The problem with term limits is that they remove most accountability from the official facing them.
The whole idea of representative democracy is that elected officials enact the will of their electorate. Periodic elections are the sole opportunity to provide feedback on the process and keep control in the hands of the people.
Elected officials have the blatantness of their corruption curtailed by the fact that they want to get re-elected. If you take away the possibility of re-election happening, they only need to talk a good enough game to get themselves in the door once, and then they have free reign to do whatever the hell they want. They would only need to make sure to not get impeached, but that's a far lower bar than failure to be re-elected.
I'm certainly not claiming that the current system works very well. But it could work far worse, and removing the small amount of accountability that elected officials still have is quick route to that.
(I think that the problem mostly needs to be solved at the electoral system level. Plurality voting is a terrible system, and the layering of plurality voting via primaries and the electoral college makes it exponentially worse. Using a Condorcet vote, approval voting, or even IRV would do an immensely better job of representing the will of the electorate. It would also have the beneficial effect of mostly destroying political parties, which are the root of a great deal of evil.)
I could be called cynical as well, but I don't think those are the particular problems we'll be facing.
The best description I've heard of China's thoughts on the US are as the hyperactive kid screaming for attention. You don't go scold the kid; that's just what he wants. Instead you ignore him and let him go wear himself out throwing a tantrum in the Middle East for a few hundred years. And you look forward to the time, maybe three to five thousand years from now, when he might be a civilized adult.
The government of Russia is currently up to their ears in their fanatical efforts to conquer... well, Russia. With possible ambitions to re-conquer all of the Soviet Union. But we're a long way away from their imperious gaze extending any further than their own former borders.
No, I think the collapse of the US will not be a military one driven by China or Russia, but rather an economic one driven by India and the EU. As soon as the euro displaces the dollar as the de facto currency for all international trade (especially petroleum trade), the whole world changes.
Yes, because we should all have to read the entirety of linked articles before we're allowed to find out whether it's a topic on which we care to read an article.
In that vein, I think slashdot should just do away with summaries and titles entirely. Just give us an unlabeled list of a dozen obfuscated urls every day, and we'll just read them all to figure out which ones we want to read.
It would be about as helpful as this "summary" was.
Five thousand shares of GOOG at a five dollar strike price would have a current face value of $2,473,600.
The next time you're going to present an argument based upon completely made up numbers, you might want to make up some that, y'know, actually support your argument.
Interesting, what you cite as its two drawbacks are what I think are its two greatest strengths.
The lack of a hardware keyboard is the primary design goal of this device. I guess we'll all have to try it out in the real world, but it strikes me as likely to be an improvement.
And even more clearly, the biggest downside to Blackberries has always been the need to use an Exchange server. Many companies do not want to involve a whole new (and bleeding awful) server platform and mail service into their networks just to support these devices. The iphone appears to be civilized enough to just speak imap, so it will work with whatever email infrastructure you have, without forcing you to build your whole network around it.
(I work at Google. I'm not speaking for them in any official capacity, just talking about my experiences here.)
1. It's a huge organization, where you're a cog in the wheel.
We try pretty hard to make that be not the case. Most development teams are three to six people, specifically to result in projects that are long on individual excellence and short on bureaucracy.
2. Part of the point of the interview process is for the interviewee to judge whether the potential employers seem nice, and know what they're doing. If the interview process involves lots of monkey business with no objectively proven reliability, then that's a big minus for me. For me, the monkey business category includes handwriting tests, polygraph tests, contrived interview situations ("there's a snake in the trash can! just kidding!"), as well as Google's puzzles and goofy computer personality tests.
I've never known Google to do any of these things. If someone did decide to do handwriting tests, faux-snake tests, or whathaveyou, I doubt they'd be asked to do any more interviews. I'm not sure I know what you mean by "Google's puzzles and goofy computer personality tests", but it doesn't sound like anything I've ever seen done here.
I (and to my knowledge, all other interviewers here) tend to ask questions that focus on and understanding of fundamental technical concepts, and the ability to reason effectively with that understanding. We try to stay away from technical trivia questions ("Oh yeah, well what's the -m option to mkdir do!?") and rely on questions about the underlying ideas.
3. Heinous traffic in Silicon Valley.
4. Insane housing prices in Silicon Valley.
Fortunately, not all of Google is in Silicon Valley; we have offices around the world. I'm not in Mountain View myself.
I'm sorry, but allowing global write access to my clipboard is also multiple types of insane:
Clobbering my clipboard destroys whatever information I had on it. Given that my system does not habitually destroy that for no good reason, sometimes that's unique information that I don't have anywhere else. I don't want it poofed by some web site being "helpful".
Clobbering my clipboard ensures that the next time I paste, something different will happen than what I expected. Obviously this can be leveraged into that "something different" being a security compromise.
So, no. What's on my clipboard is just none of any site author's bloody business.
If what you'd like to change is the behaviour of grep as a tool, then I'd suggest that the most correct solution is altering grep's behaviour, rather than working around it.
You may be thinking of the wrong "they" here. The judge and the prosecutor might not feel that they need that information, but they're not the only parties involved.
If you're accused of a crime, you have fairly broad ability to subpoena any information that you can make an even remotely plausible case for being related to the issue at hand.
So all this guy's lawyer would need to say to the judge is, "We believe that click-fraud is so rampant that the defendant's tool would not have caused any further harm. And to prove that, we're subpoenaing every line of code Google uses to detect click fraud, every log of every hit they've ever had on an ad, and all the email and meeting minutes in which any employee of the company has ever discussed the issue of click fraud."
It doesn't matter whether the claim is true or not. If it the judge considers it to be even remotely possible that it _could_ be true and relevant, the subpeonas would be granted. At which point every detail of every tool Google has ever used to combat click fraud would become a matter of public record.
That certainly strikes me as a much bigger deal for Google than whether or not one moron goes to jail.
Are you kidding me? I own multiple works by both Michael Moore and Ann Coulter, though admittedly nearly all of both have been purchased in airports. I find them both similarly amusing in their ridiculousness.
In fact, I've maintained for a long time that Coulter and Moore are basically the same person. I happen to agree with the positions that one of them advocates far more often than the other, but the intellectual honesty, rigor, and fairness with which they make their cases is nearly interchangeable. And for that reason, I'm fairly certain that neither one of them has ever convinced a single person of a single thing they didn't already believe.
As more whites and blacks, and mexicans and blacks, and asians and blacks date, marry, and interbreed
can I say no thanks, and not be called racist?
Depends a whole lot on why you're saying it.
If it's "I personally don't want to sign up, because my type is those who happen to have about my own melanin levels", that doesn't seem particularly racist.
If it's "I'd prefer people not do that, because I think races should be distinct and unmixed", that's a whole lot more problematic.
(It's a good thing we're not offtopic here or anything.)
Ah, JonKatz. The sole reason that I finally relented and created a user account, just so I could filter out his inane babbling. Good times, good times.
Any group ignorant enough to apparently believe that "Mac" is an acronym is probably beyond all hope.
(I'm always grateful when people expressing negative opinions about Apple or Macs feel compelled to spell it as "MAC". It clarifies right away that they have no idea about what they're talking, so their opinions can safely be ignored without any further examination.)
I'm not very much of a television watcher, but I do sometimes have friends over to watch movies and such. I recently picked up a projector, and now have a 100ish" display that becomes a blank wall when I'm not using it.
I'm pretty happy with it, projectors are hardly a specialty item any more, and I doubt it was significantly more expensive than a 50" plasma or lcd television. So I'm having a hard time seeing why anyone who wants a big display would ever purchase anything other than a projector.
But one of my first reactions was "America has just proved it has no backbone."
"Backbone" is not a worthwhile trait if it comes at the cost of a brain above it. The thing that withdrawal from Iraq might demonstrate to other nations is that we're not complete fucking morons. It might be a little late to make that case, but it would at least point in that direction.
Cutting and running wouldn't just be disasterous for Iraq, there are other ME countries that started "seeing the light" (stopping weapons programs, starting to have some democratically elected officials) when we invaded Iraq.
Which countries would those be? The closest thing to an example is Libya, who officially "gave up" a nuclear weapons program that was never going to get anywhere anyway. Most other countries in the region (Iran, Lebanon), were already in the process of becoming more moderate and secular until the US's belligerence threw a bunch of reactionaries into power there.
No, the only thing that the Bush Doctrine has demonstrated to people is: "If you don't have nuclear weapons, we'll randomly invade if we feel like it. If you do have nuclear weapons, we'll studiously look the other way."
But if the dog is all bark and has no teeth, everything gained will be lost.
The only things we've "gained" are the deaths of three thousand of our citizens, the blood on our hands of around half a million innocent people we murdered, and another century of hatred from a third of the world's population. I'm afraid that we won't be losing those any time soon.
There's also no chance in hell that the Democrats will do anythingto cut government spending and everyone knows it. The Republicans have been as bad as the Democrats at that in the last several years but the Dems will never do it.
Despite the siren song of a huge economic boom and tax surplus, Clinton mostly cut federal spending. Bush, conversely, has increased spending, borrowing, and deficits to absurd and unprecedented levels.
You may want to revisit your stereotypes about which is the party of fiscal responsibility.
A study by the NAACP shows a consistent pattern of voter intimidation efforts by GOP campaigns. Dozens of instances of misinformation and intimidation in several states, and every one of them by Republican organizations.
Republican Congressional candidate Tan Nguyen sent fraudulent letters to registered voters with latino last names claiming that naturalized citizens who attempted to vote would be jailed or deported.
Kathleen Harris, the Republican Secretary of State of Florida instituted a "voter-cleansing" program which falsely listed at least eight thousand voters as felons, and thus ineligible. The disenfranchised resided almost exlusively in Democrat-leaning districts.
This is just a few minutes of asking google, and specifically looking for items reported by reputable national news sources, not just random political blogs. I'm quite certain that far more documentation of similar incidents is readily available.
He's referring to the fraudulent letters distributed by Republican congressional candidate Tan Nguyen.
The letters were sent to 14,000 registered voters, and claimed (completely falsely) that naturalized citizens are not only ineligible to vote, but would be jailed or deported if they showed up at the polls. They were printed in letterhead that looked deceptively like that of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, and were signed by the completely fictional "Sergio Ramirez".
So I'm afraid that you're mistaken; these were naturalized citizens, registered voters, and the tactic was specifically designed to deceive them into forgoing their right to vote.
Exactly wrong. The Democratic party has been thinking for decades now that what they really need to do is field a candidate who is further right, more conservative-palatable, more Christianist, in order to bring in some Republicans. And the result has been a complete inability to actually challenge the Republicans on their problematic policies, and complete apathy of Democratic voters.
This is why the 2004 nomination went to Kerry instead of Dean. Dean actually said important things that people believed in. So he was clearly "unelectable". Whereas Kerry was so completely watered down and mealy-mouthed that he didn't scare anyone--or inspire anyone.
No, the thing the Democratic party needs to exactly not do is keep edging further and further toward the Republicans in the hopes of getting thrown a bone. They need to start fielding candidates who actually say meaningful things, and offer a platform that's distinct from Republican Lite.
Then he would still pose no threat to the US, and little or none to any other nation.
Saddam Hussein was, even up to 2003, the best ally the US had in the region. The only nations he ever invaded were Iran, because we told him to, and Kuwait, because he asked for the US's permission and believed that he had received it.
He was a terrible person and a terrible ruler, but he was never a threat, and never would have been. The only people to whom he was a danger were the Iraqis. Upon whom the US has visited more devastation than decades more of Saddm's rule.
Saddam has fuckall by way of "followers" these days. He was fairly universally reviled when he was in power, and now that he no longer needs to be feared, most Iraqis have moved right on to ignoring him completely.
Of course, some people suggest the laughable idea that just because Iraqis are resisting the US's invasion, they must be doing it out of loyalty to Hussein. That there are exactly two sides here, and if they hate us, they must love him.
No, there's plenty of room for hatred of both the US and Saddam. In fact, given that for most of his reign the two were cooperating, it would be fairly hard to hate the one half of the team without hating the other as well.
I want to see real benchmarks like perhaps windows...
While it's fascinating that you consider the only "real" benchmarks to be ones involving Windows, that's a fairly outre view.
Certainly it's unjustified of you to assume that there's no "point" to non-Windows benchmarks; a whole damn lot of people out there don't use Windows, and have no interest in ever doing so. Given that there's a large overlap between those people and potential macbook buyers, I'd say that Windows benchmarks would be the ones of questionable point.
Sure, Clinton and Kim Jong Il had an agreement, but the NoKos continued to work on nuclear weapons despite it.
With the abandonment of its plutonium program, North Korea began an enriched uranium program.
Yes, the Agreed Framework halted plutonium refinement. North Korea violated at least the spirit of the agreement by then pursuing uranium refinement.
But that was still a substantial success. Uranium refinement is a vastly slower, more difficult, and less reliable path to nuclear weapons. If North Korea were still limited to refining uranium in secret, they would be at least years, possibly decades away from having a single working weapon. But because Bush walked away from the agreement and allowed them to resume plutonium refinement out in the open, they now have somewhere around six of them.
I'm not saying that North Korea was a completely solved problem in the Clinton era. But the situation was leagues better than it is now, or is ever likely to be again.
Or, for those of us who prefer some sanity, there's the other description: When Clinton was in power, negotiations successfully stopped Korea's plutonium refinement process, and no weapons were produced. Bush, on the other hand, abandoned that agreement, resulting in Korea restarting their plutonium refinement program, producing several nuclear weapons, and testing one of them successfully.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with term limits is that they remove most accountability from the official facing them.
The whole idea of representative democracy is that elected officials enact the will of their electorate. Periodic elections are the sole opportunity to provide feedback on the process and keep control in the hands of the people.
Elected officials have the blatantness of their corruption curtailed by the fact that they want to get re-elected. If you take away the possibility of re-election happening, they only need to talk a good enough game to get themselves in the door once, and then they have free reign to do whatever the hell they want. They would only need to make sure to not get impeached, but that's a far lower bar than failure to be re-elected.
I'm certainly not claiming that the current system works very well. But it could work far worse, and removing the small amount of accountability that elected officials still have is quick route to that.
(I think that the problem mostly needs to be solved at the electoral system level. Plurality voting is a terrible system, and the layering of plurality voting via primaries and the electoral college makes it exponentially worse. Using a Condorcet vote, approval voting, or even IRV would do an immensely better job of representing the will of the electorate. It would also have the beneficial effect of mostly destroying political parties, which are the root of a great deal of evil.)
I could be called cynical as well, but I don't think those are the particular problems we'll be facing.
The best description I've heard of China's thoughts on the US are as the hyperactive kid screaming for attention. You don't go scold the kid; that's just what he wants. Instead you ignore him and let him go wear himself out throwing a tantrum in the Middle East for a few hundred years. And you look forward to the time, maybe three to five thousand years from now, when he might be a civilized adult.
The government of Russia is currently up to their ears in their fanatical efforts to conquer... well, Russia. With possible ambitions to re-conquer all of the Soviet Union. But we're a long way away from their imperious gaze extending any further than their own former borders.
No, I think the collapse of the US will not be a military one driven by China or Russia, but rather an economic one driven by India and the EU. As soon as the euro displaces the dollar as the de facto currency for all international trade (especially petroleum trade), the whole world changes.
Yes, because we should all have to read the entirety of linked articles before we're allowed to find out whether it's a topic on which we care to read an article.
In that vein, I think slashdot should just do away with summaries and titles entirely. Just give us an unlabeled list of a dozen obfuscated urls every day, and we'll just read them all to figure out which ones we want to read.
It would be about as helpful as this "summary" was.
Five thousand shares of GOOG at a five dollar strike price would have a current face value of $2,473,600.
The next time you're going to present an argument based upon completely made up numbers, you might want to make up some that, y'know, actually support your argument.
Interesting, what you cite as its two drawbacks are what I think are its two greatest strengths.
The lack of a hardware keyboard is the primary design goal of this device. I guess we'll all have to try it out in the real world, but it strikes me as likely to be an improvement.
And even more clearly, the biggest downside to Blackberries has always been the need to use an Exchange server. Many companies do not want to involve a whole new (and bleeding awful) server platform and mail service into their networks just to support these devices. The iphone appears to be civilized enough to just speak imap, so it will work with whatever email infrastructure you have, without forcing you to build your whole network around it.
(I work at Google. I'm not speaking for them in any official capacity, just talking about my experiences here.)
We try pretty hard to make that be not the case. Most development teams are three to six people, specifically to result in projects that are long on individual excellence and short on bureaucracy.
I've never known Google to do any of these things. If someone did decide to do handwriting tests, faux-snake tests, or whathaveyou, I doubt they'd be asked to do any more interviews. I'm not sure I know what you mean by "Google's puzzles and goofy computer personality tests", but it doesn't sound like anything I've ever seen done here.
I (and to my knowledge, all other interviewers here) tend to ask questions that focus on and understanding of fundamental technical concepts, and the ability to reason effectively with that understanding. We try to stay away from technical trivia questions ("Oh yeah, well what's the -m option to mkdir do!?") and rely on questions about the underlying ideas.
Fortunately, not all of Google is in Silicon Valley; we have offices around the world. I'm not in Mountain View myself.
I'm sorry, but allowing global write access to my clipboard is also multiple types of insane:
Clobbering my clipboard destroys whatever information I had on it. Given that my system does not habitually destroy that for no good reason, sometimes that's unique information that I don't have anywhere else. I don't want it poofed by some web site being "helpful".
Clobbering my clipboard ensures that the next time I paste, something different will happen than what I expected. Obviously this can be leveraged into that "something different" being a security compromise.
So, no. What's on my clipboard is just none of any site author's bloody business.
So OS vendors are not at fault as long as their systems are only insecure when we try to use them?
"Why should it be the OS vendor's fault that you connected your computer to a network?"
"Why should it be the OS vendor's fault that you turned your computer on?"
If what you'd like to change is the behaviour of grep as a tool, then I'd suggest that the most correct solution is altering grep's behaviour, rather than working around it.
ie, grep -h
You may be thinking of the wrong "they" here. The judge and the prosecutor might not feel that they need that information, but they're not the only parties involved.
If you're accused of a crime, you have fairly broad ability to subpoena any information that you can make an even remotely plausible case for being related to the issue at hand.
So all this guy's lawyer would need to say to the judge is, "We believe that click-fraud is so rampant that the defendant's tool would not have caused any further harm. And to prove that, we're subpoenaing every line of code Google uses to detect click fraud, every log of every hit they've ever had on an ad, and all the email and meeting minutes in which any employee of the company has ever discussed the issue of click fraud."
It doesn't matter whether the claim is true or not. If it the judge considers it to be even remotely possible that it _could_ be true and relevant, the subpeonas would be granted. At which point every detail of every tool Google has ever used to combat click fraud would become a matter of public record.
That certainly strikes me as a much bigger deal for Google than whether or not one moron goes to jail.
Are you kidding me? I own multiple works by both Michael Moore and Ann Coulter, though admittedly nearly all of both have been purchased in airports. I find them both similarly amusing in their ridiculousness.
In fact, I've maintained for a long time that Coulter and Moore are basically the same person. I happen to agree with the positions that one of them advocates far more often than the other, but the intellectual honesty, rigor, and fairness with which they make their cases is nearly interchangeable. And for that reason, I'm fairly certain that neither one of them has ever convinced a single person of a single thing they didn't already believe.
Depends a whole lot on why you're saying it.
If it's "I personally don't want to sign up, because my type is those who happen to have about my own melanin levels", that doesn't seem particularly racist.
If it's "I'd prefer people not do that, because I think races should be distinct and unmixed", that's a whole lot more problematic.
(It's a good thing we're not offtopic here or anything.)
Ah, JonKatz. The sole reason that I finally relented and created a user account, just so I could filter out his inane babbling. Good times, good times.
Any group ignorant enough to apparently believe that "Mac" is an acronym is probably beyond all hope.
(I'm always grateful when people expressing negative opinions about Apple or Macs feel compelled to spell it as "MAC". It clarifies right away that they have no idea about what they're talking, so their opinions can safely be ignored without any further examination.)
I'm not very much of a television watcher, but I do sometimes have friends over to watch movies and such. I recently picked up a projector, and now have a 100ish" display that becomes a blank wall when I'm not using it.
I'm pretty happy with it, projectors are hardly a specialty item any more, and I doubt it was significantly more expensive than a 50" plasma or lcd television. So I'm having a hard time seeing why anyone who wants a big display would ever purchase anything other than a projector.
Is there something here I'm missing?
"Backbone" is not a worthwhile trait if it comes at the cost of a brain above it. The thing that withdrawal from Iraq might demonstrate to other nations is that we're not complete fucking morons. It might be a little late to make that case, but it would at least point in that direction.
Which countries would those be? The closest thing to an example is Libya, who officially "gave up" a nuclear weapons program that was never going to get anywhere anyway. Most other countries in the region (Iran, Lebanon), were already in the process of becoming more moderate and secular until the US's belligerence threw a bunch of reactionaries into power there.
No, the only thing that the Bush Doctrine has demonstrated to people is: "If you don't have nuclear weapons, we'll randomly invade if we feel like it. If you do have nuclear weapons, we'll studiously look the other way."
The only things we've "gained" are the deaths of three thousand of our citizens, the blood on our hands of around half a million innocent people we murdered, and another century of hatred from a third of the world's population. I'm afraid that we won't be losing those any time soon.Despite the siren song of a huge economic boom and tax surplus, Clinton mostly cut federal spending. Bush, conversely, has increased spending, borrowing, and deficits to absurd and unprecedented levels.
You may want to revisit your stereotypes about which is the party of fiscal responsibility.
Happy to help:
This is just a few minutes of asking google, and specifically looking for items reported by reputable national news sources, not just random political blogs. I'm quite certain that far more documentation of similar incidents is readily available.
He's referring to the fraudulent letters distributed by Republican congressional candidate Tan Nguyen.
The letters were sent to 14,000 registered voters, and claimed (completely falsely) that naturalized citizens are not only ineligible to vote, but would be jailed or deported if they showed up at the polls. They were printed in letterhead that looked deceptively like that of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, and were signed by the completely fictional "Sergio Ramirez".
So I'm afraid that you're mistaken; these were naturalized citizens, registered voters, and the tactic was specifically designed to deceive them into forgoing their right to vote.
Exactly wrong. The Democratic party has been thinking for decades now that what they really need to do is field a candidate who is further right, more conservative-palatable, more Christianist, in order to bring in some Republicans. And the result has been a complete inability to actually challenge the Republicans on their problematic policies, and complete apathy of Democratic voters.
This is why the 2004 nomination went to Kerry instead of Dean. Dean actually said important things that people believed in. So he was clearly "unelectable". Whereas Kerry was so completely watered down and mealy-mouthed that he didn't scare anyone--or inspire anyone.
No, the thing the Democratic party needs to exactly not do is keep edging further and further toward the Republicans in the hopes of getting thrown a bone. They need to start fielding candidates who actually say meaningful things, and offer a platform that's distinct from Republican Lite.
Then he would still pose no threat to the US, and little or none to any other nation.
Saddam Hussein was, even up to 2003, the best ally the US had in the region. The only nations he ever invaded were Iran, because we told him to, and Kuwait, because he asked for the US's permission and believed that he had received it.
He was a terrible person and a terrible ruler, but he was never a threat, and never would have been. The only people to whom he was a danger were the Iraqis. Upon whom the US has visited more devastation than decades more of Saddm's rule.
Saddam has fuckall by way of "followers" these days. He was fairly universally reviled when he was in power, and now that he no longer needs to be feared, most Iraqis have moved right on to ignoring him completely.
Of course, some people suggest the laughable idea that just because Iraqis are resisting the US's invasion, they must be doing it out of loyalty to Hussein. That there are exactly two sides here, and if they hate us, they must love him.
No, there's plenty of room for hatred of both the US and Saddam. In fact, given that for most of his reign the two were cooperating, it would be fairly hard to hate the one half of the team without hating the other as well.
While it's fascinating that you consider the only "real" benchmarks to be ones involving Windows, that's a fairly outre view.
Certainly it's unjustified of you to assume that there's no "point" to non-Windows benchmarks; a whole damn lot of people out there don't use Windows, and have no interest in ever doing so. Given that there's a large overlap between those people and potential macbook buyers, I'd say that Windows benchmarks would be the ones of questionable point.
Yes, the Agreed Framework halted plutonium refinement. North Korea violated at least the spirit of the agreement by then pursuing uranium refinement.
But that was still a substantial success. Uranium refinement is a vastly slower, more difficult, and less reliable path to nuclear weapons. If North Korea were still limited to refining uranium in secret, they would be at least years, possibly decades away from having a single working weapon. But because Bush walked away from the agreement and allowed them to resume plutonium refinement out in the open, they now have somewhere around six of them.
I'm not saying that North Korea was a completely solved problem in the Clinton era. But the situation was leagues better than it is now, or is ever likely to be again.
Sure, I guess that's one way to view things.
6 /10/do_you_feel_saf.html is a good recap of the situation around the DPRK's nuclear weapons program, going back to the first Bush administration.
Or, for those of us who prefer some sanity, there's the other description: When Clinton was in power, negotiations successfully stopped Korea's plutonium refinement process, and no weapons were produced. Bush, on the other hand, abandoned that agreement, resulting in Korea restarting their plutonium refinement program, producing several nuclear weapons, and testing one of them successfully.
So why exactly are we thanking him again?
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/200