Huh? You mean someone answering 'maybe' is not doubtful? Strange.
Besides, there is the alternative of a 'working democracy' where all viable choices are American puppets, you know, like in Afghanistan, where only the former CIA collaborator Hamid Karzai has a realistic chance of getting elected.
Iyad Allawi used to work for the CIA, too. Would you like a former KGB agent as president? That alone should ensure a steady supply of insurgents, unless Allawi gets as tough as Saddam. The bombings of 'insurgent headquarters' are a nice start on that road to hell.
If only 58% of respondents believe that democracy will work out in Iraq, that is not exactly wonderful.
No need to doubt the veracity of the poll. It's gloomy enough in itself.
And of course ALL of the Shi'ites will favor free and fair elections, since they will put them on top - which may cause the Kurds to secede and the Sunni to rebel, to simplify it horribly.
Yes, the conventional forces were welcome there, but any addition of any nukes only served to heighten tension. Saying that a neutron bomb is a tactical weapon and therefore will not lead to nuclear escalation from the other side is simply wishful thinking.
The Soviet block did not have neutron bombs and they had a stated policy not to use nukes *first*. Any use of a neutron bomb would have led to instant nuclear retaliation.
And yes, we can say that you can't trust a commie, but in the game of diplomacy, what you say and do counts in raising or lowering tension.
And a heightened threat of nuclear war did lower my enjoyment of life there in the middle of ground zero with nowhere to run. In a conventional war, you can at least imagine you have a chance of survival.
So, the US generals and politicians who brought democracy and protection to Germany deserve kudos. They were wonderful. They were not the same generals who played nuclear chess on the European battlefield while ensconced in the best bunkers on the other side of the planet. Okay?
"The later planned usage in Europe was *not* to kill people without destroying property (that was propaganda from those opposed to NATO, but not Soviet, nuclear weapons). Instead, the intention was to use them against invading Warsaw Pact troop concentrations while reducing damage to nearby West German towns and cities."
Excuse me, but there's some redundancy here: Warsaw pact troop concentration = people; West German towns and cities = property.
And having lived in Germany at the time, I'd say most of the demonstrators - apart from the communist minority - were very much opposed to nuclear weapons use by both sides, particularly since most Germans had relatives on the other side.
I can see how an American might view nuking places on the other side of the globe with equanimity (not that I think most do!), but Germany was the central battlefield of most WWIII projections, and having had most of its big cities flattened by conventional means in WWII, was somewhat averse to having some Pentagon asshole play with thoughts of turning any part of it into nuclear wasteland.
Germans knew that they would be instant toast one way or the other in WWIII, and either side raising the tension by stationing nukes was not welcomed. Remember the Cuban missile crisis? This was the same thing.
So, you are quite sure that this driver will also work in whatever Windows you will use five years from now? Plenty of old hardware around that only has a win98 driver and does not work on win2k and such. Or so my mother tells me. Win95 was my last contact with MS. Even MS doesn't put up with that much old crud in its kernel, apparently. Having the sources is the only way to keep old hardware alive. There will be a move to 64 bit hardware soon and yet another shove for old drivers, no?
The binary driver for the Aureal Vortex soundcard stopped working when distributions started using GCC 3 for kernel compiles. What can we do? Nothing. Aureal went bankrupt in 2000. A binary driver means planned obsolescence for your hardware as soon as the manufacturer loses interest. Oh, I'm sure you simply dump your machines yearly and get a new one, but those old clunkers are not defective in any way - or wouldn't be, if their driver came with source that we could update. There's your ecological argument for open source.
The Le Corbusier lounge chair
It takes a bit of getting used to having your keyboard in your lap and the screen on a stool next to you, but it sure is perfect for the back. I have worked 30 hour stretches on this one and gotten up without a twinge in the back. The neck can get a bit stiff, if you don't move your head much during work, but that's a small price to pay, I think.
And then there's saddle chairs, of course, whch will strengthen your lower back while you work, but I'm too lazy to get past the four week intro period needed before it gets comfortable.
Salli saddle chair
I'm in a nit picking mood today. A citizen of Berlin is indeed a 'Berliner', which is also a jelly donut. A citizen of Frankfurt is a 'Frankfurter' and inhabitants of Hamburg are 'Hamburgers', which has NOT induced MadGonad's to change names on menus in Hamburg. Or, in short, d'uh!
Berliners do recall JFK saying "Ich bin ein Berliner!" fondly to this very day. Every documentary on Berlin's post war history has that clip.
"Who would know that the Indian govt. would be overly sensitive to Kashmir?"
Sorry, but this may sound patronizing. India and Pakistan have squabbled and fought minor wars over Kashmir for half a century. Almost every single time India and Pakistan make the news - which they do regularly, here in Europe - Kashmir gets a mention, with India accusing Pakistan of funding, training and arming insurgents in Kashmir, Pakistan denying vehemently.
Since India and Pakistan are now nuclear powers, this gets attention in countries that know what being bombed feels like, i.e. every non-American country. Kashmir may yet spark the next nuclear holocaust.
Back in the 60s, linguists postulated that your vocabulary influences your character, claiming even that bilingual people act differently depending on the language they're speaking.
That would explain why drivers start acting like enraged apes as soon as they enter their cars: They are limited to honking, blinking, acceleration and hand signals.
We are the Nigerian authorities in charge of arresting Internet fraudsters. We have recently arrested 500 of these and seized $500 million in assets. As we found your email address in their files, we assume you were one of their victims. Please send us your bank account information, so that we can refund you
I was so sure it was written by a Finn that I didn't bother checking.
You see, 'orkut' is colloquial Finnish for 'orgasms', which seemed both appropriate and something a Finnish nerd would come up with to describe social interaction.
'Immediately' is a matter of time scale. If GM had closed the plant within a year of this speech, it would have necessarily been because of President Carter's economic policies, as those things take time to implement and take effect. So, on a political time scale, almost as soon as Reagan's economic policies were fully in force, replacing Carter's, Flint experienced massive layoffs.
The Washington D.C. state machine is rather slower than anything you could implement on a PC.
For a person who believed Reagan's promises and bought a house, six years is barely halfway through the mortgage, and you would feel somewhat rushed as you went into bankruptcy, losing your job, sitting in an unsellable house that's half unpaid. In that perspective, it's like sitting on packed bags, as foresight would have demanded staying in rented housing without laying down roots in the community, ready to rip your kids out of school and relocate down south or west in search of work.
What brand of teabags are you using? Do you think the hangover is optional for the discovery? And are you reusing the teabags in your desktop fusion reactor?
Mind, I'm still relying on the Pratchett theorem: "But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten."
So I'm trying to reduce my probability of discovering the improbability drive to a million to one. So far I'm hovering at 1:900,000. Maybe if I stopped thinking about teabags...
"free speech can not be limited without being lost"
Sounds nice. On the other hand, Germany has been limiting the speech of anti-semitic hate-mongers for 50 years precisely to prevent losing freedom to another Hitler again. Do keep in mind that he was elected into office solely through the power of his and his supporters' voices.
Does that mean that Germans have no freedom of speech? Heck no. As Eric Cartman knows well, there are things published in Germany that would never get past US obscenity censors. But maybe these obscenity controls in the US mean that Americans have no free speech either.
How about my freedom to denounce all my neighbors as pedophiles, terrorists and drug addicts? Hey, you're free not to believe me after the third wrong call - and the neighbors will get their kids back from the foster home in a couple of years - so what's the problem? Absolutely unfettered freedom of speech is obviously more important. Right?
A working democracy is considerably more complicated than simply settling on a certain set of absolutes and then sticking to them. The limits of freedom need to be constantly discussed by an interested populace, or else misuse of the limits or the freedom may destroy society.
Democracies founder as soon as a majority of citizens tunes out. So let's keep talking about this.
Felt like mentioning YAML, just to add that missing "offtopic" to my collection. YAML is certainly as minimal as markup can get in keystroke count. It's beautiful. Unfortunately, folks use it only for data serialization so far. You'll have to write your own HTML/etc. converters in Perl or Ruby.
Ladies and gentlemen of Congress and Senate, since China is a communist dictatorship and Chewbacca lives on Endor, we are not just entitled but obliged to sink billions of dollars into absurd weapons programs that will put campaign contributions into your pockets and take decades to prove unworkable.
So let us forget that China is decades behind in space technology and has an economy the size of Denmark which is heavily dependent on exports to America - unlike the Soviet Union.
Next, I shall completely spoil the purity of the Sahara desert by dropping three parachutes and 72 bottles of sugared soft drinks on random locations across it.
Well, there was this tiny little leak that gave the Soviet Union the atomic bomb and the whole world four decades of fear. Everything else pales into insignificance next to this blunder.
What ever gave you that impression? Can you back up this claim with even a shred of evidence? I'm sure I couldn't, based on nearly a year of continual amusement at SCO's antics. I have yet to see any signs of intelligent life on planet SCO.
Perhaps the 'problem' here is rather that most of these things materialize so gradually.
The desertification of the Sahara over the past three thousand years never made the history books. People just gradually moved out of its way.
The shoe phone of Agent Maxwell Smart/Star Trek communicator is here and so ubiquitous that young folks forget that it used to be on the Always Next list.
Video conferences are getting more use as bandwidth widens, and some day within a decade cell phone manufacturers will take the then obvious step of turning their camera phones into live feeds - tadaa, video phone!
Toyota just presented a car that parks by itself.
If the global AIDS pandemic seems 'curiously absent in our daily lives' it's just because we intentionally ignore it as 'too depressing.' Most of the sub-Saharan states have HIV infection rates of some 20%, and it's spreading unstoppably elsewhere as well. If that doesn't feel catastrophic to you, its because you're used to it.
People adapt to anything. Unless it happens overnight and is hammered into your conscious by daily news coverage, you will regard anything as normal.
Madonna has been acting since the eighties, actually ('Desperately Seeking Susan'). Quality is irrelevant in Hollywood. You could hardly act worse than Arnold Schwarzenegger, could you? Success is a matter of luck.
So I mostly disagree on the 'never' stance, except for jet packs and bug-free Windows. They'd be probably suicide to use, anyway.
Back when I switched to Linux in '98, trying out various window managers was my main source of amusement when I could not do much else on it - such as make sense of &%#&# PPP-HOWTO to get online.
Linux is a toy shop, and window managers are the little kiddie basement of bright geegaws. Essential!
And these days the fact that the neighbor's windows nerd boy can't make heads nor tails out of my EvilWM 'desktop' when he comes snooping around asking impertinent questions is a FEATURE, not a bug. Heh heh.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? You mean someone answering 'maybe' is not doubtful? Strange.
Besides, there is the alternative of a 'working democracy' where all viable choices are American puppets, you know, like in Afghanistan, where only the former CIA collaborator Hamid Karzai has a realistic chance of getting elected.
Iyad Allawi used to work for the CIA, too. Would you like a former KGB agent as president? That alone should ensure a steady supply of insurgents, unless Allawi gets as tough as Saddam. The bombings of 'insurgent headquarters' are a nice start on that road to hell.
If only 58% of respondents believe that democracy will work out in Iraq, that is not exactly wonderful.
No need to doubt the veracity of the poll. It's gloomy enough in itself.
And of course ALL of the Shi'ites will favor free and fair elections, since they will put them on top - which may cause the Kurds to secede and the Sunni to rebel, to simplify it horribly.
Yes, the conventional forces were welcome there, but any addition of any nukes only served to heighten tension. Saying that a neutron bomb is a tactical weapon and therefore will not lead to nuclear escalation from the other side is simply wishful thinking.
The Soviet block did not have neutron bombs and they had a stated policy not to use nukes *first*. Any use of a neutron bomb would have led to instant nuclear retaliation.
And yes, we can say that you can't trust a commie, but in the game of diplomacy, what you say and do counts in raising or lowering tension.
And a heightened threat of nuclear war did lower my enjoyment of life there in the middle of ground zero with nowhere to run. In a conventional war, you can at least imagine you have a chance of survival.
So, the US generals and politicians who brought democracy and protection to Germany deserve kudos. They were wonderful. They were not the same generals who played nuclear chess on the European battlefield while ensconced in the best bunkers on the other side of the planet. Okay?
"The later planned usage in Europe was *not* to kill people without destroying property (that was propaganda from those opposed to NATO, but not Soviet, nuclear weapons). Instead, the intention was to use them against invading Warsaw Pact troop concentrations while reducing damage to nearby West German towns and cities."
Excuse me, but there's some redundancy here:
Warsaw pact troop concentration = people;
West German towns and cities = property.
And having lived in Germany at the time, I'd say most of the demonstrators - apart from the communist minority - were very much opposed to nuclear weapons use by both sides, particularly since most Germans had relatives on the other side.
I can see how an American might view nuking places on the other side of the globe with equanimity (not that I think most do!), but Germany was the central battlefield of most WWIII projections, and having had most of its big cities flattened by conventional means in WWII, was somewhat averse to having some Pentagon asshole play with thoughts of turning any part of it into nuclear wasteland.
Germans knew that they would be instant toast one way or the other in WWIII, and either side raising the tension by stationing nukes was not welcomed. Remember the Cuban missile crisis? This was the same thing.
So, you are quite sure that this driver will also work in whatever Windows you will use five years from now?
Plenty of old hardware around that only has a win98 driver and does not work on win2k and such. Or so my mother tells me. Win95 was my last contact with MS.
Even MS doesn't put up with that much old crud in its kernel, apparently. Having the sources is the only way to keep old hardware alive.
There will be a move to 64 bit hardware soon and yet another shove for old drivers, no?
The binary driver for the Aureal Vortex soundcard stopped working when distributions started using GCC 3 for kernel compiles. What can we do? Nothing. Aureal went bankrupt in 2000.
A binary driver means planned obsolescence for your hardware as soon as the manufacturer loses interest.
Oh, I'm sure you simply dump your machines yearly and get a new one, but those old clunkers are not defective in any way - or wouldn't be, if their driver came with source that we could update. There's your ecological argument for open source.
It takes a bit of getting used to having your keyboard in your lap and the screen on a stool next to you, but it sure is perfect for the back. I have worked 30 hour stretches on this one and gotten up without a twinge in the back. The neck can get a bit stiff, if you don't move your head much during work, but that's a small price to pay, I think.
And then there's saddle chairs, of course, whch will strengthen your lower back while you work, but I'm too lazy to get past the four week intro period needed before it gets comfortable. Salli saddle chair
I'm in a nit picking mood today. A citizen of Berlin is indeed a 'Berliner', which is also a jelly donut. A citizen of Frankfurt is a 'Frankfurter' and inhabitants of Hamburg are 'Hamburgers', which has NOT induced MadGonad's to change names on menus in Hamburg. Or, in short, d'uh!
Berliners do recall JFK saying "Ich bin ein Berliner!" fondly to this very day. Every documentary on Berlin's post war history has that clip.
"Who would know that the Indian govt. would be overly sensitive to Kashmir?"
Sorry, but this may sound patronizing. India and Pakistan have squabbled and fought minor wars over Kashmir for half a century. Almost every single time India and Pakistan make the news - which they do regularly, here in Europe - Kashmir gets a mention, with India accusing Pakistan of funding, training and arming insurgents in Kashmir, Pakistan denying vehemently.
Since India and Pakistan are now nuclear powers, this gets attention in countries that know what being bombed feels like, i.e. every non-American country. Kashmir may yet spark the next nuclear holocaust.
Back in the 60s, linguists postulated that your vocabulary influences your character, claiming even that bilingual people act differently depending on the language they're speaking.
That would explain why drivers start acting like enraged apes as soon as they enter their cars: They are limited to honking, blinking, acceleration and hand signals.
Kreegah, bundolo!
We are the Nigerian authorities in charge of arresting Internet fraudsters.
We have recently arrested 500 of these and seized $500 million in assets. As we found your email address in their files, we assume you were one of their victims. Please send us your bank account information, so that we can refund you
one million dollars.
(insert pinky in mouth)
I was so sure it was written by a Finn that I didn't bother checking.
You see, 'orkut' is colloquial Finnish for 'orgasms', which seemed both appropriate and something a Finnish nerd would come up with to describe social interaction.
The power of wishful thinking...
'Immediately' is a matter of time scale.
If GM had closed the plant within a year of this speech, it would have necessarily been because of President Carter's economic policies, as those things take time to implement and take effect. So, on a political time scale, almost as soon as Reagan's economic policies were fully in force, replacing Carter's, Flint experienced massive layoffs.
The Washington D.C. state machine is rather slower than anything you could implement on a PC.
For a person who believed Reagan's promises and bought a house, six years is barely halfway through the mortgage, and you would feel somewhat rushed as you went into bankruptcy, losing your job, sitting in an unsellable house that's half unpaid. In that perspective, it's like sitting on packed bags, as foresight would have demanded staying in rented housing without laying down roots in the community, ready to rip your kids out of school and relocate down south or west in search of work.
What brand of teabags are you using?
Do you think the hangover is optional for the discovery? And are you reusing the teabags in your desktop fusion reactor?
Mind, I'm still relying on the Pratchett theorem: "But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten."
So I'm trying to reduce my probability of discovering the improbability drive to a million to one. So far I'm hovering at 1:900,000. Maybe if I stopped thinking about teabags...
"free speech can not be limited without being lost"
Sounds nice. On the other hand, Germany has been limiting the speech of anti-semitic hate-mongers for 50 years precisely to prevent losing freedom to another Hitler again. Do keep in mind that he was elected into office solely through the power of his and his supporters' voices.
Does that mean that Germans have no freedom of speech? Heck no. As Eric Cartman knows well, there are things published in Germany that would never get past US obscenity censors. But maybe these obscenity controls in the US mean that Americans have no free speech either.
How about my freedom to denounce all my neighbors as pedophiles, terrorists and drug addicts? Hey, you're free not to believe me after the third wrong call - and the neighbors will get their kids back from the foster home in a couple of years - so what's the problem? Absolutely unfettered freedom of speech is obviously more important. Right?
A working democracy is considerably more complicated than simply settling on a certain set of absolutes and then sticking to them. The limits of freedom need to be constantly discussed by an interested populace, or else misuse of the limits or the freedom may destroy society.
Democracies founder as soon as a majority of citizens tunes out. So let's keep talking about this.
Felt like mentioning YAML, just to add that missing "offtopic" to my collection. YAML is certainly as minimal as markup can get in keystroke count. It's beautiful. Unfortunately, folks use it only for data serialization so far. You'll have to write your own HTML/etc. converters in Perl or Ruby.
http://www.yaml.org/
Ladies and gentlemen of Congress and Senate, since China is a communist dictatorship and Chewbacca lives on Endor, we are not just entitled but obliged to sink billions of dollars into absurd weapons programs that will put campaign contributions into your pockets and take decades to prove unworkable.
So let us forget that China is decades behind in space technology and has an economy the size of Denmark which is heavily dependent on exports to America - unlike the Soviet Union.
Next, I shall completely spoil the purity of the Sahara desert by dropping three parachutes and 72 bottles of sugared soft drinks on random locations across it.
"...shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation..."
Considering Microsoft's cash reserves, I'd say you forgot to stick your little finger in your mouth when you wrote "ten million dollars!"
Well, there was this tiny little leak that gave the Soviet Union the atomic bomb and the whole world four decades of fear. Everything else pales into insignificance next to this blunder.
"... (they aren't stupid) ..."
What ever gave you that impression?
Can you back up this claim with even a shred of evidence? I'm sure I couldn't, based on nearly a year of continual amusement at SCO's antics. I have yet to see any signs of intelligent life on planet SCO.
There is already plenty of literature on the effects of cosmic radiation on the human body:
The Fantastic Four by Marvel Comics.
I wonder which powers the Super Dummy will manifest next week.
"Oh look, it's the Invisible Thing!"
Perhaps the 'problem' here is rather that most of these things materialize so gradually.
The desertification of the Sahara over the past three thousand years never made the history books. People just gradually moved out of its way.
The shoe phone of Agent Maxwell Smart/Star Trek communicator is here and so ubiquitous that young folks forget that it used to be on the Always Next list.
Video conferences are getting more use as bandwidth widens, and some day within a decade cell phone manufacturers will take the then obvious step of turning their camera phones into live feeds - tadaa, video phone!
Toyota just presented a car that parks by itself.
If the global AIDS pandemic seems 'curiously absent in our daily lives' it's just because we intentionally ignore it as 'too depressing.' Most of the sub-Saharan states have HIV infection rates of some 20%, and it's spreading unstoppably elsewhere as well. If that doesn't feel catastrophic to you, its because you're used to it.
People adapt to anything. Unless it happens overnight and is hammered into your conscious by daily news coverage, you will regard anything as normal.
Madonna has been acting since the eighties, actually ('Desperately Seeking Susan'). Quality is irrelevant in Hollywood. You could hardly act worse than Arnold Schwarzenegger, could you? Success is a matter of luck.
So I mostly disagree on the 'never' stance, except for jet packs and bug-free Windows. They'd be probably suicide to use, anyway.
Back when I switched to Linux in '98,
trying out various window managers was
my main source of amusement when I could
not do much else on it - such as make sense
of &%#&# PPP-HOWTO to get online.
Linux is a toy shop, and window managers are
the little kiddie basement of bright geegaws.
Essential!
And these days the fact that the neighbor's
windows nerd boy can't make heads nor tails
out of my EvilWM 'desktop' when he comes snooping
around asking impertinent questions is a
FEATURE, not a bug. Heh heh.
Black shirt, white text:
"Uh, SCO sucks! (Score:5, Insightful)"
I'm trying to cut down on my SCO story habit by reading at +5. Not that it helps much...