Re:reason for, reason not for
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Wonder if you've ever had the experience where you are typing something, you think one word, and another perfectly spelled "other" word appears on the screen/paper? That one totally freaks me out. It's pretty clear that the adaptation by the body has just created another channel of language.... While I've never learned sign, I'm guessing it's a similar deal.
I had a similar experience when I was learning Korean - if my brain couldn't find the word in the desired language (Korean) it would provide it in another (usually Spanish, which I studied in high school). In cases where I had never learned the word in either language it would give me a word in Spanish anyway... though I usually knew/felt strongly that the word choice was wrong.
Damn, I completely missed that - you are absolutely correct, this was NOT a Godwin's (d'oh!) Law violation at all!
OTOH, I still disagree with the poster's conflation of the Boy Scouts with the Hitler Youth and its fellow Nazi organizations. And I call BS on the doomsaying, too. The one thing history teaches us is that every age thinks theirs is the worst ever, that things are falling apart, etc.
Tell you what, you list your version of "the lessons of WWII" and I'll be happy to discuss them. Fair enough?
Those with tinfoil hats will surely be thinking of the youth in Orwell's 1984.
Or in Hitler's Germany.
Ignoring the Goodwin's Law violation, you might ask yourself why Hitler created the Hitler Youth organization, when the Boy Scouts already existed in Germany. Perhaps it was because the Boy Scout organization had different goals, not in keeping with National Socialism? The Scouting Organization was (and is) not the problem
Co-opting the youth is a common tactic for those that wish to exercise control over society. This is easy because the youth tend to be more gullible (sorry but its true, Pokemon anyone?).
I would agree with the previous poster's point about lack of life experience rather than yours of gullibility - most kids are more idealistic that adults, not less. BTW, your "co-opting the youth" is another person's "getting the kids involved in the community", which we all think is fine when it's a Linux Installfest, right?
The key question is why the education systems we all pay for are facilitating this (although perhaps not in this particular case, many schools in the US have also been willing channels for pro-intellectual property propaganda).
Sorry, I don't get your point - what do Boy Scouts in Hong Kong have to do with "the educational system we all pay for"... if you are posting from Hong Kong you might want to so indicate. I don't see any signs the US educational system is participating in this event at all. (Yes, I am posting from the US, as are most people reading this - not all, but definitely most.)
I would imagine most of the "extra" $10-15 per copy is the money the big labels use for "promotional expenses" - like feeding promo CDs to radio stations, getting magazine space and MTV airtime, etc. What kind of support do you provide outside the Tampa area? Do your bands get regional airplay? National? Can I find their music in a West Coast music shop?
I am not intending this as a knock - if you can make those things happen for your bands, it really IS a knife into the **IA's heart. Please tell us more!
Look into tomorrow, when everyone is a musician, and everyone can listen to what they damn well want to.
Could I have some of what you're smoking, please? I did a quick count of the 50 or so folks (& family) I interact with every day, and I count 1 (one) performing musician, plus about a dozen who can and occasionally do play at least one instrument. The single musician amongst us has, with the assistance of his bandmates (who I don't include as I've not met them yet) almost enough songs for an album/cd/whatever, after about 2 years of work.
I admit, the new tools make it easier & easier to create pleasant sounds - even G'ma can crank a sweet riff out of GarageBand, for one - but it's gonna take a little more than that to make music people will bother to search out. And make no mistake, in the future you described so glowingly there isn't going to be anybody doing promotion for all these new vanity bands. Unless you think these bands will all have l33t web ski11z to match their musical genius.
I'm sorry, but I just don't have the time or musical skills to be a resource for you, sunshine, even if I wanted to. And I bet there's a lot of folks like me, whose priorities don't include creating music for free^H^H^H^Hdownloaders.
What you really mean, I think, is that you think the music is costing you too much, and that when you get it directly from the musicians you won't have to pay so much... because that's how it works right now.
What REALLY bugs me about DVDJon is this - he is fscking with a product which is darn near the best part of the current system. I fear this ill-advised meddling will only end up encouraging the **IA to stop using the Net for any kind of music delivery system. Are you so certain they can't make it harder to get music than it already is?
I can't believe I'm even thinking about responding to someone who would actually present such an action as a reasonable response to a global catastrophe.
Since you seem to have missed my point, let me try again: Scientists have constructed MODELS which SUGGEST there MAY be on-going global climate change. Many of these scientists admit their models are based on incomplete measurements, many of which are interpolated from measurements of things other than temperatures. Despite the lack of data, the meme of "Global Warming" has been used to propogate cultural and political changes which WILL have devastating economic impacts on SOME nations.
Given the above, does it not make sense to spend a significantly smaller amount of money on data collection?
You actually want to wait for worldwide famine before doing something?
No, I suggest we keep planting crops and feeding people pretty much as we have been. This isn't a point event, it's a gradual shift, even if it IS happening faster than before... which careful measurements could VERIFY to be true, if it is. I don't have any proof either way - do you?
Did you think "hey, maybe CFCs *are* bad for the ozone" at any point before seeing satellite photos of the huge, gaping hole over the south pole, or do you still think that was a bunch of eco-groovy BS, too?
Actually, I thought CFC's were bad for the ozone before the photos, although I was surprised to find them all ending up in the one place. I have no axe to grind with enviromentalists who gather data and then draw their conclusions from it. And yes, I DO believe this is still in large part a bunch of SWAGS - the difference being the SCIENTIFIC part. Why do YOU resist the thought of gathering data to prove or disprove the assumptions on which they are based?
Nice personal attack at the end, too. Way to impress a guy with your logic...
You'll note that I was merely pointing out a flaw in the OP's debate position-- taking as given the very item in dispute--
Nobody can argue with a straight face that an average temp increase of 2 degrees F in 10 years won't cause massive crop failure. Can they? If they can, should they be taken seriously?
Just a quick question - were you so caught up in the arguement that you didn't realize you were repeating the error of logic, or were you trying for the Funny mods?
Nobody can argue with a straight face that an average temp increase of 2 degrees F in 10 years won't cause massive crop failure.
And nobody has, in fact, claimed such a thing. Except you, by inference.
IF the average temperature of the Earth DOES go up 2 degrees in 10 years, I expect we WILL see crop failures. But before we go broke implementing the Kyoto Accords, which WILL cause massive poverty in the post-Industrial World (though not in China or India, yay!) how about we spend a much smaller amount on deploying enough instruments around the world to accurately measure the temperature.
After all, assuming that the global-warming scenarios are true, the total amount of farmable lands will not change - we just need to be ready to shift agricultural resources to the north & south and away from the coasts & the Equator.
And maybe, just maybe, with enough data, we can actually make plans based on logic and necessity, rather than on what are still essentially SWAGs about the weather. Harrummph!
Because perhaps there were others in the same situation as me. Weren't able to see the previous shows, and seeing how it's an on going SERIES it's kind of hard to want to watch the REST of the SERIES without knowing what happened BEFORE.
But that's just not true... I came late to watching Starate, and I've been playing catchup for three years. It hasn't limited my liking or understanding of the series. As the previous poster mentioned, SA has been in reruns virtually all year - all you need to do is start watching them on SciFi.
What you want, I expect, is the ability to watch them in some particular order - say, in the order they were originally broadcast. That may be your preference, but you really have no grounds to expect it.
Who is responsible for this, exactly? Pirates? Like the ones from Penzance, or the less musical Barbary Pirates?
You know, I wasn't planning on washing out my keyboard today, but then I wasn't really planning to spit my afternoon coffee all over my desk either... thank you so much.
the US government has, since at least the middle of the last century, publicly maintained that it is important to America to promote freedom and democracy. china, of course, is the largest communist country ever (by population, not land mass), and one of the most oppressive of modern times. if we are serious about this stated goal... than China should be a natural enemy. instead, they're given Most Favored Nation status and we're very careful not to offend them. it's difficult to see a justification for this that isn't strictly financial.
I believe you are misunderstanding the trading relationship known as "Most Favored Nation" (MFN) status. MFN is a concept, and a practice, which has almost nothing to do with 'favor' at all.
In international trade terms MFN is the default level between nations, not the pinnacle. The US uses the threat of dropping such status as a tool of internaltional diplomacy, as when Libya was denied MFN for sponsoring terrorist attacks in the 80s. Basically, any nation gets the same trading privileges as the "most favored" nation we trade with does. Most trading nations work quite strenuously to ensure they do not lose MFN status, by judicious lobbying if no other way.
So why does the US trade with China? IMHO it is because no other channel offers greater social and political traction on China and its people. Further, allowing in our products and services allows in our culture, which has thus far proven inviting and beguiling to most nations exposed to it.
I leave for another day any discussion of the value of 'western capitalist democracy' as compared to that of 'chinese communism'. I believe ours is the better socio-political system, but that may be due to living within it all these years.
Sorry, a patch has been available since earlier this week which checks all copies of GDI+ and fixes them. This is in addition to similar code already part of XP SP2, which fixed the issue in the OS.
Well he would say that, wouldn't he. Extra labor for his crew, making sure they fit the insulation in around the wiring & plumbing in the interior walls, a slow & fiddly process to do correctly, and with little return for him...
In my current place, I can barely hear noises from outside (even the takeoffs & landings at the nearby general-aviation airport) because of the excellent insulation in my exterior walls. What I can hear quite clearly is every conversation on the telephone in the kitchen and every commercial on the television in the living room, because only uninsulated interior walls seperate the master bedroom and those rooms.
Builders don't get paid by the day, they get paid by the job - the faster they finish the house, the sooner it can sell and the sooner they get their money. Of course he's going to tell you not to bother...
You mean somebody like the guy who just put together the Win98 SP?:^)
Somebody could choose to pick up an Open Source product... just like some companies have picked up Closed Source products - except in those cases it's called "buying the rights to continue production." How many companies had ownership of TurboPascal? And what about the folks still supporting QuarkExpress?
Companies producing 'commercial software' may not let anybody & everybody have their source code, but it is disingenuous to argue that getting it is impossible. They just do it differently and in a manner all the bean-counters are familiar with.
Then you go to the Finder, and search for files with the name of the program you just threw away.
Which you find all ove the place - in preferences under the user, in preferences under the application, in the System folder, in the Library folder...
Why is it that if OS X is supposedly a totally new Unix-like operating system, that 9 times out of 10 I can fix Mac problems by trashing the Preferences of whatever just stopped working? Wasn't that the OS 9 solution?
A typical Windows system follows a simple lifecycle: it starts out with a clean Windows installation, which gradually deteriorates as programs are installed, and uninstalled. Eventually, the Windows registry accumulates so much crud that the user is forced to do a clean install.
I'm throwing the BULLSHIT flag on this... and on your blind acceptance of it, though your advocacy of FreeBSD/Mac explains your agreement.
Does cruft accumulate over time? Of course it does. But does it accumulate to the point of a complete clean reinstall yearly, as the original poster claimed in TFA? No, unless you are the guy who never met a program he didn't install. And even that guy could avoid the issue if he followed the logical maintenance path. Get rid of a program? Then get rid of the cruft - open the Registry and do a search & delete of remaining files associated with the program!
I wish Microsoft did a better job of requiring application uninstallers to remove all the entries the installer put in. But is it their fault that non-MS programmers write sloppy uninstallers? I don't have a solution to that, do you, Mr Advocate? Mr Original Poster?
I've been using Windows computers at work & home since DOS & Windows 3.11, and the only times I had to do a clean reinstall were (1) when my hard drive suffered a catastrophic head crash in sector zero, rendering my data unreachable, and (2) when I attempted to configure a dual boot of Windows 98 and Red Hat, and the Linux tool I used (instead of Partition Magic) over-wrote the partition table. Number one was nobody's fault, and number two was mine - the instructions said there was a "slight risk" but a google search later found many sites saying to never use that particular tool. Be that as it may, in neither case did cruft-buildup cause the rebuild.
In my current job I rebuild a lot of systems, both Mac & PC, and the predominent reason is to make sure all our standard applications are present with no residual data from the previous user. I upgrade a lot of systems to newer versions of their respective operating systems, now OS X 10.3 & Windows XP, predominently because my users want the newer features. I also support older systems attached to scientific instruments (microscopes/spectrometers/radiation counters/etc) which cannot be replaced or upgraded because the software & hardware are rev-locked. None of those systems has ever crashed because of cruft buildup.
It seems pretty obvious to me that OP & yourself are not very well versed in the support of the MS operating systems - and there is no reason you must be if you do not wish it - but if you don't know how to do so please stop saying it cannot be done just because YOU cannot do it.
While in the Marine Corps I was a student (and later an instructor) at an all-services training base run by the Air Force - with just such a turnstile/guardhouse at the classroom area. We never thought very highly of the SPs (Squadron Police AKA Sky Pigs) guarding the facility, but did our best to avoid the temptation of screwing with them... it was just too easy.
As a student, the worst stunt I pulled was when I noticed the SPs would come into the chowhall for lunch and just leave their M-16s at a table with their headgear & other junk. The USMC is very particular about always leaving a "complete safe weapon", so I strolled over, popped out the magazines, checked the chambers, and verified the selector was set to "Safe." The two "security specialists" didn't even notice!. The next day they came in and left the rifles again - so I made them safe again. To make the point more obvious, I removed the firing pins and left them sitting on top of the SP's jaunty black berets in the middle of their table. The look on their faces was priceless.
Our commander was forced to order us to "stop helping the SPs", though he did so with a smile on his face. They stopped leaving the rifles out, at least while I was there.
When I later returned to the same base to be an instructor they had a much smarter officer in charge of the guard force. Some of my students were telling me they had been drawing moustaches and/or sticking pictures on the front of their badges and getting in without being challenged, but before I could test this myself I was invited to assist the SP colonel in a little experiment: He asked me to check in (& out if possible) using a fake badge he had made up. It was a quality job, using the regular forms and professional lamination - but it said I was Vladimir Lenin (with his picture) and a member of the KGB!
Sadly, I got right through - one of the guards touched the badge to verify I had one, but none of them looked at it. The colonel was so disgusted those guards were immediately pulled and sent back to their original training base. I wanted to keep the badge, but the colonel said he might need it again, if his guys got sloppy again...
I expected to get some flack from the other guards, but they all felt that "anybody that careless was no loss".
Hell, you could airburst a good-sized nuke near a carrier and fry all of the sensors.
Except for the shielding of the circuits on Navy ships, designed to block the effects of just such an attack. The US Navy has been studying the EMP problem since the early bomb tests in the Pacific made it evident.
I'm not writing off nukes per se, but I don't believe ballistic missiles are the main threat to a Carrier Battle Group. As mentioned in another message above, CBGs always include air-defense assets, and the Aegis-equipped cruisers and destroyers have a better-than-even chance at shooting down even your speedy ballistic warhead (or so I read...YMMV.)
What's stopping you from using your disk with their license key, from the sticker on their computer? It's easy and legal... it's the key that Microsoft tracks, not the disk.
Security. Physical and operational security are greatly enhanced if they only operate from one base. When you're using a multi-billion dollar strategic bomber it's always going to be a political decision anyway, so any decrease in time is cancelled by the potential loss of control.
Troops and tanks need bases close to the action, since they are slow to move when the balloon goes up. Overseas bases are good, because they let us fight on the other guy's land instead of our own (see Mahan, et al.) Airplanes, either really fast ones like the SR71 or really sneaky ones like the B2 can get there soon enough from CONUS.
Besides, why pay a foreign nation for basing privileges when we can keep the $$$ in our own [voting area|economy]?
Let me get this straight: you are using Hermann Gohring as your source for "political insight"?! WTF, couldn't you find a better line in Pol Pot's diaries?
Gohring, Hitler & the Nazi bosses et al may have believed they knew how politics works, but they also believed (1) they could invade and defeat the Soviet Union while still fighting on the Western Front, (2) the US would NEVER get into the war, and (3) that Jews , Negroes, and Gypsies were "polluting the pure Aryan Race".
Frankly, I think I'd look a little harder at my sources if they had such a crappy track record.
Now, as to your initial thesis, that soldiers should be questioning the motives of their leaders before carrying out their orders, here's a news flash for you: They Do. The "Law of Land Warfare" has been a mandatory part of both military induction (AKA bootcamp) and military professionalization (AKA mandatory Training Time.) To be specific, shooting unarmed civilians is and has been frowned upon as (1) morally wrong, (2) illegal, and (3) economically and politically ineffective (it costs you in both bullets and cooperation.)
Do bad things still happen during armed conflict? Yes. War is Hell, as you may have heard, and people under stress can do things they later regret. Do we try to prevent needless deaths? Yes. Do we prosecute those cases we find out about? Absolutely - does the name Calley ring a bell?
Lastly, I would agree we are making a mistake in our handling of the Iraqi Situation - I think we should just pack up & leave. We accomplished the removal of Saddam, they can figure out their own destiny without further US handholding. If they go fundamentalist, so be it, it's their sovereign right to make that decision.
Why are you trusting the users to run their own anti-virus updates? If you support an organization, why aren't you running your own anti-virus server?!
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Good times ...
OTOH, I still disagree with the poster's conflation of the Boy Scouts with the Hitler Youth and its fellow Nazi organizations. And I call BS on the doomsaying, too. The one thing history teaches us is that every age thinks theirs is the worst ever, that things are falling apart, etc.
Tell you what, you list your version of "the lessons of WWII" and I'll be happy to discuss them. Fair enough?
I am not intending this as a knock - if you can make those things happen for your bands, it really IS a knife into the **IA's heart. Please tell us more!
I admit, the new tools make it easier & easier to create pleasant sounds - even G'ma can crank a sweet riff out of GarageBand, for one - but it's gonna take a little more than that to make music people will bother to search out. And make no mistake, in the future you described so glowingly there isn't going to be anybody doing promotion for all these new vanity bands. Unless you think these bands will all have l33t web ski11z to match their musical genius.
I'm sorry, but I just don't have the time or musical skills to be a resource for you, sunshine, even if I wanted to. And I bet there's a lot of folks like me, whose priorities don't include creating music for free^H^H^H^Hdownloaders.
What you really mean, I think, is that you think the music is costing you too much, and that when you get it directly from the musicians you won't have to pay so much ... because that's how it works right now.
What REALLY bugs me about DVDJon is this - he is fscking with a product which is darn near the best part of the current system. I fear this ill-advised meddling will only end up encouraging the **IA to stop using the Net for any kind of music delivery system. Are you so certain they can't make it harder to get music than it already is?
(Love that Avery Brooks - Best. Commercial. Ever.)
Given the above, does it not make sense to spend a significantly smaller amount of money on data collection?
No, I suggest we keep planting crops and feeding people pretty much as we have been. This isn't a point event, it's a gradual shift, even if it IS happening faster than beforeNice personal attack at the end, too. Way to impress a guy with your logic ...
IF the average temperature of the Earth DOES go up 2 degrees in 10 years, I expect we WILL see crop failures. But before we go broke implementing the Kyoto Accords, which WILL cause massive poverty in the post-Industrial World (though not in China or India, yay!) how about we spend a much smaller amount on deploying enough instruments around the world to accurately measure the temperature.
After all, assuming that the global-warming scenarios are true, the total amount of farmable lands will not change - we just need to be ready to shift agricultural resources to the north & south and away from the coasts & the Equator.
And maybe, just maybe, with enough data, we can actually make plans based on logic and necessity, rather than on what are still essentially SWAGs about the weather. Harrummph!
What you want, I expect, is the ability to watch them in some particular order - say, in the order they were originally broadcast. That may be your preference, but you really have no grounds to expect it.
Ah, sweet irony ...
In international trade terms MFN is the default level between nations, not the pinnacle. The US uses the threat of dropping such status as a tool of internaltional diplomacy, as when Libya was denied MFN for sponsoring terrorist attacks in the 80s. Basically, any nation gets the same trading privileges as the "most favored" nation we trade with does. Most trading nations work quite strenuously to ensure they do not lose MFN status, by judicious lobbying if no other way.
So why does the US trade with China? IMHO it is because no other channel offers greater social and political traction on China and its people. Further, allowing in our products and services allows in our culture, which has thus far proven inviting and beguiling to most nations exposed to it.
I leave for another day any discussion of the value of 'western capitalist democracy' as compared to that of 'chinese communism'. I believe ours is the better socio-political system, but that may be due to living within it all these years.
In my current place, I can barely hear noises from outside (even the takeoffs & landings at the nearby general-aviation airport) because of the excellent insulation in my exterior walls. What I can hear quite clearly is every conversation on the telephone in the kitchen and every commercial on the television in the living room, because only uninsulated interior walls seperate the master bedroom and those rooms.
Builders don't get paid by the day, they get paid by the job - the faster they finish the house, the sooner it can sell and the sooner they get their money. Of course he's going to tell you not to bother ...
Somebody could choose to pick up an Open Source product ... just like some companies have picked up Closed Source products - except in those cases it's called "buying the rights to continue production." How many companies had ownership of TurboPascal? And what about the folks still supporting QuarkExpress?
Companies producing 'commercial software' may not let anybody & everybody have their source code, but it is disingenuous to argue that getting it is impossible. They just do it differently and in a manner all the bean-counters are familiar with.
Wow. Thanks for linking that!
Which you find all ove the place - in preferences under the user, in preferences under the application, in the System folder, in the Library folder ...
Why is it that if OS X is supposedly a totally new Unix-like operating system, that 9 times out of 10 I can fix Mac problems by trashing the Preferences of whatever just stopped working? Wasn't that the OS 9 solution?
Does cruft accumulate over time? Of course it does. But does it accumulate to the point of a complete clean reinstall yearly, as the original poster claimed in TFA? No, unless you are the guy who never met a program he didn't install. And even that guy could avoid the issue if he followed the logical maintenance path. Get rid of a program? Then get rid of the cruft - open the Registry and do a search & delete of remaining files associated with the program!
I wish Microsoft did a better job of requiring application uninstallers to remove all the entries the installer put in. But is it their fault that non-MS programmers write sloppy uninstallers? I don't have a solution to that, do you, Mr Advocate? Mr Original Poster?
I've been using Windows computers at work & home since DOS & Windows 3.11, and the only times I had to do a clean reinstall were (1) when my hard drive suffered a catastrophic head crash in sector zero, rendering my data unreachable, and (2) when I attempted to configure a dual boot of Windows 98 and Red Hat, and the Linux tool I used (instead of Partition Magic) over-wrote the partition table. Number one was nobody's fault, and number two was mine - the instructions said there was a "slight risk" but a google search later found many sites saying to never use that particular tool. Be that as it may, in neither case did cruft-buildup cause the rebuild.
In my current job I rebuild a lot of systems, both Mac & PC, and the predominent reason is to make sure all our standard applications are present with no residual data from the previous user. I upgrade a lot of systems to newer versions of their respective operating systems, now OS X 10.3 & Windows XP, predominently because my users want the newer features. I also support older systems attached to scientific instruments (microscopes/spectrometers/radiation counters/etc) which cannot be replaced or upgraded because the software & hardware are rev-locked. None of those systems has ever crashed because of cruft buildup.
It seems pretty obvious to me that OP & yourself are not very well versed in the support of the MS operating systems - and there is no reason you must be if you do not wish it - but if you don't know how to do so please stop saying it cannot be done just because YOU cannot do it.
As a student, the worst stunt I pulled was when I noticed the SPs would come into the chowhall for lunch and just leave their M-16s at a table with their headgear & other junk. The USMC is very particular about always leaving a "complete safe weapon", so I strolled over, popped out the magazines, checked the chambers, and verified the selector was set to "Safe." The two "security specialists" didn't even notice!. The next day they came in and left the rifles again - so I made them safe again. To make the point more obvious, I removed the firing pins and left them sitting on top of the SP's jaunty black berets in the middle of their table. The look on their faces was priceless.
Our commander was forced to order us to "stop helping the SPs", though he did so with a smile on his face. They stopped leaving the rifles out, at least while I was there.
When I later returned to the same base to be an instructor they had a much smarter officer in charge of the guard force. Some of my students were telling me they had been drawing moustaches and/or sticking pictures on the front of their badges and getting in without being challenged, but before I could test this myself I was invited to assist the SP colonel in a little experiment: He asked me to check in (& out if possible) using a fake badge he had made up. It was a quality job, using the regular forms and professional lamination - but it said I was Vladimir Lenin (with his picture) and a member of the KGB!
Sadly, I got right through - one of the guards touched the badge to verify I had one, but none of them looked at it. The colonel was so disgusted those guards were immediately pulled and sent back to their original training base. I wanted to keep the badge, but the colonel said he might need it again, if his guys got sloppy again ...
I expected to get some flack from the other guards, but they all felt that "anybody that careless was no loss".
I'm not writing off nukes per se, but I don't believe ballistic missiles are the main threat to a Carrier Battle Group. As mentioned in another message above, CBGs always include air-defense assets, and the Aegis-equipped cruisers and destroyers have a better-than-even chance at shooting down even your speedy ballistic warhead (or so I read ...YMMV.)
Troops and tanks need bases close to the action, since they are slow to move when the balloon goes up. Overseas bases are good, because they let us fight on the other guy's land instead of our own (see Mahan, et al.) Airplanes, either really fast ones like the SR71 or really sneaky ones like the B2 can get there soon enough from CONUS.
Besides, why pay a foreign nation for basing privileges when we can keep the $$$ in our own [voting area|economy]?
Gohring, Hitler & the Nazi bosses et al may have believed they knew how politics works, but they also believed (1) they could invade and defeat the Soviet Union while still fighting on the Western Front, (2) the US would NEVER get into the war, and (3) that Jews , Negroes, and Gypsies were "polluting the pure Aryan Race".
Frankly, I think I'd look a little harder at my sources if they had such a crappy track record.
Now, as to your initial thesis, that soldiers should be questioning the motives of their leaders before carrying out their orders, here's a news flash for you: They Do. The "Law of Land Warfare" has been a mandatory part of both military induction (AKA bootcamp) and military professionalization (AKA mandatory Training Time.) To be specific, shooting unarmed civilians is and has been frowned upon as (1) morally wrong, (2) illegal, and (3) economically and politically ineffective (it costs you in both bullets and cooperation.)
Do bad things still happen during armed conflict? Yes. War is Hell, as you may have heard, and people under stress can do things they later regret. Do we try to prevent needless deaths? Yes. Do we prosecute those cases we find out about? Absolutely - does the name Calley ring a bell?
Lastly, I would agree we are making a mistake in our handling of the Iraqi Situation - I think we should just pack up & leave. We accomplished the removal of Saddam, they can figure out their own destiny without further US handholding. If they go fundamentalist, so be it, it's their sovereign right to make that decision.