"Quality freefall"? Not really. They've always produced third tier code.
I dunno. NT 3.51 always seemed to be rock-frickin'-solid, but then I didn't use it for long before NT 4 came out.
Of course, Windows 95 was stillborn and they kept pumping the corpse full of formaldehyde for 5 years for they finally let it rot in peace, but the NT branch was really good until they started making every app they wrote effectively part of the core OS.
Remember when NT ran on 4 different processor architectures and Win32 was just one API on top of the kernel in addition to Posix and OS/2? Now that IE and WMP are practically part of the kernel it seems so long ago, and yet, in a sense, it was far more advanced because it was modular enough and clean enough to be ported.
The real kicker was when I switched to Outlook 2003 from Outlook Express. From a usability point of view, it was a pretty good improvement, especially the spam handling, but with a fairly large message store, it took at least an order of magnitude longer to access folders, etc, in O2k3 than OE. It was absurd. Oh, yeah, and the fact that an O2k3 data store can't be bigger than about 1GB to 1.5GB before it starts losing messages (I couldn't believe this at first but it was confirmed by two people with much more MS experience than me). I switched to Thunderbird around 0.5 and haven't given it a second thought.
Now here's a case where the MS software really was well-designed and easy to use (from a UI standpoint), but the grotesque slowness of the app killed it for me.
In 1994, I had a 50MHz 486SX... I didn't buy a Pentium 100 until '96, so you're right. Clock speed is more like 40 - 60 times faster (and thanks to wonders of CISC, performance is more than that). And disk space has increased for me by 3 orders of magnitude.
I seem to recall MicroCenter or CompUSA having a "Buck-a-Meg" sale and I bought a 340MB drive for $340, bringing my total to a whopping 580MB. Now I've got about 600GB over about 4 machines, maybe more since each box is crammed full of old drives ranging from 7GB to 250GB etc in addition to a few bigger drives.
I used to hate how my Amiga took like 3 minutes to boot back in the late 80's. Windows 2000 on a machine that was 100 times faster took around the same time. XP is much better, but still, there are times when I have a lot of apps loaded and it just seems to go out to lunch for several seconds before anything responds. And don't get me started on the launch time for Word 2003...
This reminds me of my first thought when I saw Windows 95 message "It is now safe to turn off your computer."
Which was, "However it is no longer safe to turn on your computer."
Quality freefall.
Really, how much new useful functionality has MS provided in the last 5 years? It takes just as long to load apps now as it did 10 years ago, even though machines are 10 times faster with 100 times more memory. Functionality increases at best in a linear fashion, while system requirements increase at a geometric rate. Software eats more of your computer and offers less in return.
Remember when MS supposedly shut down for a month to work on security issues? That was about 4 years ago. Not only did the problems not go away, but the occurance of gaping new exploits increased significantly.
Maybe they should shut down for a year. Take all the gigabyte-gobbling shit they've written for the last 10 years and turn it into useful code with no new functionality. Returning with the same stuff they have now, but with little or no security issues would win them more customers than their current monopolistic policies and FUD spreading ever will.
Really, what else could they possibly do besides introduce a bunch of bloated new technologies for doing the same damn thing we all wrote for ourselves years ago, but without all the MS lock in and huge learning curve?
I have to ask, what has MS done that is actually useful since Windows 2000?
Carter might be honorable and honest, but when it comes to credibility, there's a little matter of judgement, which in my opinion he is grossly lacking. He may be honest, but his opinions are so colored by his political views that I don't find him credible at all.
It depends... some people consider that it only makes sense that they should be still alove when frozen. Due to the ethical dilemma, I would doubt the cryogenic companies that actually exist would do that... especially the ones that offer bargain freezing for your head only.
It's no conspiracy, though, because it's no secret where "Gunga" Dan's bias and preferences lie, and there hasn't been any question of that for 20-plus years. Courage, indeed.
I'm not surprised that he would risk his career to attack Bush, just that he would do so in a such an pathetic way. After all, it took him two weeks to admit something was fishy about those documents, about 13 days longer than the rest of the world.
The worst part about is the whining that "Even if the documents are fake, they're still right." That is the most irresponsible journalism, because they don't have anything to back it up. I'm left concluding that no one can prove it either way, but, well, like Kerry and his medals, I just don't care.
Rather than digging through the detritus of activities from 35 years ago, perhaps CBS could try reporting something newsworthy. As a last laugh, the Memogate story (which the document experts advised against running) supposedly bumped an Ed Bradley piece accusing the Bush Administration of being duped by fake documents in the Nigeria uranium situation.
It wouldn't be as bad as your cryogenic company going belly-up. It would really suck to be defrosted in 2999 only to find you're half-melted refrozen... and dead.
If a car malfunctions seriously, someone could be hurt or killed and that means lawsuits. If MS causes your company to lose a day of productivity while you clean up after some virus attack, you're on your own. It seems no one has tested these EULA's that absolve the manufacturer from any blame or responsibility.
I guess the question is: How much damage needs to be done before MS can be considered as guilty of not delivering what it promises? This isn't just a matter of MS being evil or anything... it's a tricky question. Software is far more complex than even a car, and even if MS weren't often driven by less than scrupulous motives and had better management, etc, there would still be bugs. They could be better, but there will always be security holes. How do you determine if they've made a good faith effort to prevent these problems, or if they are just being sloppy?
By making that statement, they imply a distrust for the correctness of military records, and thus open up counterattacks which suggest their own candidate
So, two wrongs make a right. Yeah, that's politics for you.
At least Gore had the good sense to not drag up this nonsense, oh wait, it's not Kerry any more, it's the network news arm of his campaign: CBS.
You know, it's ironic that everyone is saying to just move on and get past the circumstances surrounding Kerry's Purple Hearts and Silver Star, because according to the military, he earned them and deserved them, and yet the DNC is beating up on Bush even though he received an honorable discharge, in other words, according to the military, he did his job.
How is that the military's word is good enough for one candidate and not the other. I would love to see one campaign where a double standard isn't so blatantly applied by either side. As it is, I need to keep duct tape wrapped around my head to keep it from exploding.
Here's an idea: Let's give Kerry credit for serving bravely and honorably and let's give Bush credit for serving, even if it wasn't in combat.
Here's the real question: Who's going to keep the Islamofascist nutjobs from blowing me up?!
I still can't see what tortured logic you are applying to blame this issue on the Republicans. Dan Rather destroyed himself (and he's been doing it for years). I didn't give him any credibility before all this happened. You ever hear the nickname "Red" Dan Rather? It's been around for years, even decades.
Courage, indeed. CBS has gotten to the point where they can't even pretend to be objective. I'd trust the National Enquirer before those clowns.
....and why do you think being on good terms with our international neighbors means being weak?
Since when did France, Germany and Russia become the whole of the international community. I seem to recall lots of countries joining the U.S. Why should anyone for any reason give a crap about what France thinks? They'd screw us in a minute if it gave them a chance to be relevant again in geopolitics. Besides France and Russia were on the take from Saddam, so of course they didn't want the war. They were making money from it. Of course, so was the U.N. who was knee-deep in kickbacks from Oil for Money^h^h^h^h^h Food program.
They said there was no proof and they were right.
"They" being whom? Before the war, _everyone_ thought there were WMD's: The Democrats, the U.N., even France. You'd probably be surprised to hear Senators Kerry and Kennedy both speaking out about the WMD's in Iraq needing to be eliminated (as they did in the late 90's), even unilaterally if necessary (yes, you heard me)... that is, until a Republican president actually decided to do just that and then somehow all the facts "changed".
There was no one arguing there weren't WMD until Bush got inspectors back in. Saddam had from '98 to '03 to do anything he wanted because the impotent U.N. and the so-called world community couldn't even put enough pressure on him to abide by the terms of surrender from the first Gulf War. If the U.S. was so weak, how did Bush get the Security Council to vote to give the authority to take action if U.N. Resolution (i.e. Toilet Paper) #1441 were materially violated. Was it a weak country that got inspectors back in? How badly would you have excoriated Bush had he not gone in and WMD's (many of which were probably shipped into Syria) were used in Israel, or London, or New York.
The Democratic opposition to war has been largely political in nature, and you can see it in Kerry who can't decide where he stands on the Iraq situation since he says it was foolish to go in, and yet elsewhere says he would have done the same _even knowing there were no WMD's_. One day he's saying we should get out, another day he's saying he'll put in more troops. Out of the leading Democrats, only Lieberman, who actually has some principles, even though he sold out to join Gore's ticket, and Howard Dean have actually been consistent about the war.
And no one seems to realize that head of the snake, Iran, is now bordered on both sides by fledgling democracies. How long do you think their dictatorship will last. I wish Bush would support Iranian citizens the same way Reagan supported the Polish, very vocally.
Sure, we were stronger before Bush was president because we hadn't been attacked yet, but the bomb was ticking. It was a false sense of security brought on largely by Clinton basically ignoring the issue. Osama bin Laden had declared war on the U.S. at least 5 separate times, and Clinton didn't do much to try to stop him or any other terrorist activity.
The terrorist activity has increased in Iraq? Of course! Do the hornets swarm when you attack their nest? They realize that as soon as a democracy is in place in Iraq and the Islamofascist nutjobs aren't in control, they're toast. Go back and look up the first targets the U.S. military hit in 2003 in Iraq. What? Terrorist training camps? How could that be since there are no terrorists in Iraq?
Make no mistake about it, Iraq supported terrorism, and Saddam was more than happy to do anything he could to undermine U.S. security. Recall Putin warning the President that Iraq was planning to strike in the U.S.? Recall Saddam publically paying reward money to families of suicide bombers from Palestine?
If you look at Iraq in a vacuum, it doesn't make sense, especially since it hasn't gone well since the actual war part of the war ended. But if you look at it in the context it exists, you will see it is one prong in the multi-prong military, economic and diplomatic War on Terror that President Bush laid out in late 2001/early 2002.
Well, as far as switching goes, I know that I could find plenty of software to do what I want under Linux, because I run a bunch of OSS that works on both platforms, but the reasons I don't switch are (in increasing order of importance):
1. I have a tons of Windows games that I like to play. (Although with VMWare or possibly Wine, this isn't an issue) 2. I've been using the same command shell for 15 years (4NT, which used to be 4DOS) (of course, there are plenty of powerful shells to choose from, but I like what I'm used to) 3. I've been using the same editor for 15 years (Multi-edit, ditto comment from #2) 4. Despite all my complaints about the libraries, I actually like Visual Studio (of course, I'm still using version 6, for some reason none of my clients are interested in anything newer, maybe it's because most of MS's new technologies exist to support MS's technologies, instead of actually getting work done). 4. I'm employed as a Windows developer.
I would argue that some of MS's software has been superior, but mostly they succeed for the reasons you stated, and it's clear they believe they can't compete on merit with Linux so they will be doing everything they can to win in ways other than by being better, but I would match the thousand points of light of the OSS community against a huge disorganized bureaucracy any day.
We're shutting down a lot of bases because we really don't need to be, say, defending West Germany against the Soviets any more. We're withdrawing troops from South Korea because they were only cannon fodder anyway. If Kim decides to march a million troops across the DMZ, 20000 U.S. troops aren't going to make a huge difference. Besides, it's very much in China's interest to keep North Korea in check, and the U.S. has been working with China (and places like Japan) to put pressure on North Korea to keep its geopolitical Short Man's Disease to itself.
The fact of the matter is, we've been scattering our troops all over the world for reasons that are at best tangential to U.S. security and it's perfectly valid strategically to bring a bunch of them back home. This is long overdue.
And finally regardless of the current U.S. situation the poll is saying this:
More foreigners want Kerry as President and most foreigners want the U.S. President to be weak and not strong. Draw your own conclusions on their impression of Kerry.
You know what, I love living in a time where something a man did 35 years ago is more relevant than everything he's done since. Why doesn't Kerry run on his 20 years service as a Senator? Is that because while he realizes (most) people will respect his military record, people will not support him based on everything he's done that's actually relevant to the job.
I love living in a time where one party's candidate actively dodged the draft and protested his country overseas and his party says there's nothing wrong with that, and yet the other party's candidate served in the military, though not in combat, and that's not good enough.
Face it, you don't win elections based on hate and Democrats' only message since 2000 has been that they hate Bush. They loved the idea so much that Bush would have lost against an unnamed Democrat around 2002 (which is an absurd question), that they decided to run a cypher against him. Good luck. Your candidate will need it, because regardless of his qualifications, he's run the worst campaign since Dukakis in '88, and we all know how that went.
He might be good coming back from being behind, but now he's of outside of the Peoples' Republic of Massachusetts and in the real world. After all, if America's favorite swimming instructor can be elected Senator for life in a state, we're not talking about the mainstream.
Slashdot Mirror
President Bush: How do you pronounce "Nuclear"?
Senator Kerry: How do you pronounce "Genghis Khan"?
"Quality freefall"? Not really. They've always produced third tier code.
I dunno. NT 3.51 always seemed to be rock-frickin'-solid, but then I didn't use it for long before NT 4 came out.
Of course, Windows 95 was stillborn and they kept pumping the corpse full of formaldehyde for 5 years for they finally let it rot in peace, but the NT branch was really good until they started making every app they wrote effectively part of the core OS.
Remember when NT ran on 4 different processor architectures and Win32 was just one API on top of the kernel in addition to Posix and OS/2? Now that IE and WMP are practically part of the kernel it seems so long ago, and yet, in a sense, it was far more advanced because it was modular enough and clean enough to be ported.
The real kicker was when I switched to Outlook 2003 from Outlook Express. From a usability point of view, it was a pretty good improvement, especially the spam handling, but with a fairly large message store, it took at least an order of magnitude longer to access folders, etc, in O2k3 than OE. It was absurd. Oh, yeah, and the fact that an O2k3 data store can't be bigger than about 1GB to 1.5GB before it starts losing messages (I couldn't believe this at first but it was confirmed by two people with much more MS experience than me). I switched to Thunderbird around 0.5 and haven't given it a second thought.
Now here's a case where the MS software really was well-designed and easy to use (from a UI standpoint), but the grotesque slowness of the app killed it for me.
In 1994, I had a 50MHz 486SX... I didn't buy a Pentium 100 until '96, so you're right. Clock speed is more like 40 - 60 times faster (and thanks to wonders of CISC, performance is more than that). And disk space has increased for me by 3 orders of magnitude.
I seem to recall MicroCenter or CompUSA having a "Buck-a-Meg" sale and I bought a 340MB drive for $340, bringing my total to a whopping 580MB. Now I've got about 600GB over about 4 machines, maybe more since each box is crammed full of old drives ranging from 7GB to 250GB etc in addition to a few bigger drives.
I used to hate how my Amiga took like 3 minutes to boot back in the late 80's. Windows 2000 on a machine that was 100 times faster took around the same time. XP is much better, but still, there are times when I have a lot of apps loaded and it just seems to go out to lunch for several seconds before anything responds. And don't get me started on the launch time for Word 2003...
This reminds me of my first thought when I saw Windows 95 message "It is now safe to turn off your computer."
Which was, "However it is no longer safe to turn on your computer."
Quality freefall.
Really, how much new useful functionality has MS provided in the last 5 years? It takes just as long to load apps now as it did 10 years ago, even though machines are 10 times faster with 100 times more memory. Functionality increases at best in a linear fashion, while system requirements increase at a geometric rate. Software eats more of your computer and offers less in return.
Remember when MS supposedly shut down for a month to work on security issues? That was about 4 years ago. Not only did the problems not go away, but the occurance of gaping new exploits increased significantly.
Maybe they should shut down for a year. Take all the gigabyte-gobbling shit they've written for the last 10 years and turn it into useful code with no new functionality. Returning with the same stuff they have now, but with little or no security issues would win them more customers than their current monopolistic policies and FUD spreading ever will.
Really, what else could they possibly do besides introduce a bunch of bloated new technologies for doing the same damn thing we all wrote for ourselves years ago, but without all the MS lock in and huge learning curve?
I have to ask, what has MS done that is actually useful since Windows 2000?
Carter might be honorable and honest, but when it comes to credibility, there's a little matter of judgement, which in my opinion he is grossly lacking. He may be honest, but his opinions are so colored by his political views that I don't find him credible at all.
You aren't willing (or able) to back up your claims? Come clean, are you really Dan Rather?
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
So you're saying most lefties really aren't liberals, and a lot of conservatives are? That would be my conclusion.
And all this approach does is scare the idiot users, because the typical computer-phobe will assume his machine's been infected with a virus.
So really, the tool doesn't serve anyone well.
It depends... some people consider that it only makes sense that they should be still alove when frozen. Due to the ethical dilemma, I would doubt the cryogenic companies that actually exist would do that... especially the ones that offer bargain freezing for your head only.
It's no conspiracy, though, because it's no secret where "Gunga" Dan's bias and preferences lie, and there hasn't been any question of that for 20-plus years. Courage, indeed.
I'm not surprised that he would risk his career to attack Bush, just that he would do so in a such an pathetic way. After all, it took him two weeks to admit something was fishy about those documents, about 13 days longer than the rest of the world.
The worst part about is the whining that "Even if the documents are fake, they're still right." That is the most irresponsible journalism, because they don't have anything to back it up. I'm left concluding that no one can prove it either way, but, well, like Kerry and his medals, I just don't care.
Rather than digging through the detritus of activities from 35 years ago, perhaps CBS could try reporting something newsworthy. As a last laugh, the Memogate story (which the document experts advised against running) supposedly bumped an Ed Bradley piece accusing the Bush Administration of being duped by fake documents in the Nigeria uranium situation.
Foolishness is not courage, Dan.
You mean the "Low-Budget Horror Channel" that shows occasional SF? What about it?
It wouldn't be as bad as your cryogenic company going belly-up. It would really suck to be defrosted in 2999 only to find you're half-melted refrozen... and dead.
Next thing you know we'll see commercials with dead celebrities dancing with vacuum cleaners or some nonsense...
Oh, wait, that's already happened.
Well, it's even simpler than that:
If a car malfunctions seriously, someone could be hurt or killed and that means lawsuits. If MS causes your company to lose a day of productivity while you clean up after some virus attack, you're on your own. It seems no one has tested these EULA's that absolve the manufacturer from any blame or responsibility.
I guess the question is: How much damage needs to be done before MS can be considered as guilty of not delivering what it promises? This isn't just a matter of MS being evil or anything... it's a tricky question. Software is far more complex than even a car, and even if MS weren't often driven by less than scrupulous motives and had better management, etc, there would still be bugs. They could be better, but there will always be security holes. How do you determine if they've made a good faith effort to prevent these problems, or if they are just being sloppy?
Even worse! They'll know that I got the Kosher meal AND I'M NOT EVEN JEWISH!!!!
By making that statement, they imply a distrust for the correctness of military records, and thus open up counterattacks which suggest their own candidate
So, two wrongs make a right. Yeah, that's politics for you.
At least Gore had the good sense to not drag up this nonsense, oh wait, it's not Kerry any more, it's the network news arm of his campaign: CBS.
We're seeing an increase in profit-motivated attacks,
You mean like Microsoft writing buggy and insecure software and then charging everyone for the next version where they claim everything is fixed?
Yeah, but I'd heard that phrase before he came along.
Sick Freak Rick
You know, it's ironic that everyone is saying to just move on and get past the circumstances surrounding Kerry's Purple Hearts and Silver Star, because according to the military, he earned them and deserved them, and yet the DNC is beating up on Bush even though he received an honorable discharge, in other words, according to the military, he did his job.
How is that the military's word is good enough for one candidate and not the other. I would love to see one campaign where a double standard isn't so blatantly applied by either side. As it is, I need to keep duct tape wrapped around my head to keep it from exploding.
Here's an idea: Let's give Kerry credit for serving bravely and honorably and let's give Bush credit for serving, even if it wasn't in combat.
Here's the real question: Who's going to keep the Islamofascist nutjobs from blowing me up?!
I still can't see what tortured logic you are applying to blame this issue on the Republicans. Dan Rather destroyed himself (and he's been doing it for years). I didn't give him any credibility before all this happened. You ever hear the nickname "Red" Dan Rather? It's been around for years, even decades.
Courage, indeed. CBS has gotten to the point where they can't even pretend to be objective. I'd trust the National Enquirer before those clowns.
Since when did France, Germany and Russia become the whole of the international community. I seem to recall lots of countries joining the U.S. Why should anyone for any reason give a crap about what France thinks? They'd screw us in a minute if it gave them a chance to be relevant again in geopolitics. Besides France and Russia were on the take from Saddam, so of course they didn't want the war. They were making money from it. Of course, so was the U.N. who was knee-deep in kickbacks from Oil for Money^h^h^h^h^h Food program.
They said there was no proof and they were right.
"They" being whom? Before the war, _everyone_ thought there were WMD's: The Democrats, the U.N., even France.
You'd probably be surprised to hear Senators Kerry and Kennedy both speaking out about the WMD's in Iraq needing to be eliminated (as they did in the late 90's), even unilaterally if necessary (yes, you heard me)... that is, until a Republican president actually decided to do just that and then somehow all the facts "changed".
There was no one arguing there weren't WMD until Bush got inspectors back in. Saddam had from '98 to '03 to do anything he wanted because the impotent U.N. and the so-called world community couldn't even put enough pressure on him to abide by the terms of surrender from the first Gulf War. If the U.S. was so weak, how did Bush get the Security Council to vote to give the authority to take action if U.N. Resolution (i.e. Toilet Paper) #1441 were materially violated. Was it a weak country that got inspectors back in? How badly would you have excoriated Bush had he not gone in and WMD's (many of which were probably shipped into Syria) were used in Israel, or London, or New York.
The Democratic opposition to war has been largely political in nature, and you can see it in Kerry who can't decide where he stands on the Iraq situation since he says it was foolish to go in, and yet elsewhere says he would have done the same _even knowing there were no WMD's_. One day he's saying we should get out, another day he's saying he'll put in more troops. Out of the leading Democrats, only Lieberman, who actually has some principles, even though he sold out to join Gore's ticket, and Howard Dean have actually been consistent about the war.
And no one seems to realize that head of the snake, Iran, is now bordered on both sides by fledgling democracies. How long do you think their dictatorship will last. I wish Bush would support Iranian citizens the same way Reagan supported the Polish, very vocally.
Sure, we were stronger before Bush was president because we hadn't been attacked yet, but the bomb was ticking. It was a false sense of security brought on largely by Clinton basically ignoring the issue. Osama bin Laden had declared war on the U.S. at least 5 separate times, and Clinton didn't do much to try to stop him or any other terrorist activity.
The terrorist activity has increased in Iraq? Of course! Do the hornets swarm when you attack their nest? They realize that as soon as a democracy is in place in Iraq and the Islamofascist nutjobs aren't in control, they're toast. Go back and look up the first targets the U.S. military hit in 2003 in Iraq. What? Terrorist training camps? How could that be since there are no terrorists in Iraq?
Make no mistake about it, Iraq supported terrorism, and Saddam was more than happy to do anything he could to undermine U.S. security. Recall Putin warning the President that Iraq was planning to strike in the U.S.? Recall Saddam publically paying reward money to families of suicide bombers from Palestine?
If you look at Iraq in a vacuum, it doesn't make sense, especially since it hasn't gone well since the actual war part of the war ended. But if you look at it in the context it exists, you will see it is one prong in the multi-prong military, economic and diplomatic War on Terror that President Bush laid out in late 2001/early 2002.
I think you must have had your firewall turned inside out.
Well, as far as switching goes, I know that I could find plenty of software to do what I want under Linux, because I run a bunch of OSS that works on both platforms, but the reasons I don't switch are (in increasing order of importance):
1. I have a tons of Windows games that I like to play. (Although with VMWare or possibly Wine, this isn't an issue)
2. I've been using the same command shell for 15 years (4NT, which used to be 4DOS) (of course, there are plenty of powerful shells to choose from, but I like what I'm used to)
3. I've been using the same editor for 15 years (Multi-edit, ditto comment from #2)
4. Despite all my complaints about the libraries, I actually like Visual Studio (of course, I'm still using version 6, for some reason none of my clients are interested in anything newer, maybe it's because most of MS's new technologies exist to support MS's technologies, instead of actually getting work done).
4. I'm employed as a Windows developer.
I would argue that some of MS's software has been superior, but mostly they succeed for the reasons you stated, and it's clear they believe they can't compete on merit with Linux so they will be doing everything they can to win in ways other than by being better, but I would match the thousand points of light of the OSS community against a huge disorganized bureaucracy any day.
We're shutting down a lot of bases because we really don't need to be, say, defending West Germany against the Soviets any more. We're withdrawing troops from South Korea because they were only cannon fodder anyway. If Kim decides to march a million troops across the DMZ, 20000 U.S. troops aren't going to make a huge difference. Besides, it's very much in China's interest to keep North Korea in check, and the U.S. has been working with China (and places like Japan) to put pressure on North Korea to keep its geopolitical Short Man's Disease to itself.
The fact of the matter is, we've been scattering our troops all over the world for reasons that are at best tangential to U.S. security and it's perfectly valid strategically to bring a bunch of them back home. This is long overdue.
And finally regardless of the current U.S. situation the poll is saying this:
More foreigners want Kerry as President and most foreigners want the U.S. President to be weak and not strong. Draw your own conclusions on their impression of Kerry.
You know what, I love living in a time where something a man did 35 years ago is more relevant than everything he's done since. Why doesn't Kerry run on his 20 years service as a Senator? Is that because while he realizes (most) people will respect his military record, people will not support him based on everything he's done that's actually relevant to the job.
I love living in a time where one party's candidate actively dodged the draft and protested his country overseas and his party says there's nothing wrong with that, and yet the other party's candidate served in the military, though not in combat, and that's not good enough.
Face it, you don't win elections based on hate and Democrats' only message since 2000 has been that they hate Bush. They loved the idea so much that Bush would have lost against an unnamed Democrat around 2002 (which is an absurd question), that they decided to run a cypher against him. Good luck. Your candidate will need it, because regardless of his qualifications, he's run the worst campaign since Dukakis in '88, and we all know how that went.
He might be good coming back from being behind, but now he's of outside of the Peoples' Republic of Massachusetts and in the real world. After all, if America's favorite swimming instructor can be elected Senator for life in a state, we're not talking about the mainstream.
Yes, if the questions are half as biased in that nutty article, the polls will be skewed all over the place.