How about the fact that they are just human. Do you really honestly beleive microsoft engineers let bugs out intentionaly... negligence is along way from intent... Besides people are going to mistake problems will get through even with months of testing. Its much harder but yes things will get through.
But according to 99.9999% of Slashdotters, that's exactly what Microsoft does. Meanwhile the tanned, sculpted heroes with perfect teeth over on the Open Source side crank out product after product with No Bugs Whatsoever. (yeah, right).
Do I fault one or both? Yes. I use Microsoft products, and I expect a higher standard from them because I know that they're writing some good code. They're lightyears ahead of the OpenSource crowd in terms of usability. See how fast I can get an ssl-enabled virtual site up in IIS as compared to in Apache. The opensource crowd focuses more on writing a more secure product (but the bugs still get through). As for usability and overall user friendliness... well, let's just say that you get what you pay for.
I've spent the entire day trying to find the answer to a nagging Apache+SSL question today, and it's a basic one, too. I'd rather be watching the Dead Zone marathon. And it's not part of the "experience"- it's crap. I shouldn't have to waste hours of my time looking for poorly documented and written howtos, completely bogus manpages, and the usual *nix "RTFM/STFW" reply that's so prevalent in these days.
But you know what? I expect better from both crowds. The irony only tastes that much better when something from the OpenSource side gets hammered with something potentially big like this, after all the ballyhoo, bragging and namecalling at Microsoft's expense. Something about people living in glass houses. I fault OpenSource for writting crap as much as I fault Microsoft for doing the same.
The OS crowd really can't bash MS without sounding like hypocrites. I've seen some horrible OS projects, just like MS. Worms and viruses? Plenty. Starting off with Morris. Why so many worms and viruses for Windows? Because that's where the users are. Maybe the OS guys can say "Not quite as many holes as MS!". Really- that whole mantra about BSD and their no-flaw base install was just begging to torn down. Just like Ellison's claim about Oracle9i being uncrackable.
But if I want 32 and a half dozen opensource Java/Ruby/PERL/Python/zsh MP3 players for my futon, I know where to look.
If you were going to sea and had a choice of two boats... One with a number of small leaks and one or two large ones OR a boat with a huge amount of small leaks and quite a bit of very large ones... you would still pick the boat with the least amount of leaks...
How about accept neither and demand a better boat?
It's just common sense
If you're willing to be stuck with 2 crap options. Demand a higher standard.
In IIS, the final nail in the coffin when it comes to security is the fact that it runs under the privileges of SYSTEM. Anyone knows what Apache on NT/2k runs as?
Wrong. All accesses via IIS are in the context of the IUSR_ unless explicitly defined otherwise. The IUSR account has minimal permissions, although a lot of admins forget to lock down the file permissions (IUSR being a part of the Everyone group)
Ah! but the funny thing is, any innovations that the open source community make would be shunned because they would be different to the Microsoft "Standards"
We'll never know at this rate, since the OS community really isn't pushing the envelope as far as exploring new technologies. Unless you consider 4000 semi-functional MP3 players to be extreme computing.
And before you go spouting the Party Line about MS and standards, review Win2k and XP's embrace of standards, especially Kerberos. MS does Kerberos a lot better than many UNIX vendors do, and still manages to fall exactly withing the published standards.
When will they finally see that the best way to improve MS is to allow the Open Source developer community free rein in order to come out with more and more brilliant ideas and concepts?
Maybe because Microsoft doesn't have to.
Also, Open Source has done very little (to use a BillG term) to create any innovations. They're all busy either writing an Yet Another MP3 player for their toasters, or writing Open Source clones of existing software (OpenOffice, etc). What innovations have Open Source come up with? Just the other week, people wanted an Open Source port of Exchange, for Christ's sake!
That's called being "feature rich". If you're just using Exchange for email, someone probably didn't do a good job at cost/feature analysis.
It becomes a single point of failure for a bunch of stuff.
That's true for any email system. You could look into secondary MX servers.
Plus is expensive as just a mail server.
But you just said it far from just email! Seriously, if all you're doing is sending email back and forth, someone didn't do their homework. We use Exchange, and we use a lot of the features it has. I've proposed getting rid of it in favor of using Postfix, but the boss and the bosses above him like the Calendering and Scheduling features. Odd that a Windows admin would propose a Linux solution, but that's just the way I am.
I say the Exchange servers should be totally eliminiated in favor of a non-lan/wan centric solution (watch your step, marketing words all around), namely a true internet application, shared, replicable, and reliable.
But all email servers are like that. Running Sendmail or Postfix? Gee, you still have one central mail server. With Exchange you can at least have a bridgehead server that sends/receives email to the outside world, and Exchange server at each physical site that get their user's mail replicated to them from the bridgehead. Cuts down dramatically on bandwidth consumption.
But Microsoft's proprietary mailbox format, MAPI, which nothing but the Outlook clients appear to be able to read. Sources have it on my side that Exchange XP, I think, moves toward IMAP for its mailbox.
But Exchange 5.5 and 2000 support IMAP and POP3! Plus, MAPI is fully documented and available for any bright young coder to create a new email client.
(reasonably) small machine with TV-out running Linux is good for a lot of neat AV type applications.
Like watching a DVD? It can already do that without the "benefit" of Linux.
It's powerful enough to be useful, and designed to look like Consumer Electronics Gear instead of like a computer, so won't look ugly in your TV cabinet (well, I personally think that the X-Box is ugly as sin, but that's just me).
I can't name one person that I know that has a computer or PC type appliance sitting in their entertainment center.
In addition, putting Linux on it opens it up to the whole world of Linux console emulators, so you could make your X-Box emulate an 8 bit nintendo or an Atari or a whole host of arcade games with MAME.
To me, it soulds like a lot of duplicated effort. If you want an emulator box, you can have one right now, but it's not going to be on an Xbox. You want to play MAME, but you want to play MAME on an Xbox. Strange. You can wait for MAME to run on an XBox, I'll go play it right now on my Win2k or RedHat box.
Last I heard, Microsoft was losing money on every X-Box sold. Their plan was to make it up through getting a piece of the action for every game sold. So if you hate Microsoft, buying an X-Box but not buying any MS-approved games takes money directly out of their pockets.
So you're going to buy an Xbox and (eventually) install Linux but never buy a game? And do you think that with eleventy billion dollars in cash reserves, that the loss of $100 here and there are going to make a difference? Let's face the reality of the situation: there are enough people who buy Xbox games to offset the one or two that don't. And all you're going to do is help inflate sales figures for MS.
Pure hack value. Remember that Unix was originally designed so they could play a silly little game on a spare DEC minicomputer. Geeks doing weird things with weird hardware often leads to great results.
Yeah, but I still ask: what's the point? Someone's offering 100k for the first person to get an xbox to run linux. Why? I'm all for making stuff do things it wasn't intended to to, but when 100k is put up, I wonder why is there such an interest in this? Surely it has to be beyond "h4w h4w h4w! Look! I got a Microsoft product to run Linux!".
There was talk about having a rack full of Dreamcasts or PS2's to run Linux and be webserver farms. I don't know about you, but if the company I work for saw that our coroprate website was being run on a game console instead of a real server (redundant power supplies, hotswappable RAID, etc..) we'd immediately be looking for a new provider. There is little to no business use for running Linux on a game console, so it becomes merely an academic pursuit. I can understand that. But a 100,000 dollar reward? And all the shouting and hairpulling before on other platforms. I don't get it. Surely nobody here would even consider using a Dreamcase, PS2 or xbox as their primary workstation or server. You can't really modify them, you're locked in to a fixed configuration often with proprietary hardware.
So other than the "golly gee" factor, why is it so important to get linux running on my toaster, and why is it worth $100,000 to someone to get it running on an xbox?
Linux on an XBox. The question begs to be asked: Why? I asked this when there was so much hullaballoo over booting linux on a dreamcast, and all I got for a reply was "don't tell me how to use my dreamcast!!".
So. Why so much noise over Linux on an XBox? Why could a Slashdotter buy an XBox anyway? You all hate MS so much. And then devote hours and hours into getting Linux to run on it? Yeah, I suppose you all get some kind of sick thrill from it, from "perverting" an MS product, but geez... isn't this sort of like having sex with your sister?
Again, the Old Guard of the Anti-Microsoft "Can't do right anytime" Regime (read: Timothy), attacks with a flawed premise: attack Trustworthy Computing.
Newsflash, Tim: First the shatter exploit requires some unusual circumstances, and relies on shoddy programming. Second, the Trustworthy Computing concept is nary a few months old at Microsoft. Somehow they're supposed to magic all kinds of bugfixes to your old Win9x box? Give me a break. You'll see these advancements in security in.Net and Palladium.
We deal with customers transferring large amounts of sensitive data to us. Our requirements are that the control and data streams be encrypted, and that the customers are confined to only their upload directories. We use SSH so we can do sftp and chroot the users to their own little jail. For our customers that use Windows, we supply a copy of CuteFTP, and a VBScript written by yours truly to automate the data transfer (the latest CuteFTP supports sftp and ssl-ftp). We're very happy with this setup as it's secure and easy to use for our customers. We'd use OpenSSH, but it doesn't do user chrooting without some heavy modification. Because of SSH, we've been able to ditch our aging NT4.0 Server running WS-FTP with SSL enabled for our data transfers.
So much for the "many eyes, open source, no bugs" theory. And what's with they delayed announcement? Open-source taking a few clues from the Dark Side?
A lot of people justify their cowardice with namby-pamby rationalizations to make their guilt go away. "Oh, our President's on a publicity trip", or "We have no reason being there", "Military people are just a bunch of murderers"
Heaven forfend people be forced to replace their Birkenstocks with jungle boots, or eat MREs instead of tofu. It boils down to the fact that they haven't the stones to consider their own safety and comfort secondary to someone else's. Fortunately for them, there are people who do.
See, I don't get this whole "Army of One" business. If I were to join the army, I wouldn't want to be fighting alone.
It's not meant to mean that you're a One Man Army. A fighting unit, be it a squad, platoon, company, regiment or whole Army works because it acts as a unit. Everyone works together to accomplish one goal. Acts as one. The campaign also demonstrates how important an individual is to the whole of the unit. It's a double entendre.
If you believe the conspiracy theorists, it's already been planned for next year. To answer the question "What does every first term Presidency want? A second term". That, according to conspiracy theory, is exactly what's going to be done next year to put Bush in the White House for 4 more year. I guess it's a comback tour "Unfinished Business" or something. With WWF superstars opening for it.
Governments do sometimes ask their armed forces to perform tasks that are nothing to do with protecting the people of that country or democracy. Do you feel that no-one should challenge this? You seem to claim that as a soldier, you can't challenge it because it's against military code, but civilians can't challenge it because they are not the ones that are doing it, and they are denegrading the soldiers when they do.
Soldier's don't have the luxury of questioning orders. You as a cadet should at least know this. For example, if orders were given tomorrow that we were marching into Country X, what do you think would happen if I questioned the morals/rightness/ethics of those orders? They'd say "Shut up Cabal, or we'll Article 15 your ass and throw you in the stockade". If I continued, it would be a field grade court martial, time at Leavenworth, BCD discharge with no benefits, and no chance of employment. If it were wartime, it would probably mean the firing squad.
When you enlist, you sign your name on the dotted line, you hold up your right hand and swear to defend and protect the Constitution and to obey the lawful orders of your superiors. A lot of people in this forum seem to get hung up on the differences between unlawful and something they don't agree with. I don't agree with OS/2, but it's still legal, dammit. I'm sure a significant percentage of them smoke pot, despite it being illegal, but they don't have any ethical quibbles about it. Situational ethics, I guess. I call them hypocrites.
Can you protest? Yes, but you're not going to get far. Can civilians? Yes they can, and should. See Vietnam. Civilians are the only people who can make policy. It starts there. The military is just the enforcement arm.
And back to the point, this is exactly what I think the original posted is getting at - that as a soldier you are not signing up to a force who's role it is to defend your country, but who's role it is to follow the orders of their commanders, whatever they may be.
So, you accept orders unquestioningly, yet realise that by not standing up to the wrongs of others you are complicit in their evil? Interesting.
Obviously someone who hasn't served. Allow me to enlighten you: In the military, you do not have a choice. You are given an order, you obey. Military life is not like in the movies, or on "JAG", where orders are routinely disobeyed with a wink and nudge, and everything is hunkey-dorey at the end of an hour. I cannot name one branch of service where insubordination is tolerated. Failure to obey an order is grounds for a field grade Article 15 at the least, all the way up to a court martial if someone's feeling punchy. And it gets a lot worse from there. Pray it's not during declared wartime, where the penalties get to be a little harsher.
You are allowed to disobey an unlawful order, though. But I've never been issued one.
And as for the Iraq comment - yes it is an issue with the leadership, but they are the ones that make the decisions, and as a soldier are you as happy risking your life to help their popularity as you are defending freedom?
While I was in the infantry, we had a saying: "Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die". How I feel about a situation doesn't matter one iota to Congress, the President or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As I saw being slung around here on yet another anti-Microsoft article: "All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". I think that applies to the Iraq situation, although I will agree that it was flawed in its execution.
Slashdot Mirror
How about the fact that they are just human. Do you really honestly beleive microsoft engineers let bugs out intentionaly ... negligence is along way from intent ...
Besides people are going to mistake problems will get through even with months of testing. Its much harder but yes things will get through.
But according to 99.9999% of Slashdotters, that's exactly what Microsoft does. Meanwhile the tanned, sculpted heroes with perfect teeth over on the Open Source side crank out product after product with No Bugs Whatsoever. (yeah, right).
Do I fault one or both? Yes. I use Microsoft products, and I expect a higher standard from them because I know that they're writing some good code. They're lightyears ahead of the OpenSource crowd in terms of usability. See how fast I can get an ssl-enabled virtual site up in IIS as compared to in Apache. The opensource crowd focuses more on writing a more secure product (but the bugs still get through). As for usability and overall user friendliness... well, let's just say that you get what you pay for.
I've spent the entire day trying to find the answer to a nagging Apache+SSL question today, and it's a basic one, too. I'd rather be watching the Dead Zone marathon. And it's not part of the "experience"- it's crap. I shouldn't have to waste hours of my time looking for poorly documented and written howtos, completely bogus manpages, and the usual *nix "RTFM/STFW" reply that's so prevalent in these days.
But you know what? I expect better from both crowds. The irony only tastes that much better when something from the OpenSource side gets hammered with something potentially big like this, after all the ballyhoo, bragging and namecalling at Microsoft's expense. Something about people living in glass houses. I fault OpenSource for writting crap as much as I fault Microsoft for doing the same.
The OS crowd really can't bash MS without sounding like hypocrites. I've seen some horrible OS projects, just like MS. Worms and viruses? Plenty. Starting off with Morris. Why so many worms and viruses for Windows? Because that's where the users are. Maybe the OS guys can say "Not quite as many holes as MS!". Really- that whole mantra about BSD and their no-flaw base install was just begging to torn down. Just like Ellison's claim about Oracle9i being uncrackable.
But if I want 32 and a half dozen opensource Java/Ruby/PERL/Python/zsh MP3 players for my futon, I know where to look.
If you were going to sea and had a choice of two boats... One with a number of small leaks and one or two large ones OR a boat with a huge amount of small leaks and quite a bit of very large ones... you would still pick the boat with the least amount of leaks...
How about accept neither and demand a better boat?
It's just common sense
If you're willing to be stuck with 2 crap options. Demand a higher standard.
In IIS, the final nail in the coffin when it comes to security is the fact that it runs under the privileges of SYSTEM. Anyone knows what Apache on NT/2k runs as?
Wrong. All accesses via IIS are in the context of the IUSR_ unless explicitly defined otherwise. The IUSR account has minimal permissions, although a lot of admins forget to lock down the file permissions (IUSR being a part of the Everyone group)
Ah! but the funny thing is, any innovations that the open source community make would be shunned because they would be different to the Microsoft "Standards"
We'll never know at this rate, since the OS community really isn't pushing the envelope as far as exploring new technologies. Unless you consider 4000 semi-functional MP3 players to be extreme computing.
And before you go spouting the Party Line about MS and standards, review Win2k and XP's embrace of standards, especially Kerberos. MS does Kerberos a lot better than many UNIX vendors do, and still manages to fall exactly withing the published standards.
I'm sorry, I must have missed the announcement that you were appointed as Dude in Charge of Title Endowments.
When will they finally see that the best way to improve MS is to allow the Open Source developer community free rein in order to come out with more and more brilliant ideas and concepts?
Maybe because Microsoft doesn't have to.
Also, Open Source has done very little (to use a BillG term) to create any innovations. They're all busy either writing an Yet Another MP3 player for their toasters, or writing Open Source clones of existing software (OpenOffice, etc). What innovations have Open Source come up with? Just the other week, people wanted an Open Source port of Exchange, for Christ's sake!
But the exchange server is far from just email.
That's called being "feature rich". If you're just using Exchange for email, someone probably didn't do a good job at cost/feature analysis.
It becomes a single point of failure for a bunch of stuff.
That's true for any email system. You could look into secondary MX servers.
Plus is expensive as just a mail server.
But you just said it far from just email! Seriously, if all you're doing is sending email back and forth, someone didn't do their homework. We use Exchange, and we use a lot of the features it has. I've proposed getting rid of it in favor of using Postfix, but the boss and the bosses above him like the Calendering and Scheduling features. Odd that a Windows admin would propose a Linux solution, but that's just the way I am.
It's part of the install. You have to turn it on. You can do this at the site, server or user level.
I don't know if Exchange provides a web interface, but GroupWise provides a very nice one
Yes, Exchange provides OWA- Outlook Web Access, which is a very usable web interface.
I say the Exchange servers should be totally eliminiated in favor of a non-lan/wan centric solution (watch your step, marketing words all around), namely a true internet application, shared, replicable, and reliable.
But all email servers are like that. Running Sendmail or Postfix? Gee, you still have one central mail server. With Exchange you can at least have a bridgehead server that sends/receives email to the outside world, and Exchange server at each physical site that get their user's mail replicated to them from the bridgehead. Cuts down dramatically on bandwidth consumption.
But Microsoft's proprietary mailbox format, MAPI, which nothing but the Outlook clients appear to be able to read. Sources have it on my side that Exchange XP, I think, moves toward IMAP for its mailbox.
But Exchange 5.5 and 2000 support IMAP and POP3! Plus, MAPI is fully documented and available for any bright young coder to create a new email client.
(reasonably) small machine with TV-out running Linux is good for a lot of neat AV type applications.
Like watching a DVD? It can already do that without the "benefit" of Linux.
It's powerful enough to be useful, and designed to look like Consumer Electronics Gear instead of like a computer, so won't look ugly in your TV cabinet (well, I personally think that the X-Box is ugly as sin, but that's just me).
I can't name one person that I know that has a computer or PC type appliance sitting in their entertainment center.
In addition, putting Linux on it opens it up to the whole world of Linux console emulators, so you could make your X-Box emulate an 8 bit nintendo or an Atari or a whole host of arcade games with MAME.
To me, it soulds like a lot of duplicated effort. If you want an emulator box, you can have one right now, but it's not going to be on an Xbox. You want to play MAME, but you want to play MAME on an Xbox. Strange. You can wait for MAME to run on an XBox, I'll go play it right now on my Win2k or RedHat box.
Last I heard, Microsoft was losing money on every X-Box sold. Their plan was to make it up through getting a piece of the action for every game sold. So if you hate Microsoft, buying an X-Box but not buying any MS-approved games takes money directly out of their pockets.
So you're going to buy an Xbox and (eventually) install Linux but never buy a game? And do you think that with eleventy billion dollars in cash reserves, that the loss of $100 here and there are going to make a difference? Let's face the reality of the situation: there are enough people who buy Xbox games to offset the one or two that don't. And all you're going to do is help inflate sales figures for MS.
Pure hack value. Remember that Unix was originally designed so they could play a silly little game on a spare DEC minicomputer. Geeks doing weird things with weird hardware often leads to great results.
Yeah, but I still ask: what's the point? Someone's offering 100k for the first person to get an xbox to run linux. Why? I'm all for making stuff do things it wasn't intended to to, but when 100k is put up, I wonder why is there such an interest in this? Surely it has to be beyond "h4w h4w h4w! Look! I got a Microsoft product to run Linux!".
There was talk about having a rack full of Dreamcasts or PS2's to run Linux and be webserver farms. I don't know about you, but if the company I work for saw that our coroprate website was being run on a game console instead of a real server (redundant power supplies, hotswappable RAID, etc..) we'd immediately be looking for a new provider. There is little to no business use for running Linux on a game console, so it becomes merely an academic pursuit. I can understand that. But a 100,000 dollar reward? And all the shouting and hairpulling before on other platforms. I don't get it. Surely nobody here would even consider using a Dreamcase, PS2 or xbox as their primary workstation or server. You can't really modify them, you're locked in to a fixed configuration often with proprietary hardware.
So other than the "golly gee" factor, why is it so important to get linux running on my toaster, and why is it worth $100,000 to someone to get it running on an xbox?
Linux on an XBox. The question begs to be asked: Why? I asked this when there was so much hullaballoo over booting linux on a dreamcast, and all I got for a reply was "don't tell me how to use my dreamcast!!".
So. Why so much noise over Linux on an XBox? Why could a Slashdotter buy an XBox anyway? You all hate MS so much. And then devote hours and hours into getting Linux to run on it? Yeah, I suppose you all get some kind of sick thrill from it, from "perverting" an MS product, but geez... isn't this sort of like having sex with your sister?
Again, the Old Guard of the Anti-Microsoft "Can't do right anytime" Regime (read: Timothy), attacks with a flawed premise: attack Trustworthy Computing.
.Net and Palladium.
Newsflash, Tim: First the shatter exploit requires some unusual circumstances, and relies on shoddy programming. Second, the Trustworthy Computing concept is nary a few months old at Microsoft. Somehow they're supposed to magic all kinds of bugfixes to your old Win9x box? Give me a break. You'll see these advancements in security in
We deal with customers transferring large amounts of sensitive data to us. Our requirements are that the control and data streams be encrypted, and that the customers are confined to only their upload directories. We use SSH so we can do sftp and chroot the users to their own little jail. For our customers that use Windows, we supply a copy of CuteFTP, and a VBScript written by yours truly to automate the data transfer (the latest CuteFTP supports sftp and ssl-ftp). We're very happy with this setup as it's secure and easy to use for our customers. We'd use OpenSSH, but it doesn't do user chrooting without some heavy modification. Because of SSH, we've been able to ditch our aging NT4.0 Server running WS-FTP with SSL enabled for our data transfers.
So much for the "many eyes, open source, no bugs" theory. And what's with they delayed announcement? Open-source taking a few clues from the Dark Side?
You forgot one final reason:
Cowardice
A lot of people justify their cowardice with namby-pamby rationalizations to make their guilt go away. "Oh, our President's on a publicity trip", or "We have no reason being there", "Military people are just a bunch of murderers"
Heaven forfend people be forced to replace their Birkenstocks with jungle boots, or eat MREs instead of tofu. It boils down to the fact that they haven't the stones to consider their own safety and comfort secondary to someone else's. Fortunately for them, there are people who do.
See, I don't get this whole "Army of One" business. If I were to join the army, I wouldn't want to be fighting alone.
It's not meant to mean that you're a One Man Army. A fighting unit, be it a squad, platoon, company, regiment or whole Army works because it acts as a unit. Everyone works together to accomplish one goal. Acts as one. The campaign also demonstrates how important an individual is to the whole of the unit. It's a double entendre.
If you believe the conspiracy theorists, it's already been planned for next year. To answer the question "What does every first term Presidency want? A second term". That, according to conspiracy theory, is exactly what's going to be done next year to put Bush in the White House for 4 more year. I guess it's a comback tour "Unfinished Business" or something. With WWF superstars opening for it.
Governments do sometimes ask their armed forces to perform tasks that are nothing to do with protecting the people of that country or democracy. Do you feel that no-one should challenge this? You seem to claim that as a soldier, you can't challenge it because it's against military code, but civilians can't challenge it because they are not the ones that are doing it, and they are denegrading the soldiers when they do.
Soldier's don't have the luxury of questioning orders. You as a cadet should at least know this. For example, if orders were given tomorrow that we were marching into Country X, what do you think would happen if I questioned the morals/rightness/ethics of those orders? They'd say "Shut up Cabal, or we'll Article 15 your ass and throw you in the stockade". If I continued, it would be a field grade court martial, time at Leavenworth, BCD discharge with no benefits, and no chance of employment. If it were wartime, it would probably mean the firing squad.
When you enlist, you sign your name on the dotted line, you hold up your right hand and swear to defend and protect the Constitution and to obey the lawful orders of your superiors. A lot of people in this forum seem to get hung up on the differences between unlawful and something they don't agree with. I don't agree with OS/2, but it's still legal, dammit. I'm sure a significant percentage of them smoke pot, despite it being illegal, but they don't have any ethical quibbles about it. Situational ethics, I guess. I call them hypocrites.
Can you protest? Yes, but you're not going to get far. Can civilians? Yes they can, and should. See Vietnam. Civilians are the only people who can make policy. It starts there. The military is just the enforcement arm.
And back to the point, this is exactly what I think the original posted is getting at - that as a soldier you are not signing up to a force who's role it is to defend your country, but who's role it is to follow the orders of their commanders, whatever they may be.
I agree.
So, you accept orders unquestioningly, yet realise that by not standing up to the wrongs of others you are complicit in their evil? Interesting.
Obviously someone who hasn't served. Allow me to enlighten you: In the military, you do not have a choice. You are given an order, you obey. Military life is not like in the movies, or on "JAG", where orders are routinely disobeyed with a wink and nudge, and everything is hunkey-dorey at the end of an hour. I cannot name one branch of service where insubordination is tolerated. Failure to obey an order is grounds for a field grade Article 15 at the least, all the way up to a court martial if someone's feeling punchy. And it gets a lot worse from there. Pray it's not during declared wartime, where the penalties get to be a little harsher.
You are allowed to disobey an unlawful order, though. But I've never been issued one.
So, either laugh with them, or just ignore them, but no need to berade the man for having a sense of humor.
Just exercising my right to browbeat someone who happens to have an opinion I don't agree with, and isn't very funny. IMHO.
Speaking as one of those millions, I thought it was funny.
I didn't.
And as for the Iraq comment - yes it is an issue with the leadership, but they are the ones that make the decisions, and as a soldier are you as happy risking your life to help their popularity as you are defending freedom?
While I was in the infantry, we had a saying: "Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die". How I feel about a situation doesn't matter one iota to Congress, the President or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As I saw being slung around here on yet another anti-Microsoft article: "All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". I think that applies to the Iraq situation, although I will agree that it was flawed in its execution.
Nor were power-ups of any sort available, unless you count caffiene.
Gee you missed the two most obvious powerups: alcohol and Motrin. They were in abundant supply in my unit.