Because they aren't over their "great empire" and "the Third Rome" syndrome — and continue to challenge us at every opportunity, even if it means sacrificing their own welfare...
A decade after Reagan the USSR collapsed dramatically loosing the Cold War... And then another decade was spent helping them get back on their feet, which — unfortunately — went without Nuremberg-like trials of the Communist criminals against humanity (some of whom have since passed away — peacefully, in their beds).
And today the revived Russia is, once again, at its evil empire's worse — provocative "patrols" (both air and submarines) close to the American borders, military invasions into neighboring countries, propping up regimes hostile to the US for the sole reason of their being hostile to the US.
Carthago delenda est — used to insist Cato (the Elder) in between Punic wars, which nearly destroyed Rome itself. There is no need to kill all men and sell women and children to slavery in our era, but here is hoping, the next time we have a spectacular (if more difficult) victory over Russia, we don't allow its criminal institutions (such as the KGB and the Communist Party) to survive, and take away their nuclear weapons while we are at it...
When the cars, or, rather, horseless carriages were first introduced, didn't some locales require them to be preceded by a person carrying a bell — to warn the public of the monstrosity's approach?
Generally, most criminals do not rise to the top of the intelligence pool.
Only in a relatively free country with half-decent economy — such as where we both live.
Nigerian scammers, for example, on the other hand, are not stupid at all — they just have fewer opportunities to use their brains honestly. Not that it is any excuse for them, of course...
Well, it costs $400 (for the variant with a keyboard), it is not shipping as of today, and the warning tells you, all software will remain in "beta" with updates "throughout summer"... Summer is over, but they haven't gotten around to updating their web-site, which hardly inspires confidence...
Why exactly are you posting a link to this vaporware, which is not even producing fresh vapor any more?
This article says that the US ranked 37th in a WHO effort to rank health care systems, whereas socialist France was ranked #1, Italy #2.
I don't know about their methodology, but if the country, where thousands have died from a heatwave, that happened to coincide with a holiday season, is ranked #1, something is seriously wrong with it...
At any rate, such benchmarks are nearly meaningless, because, as Joseph Stalin put it, "People who vote don't matter. People, who count the votes matter." As with benchmarking computers, there are too many dimensions to consider, so certain "judgment calls" have to be made in order to be able to produce a single-dimension rating from best to worse. Even identifying the dimensions is hard enough. Measuring each one is even harder, and objectively assigning proper weight to each measurement is nearly impossible. The opinions and agenda of the people doing the measuring and weighting come into play and affect the results far more than the actual underlying facts.
The WHO-study of 2000, for example, was overseen by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway and a socialist. According to her, it is the equality of distribution of the health-care, that matter most, rather than the actual amounts spent (perhaps unequally!) — simply because "there is no consensus on what spending is appropriate".
Other "studies" have similar problems — they fault the US (and take off points from its score) simply because it does not have "universal" health coverage. In other words, ours could be the most amazing hospitals in the universe, but if they ask to be paid for their services, they'll be rated below Costa-Rican and Maroccan, where the care is paid for via taxes rather than fees, and is therefor "free".
The lesson for you here is, whenever given an opinion (especially of bombastic kind), check out, if the opponents of opinion-holder have already made a rebuttal...
Here, read more about how the anti-US, pro-Socialism studies were rigged...
You're not really trying, are you?
I am trying really hard to prevent the America's health-care from becoming the spectacular boondoggle like our public (!) schools, for example... Even if our hospitals really did all suck as badly as New York Times would make you think, handing them over to the government can only make things worse. Not better...
I always knew Bush's speech impediment would cause this sort of confusion.
Well, his teleprompter had everything nicely spelled-out. Oh, wait, he rarely used one — and mostly for phonetic spellings of remote locales and foreign names.
... no longer limited by the features a camera manufacturer sees fit to supply...
Wouldn't the life be a lot better, if there weren't any evil, scheming, lying manufacturers to begin with? Seriously — whatever a commune of happy altruistic enthusiast can not create, can be created by a friendly government agency...
This entire push to "electronic voting" started after the 2000 elections... The sore losers were very vocal lamenting, as usual, US being so behind the wise Europe, and craving change...
The question was how can this be a weapon "with little to no collateral damage" if in fact the reflections do collateral damage.
First, the target has to be covered by mirrors — high quality ones — for the laser to pose danger to the innocent around it... And even then, blinding a few innocent bystanders, who happened to be looking at the target from the wrong angle at the wrong moment compares to killing and maiming everybody within similar distance about as much as, uhm, waterboarding compares to actual bone-breaking and nail-pulling...
We can't even let terminal patients die without wasting vast sums to slightly prolong their misery.
Wow! Wait a minute... After weeks of your colleagues denying the suggestion, that classifying patients by someone as "terminal" — and thus not worthy of continuing care, as already happens in the UK — has never even entered the minds of the respectable authors of "Obamacare", you just had to blurt it out on Slashdot, that you'd really prefer to have such a system...
Shame on you, comrade. Loose lips sink (dictator)ships... Should I report you for spreading this fishy rumor about someone wanting death panels?
Yes, I know, you said, "we can't" (have death panels) — but if you want them to happen, and have the "Yes we can!" attitude, you better be stopped now, because where there is a will, there may some day be found a way...
Apparently it's OK to send people to their deaths if it's for a war.
No American is being sent to their death. None. We don't have suicide missions. Our enemies do sometimes, but we don't. And even they don't force anybody into it — it is all about voluntarily dying for a greater cause.
so, let's declare war on Mars!
A regular war just would not do anymore. It would have to be a jihad...
Colonists heading to the new world were heading from a place of high resource (to live) contention to a place of low resource contention.
Actually, a lot of people moved to find freedom — such as freedom from religious persecutions. (Including those, who went on to persecute other religions here.)
If the Martians get to set up their own government over there — including writing their own Constitution — it could be quite tempting... I just thought, I'll be moving to Antarctica first (with my great-grandchildren flying off to other planets) — Antarctica is just as deserted, but a lot closer to (the current) home, and a lot easier to colonize...
When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.
Ok, I actually had a nice big long rebuttal typed up...
No, you hadn't...
but you're defending Palin.
She needs no "defense" — she was never credibly attacked. But, to paraphrase a certain Obama supporter: you are about to be ruled by a white woman, cracker. And it ain't gonna be Hillary...
It's more of a failure of the "Office of E-Government & Information Technology" than a failure of the man himself.
Right. And our problems in Iraq were due to Pentagon's incompetence — nothing to do with Bush... What happened to "The Buck Stops Here" attitude? Appointing a "czar" does not lift responsibility... Sorry, the executive is responsible for everything — if a particular failure is not his fault directly, then his fault is in hiring the wrong person. This is why CEOs get paid big bucks...
But Obama has never been an executive — except for the aforementioned charity, which failed in its mission to improve Chicago's public schools. Seriously. That's it... He's been an employee (a lawyer), and a law-maker (simply voting "present" most of the time, though). He never ran anything...
Seriously though, do you really think McCain would have done better at this?
I don't know, what McCain would've done on this — as things stand, having this web-site up is worse than not having it at all.
Although McCain was a lackluster candidate, he certainly has more life experience than Obama. If he thought, that such a web-site is necessary/useful, I'm pretty sure, he would've been better at appointing qualified people to create it. One needn't be "technologically advanced" in person to be able to do this — witness Rupert Murdoch's success with MySpace, for example.
And if McCain ever felt wanting in executive experience, Sarah Palin alone — having been a mayor and a State Governor — has more of that than Obama and Biden together... But the electorate was better informed of the gaffes attributed to her (she never claimed seeing Russia from her window — Tina Fey's character on SNL said that), than of Biden's real idiocies (such as: "When we, along with France kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon...") and past plagiarism.
Having never done this before, the government is bound to have problems.
Of course! This is true about Obama himself — the man has never had any executive experience, except for chairing a failed charity project (together with an ex-terrorist, khmm...).
But whenever this lack of experience was pointed out last year, the shrieks of the "we are the ones we've been waiting for" crowd drowned it out, who wanted their n00b elected without questioning, what the "Change" is going to mean...
Now, when the most technologically-advanced Presidency — remember all the endearing stories about his Blackberry, and the ridiculing of McCain's reluctance to use e-mail? — can't put a web-site together, "having never done this before" is an excuse...
while India had its own opinions and a democracy which meant they didn't roll over when the US asked
No, the problem was not with India's Democracy per se, the problem was with their Democracy being penetrated throughout by KGB. It began in the 1950-ies and was complete over subsequent decades. The rest of the world got the chance to learn about it (and other KGB secrets) in the 1990-ies, when Mitrokhin archive became public, but the US government, no doubt, knew all along and could not trust the Indian, despite all the sympathy for their Democracy and culture...
It was not that long ago — in all likelihood, there still remain busy politicians and government workers in India, who either never got off Russian payroll, or could be blackmailed by Russia into new cooperation...
They're a hell of a lot more trustworthy and reliable than Pakistan is.
I'm not so sure at all... USSR/Russia and India go way back — during the Ghandi times, KGB's influence over Indian politicians was near-complete. The success of penetratingIndia was an example, that KGB studied and thought to repeat in other countries. Most of those politicians are still alive and still busy — there was no clean-up, unlike, say, in Germany, which exposed Stazi agents. Kinda...
For all we know, there are, very likely, still people in various Indian ministries (including, no doubt, the Defense), who either never got off Russian payroll, or can be blackmailed by the new Russian agents.
Pakistan's military (rather than the entire country) was, probably, a better ally throughout, even if they aren't without problems of their own...
India has the bodies for a very large army, they have the budget for advanced weapons systems.
They are too far away to be a threat to us. But they are close enough to China, to keep them busy... And, as I said, Indians' values are the closest to ours in the region. Not that the same was not true of the Germans, true, but still.
The money we're putting into maintaining 12 aircraft carrier groups and trying to maintain our military presence in Asscrapistan is killing us.
No, that's not, what is killing us. Even with the two wars ongoing, the entire Department of Defense's 2008 budget was only about 30% of the tax receipts the same year (an even smaller share of the actual budget — because of the deficits). The Federal Government really is a vast insurance company with a defense business on a side. We can double the number of carrier groups and still be below the cost of Obamacare, for example...
Asscrapistan is good for target practice and live-fire training — keeps the military in shape.
Although I'd rather everybody were coming to American companies for such technology — rather than to Russia, as the Indians did for this fighter — a strong India is good for US.
Their values are the closest to ours in that neighborhood and it is good to have a counterweight to the ambitious China.
And, hey, maybe, the Indians will share some of the load world-wide, that Americans (and the British) are currently managing almost entirely on our own. Perhaps, people will even begin blaming them (and burn their flag), when they screw up...
Ares is supposed to help get us to Mars eventually.
Mars and Ares are often compared, but they aren't the same... Romans considered Mars as the god of war in general — kind of a mix of Ares and his sister Athena. Mars was also the god of agriculture — nothing to do with Ares, other than that a battlefield becomes a very good spot to plant crops, because of all the rotted flesh...
Anyway, an entire planet may deserve to be named after a god, but a rocket? No more than a nymph, or some animal. Pegasus, for example, is a perfectly appropriate name for a rocket. Ares is not...
... these meetings could been seen as illegal collusion.
Labor unions have been targeting Wal-Mart for years. Why is it Ok for these trusts — entities existing solely to maintain and raise the price of their members' services — to target a business, instead of getting the taste of anti-trust laws?
Microsoft — even after partnering with Yahoo! — is far from holding a noticeable chunk of the search market. I'm pretty sure, they can do anything they want to, when challenging the dominant player, while the Google's hands are somewhat tied by the anti-monopoly legislation...
Slashdot Mirror
Because they aren't over their "great empire" and "the Third Rome" syndrome — and continue to challenge us at every opportunity, even if it means sacrificing their own welfare...
A decade after Reagan the USSR collapsed dramatically loosing the Cold War... And then another decade was spent helping them get back on their feet, which — unfortunately — went without Nuremberg-like trials of the Communist criminals against humanity (some of whom have since passed away — peacefully, in their beds).
And today the revived Russia is, once again, at its evil empire's worse — provocative "patrols" (both air and submarines) close to the American borders, military invasions into neighboring countries, propping up regimes hostile to the US for the sole reason of their being hostile to the US.
Carthago delenda est — used to insist Cato (the Elder) in between Punic wars, which nearly destroyed Rome itself. There is no need to kill all men and sell women and children to slavery in our era, but here is hoping, the next time we have a spectacular (if more difficult) victory over Russia, we don't allow its criminal institutions (such as the KGB and the Communist Party) to survive, and take away their nuclear weapons while we are at it...
When the cars, or, rather, horseless carriages were first introduced, didn't some locales require them to be preceded by a person carrying a bell — to warn the public of the monstrosity's approach?
Only in a relatively free country with half-decent economy — such as where we both live.
Nigerian scammers, for example, on the other hand, are not stupid at all — they just have fewer opportunities to use their brains honestly. Not that it is any excuse for them, of course...
And not the corporations either:
At least, the corporate greed is not to blame this time...
Well, it costs $400 (for the variant with a keyboard), it is not shipping as of today, and the warning tells you, all software will remain in "beta" with updates "throughout summer"... Summer is over, but they haven't gotten around to updating their web-site, which hardly inspires confidence...
Why exactly are you posting a link to this vaporware, which is not even producing fresh vapor any more?
I don't know about their methodology, but if the country, where thousands have died from a heatwave, that happened to coincide with a holiday season, is ranked #1, something is seriously wrong with it...
At any rate, such benchmarks are nearly meaningless, because, as Joseph Stalin put it, "People who vote don't matter. People, who count the votes matter." As with benchmarking computers, there are too many dimensions to consider, so certain "judgment calls" have to be made in order to be able to produce a single-dimension rating from best to worse. Even identifying the dimensions is hard enough. Measuring each one is even harder, and objectively assigning proper weight to each measurement is nearly impossible. The opinions and agenda of the people doing the measuring and weighting come into play and affect the results far more than the actual underlying facts.
The WHO-study of 2000, for example, was overseen by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway and a socialist. According to her, it is the equality of distribution of the health-care, that matter most, rather than the actual amounts spent (perhaps unequally!) — simply because "there is no consensus on what spending is appropriate".
Other "studies" have similar problems — they fault the US (and take off points from its score) simply because it does not have "universal" health coverage. In other words, ours could be the most amazing hospitals in the universe, but if they ask to be paid for their services, they'll be rated below Costa-Rican and Maroccan, where the care is paid for via taxes rather than fees, and is therefor "free".
The lesson for you here is, whenever given an opinion (especially of bombastic kind), check out, if the opponents of opinion-holder have already made a rebuttal...
Here, read more about how the anti-US, pro-Socialism studies were rigged...
I am trying really hard to prevent the America's health-care from becoming the spectacular boondoggle like our public (!) schools, for example... Even if our hospitals really did all suck as badly as New York Times would make you think, handing them over to the government can only make things worse. Not better...
Well, his teleprompter had everything nicely spelled-out. Oh, wait, he rarely used one — and mostly for phonetic spellings of remote locales and foreign names.
Citation (badly) needed.
Wouldn't the life be a lot better, if there weren't any evil, scheming, lying manufacturers to begin with? Seriously — whatever a commune of happy altruistic enthusiast can not create, can be created by a friendly government agency...
And the government will be doing an even better job at it, I see...
This entire push to "electronic voting" started after the 2000 elections... The sore losers were very vocal lamenting, as usual, US being so behind the wise Europe, and craving change...
First, the target has to be covered by mirrors — high quality ones — for the laser to pose danger to the innocent around it... And even then, blinding a few innocent bystanders, who happened to be looking at the target from the wrong angle at the wrong moment compares to killing and maiming everybody within similar distance about as much as, uhm, waterboarding compares to actual bone-breaking and nail-pulling...
Wow! Wait a minute... After weeks of your colleagues denying the suggestion, that classifying patients by someone as "terminal" — and thus not worthy of continuing care, as already happens in the UK — has never even entered the minds of the respectable authors of "Obamacare", you just had to blurt it out on Slashdot, that you'd really prefer to have such a system...
Shame on you, comrade. Loose lips sink (dictator)ships... Should I report you for spreading this fishy rumor about someone wanting death panels?
Yes, I know, you said, "we can't" (have death panels) — but if you want them to happen, and have the "Yes we can!" attitude, you better be stopped now, because where there is a will, there may some day be found a way...
No American is being sent to their death. None. We don't have suicide missions. Our enemies do sometimes, but we don't. And even they don't force anybody into it — it is all about voluntarily dying for a greater cause.
A regular war just would not do anymore. It would have to be a jihad...
Actually, a lot of people moved to find freedom — such as freedom from religious persecutions. (Including those, who went on to persecute other religions here.)
If the Martians get to set up their own government over there — including writing their own Constitution — it could be quite tempting... I just thought, I'll be moving to Antarctica first (with my great-grandchildren flying off to other planets) — Antarctica is just as deserted, but a lot closer to (the current) home, and a lot easier to colonize...
No, you hadn't...
She needs no "defense" — she was never credibly attacked. But, to paraphrase a certain Obama supporter: you are about to be ruled by a white woman, cracker. And it ain't gonna be Hillary...
Right. And our problems in Iraq were due to Pentagon's incompetence — nothing to do with Bush... What happened to "The Buck Stops Here" attitude? Appointing a "czar" does not lift responsibility... Sorry, the executive is responsible for everything — if a particular failure is not his fault directly, then his fault is in hiring the wrong person. This is why CEOs get paid big bucks...
But Obama has never been an executive — except for the aforementioned charity, which failed in its mission to improve Chicago's public schools. Seriously. That's it... He's been an employee (a lawyer), and a law-maker (simply voting "present" most of the time, though). He never ran anything...
I don't know, what McCain would've done on this — as things stand, having this web-site up is worse than not having it at all.
Although McCain was a lackluster candidate, he certainly has more life experience than Obama. If he thought, that such a web-site is necessary/useful, I'm pretty sure, he would've been better at appointing qualified people to create it. One needn't be "technologically advanced" in person to be able to do this — witness Rupert Murdoch's success with MySpace, for example.
And if McCain ever felt wanting in executive experience, Sarah Palin alone — having been a mayor and a State Governor — has more of that than Obama and Biden together... But the electorate was better informed of the gaffes attributed to her (she never claimed seeing Russia from her window — Tina Fey's character on SNL said that), than of Biden's real idiocies (such as: "When we, along with France kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon...") and past plagiarism.
Of course! This is true about Obama himself — the man has never had any executive experience, except for chairing a failed charity project (together with an ex-terrorist, khmm...).
But whenever this lack of experience was pointed out last year, the shrieks of the "we are the ones we've been waiting for" crowd drowned it out, who wanted their n00b elected without questioning, what the "Change" is going to mean...
Now, when the most technologically-advanced Presidency — remember all the endearing stories about his Blackberry, and the ridiculing of McCain's reluctance to use e-mail? — can't put a web-site together, "having never done this before" is an excuse...
No, the problem was not with India's Democracy per se, the problem was with their Democracy being penetrated throughout by KGB. It began in the 1950-ies and was complete over subsequent decades. The rest of the world got the chance to learn about it (and other KGB secrets) in the 1990-ies, when Mitrokhin archive became public, but the US government, no doubt, knew all along and could not trust the Indian, despite all the sympathy for their Democracy and culture...
It was not that long ago — in all likelihood, there still remain busy politicians and government workers in India, who either never got off Russian payroll, or could be blackmailed by Russia into new cooperation...
I'm not so sure at all... USSR/Russia and India go way back — during the Ghandi times, KGB's influence over Indian politicians was near-complete. The success of penetrating India was an example, that KGB studied and thought to repeat in other countries. Most of those politicians are still alive and still busy — there was no clean-up, unlike, say, in Germany, which exposed Stazi agents. Kinda...
For all we know, there are, very likely, still people in various Indian ministries (including, no doubt, the Defense), who either never got off Russian payroll, or can be blackmailed by the new Russian agents.
Pakistan's military (rather than the entire country) was, probably, a better ally throughout, even if they aren't without problems of their own...
They are too far away to be a threat to us. But they are close enough to China, to keep them busy... And, as I said, Indians' values are the closest to ours in the region. Not that the same was not true of the Germans, true, but still.
No, that's not, what is killing us. Even with the two wars ongoing, the entire Department of Defense's 2008 budget was only about 30% of the tax receipts the same year (an even smaller share of the actual budget — because of the deficits). The Federal Government really is a vast insurance company with a defense business on a side. We can double the number of carrier groups and still be below the cost of Obamacare, for example...
Asscrapistan is good for target practice and live-fire training — keeps the military in shape.
Although I'd rather everybody were coming to American companies for such technology — rather than to Russia, as the Indians did for this fighter — a strong India is good for US.
Their values are the closest to ours in that neighborhood and it is good to have a counterweight to the ambitious China.
And, hey, maybe, the Indians will share some of the load world-wide, that Americans (and the British) are currently managing almost entirely on our own. Perhaps, people will even begin blaming them (and burn their flag), when they screw up...
Mars and Ares are often compared, but they aren't the same... Romans considered Mars as the god of war in general — kind of a mix of Ares and his sister Athena. Mars was also the god of agriculture — nothing to do with Ares, other than that a battlefield becomes a very good spot to plant crops, because of all the rotted flesh...
Anyway, an entire planet may deserve to be named after a god, but a rocket? No more than a nymph, or some animal. Pegasus, for example, is a perfectly appropriate name for a rocket. Ares is not...
Labor unions have been targeting Wal-Mart for years. Why is it Ok for these trusts — entities existing solely to maintain and raise the price of their members' services — to target a business, instead of getting the taste of anti-trust laws?
Microsoft — even after partnering with Yahoo! — is far from holding a noticeable chunk of the search market. I'm pretty sure, they can do anything they want to, when challenging the dominant player, while the Google's hands are somewhat tied by the anti-monopoly legislation...