Saying that no "WMD's were found" is either ignorant or untrue. Please read the report on Iraq's WMDs itself & not just excerpts that others have cherry picked out of it. What wasn't found were functional WMDs yet there clearly had been WMDs in Iraq. Proof in the form of equipment sold to Iraq, traces found in sites that had been dismantled, cleaned up & then occulted by Saddam. Blueprints. Nuclear detonators recovered from the bottom of the Tigris. Other bits & pieces. The report is exhaustive. According to your logic I could kill your mother, yet were I able to dispose of her body good enough so that you couldn't hold up a femur with my tooth marks on it, she'd still be alive.
The GW1 cease fire terms were specifically worded to make Saddam relinquish his WMD & not just bury it or sell it off to someone who would just sell it back once sanctions wore off. That is why destroying his WMD & then destroying the proof that he had done so was so terminally stupid. He had already been condemned, all that was left was the sentencing.
As for your attempt to buttonhole me: Bzzzzt, try again. The first president I voted for was Carter, the last one was Obama & while I liked Bush I, Bush II wasn't to my liking. Nice to see that pacifists still predictably try to label anyone who calls BS on their wilder fantasies republicans.
They weren't hiding their WMD's just from Iran, They were hiding them from all those who feared that Saddam was just hiding the WMD somewhere where they could be dug up once the sanctions & other controls went away. antifuldus conveniently forgets that Saddam deliberately starved his own people to make it look like the sanctions were overbroad even while spending all his resources on playing shell games with international inspectors & building hundreds of presidential palaces. Pressure was mounting to remove all controls over Saddam. Tell us antifuldus, who's fault is it if I play chicken on a bicycle with a guy in a truck? Saddam could have swallowed his pride, destroyed his WMD, let the inspectors prove it & there would have been no GW2. Instead he decided to play chicken & got flattened. It was a lesson Khadaffi took to heart. Too bad for him that he couldn't recognize that more was needed to sate the desires of those he oppressed.
You opted not to address my point that no treaty was ever signed to end GW1 & the cease fire to GW1 explicitly specified that hostilities would recommence unless Saddam allowed unfettered access to his WMD sites (which he did not do). To many pacifists (a group among which I suspect you belong) no war is justified & in my opinion you are overly negatively weighting the results of the GW2 to justify that stance to yourself and others. Consider what Saddam's murderous sons (emboldened by the "victory" over the US had the US blinked) who would now be coming into power would have done to the region had they not been eliminated. Bashar's massacres would be sideshows. You probably won't, because that goes against blaming those you consider worse: Bush & the Republicans or just the US military as a whole. It's much easier to judge in hindsight that all alternatives to war were more plausible. FDR knew that Japan was about to bomb Pearl Harbor too, right?
Ah, a point I omitted to address: Iraq was already in the midst of a bloody sectarian war, it's just that Saddam had the upper hand & it was "only" the kurds & the shia were being massacred mostly out of the western public's eye. Some seem to think that this makes it all better...
Nukes being the only justification for GW2 is a straw horse that has been generally used by those such as yourself wanting to portray it as completely unjustified (much like you revise Iraq to not be the threat is was seen to be at that time using current knowledge). The cease-fire Saddam signed at the cessation of hostilities after GW1 specified that the cease-fire was null unless he gave up his WMD & documented the progress he had made until that point. When Saddam buried as much as he could, destroyed what was left & impeded inspections Saddam did not magically make his work on WMD disappear, he just made it impossible to prove exactly what progress he had made. The situation is akin to athletes that are disqualified for using masking agents or politicians who are condemned for coverups. That is what made the invasion justified & indeed the ultimatum he was given on the eve of GW2 stated precisely that: Allow inspectors unimpeded access to your sites to document your WMD. He refused, GW2 on...
You need to cut down on the revisionist hindsight. Saddam's Iraq was clearly the worst at that time. Lets see: Known to be working on nukes: Iraq, Iran & NK. Pushing Terrorism: Iraq, Iran & NK Attempted assassination of a former US President: Iraq Had recently invaded a neighboring country: Iraq. Had recently invades a second neighboring country: Iraq.
Nukes may indeed be a get out of jail free card for thuggish regimes preserving them from military action but the sanctions, now that just about everyone is agreeing to them and making sure that cheaters are getting punished may yet make the lesson "reneg on your signature of the the Non-proliferation treaty & lose all your international trading partners".
Work or not, you'll still get government money in Europe. My wife teaches kids from neighborhoods where it has beeen 3 generations since anyone held a job. Sure, you'll be poor but the poor in Europe living off of government handouts still lord it over their cousins in N Africa when they go back to visit every summer. It makes trying to teach them the value of a work ethic difficult. The ones that have the ambition to work are great kids, but the system is not rewarding the right values.
Only if the US decides to limit itself to purely military targets (which is unlikely if Iran sinks a single US warship)
The Serbs were laughing at the US for playing their shell game & blowing up thier fake tanks for a month or two. The Serbs were good at playing the shell game, kudos to them but once the US got wind of being played they changed the game & started targeting the serbian industrial infrastructure that they used to build their military. The Dayton accords were signed shortly after yet even now the serbian economy has still not recovered...
If the US decides to go after Iran's industrial infrastructure they're in for a world of hurt.
Yes, the Greeks screwed everyone by fraudulently juggling their budgets and indulging in an oversized public sector but the deeper problem is that the Greeks are a nation of tax dodgers. Even now, many of the translated headlines i see from Greece are more about cutting the public sector than about getting people to actually pay the taxes they use to justify the budget. You cannot have a first world public sector on a third world tax base without a windfall like oil.
I don't know if you've ever held a security clearance (but given your comments I doubt it) but it is rare for sensitive & classified information to be completely out of the public eye. Usually theres a bit here & a bit there. The point in classifying a document containing publicly available info is to make it more difficult for adversaries to get it all in one place & avoid eliminating the uncertainties that compiling info from multiple sources inevitably adds.
Some people are saying that the info was already published elsewhere. It is far from clear that the previously published info is the same as that which was censored & it may be just this point that got it censored. Unless you are the author or have have read all the papers & cross referenced the data you cannot know whether or not the horse is out of the barn or not. That won't stop you from assuming that classifying the paper is useless, but that just shows that you're ignorant* of the real issues.
* note that I use the word not as an insult but to point out that you don't know enough to know whether or not the paper merited censorship or not. I'm just as ignorant as you are on that point.
Stop beating that ridiculous straw man. Publicly funded does not automatically imply publication to the public at large. The Manhattan project was also publicly funded yet even independently researched theses that describe the implementation of an A-bomb cave been classified.
Thats a mighty wide brush you're using in describing all publishers as only being involved in the production side of book creation & thus useless in the ebook world. Some publishers are much more helpful to their authors and actively participate in the creative process. Jim Baen comes to mind, who has nurtured many authors to greater success. Baen was also a forerunner in making part of their book catalogue available free for download in a number of formats: http://www.baen.com/library/
What, if not global warning, were you referring to in your first post by "Yeah, and 80+mph winds were rare in Miami in the 1970s and early 1980s too.--"?
Your point is only valid if you can statistically show that Miami has had more hurricanes than it had previously. The sample size is too small so you cannot, Not everything can be pinned on the coattails of global warming.
Now, young grasshopper try to explain how the sand dunes moved in the absence of any storms visible from orbit. The theory up to now has been. they shouldn't. They do. Do you at last understand why this is news for nerds & not just an occasion for you claim that the higher than normal temperatures in your bathtub are due to global warming?
Nice job missing TFAs point. It's not that there are no storm systems on mars which were judged capable of high winds, it's that the dunes moved without seeing the martian equivalent of hurricanes from orbit.
On the implied subject, the sample size of huriicanes going through Miami (or just hurricanes in general) since the mid 80s is too small to support any conclusions.
Formation flying?!? Only airshow pilots fly in formation close enough for 3D to be useful. AAR does look like a useful corner case but still doesn't merit the overstated "want" in the top post of this thread.
Remind me to criticize the next president for being a hypocrite for promising to change things for the people in DC & then renegging on his promises. Until then I'll continue on Obama...
The spiel is from someone actively trying to sell the system, not an appreciation from anyone who has tried to use it. Sorry, I don't believe used car salesmen either.
Even according to the spiel, 3D is only useful for landing. True, it's one of the most dangerous parts of a flight but I remain skeptical of any major advantage of adding 3D to a flight simulator. You're still only affecting parallax & not depth of field & most of what pilots need to learn for landing are valid in 2D & even without any display at all.
Sure, the reason why Obama will never take a stand on this issue is because it's not his job to take principaled stands on issues & thereby encourage the legislative branch to move in the desired direction...
Except that that's exactly what he does on other issues & should be doing here but won't because then the Dems would lose the record labels patronage.
Why? I mean this is a flight simulator with most everything except for the plane itself far enough away to be indistinguishable from infinity. I'll admit that I've stopped going to 3D movies as they give me a headache & the bleed through & darkness that 3D adds just ruin the moviegoing experience for me.
What exactly can 3D add to what is supposed to be a simulation of real-life? The split second of noticing the trees are closer to the ground before you impact? I don't see the point.
Google wasn't a in the telephone buisiness either not so long ago. Then they decided that owning part of the mobile OS market was a good growth direction and a means of keeping their search market share. Google could expand in this direction by making the OS free for others to license without undermining their core buisiness. Apple, however screamed bloody murder as android undermines their core buisiness and the cozy relationship between Apple & Google being on each others boards was history.
Turnabout is fair play, so Apple is now expanding into search through SIri. Apple does not need to make any money off of search. Mastering voice command will give apple many other advantages in the future as the rumors of a voice commanded appleTV show but the initial objective may just be to blunt andoid's growth & deflate google somewhat by making the easiest means of searching anything from an iphone siri instead of google.
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They couldn't because Russia & China would have auto-vetoed. Auto determination & free will do not go well with their current governments.
Saying that no "WMD's were found" is either ignorant or untrue. Please read the report on Iraq's WMDs itself & not just excerpts that others have cherry picked out of it. What wasn't found were functional WMDs yet there clearly had been WMDs in Iraq. Proof in the form of equipment sold to Iraq, traces found in sites that had been dismantled, cleaned up & then occulted by Saddam. Blueprints. Nuclear detonators recovered from the bottom of the Tigris. Other bits & pieces. The report is exhaustive. According to your logic I could kill your mother, yet were I able to dispose of her body good enough so that you couldn't hold up a femur with my tooth marks on it, she'd still be alive.
The GW1 cease fire terms were specifically worded to make Saddam relinquish his WMD & not just bury it or sell it off to someone who would just sell it back once sanctions wore off. That is why destroying his WMD & then destroying the proof that he had done so was so terminally stupid. He had already been condemned, all that was left was the sentencing.
As for your attempt to buttonhole me: Bzzzzt, try again. The first president I voted for was Carter, the last one was Obama & while I liked Bush I, Bush II wasn't to my liking. Nice to see that pacifists still predictably try to label anyone who calls BS on their wilder fantasies republicans.
They weren't hiding their WMD's just from Iran, They were hiding them from all those who feared that Saddam was just hiding the WMD somewhere where they could be dug up once the sanctions & other controls went away. antifuldus conveniently forgets that Saddam deliberately starved his own people to make it look like the sanctions were overbroad even while spending all his resources on playing shell games with international inspectors & building hundreds of presidential palaces. Pressure was mounting to remove all controls over Saddam.
Tell us antifuldus, who's fault is it if I play chicken on a bicycle with a guy in a truck? Saddam could have swallowed his pride, destroyed his WMD, let the inspectors prove it & there would have been no GW2. Instead he decided to play chicken & got flattened. It was a lesson Khadaffi took to heart. Too bad for him that he couldn't recognize that more was needed to sate the desires of those he oppressed.
You opted not to address my point that no treaty was ever signed to end GW1 & the cease fire to GW1 explicitly specified that hostilities would recommence unless Saddam allowed unfettered access to his WMD sites (which he did not do). To many pacifists (a group among which I suspect you belong) no war is justified & in my opinion you are overly negatively weighting the results of the GW2 to justify that stance to yourself and others. Consider what Saddam's murderous sons (emboldened by the "victory" over the US had the US blinked) who would now be coming into power would have done to the region had they not been eliminated. Bashar's massacres would be sideshows. You probably won't, because that goes against blaming those you consider worse: Bush & the Republicans or just the US military as a whole. It's much easier to judge in hindsight that all alternatives to war were more plausible. FDR knew that Japan was about to bomb Pearl Harbor too, right?
Ah, a point I omitted to address: Iraq was already in the midst of a bloody sectarian war, it's just that Saddam had the upper hand & it was "only" the kurds & the shia were being massacred mostly out of the western public's eye. Some seem to think that this makes it all better...
Nukes being the only justification for GW2 is a straw horse that has been generally used by those such as yourself wanting to portray it as completely unjustified (much like you revise Iraq to not be the threat is was seen to be at that time using current knowledge).
The cease-fire Saddam signed at the cessation of hostilities after GW1 specified that the cease-fire was null unless he gave up his WMD & documented the progress he had made until that point. When Saddam buried as much as he could, destroyed what was left & impeded inspections Saddam did not magically make his work on WMD disappear, he just made it impossible to prove exactly what progress he had made. The situation is akin to athletes that are disqualified for using masking agents or politicians who are condemned for coverups. That is what made the invasion justified & indeed the ultimatum he was given on the eve of GW2 stated precisely that: Allow inspectors unimpeded access to your sites to document your WMD. He refused, GW2 on...
You need to cut down on the revisionist hindsight. Saddam's Iraq was clearly the worst at that time.
Lets see:
Known to be working on nukes: Iraq, Iran & NK.
Pushing Terrorism: Iraq, Iran & NK
Attempted assassination of a former US President: Iraq
Had recently invaded a neighboring country: Iraq.
Had recently invades a second neighboring country: Iraq.
Nukes may indeed be a get out of jail free card for thuggish regimes preserving them from military action but the sanctions, now that just about everyone is agreeing to them and making sure that cheaters are getting punished may yet make the lesson "reneg on your signature of the the Non-proliferation treaty & lose all your international trading partners".
Work or not, you'll still get government money in Europe. My wife teaches kids from neighborhoods where it has beeen 3 generations since anyone held a job. Sure, you'll be poor but the poor in Europe living off of government handouts still lord it over their cousins in N Africa when they go back to visit every summer. It makes trying to teach them the value of a work ethic difficult. The ones that have the ambition to work are great kids, but the system is not rewarding the right values.
Only if the US decides to limit itself to purely military targets (which is unlikely if Iran sinks a single US warship)
The Serbs were laughing at the US for playing their shell game & blowing up thier fake tanks for a month or two. The Serbs were good at playing the shell game, kudos to them but once the US got wind of being played they changed the game & started targeting the serbian industrial infrastructure that they used to build their military. The Dayton accords were signed shortly after yet even now the serbian economy has still not recovered...
If the US decides to go after Iran's industrial infrastructure they're in for a world of hurt.
Yes, the Greeks screwed everyone by fraudulently juggling their budgets and indulging in an oversized public sector but the deeper problem is that the Greeks are a nation of tax dodgers. Even now, many of the translated headlines i see from Greece are more about cutting the public sector than about getting people to actually pay the taxes they use to justify the budget. You cannot have a first world public sector on a third world tax base without a windfall like oil.
I don't know if you've ever held a security clearance (but given your comments I doubt it) but it is rare for sensitive & classified information to be completely out of the public eye. Usually theres a bit here & a bit there. The point in classifying a document containing publicly available info is to make it more difficult for adversaries to get it all in one place & avoid eliminating the uncertainties that compiling info from multiple sources inevitably adds.
Some people are saying that the info was already published elsewhere. It is far from clear that the previously published info is the same as that which was censored & it may be just this point that got it censored. Unless you are the author or have have read all the papers & cross referenced the data you cannot know whether or not the horse is out of the barn or not. That won't stop you from assuming that classifying the paper is useless, but that just shows that you're ignorant* of the real issues.
* note that I use the word not as an insult but to point out that you don't know enough to know whether or not the paper merited censorship or not. I'm just as ignorant as you are on that point.
Stop beating that ridiculous straw man. Publicly funded does not automatically imply publication to the public at large. The Manhattan project was also publicly funded yet even independently researched theses that describe the implementation of an A-bomb cave been classified.
Thats a mighty wide brush you're using in describing all publishers as only being involved in the production side of book creation & thus useless in the ebook world.
Some publishers are much more helpful to their authors and actively participate in the creative process. Jim Baen comes to mind, who has nurtured many authors to greater success. Baen was also a forerunner in making part of their book catalogue available free for download in a number of formats: http://www.baen.com/library/
And just maybe some of us are interested in how research has progressed since the last article...
much clearer, thanks.
What, if not global warning, were you referring to in your first post by "Yeah, and 80+mph winds were rare in Miami in the 1970s and early 1980s too.--"?
Your point is only valid if you can statistically show that Miami has had more hurricanes than it had previously. The sample size is too small so you cannot, Not everything can be pinned on the coattails of global warming.
Now, young grasshopper try to explain how the sand dunes moved in the absence of any storms visible from orbit. The theory up to now has been. they shouldn't. They do. Do you at last understand why this is news for nerds & not just an occasion for you claim that the higher than normal temperatures in your bathtub are due to global warming?
The dunes moved without us seeing anything like a major sandstorm beeing seen from orbit.
Nice job missing TFAs point. It's not that there are no storm systems on mars which were judged capable of high winds, it's that the dunes moved without seeing the martian equivalent of hurricanes from orbit.
On the implied subject, the sample size of huriicanes going through Miami (or just hurricanes in general) since the mid 80s is too small to support any conclusions.
Formation flying?!? Only airshow pilots fly in formation close enough for 3D to be useful. AAR does look like a useful corner case but still doesn't merit the overstated "want" in the top post of this thread.
Remind me to criticize the next president for being a hypocrite for promising to change things for the people in DC & then renegging on his promises. Until then I'll continue on Obama...
The spiel is from someone actively trying to sell the system, not an appreciation from anyone who has tried to use it. Sorry, I don't believe used car salesmen either.
Even according to the spiel, 3D is only useful for landing. True, it's one of the most dangerous parts of a flight but I remain skeptical of any major advantage of adding 3D to a flight simulator. You're still only affecting parallax & not depth of field & most of what pilots need to learn for landing are valid in 2D & even without any display at all.
Sure, the reason why Obama will never take a stand on this issue is because it's not his job to take principaled stands on issues & thereby encourage the legislative branch to move in the desired direction...
Except that that's exactly what he does on other issues & should be doing here but won't because then the Dems would lose the record labels patronage.
Why? I mean this is a flight simulator with most everything except for the plane itself far enough away to be indistinguishable from infinity. I'll admit that I've stopped going to 3D movies as they give me a headache & the bleed through & darkness that 3D adds just ruin the moviegoing experience for me.
What exactly can 3D add to what is supposed to be a simulation of real-life? The split second of noticing the trees are closer to the ground before you impact? I don't see the point.
Google wasn't a in the telephone buisiness either not so long ago. Then they decided that owning part of the mobile OS market was a good growth direction and a means of keeping their search market share. Google could expand in this direction by making the OS free for others to license without undermining their core buisiness. Apple, however screamed bloody murder as android undermines their core buisiness and the cozy relationship between Apple & Google being on each others boards was history.
Turnabout is fair play, so Apple is now expanding into search through SIri. Apple does not need to make any money off of search. Mastering voice command will give apple many other advantages in the future as the rumors of a voice commanded appleTV show but the initial objective may just be to blunt andoid's growth & deflate google somewhat by making the easiest means of searching anything from an iphone siri instead of google.