyone will giggle while the bouncers toss him out, and the trial will proceed as before.
> I am by no means in hell a lawyer
Once you said that you weren't in Hell, you didn't have to add that you weren't a lawyer...
> it seems like IBM is trying to determine whether something much of Slashdot suspects is verifiably true: that some sort of sinister third party (Microsoft comes to mind) is morally and financially behind SCO's actions.
IABNMIHALEither, but I suspect that the court will put serious limitations on what IBM's lawyers can ask shareholders. However, if those SCO rants are a funded Linux sabatoge or a pump-n-dump scheme (as so many of us think), SCO / Canopy Group is now at some risk of having extremely damaging facts come out.
A very smart move on IBM's part. We may hear of an SCO offer to settle in the very near future.
> I always thought it amusing that his administration fought so hard again UoM's affirmative action policy, when he benefitted tremendously from another form of affirmative action known as "legacy." There's NO WAY that idiot would've gotten into Yale or Harvard any other way.
His actions are very consistent, once you learn to view them as "preserving the system of privilege".
> I always thought the whole conservative/liberal difference was in how much control the governemnt should have on the lives of the citizens. Republicans traditionally favored government at the state level while democrats have favored governemt at the federal level. I could be wrong, but that's the way I have always understood it.
> On a side note, if I am interpreting this corectly, it's a bit ironic that the republicans are pushing the patriot act. I guess in these times it's not so clear cut.
If you watch carefully, you'll notice that for the past generation or so about the only time the Republicans harp on "let the states decide" is when they want to get around a constitutional limitation on the government.
A better way of understanding the two parties is that they differ on whether the middle class' tax money should be spent for the advantage of the very poor or the very rich. (Not 100% accurate, but ISTM a pretty good first approximation.)
> What nature? You mean the "make as much money as is possible for their shareholders at all costs" nature? Like every publically traded company on the planet?
It's the "at all costs" part that some of us balk at. There are limits to acceptable behavior, even when money is at stake.
> Why is EVERY STORY turning into a shot at Microsoft at some point?
Maybe it has something to do with the nature of Microsoft?
> Ya know, you guys need to think about what you're inferring by insisting that Bush had something sinister to do with this
A careful reader might have noticed that I was specifically corecting the misperception that Bush had anything to do with this. It was Time, not Bush.
The motive is suspect all the same.
> uhmmm Clinton did? Can't you read?
Yeah, I read your claim that it all came as a surprise to Clinton.
Your story's not just a fantasy; it doesn't even make sense.
> However, when the troops leave, you WILL see an attempt to setup Iran II in southern Iraq, just like GHW Bush predicted.
Yes, the Administration has set up a real tiger-by-the-tail situation, which doesn't seem to have any workable solution at all. I suspect hostility will increase the longer we stay there, but you'll get an instant revolution the day they pull out.
However, there are indications that the neocons behind this don't have any anticipation of pulling the US troops out ever, letting Iraq serve as the regional hot-spot troop depot the way Germany did throughout the Cold War.
> well we Brits may be the only other major contributor of troops in Iraq, but that doesn't mean to say the British people support the war. In fact, according to this article at the Times newspaper (A generally conservative UK paper) only 1 in 4 Brits support the shrub's handling of Iraq, and he can expect to meet significant protests when he comes to see us next week.
Yes, the late-night US telemedia were reporting on this last night. They said the plan was for him to drive across town in a motorcade with the Queen, but they may have to cancel that due to security concerns amid the anticipated protests, which may involve "hundreds of thousands" of protesters.
One British commentator said that part of the outrage was that the British public didn't want to "serve as a colorful backdrop to his re-election campaign", as most of them hope like hell he doesn't get re-elected.
Also, if you haven't seen the stories, the Secret Service has been carefully shielding him from seeing any protesters when he's out and about in the USA, so I would guess there's some concern about shocking him with the sight of such massive protests in the streets of the capital of our closest ally.
I won't be at all surprised if the motorcade is cancelled.
> Oh, yeah...the liberal media "Myth". Right. The only reason you think it's a "myth" is that you agree with the editorializing they pass off as "news".
Nope. The reason I know that most of the US media is conservative is that I don't agree with the editorializing they pass off as "news".
> It's not fantasy, it's fact. Read the book, stop making wild accusations. Carter negotiated the disarmament, not the treaty. These are two different things.
So what was his athority for negotiating concessions on the part of the US, unbeknownst to the the US government?
Fantasy.
> I don't remember the mans name
That's the whole point, silly!
The most notorious example was Beria, Stalin's right-hand man before he became an unperson for some reason or other. Supposedly Stalin had letters sent to everyone who had bought the state-sponsored encyclopedia, telling them to remove the pages that contained the article about him.
> Education has changed a lot of the past decade. It used to be about educating someone to think about the problem but now we teach them how to pass an exam.
And I wonder, in 50 years what will be the exam's "right" answer for questions about the history of the Iraq war?
> Clearly this article was ++ungood, and needed to be edited by one of the historians at the Ministry of Truth...err, Department of Homeland Security. I'm sure that this article will re-appear shortly in it's correct form, proving George Bush Sr. desperately wanted to invade Iraq and capture Sadaam during the first Gulf War, but was thwarted by the evil schemings of Eastasia...err, the Liberals.
<bartinfetalposture>
Must repress memories again, must repress memories again, must repress memories again,
</bartinfetalposture>
> And this is the same inept monkey your buds are accusing of having zapped this article out of existence?
No, the owners of Time zapped the article out of existence for the benefit of the inept monkey.
> Oh, and I say all of this as a moderate. I'm neither rightwing nor left. I was willing to go along with the invasion of Iraq because I believed that there was no way a president could engage in such a move without massive amounts of intelligence indicating a clear and present threat. [...] Oops.
One thing that all this has left me wondering... even if you factor out the political "sexing up" of the intelligence, do our vaunted intelligence agencies really know much of anything about what's going on around the world?
If you followed the media in the years before 9/11 you got the impression that our spy agencies knew exactly what Russia, China, etc. were up to, knew the details of their most secret weapons programs, knew who was pulling strings around the world, etc. But after all the maybes, don't-knows, and not-reliables cropping up regarding pre-war Iraq, I now wonder whether our intelligence picture of the world is much better than a random guess.
> a vote for bush 2004 is a vote for world war III
Or as the bumper sticker says, Bush/Cheny - Four More Wars!
> This is yet another reason why the Iraq debacle and similar right-wing tactics are doomed and stupid. They apply force in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, and end up making things worse.
The interesting question is whether or not some of the decision makers want things that way. We know darn well that some of them would like to wreck the UN, and the political advantages of having an ongoing war are well known.
Presumably not everyone who read 1984 took the intended lesson away from it.
> In 1994, Clinton was planning on bombing North Korea. However, he received a call from Jimmy Carter saying "hey I'm going to North Korea tomorrow to negotiate a disarmament". Clinton, who didn't have the hear to say no to the great Jimmy Carter, said OK. The next day, Clinton saw on CNN that Jimmy Carter had done just what he said he was going to do... negotiate a disarmament with North Korea. However, what Clinton did not expect, was that Carter's agreement made all kinds of concessions of the U.S. side and none of the North Korean side.
Nice fantasy, but in 1994 Carter didn't have any authority to negotiate treaties or concessions on his own.
> I do not no why this story was approved by slashdot admins.
So you don't think historical revisionism on our favorite source of information, the WWW, is relevant to Slashdot?
> But no matter what anyone says, things have changed since September 11
Yep, and they have jack-all to do with whether it was a good idea to institute regime change in Iraq. (Notice how close George I call it on the consequences, without any knowledge of 9/11.)
The common assesment outside the Bush Administration and its suckups is that the war in Iraq has drawn resources away from the war on terrorism.
> The arguements will come in that 9/11 has nothing to do with Iraq.. and Al Qaeda has nothing to do with Iraq, but current news would disagree with that assessment.
No, that news merely shows that the "bring 'em on" challenge has been taken up. Al Qaeda did not operate freely in Iraq while Saddam was in power, and the fact that they do now simply reinforces the folly of our actions.
> In that vein, here's an interesting piece on the so-called liberal media. This is a study of the bias of sources used by the major broadcast media in the run-up to the Iraq war.
In a similar vein, somewhere out there on the interweb there's a chart showing what percentage of viewers have a specific misconception about whether Iraq was involved in 9/11 vs. what their preferred newsteat is. (As you can imagine, FAUX watchers were the worst of the lot, but even PBS didn't rate all that well.)
Unfortunately I can't seem to find the site again, but maybe someone can cough it up for us.
> It is still upheld that Al Qaeda training camps existed in northern Iraq before the war. They have proof the camp was being used even 1 month before the beginning of the invasion.
Yep, Ansar al-Islam, which came in to being under the protection of the US/British no-fly zone in Northern Iraq after 1991, in the de facto autonomous Kurdish region, and with no ties to the Baath regime whatsoever.
You're merely blaming Saddam for our fuck-up.
> Secondly, Iraqi disposed commanders are now in charge of these Al Qaeda cells which are in Iraq.
That is, as yet, pure speculation.
> If Saddam had no ties with Al Qaeda, why would Iraqi officials be "leading" Al Qaeda members to attack civilians and U.S. soldiers?
Supposing it were actually true rather than speculative, it would probably be because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" has strong sway in the Muslim world, and we have provided them with something very tangible to agree on.
> How on earth can anyone define value of an artistic medium?
That's a good question, but if you examine what fraction of the money you spend on a CD ends up in the artist's hands, you immediately see that most of what you are paying for is services of more prosaic value, in this case grossly overpriced.