Go to 1:13 in the video and watch the blocky building on the right. You can see the smoke/vapor from the radiant heat cooking the surface of the building, much like those old nuke test films before the blast wave hits.
Grid that axe all you want, just not with revisionist BS like that. Duke3D took 2.5 years to launch after DOOM. And then only 5 months after Duke3D landed Quake dropped. Build was fun, but as a technical competition it was no match for what Carmack was doing.
As for hardware, the first useful consumer 3D hardware didn't land for months *after* Quake shipped, when the Verite boards appeared in stores. And Quake supported them very early. And Carmack was also the primary independent champion of Voodoo, and those were the products that grew that market. So if you want to say he failed by missing the PC 3D hardware revolution, then you're arguing that 1) he missed the revolution he was key in making happen, and 2) he doesn't deserve credit for the revolution he did so much to popularize. More bull.
And Unreal always had its own renderer. Why would anyone expect them to drop their homegrown tech and adopt a competitor's? Not every designer jumps engines every 4 months. (Is that you, George?)
Lay blame wherever you want to for iD's modern malaise, but denying their groundbreaking early achievements is just absurd.
"Apple put it in the iMac in 1998 and excluded all other port types."
and then
"I know the iMac had the irDA port."
Now that you've established that you knew your statement was false when you made it, there's not much point in having a factual discussion with you anymore.
> Though USB had been on PC motherboards beginning in 1996,
> nobody did anything with it until Apple put it in the
> iMac in 1998 and excluded all other port types.
And those aren't introduction dates, they're just handy examples.
By the way, those listed companies were the top 5 PC makers in Q3 1998, globally and in the US, and they accounted for the strait-up majority of the US PC market at the time.
Well, that wasn't a full year. How about 1999? We've seen the overall number of 100 million USB PCs, but in 1999 Apple sold only 1.8 million iMacs. So in 1999 USB iMacs again accounted for roughly 2% of the USB PC market. Still ouch.
So, the iMac was not the first PC with USB, the iMac was not the major but rather a fractionally tiny vector for USB into the marketplace, and the iMac did not "exclude all other port types."
Can you make VMWare with Windows and and IE7 run in this scenario? There are lots of things (embedded Windows Media, etc) out there that I wouldn't expect to work on this setup, so that makes me wonder if this read only setup would also support VMWare with Windows and IE7, or at least Windows plus Firefox and MS's WMP plugin.
Ideally, the Windows session would pop into existence when invoked from the frozen image, and then everything but the original image disappears at the end of session.
Hmm, can the user have bookmarks with these read-only setups?
Buying CFL lights with the light quality you'll want to spend hours around is a serious headache. A few of the factors you need to keep in mind while researching you purchase:
Color Temperature Do you mind looking like a blue-veined freak in one room but not another?
CRI has come under a fair bit of criticism in recent years as it does not always correlate well with the subjective color-rendering quality for real scenes, particularly for modern (e.g. fluorescent) lightsources with spikey emission spectra, or white LEDs. It is understood that the CIE is looking at developing newer color-rendering performance metrics.
Are they compatible with your dimmer switches? Probably not.
Are they compatible with your electronically programmable switches? Maybe not, due to low levels of current leaking to the bulb in those switches.
Are they mountable in your enclosed fixtures without compromising bulb life? Probably not, but don't count on GE to tell you that.
Do your surviving candidate bulbs go full blast the moment you turn them on? I only know one manufacturer that achieves this (TCP) and their CRI ratings are disappointing.
I have seven CFL bulbs in various places in my house. None are home runs in all the ways that incandescent bulbs always are. I wish they were better, and I wish I had the answers.
"An operator who is properly secured by a seatbelt has a better chance of maintaining control of the vehicle in an emergency situation and of surviving a crash."
"I drive a race car for fun, not professionally (SpecE30 Mid-Atlantic #59). The first thing that they teach you in a car control clinic is that the primary purpose of your 3-point seatbelt or 5/6/7/8-point harness is to keep you in a position where you can control the vehicle; keeping you from vaulting through the windshield is just an added benefit. (Preventing serious injury requires airbags or an SFI 38.1-certified head and neck restraint system.)"
"Also, the safety belt helps belted drivers maintain control of the car by keeping them in the driver's seat. This increases the chance of preventing a second crash."
Bar and restaurant employees have health protections, too. It's indefensible for someone to start working at a smoke-free restaurant and then have the owner decide to expose employees to unnecessary deadly toxins by allowing smoking. Read up on the latest announcements regarding the well-established dangers of second-hand smoke: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060627/sc_nm/smoking_ dc_16
And seat belt laws are not for the protection of the driver; they're for people around the driver because the seat belt keeps the driver at the controls after the initial impact.
Sometimes there's more to the world than your instantaneous desires.
This description make it sound like there's nothing stopping a content producer from targeting anybody else's player. So then, Sony Studios could use its movie releases to permanently cripple the players from manufacturers that compete with Sony on hardware?
And what about software players? Microsoft is a content producer and they could also produce a player. What's to stop them from disabling Apple players?
Re:Sorry, thanks for playing
on
fvwm Turns Ten
·
· Score: 1
80486DX2 was the first clock doubling CPU
Bzzt! It was the first clock doubling CPU from Intel, but not the first alltogether.
Microwave ovens are purposely tuned to be near the frequencies of water molecules. If it was precisely at the frequency then the waves wouldn't penetrate past the surface and all the heating would occur at the surface, which is pretty far from optimal.
Explanation: What that means is that there is now a free-of-charge and user modifiable software system that can, in combination with hardware built to a freely available specification, use a normal personal computer to recieve and save bit for bit copies of the high definition television signals already being beamed out by broadcasters. That means you can create perfect copies, with color, fidelity and detail that far outstrips what you are used to from standard television or even direct broadcast satellite (like DirecTV), and use them at your convenience and in the full range of uses allowed under fair use, the legal doctrine that gives you considerable freedom to save, copy and even distribute copyrighted materials.
In the long term fight for the maintenance of fair use against the MPAA and the RIAA, it's a very big deal. It's the DeCSS of HDTV.
The current industry/legislature proposals do not lean on encryption, but on a "broadcast flag" that tags broadcast content with what level of freedom viewers have to capture, caopy, manipulate and distribute the broadcast material, with all of the available restrictions imposed at the whim of the broadcaster, to be enforced in the receiver.
Wanna guess what the defaults would be like?
Wouldn't it be nice to have an open, non-proprietary receiver that you have intimate control over?
Not necessarily Vegetarian friendly
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 1
One of the methods discussed uses collagen as a culture for growing the tissue. That's a problem for ethical vegetarians since collagen is derived from dead animal flesh.
Tastes like chicken indeed.
Nirvikalpa-Samadhi
on
Gaming Zone?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
A term used in Vedanta to refer to the highest, transcendent state of consciousness. It is the realization of "I am consciousness" which exists without the thought, "I am consciousness." In this experience there is selflessness, no-mind, non-duality, and the subject-object relationship momentarily disappears. It is the highest, samadhi-state of non-dual union with one's own consciousness.
I swear I had this experienced induced by a game of Wolf3D. The power failure in the middle of it was really disorienting.
ISA MicroChannel Architecture (MCA, the PS/2 bus) EISA VESA Local Bus (VLB) PCI
Everbody's so freaking eager to forget VESA. It was FASTER than PCI (32 bits X 40(!) MHz), which it coexisted with later on as PCI appeared.
MS did not pioneer the "reset the CPU" method for enabling preemptive multitasking on the 286, Novell did.
And, to my recollection, OS/2 was not fully 32-bit until 2.1 GA.
And OS/2 Warp crashed all the damn time if you were doing something so outrageous as to trying to play an AVI file it didn't like. Fall down, go boom, either the whole damn thing or whatever had control of the single input queue, another single point of failure in the system that would completely lock you out of your 'puter.
The RegUS will be the US version of theregister.co.uk, vendors have been notified, and a letter from The Pabster says that will give Tom's Hardware "its own technology news site", allowing The Pabster to have "more flexibility in terms of such announcements".
Former coworkers. One also tells me that he pities anyone trying to use 802.11b in DC as they are beating the hell out that frequency range with the boosted-output transceivers this gear uses.
Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but digital cameras are not vegan-compatible either. The color LCD in the camera (all color LCD's) include proteins extracted from fish sources. I shit you not.
Here's the UN's own backgrounder on UNOSOM I, which unfolded from limited coordination teams to a Security Council resolution imposing an arms embargo to another unanimous resolution calling for a humanitarian assistance mission. Note particularly that the United States did not participate at this time. A $700B aid program began, but soon deteriorated under the conflicting aims of local warlords:
Implementing the programme proved difficult. Continuing disagreements among Somali factions... made the effective deployment of UNOSOM impossible. The Special Representative [resigned and was replaced]. On 28 October, General Mohamad Fahrah Aidid declared that the Pakistani UNOSOM battalion would no longer be tolerated in Mogadishu. He also ordered the expulsion of the UNOSOM Coordinator for Humanitarian Assistance. Subsequently, Aidid's forces shelled and shot at UNOSOM forces controlling the airport, and [other] forces shelled ships carrying food as they attempted to enter Mogadishu port. General Aidid objected to United Nations control of the airport; [others] wanted UNOSOM to take full control of the port. On 13 November, after coming under machine-gun, rifle and mortar fire, the Pakistani troops controlling the airport returned fire. In the absence of a government capable of maintaining law and order, relief organizations experienced increased hijacking of vehicles, looting of convoys and warehouses, and detention of expatriate staff.
In other words, the situation in Somalia deteriorated severely before the United States ever got involved. The forces most viciously opposed by the warlord Aidid were fellow Muslims from Pakistan. In December, the UN Security Council again passed a unanimous resolution (remember: this includes not only the five permanent members, but also the temporary regional members in rotating seats) to authorize the United States deployment of a security force. The US forces remained there under a marginally improved security profile, but the UN remained concerned as aid was not getting to the provinces and looting and violence against humanitarian workers continued.
Finally, under UNOSOM II, the mandate of the force was expanded as follows:
monitoring that all factions continued to respect the cessation of hostilities and other agreements to which they had consented;
* preventing any resumption of violence and, if necessary, taking appropriate action;
* maintaining control of the heavy weapons of the organized factions which would have been brought under international control;
* seizing the small arms of all unauthorized armed elements;
* securing all ports, airports and lines of communications required for the delivery of humanitarian assistance;
* protecting the personnel, installations and equipment of the United Nations and its agencies, ICRC as well as NGOs;
* continuing mine-clearing, and;
* repatriating refugees and displaced persons within Somalia.
That's a pretty heavy workload, leaving little room for "guarding oilmen", and again, this was the goal that all members of the UN Security Council agreed on, with the US presence providing a backbone but hardly the majority of the forces. This phase led to a hopeful, temporary peace agreement and plans for an interim government and disarmament of the warlords.
At this point Aidid's cooperation deteriorated swiftly.
Following the transition to UNOSOM II in May 1993, it became clear that, although signatory to the March Agreement, Aidid's faction would not cooperate in the Agreement's implementation. Attempts to implement disarmament led to increasing tensions and, on 5 June, to violence. In a series of armed attacks against UNOSOM II troops throughout south Mogadishu by Somali militia, 25 Pakistani soldiers were killed, 10 were reported missing and 54 wounded. The Special Representative stated that the soldiers were "murdered as they sought to serve the neediest people in the city". The Security Council adopted [a resolution] strongly condemning the unprovoked armed attacks against UNOSOM II. On 8 June, 11 Somali parties condemned the attacks and expressed support for [this] resolution.
So, we had a US presence as part of a UN humanitarian mission that was starting to deteriorate under the determined opposition of a warlord who stood to lose power under the interim government. After non-American forces tried to disarm his troops, he massacred them, placing the entire mission in danger. If the troops themselves were at risk of outright mob violence and murder, how safe were the humanitarian workers? The next step was explicitly authorized by the United Nations Security Council members. Even though the United States had been expecting to ramp down its presence in Somalia under UNOSOM II, setting a firm withdrawal date of March 1994, the new conflict with Aidid required them to participate in an escalation of the mission, which involved several obvious things like taking control of the radio station and forcibly disarming those militia they could. After the June massacre the United Nations issued an arrest warrant for Aidid. (The UN, not the US.) This is when the Army Rangers went in, later joined by the Delta Force squadrons and temporarily the AC-130 gunships. Even so, it was not until October of 1993 that the fatal raid took place.
Were there Western oil interests present in Somalia? Yes. Was there contact with the representatives of those oil interests? Yes. Would a stabilized Somalia be profitable to Western oil and business interests? Yes. But it would also be a humanitarian boon to the people of Somalia, and this was the basis for the 100% agreement of the entire United Nations Security Council on every step of the UNOSOM mission. The US didn't even want to play a central role, with plans to quietly slip out and let the UN run things, until the murder of UN peacekeepers forced a response.
Amazingly, with a globalized economy and free trade covering most of the globe, there is a high likelihood that US or Western business interests will already be present wherever there is a conflict. Noting this is hardly evidence, in and of itself, of murkier, craven motives. To say "we were there to protect American oil interests" is to trivially oversimplify a very complex situation.
Alex Cox, the author of that column [that inspired Dan's piece, not the parent post here], is well known as a left-leaning muckraker given to conspiracy theories. (He's also had at least a moment as a good director.) Cox's narrative "capriciously" suggests that Bush moved unilaterally by "sending in the Marines", but this part of the mission proved relatively peaceful. It was not until the unprovoked massacre of Pakistani soldiers that the UN mission character changed to one of confrontation with Aidid. Cox sneers that the Marines' main task was "guarding oil men" and places scare quotes around the word partners (why not just come right out and say lackeys?). In any case Cox deliberately omits in his story any mention of the massacre which provoked the unanimous response of the United Nations Security Council. Nope; Cox has it that we just "decided that Aidid was [our] enemy". What a foul lie, Mr. Cox. In describing the fatal raid, Cox omits any mention of the deliberate RPG attacks on US helicopters, and suggests that the US troops became "confused" when surrounded by an angry crowd and proceeded to "massacre" Somalis. Cox fails to note that this angry crowd was armed and had been primed over a period of weeks for just such an ambush. The RPG attacks on the helicopters involved planning, procurement, training, and strategizing. Cox would like to have it merely be an "angry crowd" but it was a disciplined militia force that hid inside an angry, incited crowd. Then he goes off on an "all American elite forces are racist" riff that probably satisfies his muckraking impulse but fails to ask a single soldier whether he harbored racist feelings for the people of Somalia. (Most of them didn't; they thought they were doing a good deed, boy scout style.) There was a major error when the Quick Reaction Force attacked an Aidid shura meeting with a missile; accounts vary as to how many died, but it does seem likely that not all of them were military lieutenants.
The indignation Cox puffs up at American "war crimes" is somewhat diminished when one actually reads Bowden's book(which does not omit mention of the incidents, as he suggests). The prisoner praying in custody in an Army 6x6 took an incoming bullet, as Bowden and other sources make clear. The woman who was shot near the crash site was apparently unarmed, but the book adds the information that she was stepping into the street to "spot" for nearby gunmen and pointing out the soldiers' position, making her a combatant. A tough call in any situation, even a firefight for your own life. Update: I've found the Richard Dowden piece that Cox implies is based on independent reporting, but in fact it's entirely derivative of the publication of Bowden's book and Inquirer series, and the wording is Dowden's own spin.
Really, that's a disgusting little piece of distortion and I've lost any respect for Alex Cox now that I've read it. I mean, if you're going to tell this story and say not one word about the massacre of the Pakistanis, how can you lay any claim to honesty? The word Pakistan does not even appear in the article. Cox: for shame.
Slashdot Mirror
The text at that non-forbes link is incomplete. This different forbes link works for me, after allowing javascript from forbes and forbesimg:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/01/02/ask-ethan-is-interstellar-travel-possible/
But the article is underwhelming.
Go to 1:13 in the video and watch the blocky building on the right. You can see the smoke/vapor from the radiant heat cooking the surface of the building, much like those old nuke test films before the blast wave hits.
Grid that axe all you want, just not with revisionist BS like that. Duke3D took 2.5 years to launch after DOOM. And then only 5 months after Duke3D landed Quake dropped. Build was fun, but as a technical competition it was no match for what Carmack was doing.
As for hardware, the first useful consumer 3D hardware didn't land for months *after* Quake shipped, when the Verite boards appeared in stores. And Quake supported them very early. And Carmack was also the primary independent champion of Voodoo, and those were the products that grew that market. So if you want to say he failed by missing the PC 3D hardware revolution, then you're arguing that 1) he missed the revolution he was key in making happen, and 2) he doesn't deserve credit for the revolution he did so much to popularize. More bull.
And Unreal always had its own renderer. Why would anyone expect them to drop their homegrown tech and adopt a competitor's? Not every designer jumps engines every 4 months. (Is that you, George?)
Lay blame wherever you want to for iD's modern malaise, but denying their groundbreaking early achievements is just absurd.
and then
Now that you've established that you knew your statement was false when you made it, there's not much point in having a factual discussion with you anymore.
Good day.
> nobody did anything with it until Apple put it in the
> iMac in 1998 and excluded all other port types.
That's incorrect, on several core points. First off, as for iMacs having no other ports? Not so much. The original iMac also included the irDA port, through which it supported networking and files transfers and printing.
And all the major PC players were all over USB before the iMac appeared on August 15, 1998:
And those aren't introduction dates, they're just handy examples.
By the way, those listed companies were the top 5 PC makers in Q3 1998, globally and in the US, and they accounted for the strait-up majority of the US PC market at the time.
And Apple sold only a tiny fraction of the USB PCs bought in the era of the early iMac. "USB PC shipments were estimated at 20 million units in 1997 and 100 million units in 1999." So I'll split the difference and say 1998 saw 50 million USB PCs sold. How many were iMacs? Try 0.8 million. So that's 0.8 million versus 50 million. Let's be charitable and call that a 50:1 ratio or 2% of market share. Ouch.
Well, that wasn't a full year. How about 1999? We've seen the overall number of 100 million USB PCs, but in 1999 Apple sold only 1.8 million iMacs. So in 1999 USB iMacs again accounted for roughly 2% of the USB PC market. Still ouch.
So, the iMac was not the first PC with USB, the iMac was not the major but rather a fractionally tiny vector for USB into the marketplace, and the iMac did not "exclude all other port types."
Can you make VMWare with Windows and and IE7 run in this scenario? There are lots of things (embedded Windows Media, etc) out there that I wouldn't expect to work on this setup, so that makes me wonder if this read only setup would also support VMWare with Windows and IE7, or at least Windows plus Firefox and MS's WMP plugin.
Ideally, the Windows session would pop into existence when invoked from the frozen image, and then everything but the original image disappears at the end of session.
Hmm, can the user have bookmarks with these read-only setups?
Color Temperature
Do you mind looking like a blue-veined freak in one room but not another?
Color Rendering Index
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Color-r
And once you understand CRI, then you learn that Are they compatible with your dimmer switches?
Probably not.
Are they compatible with your electronically programmable switches?
Maybe not, due to low levels of current leaking to the bulb in those switches.
Are they mountable in your enclosed fixtures without compromising bulb life?
Probably not, but don't count on GE to tell you that.
scotopic/photopic ratio
http://www.auroraballast.com/resources.php?s=2#sc
Do your surviving candidate bulbs go full blast the moment you turn them on?
I only know one manufacturer that achieves this (TCP) and their CRI ratings are disappointing.
I have seven CFL bulbs in various places in my house. None are home runs in all the ways that incandescent bulbs always are. I wish they were better, and I wish I had the answers.
Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health http://www.dcist.com/archives/2006/06/12/district
Bar and restaurant employees have health protections, too. It's indefensible for someone to start working at a smoke-free restaurant and then have the owner decide to expose employees to unnecessary deadly toxins by allowing smoking. Read up on the latest announcements regarding the well-established dangers of second-hand smoke: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060627/sc_nm/smoking_ dc_16
And seat belt laws are not for the protection of the driver; they're for people around the driver because the seat belt keeps the driver at the controls after the initial impact.
Sometimes there's more to the world than your instantaneous desires.
This description make it sound like there's nothing stopping a content producer from targeting anybody else's player. So then, Sony Studios could use its movie releases to permanently cripple the players from manufacturers that compete with Sony on hardware?
And what about software players? Microsoft is a content producer and they could also produce a player. What's to stop them from disabling Apple players?
80486DX2 was the first clock doubling CPU
Bzzt! It was the first clock doubling CPU from Intel, but not the first alltogether.
Radar detector: fat fine, car searched and mucho points on the license.
False. No points, and they can't even compel you to relinquish it. And it has never been fully tested in court, either.
Microwave ovens are purposely tuned to be near the frequencies of water molecules. If it was precisely at the frequency then the waves wouldn't penetrate past the surface and all the heating would occur at the surface, which is pretty far from optimal.
Explanation: What that means is that there is now a free-of-charge and user modifiable software system that can, in combination with hardware built to a freely available specification, use a normal personal computer to recieve and save bit for bit copies of the high definition television signals already being beamed out by broadcasters. That means you can create perfect copies, with color, fidelity and detail that far outstrips what you are used to from standard television or even direct broadcast satellite (like DirecTV), and use them at your convenience and in the full range of uses allowed under fair use, the legal doctrine that gives you considerable freedom to save, copy and even distribute copyrighted materials.
In the long term fight for the maintenance of fair use against the MPAA and the RIAA, it's a very big deal. It's the DeCSS of HDTV.
The current industry/legislature proposals do not lean on encryption, but on a "broadcast flag" that tags broadcast content with what level of freedom viewers have to capture, caopy, manipulate and distribute the broadcast material, with all of the available restrictions imposed at the whim of the broadcaster, to be enforced in the receiver.
Wanna guess what the defaults would be like?
Wouldn't it be nice to have an open, non-proprietary receiver that you have intimate control over?
One of the methods discussed uses collagen as a culture for growing the tissue. That's a problem for ethical vegetarians since collagen is derived from dead animal flesh.
Tastes like chicken indeed.
quote source
This is how I make my pickle glow.
PC bus history:
ISA
MicroChannel Architecture (MCA, the PS/2 bus)
EISA
VESA Local Bus (VLB)
PCI
Everbody's so freaking eager to forget VESA. It was FASTER than PCI (32 bits X 40(!) MHz), which it coexisted with later on as PCI appeared.
MS did not pioneer the "reset the CPU" method for enabling preemptive multitasking on the 286, Novell did.
And, to my recollection, OS/2 was not fully 32-bit until 2.1 GA.
And OS/2 Warp crashed all the damn time if you were doing something so outrageous as to trying to play an AVI file it didn't like. Fall down, go boom, either the whole damn thing or whatever had control of the single input queue, another single point of failure in the system that would completely lock you out of your 'puter.
...before it gets Foxed.
What's the impact of this news on the security of the newly accepted AES (DES replacement)?
Here the citation:
Full-color displays also require expensive red/green/blue filters made of dichromated gelatin--fish glue.
from A Bright Future for Displays - April 2001
Former coworkers. One also tells me that he pities anyone trying to use 802.11b in DC as they are beating the hell out that frequency range with the boosted-output transceivers this gear uses.
Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but digital cameras are not vegan-compatible either. The color LCD in the camera (all color LCD's) include proteins extracted from fish sources. I shit you not.
Here's the UN's own backgrounder on UNOSOM I, which unfolded from limited coordination teams to a Security Council resolution imposing an arms embargo to another unanimous resolution calling for a humanitarian assistance mission. Note particularly that the United States did not participate at this time. A $700B aid program began, but soon deteriorated under the conflicting aims of local warlords:
In other words, the situation in Somalia deteriorated severely before the United States ever got involved. The forces most viciously opposed by the warlord Aidid were fellow Muslims from Pakistan. In December, the UN Security Council again passed a unanimous resolution (remember: this includes not only the five permanent members, but also the temporary regional members in rotating seats) to authorize the United States deployment of a security force. The US forces remained there under a marginally improved security profile, but the UN remained concerned as aid was not getting to the provinces and looting and violence against humanitarian workers continued.
Finally, under UNOSOM II, the mandate of the force was expanded as follows:
That's a pretty heavy workload, leaving little room for "guarding oilmen", and again, this was the goal that all members of the UN Security Council agreed on, with the US presence providing a backbone but hardly the majority of the forces. This phase led to a hopeful, temporary peace agreement and plans for an interim government and disarmament of the warlords.
At this point Aidid's cooperation deteriorated swiftly.
So, we had a US presence as part of a UN humanitarian mission that was starting to deteriorate under the determined opposition of a warlord who stood to lose power under the interim government. After non-American forces tried to disarm his troops, he massacred them, placing the entire mission in danger. If the troops themselves were at risk of outright mob violence and murder, how safe were the humanitarian workers? The next step was explicitly authorized by the United Nations Security Council members. Even though the United States had been expecting to ramp down its presence in Somalia under UNOSOM II, setting a firm withdrawal date of March 1994, the new conflict with Aidid required them to participate in an escalation of the mission, which involved several obvious things like taking control of the radio station and forcibly disarming those militia they could. After the June massacre the United Nations issued an arrest warrant for Aidid. (The UN, not the US.) This is when the Army Rangers went in, later joined by the Delta Force squadrons and temporarily the AC-130 gunships. Even so, it was not until October of 1993 that the fatal raid took place.
Were there Western oil interests present in Somalia? Yes. Was there contact with the representatives of those oil interests? Yes. Would a stabilized Somalia be profitable to Western oil and business interests? Yes. But it would also be a humanitarian boon to the people of Somalia, and this was the basis for the 100% agreement of the entire United Nations Security Council on every step of the UNOSOM mission. The US didn't even want to play a central role, with plans to quietly slip out and let the UN run things, until the murder of UN peacekeepers forced a response.
Amazingly, with a globalized economy and free trade covering most of the globe, there is a high likelihood that US or Western business interests will already be present wherever there is a conflict. Noting this is hardly evidence, in and of itself, of murkier, craven motives. To say "we were there to protect American oil interests" is to trivially oversimplify a very complex situation.
Alex Cox, the author of that column [that inspired Dan's piece, not the parent post here], is well known as a left-leaning muckraker given to conspiracy theories. (He's also had at least a moment as a good director.) Cox's narrative "capriciously" suggests that Bush moved unilaterally by "sending in the Marines", but this part of the mission proved relatively peaceful. It was not until the unprovoked massacre of Pakistani soldiers that the UN mission character changed to one of confrontation with Aidid. Cox sneers that the Marines' main task was "guarding oil men" and places scare quotes around the word partners (why not just come right out and say lackeys?). In any case Cox deliberately omits in his story any mention of the massacre which provoked the unanimous response of the United Nations Security Council. Nope; Cox has it that we just "decided that Aidid was [our] enemy". What a foul lie, Mr. Cox. In describing the fatal raid, Cox omits any mention of the deliberate RPG attacks on US helicopters, and suggests that the US troops became "confused" when surrounded by an angry crowd and proceeded to "massacre" Somalis. Cox fails to note that this angry crowd was armed and had been primed over a period of weeks for just such an ambush. The RPG attacks on the helicopters involved planning, procurement, training, and strategizing. Cox would like to have it merely be an "angry crowd" but it was a disciplined militia force that hid inside an angry, incited crowd. Then he goes off on an "all American elite forces are racist" riff that probably satisfies his muckraking impulse but fails to ask a single soldier whether he harbored racist feelings for the people of Somalia. (Most of them didn't; they thought they were doing a good deed, boy scout style.) There was a major error when the Quick Reaction Force attacked an Aidid shura meeting with a missile; accounts vary as to how many died, but it does seem likely that not all of them were military lieutenants.
The indignation Cox puffs up at American "war crimes" is somewhat diminished when one actually reads Bowden's book(which does not omit mention of the incidents, as he suggests). The prisoner praying in custody in an Army 6x6 took an incoming bullet, as Bowden and other sources make clear. The woman who was shot near the crash site was apparently unarmed, but the book adds the information that she was stepping into the street to "spot" for nearby gunmen and pointing out the soldiers' position, making her a combatant. A tough call in any situation, even a firefight for your own life. Update: I've found the Richard Dowden piece that Cox implies is based on independent reporting, but in fact it's entirely derivative of the publication of Bowden's book and Inquirer series, and the wording is Dowden's own spin.
Really, that's a disgusting little piece of distortion and I've lost any respect for Alex Cox now that I've read it. I mean, if you're going to tell this story and say not one word about the massacre of the Pakistanis, how can you lay any claim to honesty? The word Pakistan does not even appear in the article. Cox: for shame.