FYI, Spider is as obsessive a fan of Heinlein as I have ever seen. If anyone could do this book, it would be him.
Reading the first two chapters (all that is posted at the moment) was bizarre. It was clearly Spider's writing, but it was also clearly Heinlein's story; if I wasn't familiari with Spider's ability as an author, I'd be worried that the book would be dreck. Instead, I look forward to being able to read the whole book.
Or, in a move to increase tie-ups and add confusion, make a concealed misting device and go through the area where people are waiting to check their baggage, misting random luggage and carryons with small concentrations of just those volatiles, to ensure that as many people as possible get caught in the explosives sniffer. Meanwhile, the actual bomb had casting resin poured over it and allowed to cure completely, eliminating any avenue for the escape of these VOCs...
Another good padding material is Ethafoam; it's a semi-rigid polyethylene closed-cell foam -- if you've gotten some electronic hardware where the packing foam is assembled from cut and glued sheets of a white or pink, slightly shiny, somewhat waxy-looking foam material, that's Ethafoam. You can find it on the Net in sheets ranging from 1" to 4" thick; it's easily cut with a knife, so you can build whatever padding frame you like.
I found that the Mezzi laptop cases were significantly cheaper, and had the benefit of being available in a size to fit my laptop -- the LUXslim XXT aluminum case fit my laptop very nicely -- a Clevo D900K, power supply, external Logitech trackball, external FDD, WTR54GS wireless router, and headphones fit neatly into the case.
*sigh* 'Pong' is a British slang term for a bad smell or stench, or the act of stinking -- referring to the GenCon attendees, sometimes known as (in a more literal sense than the apellation is usually meant) 'The Great Unwashed'.
But all this all means is that, more or less by accident, because no one can second-guess their reasoning, juries could effectively nullify a law -- if nearly every jury assembled to try a particular type of case acquitted the defendant. Has this ever happened? I doubt it very much. I think it's entirely a theoretical power.
Go back and look at the problems that prosecutors had in obtaining convictions under the Fugitive Slave Act. For a less-savory picture, go back and look at how rarely all-white juries in the South convicted a white defendant of assault or murder against a black victim.
The 1895 decision in Sparf vs. US that held that the court was not required to inform jurors of their power to acquit in the face of both the evidence and the law also upheld the existence of that right; the decision stated that the citizens had the responsibility to be aware of their rights and responsibilities, and it was not the court's responsibility to remind them. Three years after US v Moylan, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia also rendered a verdict upholding jury nullification, stating that the jury has an "... unreviewable and irreversible power.. to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge...." (US vs Dougherty, 473 F 2d 1113, 1139 (1972)).
Doesn't work that way. The jury is only the "trier of fact." Their job is only to decide the facts of the case, e.g. "did so-and-so do the following things as the prosecution alleges." It's then up to the judge to decide what the law says should happen if those facts are true.
I refer you to the decision in U.S. vs Moylan, 417 F 2d 1002, 1006 (1969):
"We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge, and contrary to the evidence (emphasis mine). This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic of passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision."
God, I'm so tired of "Sturgeon's Law". It's just a lame excuse for bad writing.
However, it's a more succinct roll-up of the fact that if you take something that was fresh and innovative and remake it for the second, third, fourth, or fifth time, it's going to be crap unless you put a lot more work into it than was put into the original -- and slapping on a bunch of flashy special effects, which seems to be the primary characteristic of recent remakes, is not enough by itself to lift a crap remake out of being crap.
After reading that, I must seriously question your ability to judge any film or video work.
I don't find it that hard to believe. With a couple seasons to pick episodes from, I'm sure you can find one good scene in the run... After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Another issue is the familiarity with the weapons, as mention in TFA. A 3-foot sword has a 3-foot range, but a 2-foot gun has an arbitrary range that takes practise and familiarity to recognize by sight. It's quicker and easier to cut a guy with a kitchen utensil then to hone a masterwork of alien engineering.
And that two-foot gun will do much the same damage at 10 feet as it will at a thousand feet, and should readily kill someone with a single hit. The only difference is in how hard it is to hit that little dot out there -- so when you get into a firefight, a "realistic" combat resolution results, effectively, in your charcter having a completely-random chance to die every time their opponent shoots -- and that is going to rapidly prove to be no fun for players.
On the contrary, your feet swell when you are sitting for long hours. Ask anyone who spends lots of time sitting on an airplane. Walking actually *AIDS* the blood moving back up toward the heart through the muscles squeezing the veins and the valves preventing back-flow.
It's not the blood circulation that gets the primary benefit from walking, it's lymph circulation. Because of the increased pressure in your legs, fluid escapes from your blood vessels, where it is collected by your lymphatic system and carried up to the nodes in your chest, where it is returned to your bloodstream. But unlike your circulatory system, the only pump for your lymphatic system is your muscles; the lymphatic ducts are squeezed by your muscles as you move, so if you don't walk around, the fluid builds up in your feet and calves. This is why people with lymphedema wear compression stockings; the additional pressure provided by the stocking helps keeps the fluid from seeping out in the first place, and assists the action of the muscles in pumping the lymph back up toward the chest. Standing in one spot creates the same effect as sitting down, except that there's a bigger fluid column pushing fluid out into your feet and calves.
And remember, without competent (and expensive) technical support, uninstalling Wife 1.0 will automatically install Alimony 1.0, which is a big resource hog...
OK line up boys and girls. On my left: those who think that the Federal Government should run the Internet for the good of the public, because those big corporations are EVIL. On my right: those who think that free-market competition should decide the winners and losers, and will drive the Internet's evolution much faster than the stranglehold of the --- perhaps not "Evil" but at least "Slow, incompetent, and stifling -- Federal Government.
Where do you stand?
If the backbone providers want to be free of government requirements that they provide the same level of service to everyone, then they should be prepared to accept the concurrent responsibility -- that as soon as they are no longer blind to the traffic passing over their networks, the moment they look at the packets to determine whether they should be given priority treatment, they're no longer a "common carrier", and become liable for any illegal activity they support by forwarding packets. I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA would love to have a nice, deep-pocketed target like the telecommunications industry to claim as co-defendants in suits claiming millions of dollars of damages from copyright violations due to filesharing. If they don't want government regulation, they shouldn't expect to get government protection.
The consumers want one thing -- competition. Competition happens when government stays away from the market. The more we let government "regulate" net neutrality or attempt to create a level playing field, the more we'll see our prices go up, our service levels go down, and competition get wiped out of the market.
Creating a level playing field is simple. At the point where the pipe provider looks at the packet to determine whether it comes from an 'upgrade' site and needs to be given a higher priority, the provider can no longer claim that they don't know anything about what is passing across their network, and can justifiably be stripped of their common carrier status. If the tradeoff for being allowed to charge sites to give packets from/to that site a higher priority is to become liable for the content carried on their network, it's not going to be a particularly attractive prospect.
Although some historians claim that Eisenhower's motivations were military in nature, the nation's civilian population reaped the rewards
and mother nature was wounded... all the roadkill, destruction of wildlife habitis, splitting / dividing of land... we shoulda stuck to gravel roads, flying, and our bicycles. Or maybe we shoulda worked harder on tele-transporting.
It can't have been military in nature... the Act allocated money over 13 years, and the interstate highway system wasn't built to serve the purposes of the Navy (battleships can't meet the speed minimums on the interstates), and it says very clearly in the Constitution that no allocation of money for the Army may be longer than two years. And we'd never have a President who'd do anything that violated the Constitution, right? At least, not so blatantly...
The Sun? Never heard of it, what weird world do you live in with your fantasy realms called "out of doors". Man, Slashdot really does attract crazy people.
I think that's the name they give to the bright light in the Big Room -- the one that has a ceiling that's sometimes blue with a bright light and sometimes black with lots of little lights.
Reading both articles, and other material on net neutrality on the Net, it seems to me that what we're seeing here is a frantic attempt to chase after escaping revenue -- as VOIP becomes more popular, the interchanges and long-distance trunks won't get as much traffic so the telcos will lose the charges they levied on that traffic -- by making it legal for them to say "Nice VOIP setup you have there. Be a shame if a surge in bandwidth usage disrupted its packet traffic and garbled conversations. But we'll cut you a deal; if you pay a 20% surcharge on your bandwidth rate, we'll see that your packets get a high priority, so they'll go through without interruption."
>They have to point to flaws and holes in the current theory Ideally with field data.
such as the temperatures recorded at sites that used to be in rural areas, but are now in suburban or urban areas, due to the growth of cities. The global-warming advocates admit that the urbanization itself causes the temperature readings to increase, but that they apply a correction factor to account for that increase. However, if you press them for details on the correction factor, it's based on estimates of how much a given amount of urbanization will increase the temperature -- making the resultant temperature data suspect. There are other 'corrections' that result in the warming being overstated, such as reduction in nighttime cooling due to increased cloudiness and other factors, which results in overstatement of temperature increases. For example, this page shows how improper data collection and adjustment skews the data (in this case, the premise that moving the data collection station can eliminate the urban heat island warming); after applying an empirical correction for the urban heat island, the average temperature at the Sydney station has decreased over the last century. While one data point is functionally useless for projecting an overall trend, it does illustrate the lack of scientific rigor in the collection of temperature data.
The issue isn't the number of possible actions that your character can take. Those are good.
The issue is that those actions have only extremely limited and unrealistic results in the game world. What we need aren't restrictions on what the player can do (returning back to older games), but rather an improvement in how games react dynamically to unexpected user input.
However, there are limits to what is practical to do in the interests of making a game playable, particularly with MMORPGs. For example, in NCSoft's 'City of Heroes', you can beat up on a group of Freakshow on the streets of Brickstown, and the other members of the group will react and attack you as soon as you attack the first member of the group -- but the other group of Freakshow fifty feet down the street won't bat an eyelash, even if one of the group you're attacking runs away past them and you fire a blast of lightning through the group at the fleeing villain. Now, on the one hand, not having every member of a villain group within a half-mile of an attack on some of their members serves to keep a character from being overwhelmed by opponents, while allowing for the number of opponents available to all the players in the zone high enough to make play enjoyable. On the other hand, the artificiality of having mobs standing around in what would be clear sight of a battle (and superhero battles would be more attention-getting than simple gunfights, with fire, energy, lightning, ice, and other attacks going off in different directions and people getting knocked around, sometimes dozens of feet) is somewhat immersion-breaking. But the genre is superheroes; hanging out on the edges, looking to kite one villain and get them to pull away from the rest of their group, so you can whack them and do it again doesn't feel heroic, so the aggro ranges have to be set to allow players to jump into a fight without worrying that all the other villains on the street in a five-block radius are going to zerg them the moment the first zapblast lights up the area.
LEDs on the front of the case Yeah, they look cool. For about 5 minutes. They are dim enough not to illuminate, but bright enough to catch your eye. Hardware equivalent of a flash ad. Also, if you keep your PC in your bedroom, you'd better find something to put in front of the LEDs.
My laptop has three nice, bright blue status LEDs just below the display, where they're shining in your eyes all the time you're using the laptop -- which is why my laptop has a small rectangle of painter's tape over the LED slots, which obscure them just enough so that they don't distract too much from the display. The lack of any kind of brightness control is, after the decision to put the status LEDs there in the first place, the unit's most annoying design flaw.
I don't want to subsidize the infrastructure with my taxes anymore, and I don't want to pay the same rate for my ~5GB-10GB/month of bandwidth use as someone who uses 100GB+. I also don't want the government telling private businesses that they cannot reserve part of their networks for their own services. As long as they are providing you with the QoS that they advertise and contractually agree to provide you, why do you care if Verizon keeps 80% of the network for their IP TV service? If we get up to 10mbps as the standard rate, and they keep 40mbps for themselves, is that 10mbps any slower? Of course not. Your piece of the pie just keeps becoming more and more in real numbers as their network expands.
The problem is that the companies already benefit from legislation that restricts or eliminates competition. You cite a 10mbps 'standard rate' -- and I will assume here that you meant a 10Mbps rate, not ten millibits per second -- what prevents a provider who has an existing (and government-maintained) monopoly on high-speed service in an area to decide that its 'standard rate' is now 100kbps (still faster than 56k dialup), with a $50/month charge to get 1Mbps access, and a $100/month charge to get 10Mbps access? Or the provider, whose board of directors has a preponderance of individuals with strong religous beliefs, suddenly deciding that they can't in all conscience operate a company that provides access to 'immoral' content and implements blocking for any site that serves porn, nudity, excessive violence, abortion-rights views, or any other opinion they disapprove of?
... but I don't really think that was the theory the Iraq war was launched on.
Unfortunately, the "We've got the most sophisticated and high-tech military in the world; the Iraqis don't have a chance against us" attitude was very real... and as far as defeating the Iraqi military went, it was correct. However, Shrub sent in troops without a clear plan for what we would do after Saddam was pulled down. From what I've seen, his expectation was that the Iraqis, grateful for having had Saddam's boot pulled off their necks, would rally around their American liberators and spontaneously form a cooperative, peaceful democracy. Instead, the Shiite majority took it as the opportunity to get their 'fair' share of the power, the Sunni minority that got pushed off the top of the heap started a guerilla campaign to bleed the occupying military white, and the Kurds took it as an opportunity to carve their own (hopefully) autonomous homeland back out of Iraq.
Iraq was a country created artificially by the British from territory seized from the Ottoman Turks after WWI, having been formed from three culturally distinct regions that have, over the country's history, provided sufficient internal conflict and despotism to establish a steady turnover in power until Saddam Hussein seized control. For all of his excesses in putting down resistance to his government, he did achieve a continuity of government beyond what Iraq had previously experienced.
From watching the 'reconstruction' of Iraq, I am reminded of two of the mottoes of the Interplanetary Relations Bureau from Lloyd Biggles' stories: "Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny." and "Democracy is not a form of government, it is a state of mind. People can not be arbitrarily placed in a state of mind." Shrub's actions in pushing the Iraqis into forming a democratic government appear driven by what he wants to have happen, not what it is practical for the Iraqis to achieve in a reasonable amount of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading the first two chapters (all that is posted at the moment) was bizarre. It was clearly Spider's writing, but it was also clearly Heinlein's story; if I wasn't familiari with Spider's ability as an author, I'd be worried that the book would be dreck. Instead, I look forward to being able to read the whole book.
Or, in a move to increase tie-ups and add confusion, make a concealed misting device and go through the area where people are waiting to check their baggage, misting random luggage and carryons with small concentrations of just those volatiles, to ensure that as many people as possible get caught in the explosives sniffer. Meanwhile, the actual bomb had casting resin poured over it and allowed to cure completely, eliminating any avenue for the escape of these VOCs...
Another good padding material is Ethafoam; it's a semi-rigid polyethylene closed-cell foam -- if you've gotten some electronic hardware where the packing foam is assembled from cut and glued sheets of a white or pink, slightly shiny, somewhat waxy-looking foam material, that's Ethafoam. You can find it on the Net in sheets ranging from 1" to 4" thick; it's easily cut with a knife, so you can build whatever padding frame you like.
I found that the Mezzi laptop cases were significantly cheaper, and had the benefit of being available in a size to fit my laptop -- the LUXslim XXT aluminum case fit my laptop very nicely -- a Clevo D900K, power supply, external Logitech trackball, external FDD, WTR54GS wireless router, and headphones fit neatly into the case.
Look for 'closed-cell foam'; that will get you the right material.
*sigh* 'Pong' is a British slang term for a bad smell or stench, or the act of stinking -- referring to the GenCon attendees, sometimes known as (in a more literal sense than the apellation is usually meant) 'The Great Unwashed'.
...on both sides, as the console-gaming boothies get their first real exposure to 'pong' -- and not the electronic one...
Go back and look at the problems that prosecutors had in obtaining convictions under the Fugitive Slave Act. For a less-savory picture, go back and look at how rarely all-white juries in the South convicted a white defendant of assault or murder against a black victim.
The 1895 decision in Sparf vs. US that held that the court was not required to inform jurors of their power to acquit in the face of both the evidence and the law also upheld the existence of that right; the decision stated that the citizens had the responsibility to be aware of their rights and responsibilities, and it was not the court's responsibility to remind them. Three years after US v Moylan, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia also rendered a verdict upholding jury nullification, stating that the jury has an "... unreviewable and irreversible power.. to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge...." (US vs Dougherty, 473 F 2d 1113, 1139 (1972)).
I refer you to the decision in U.S. vs Moylan, 417 F 2d 1002, 1006 (1969):
However, it's a more succinct roll-up of the fact that if you take something that was fresh and innovative and remake it for the second, third, fourth, or fifth time, it's going to be crap unless you put a lot more work into it than was put into the original -- and slapping on a bunch of flashy special effects, which seems to be the primary characteristic of recent remakes, is not enough by itself to lift a crap remake out of being crap.
I don't find it that hard to believe. With a couple seasons to pick episodes from, I'm sure you can find one good scene in the run... After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
And that two-foot gun will do much the same damage at 10 feet as it will at a thousand feet, and should readily kill someone with a single hit. The only difference is in how hard it is to hit that little dot out there -- so when you get into a firefight, a "realistic" combat resolution results, effectively, in your charcter having a completely-random chance to die every time their opponent shoots -- and that is going to rapidly prove to be no fun for players.
It's not the blood circulation that gets the primary benefit from walking, it's lymph circulation. Because of the increased pressure in your legs, fluid escapes from your blood vessels, where it is collected by your lymphatic system and carried up to the nodes in your chest, where it is returned to your bloodstream. But unlike your circulatory system, the only pump for your lymphatic system is your muscles; the lymphatic ducts are squeezed by your muscles as you move, so if you don't walk around, the fluid builds up in your feet and calves. This is why people with lymphedema wear compression stockings; the additional pressure provided by the stocking helps keeps the fluid from seeping out in the first place, and assists the action of the muscles in pumping the lymph back up toward the chest. Standing in one spot creates the same effect as sitting down, except that there's a bigger fluid column pushing fluid out into your feet and calves.
And remember, without competent (and expensive) technical support, uninstalling Wife 1.0 will automatically install Alimony 1.0, which is a big resource hog...
If the backbone providers want to be free of government requirements that they provide the same level of service to everyone, then they should be prepared to accept the concurrent responsibility -- that as soon as they are no longer blind to the traffic passing over their networks, the moment they look at the packets to determine whether they should be given priority treatment, they're no longer a "common carrier", and become liable for any illegal activity they support by forwarding packets. I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA would love to have a nice, deep-pocketed target like the telecommunications industry to claim as co-defendants in suits claiming millions of dollars of damages from copyright violations due to filesharing. If they don't want government regulation, they shouldn't expect to get government protection.
Creating a level playing field is simple. At the point where the pipe provider looks at the packet to determine whether it comes from an 'upgrade' site and needs to be given a higher priority, the provider can no longer claim that they don't know anything about what is passing across their network, and can justifiably be stripped of their common carrier status. If the tradeoff for being allowed to charge sites to give packets from/to that site a higher priority is to become liable for the content carried on their network, it's not going to be a particularly attractive prospect.
It can't have been military in nature... the Act allocated money over 13 years, and the interstate highway system wasn't built to serve the purposes of the Navy (battleships can't meet the speed minimums on the interstates), and it says very clearly in the Constitution that no allocation of money for the Army may be longer than two years. And we'd never have a President who'd do anything that violated the Constitution, right? At least, not so blatantly...
I think that's the name they give to the bright light in the Big Room -- the one that has a ceiling that's sometimes blue with a bright light and sometimes black with lots of little lights.
Reading both articles, and other material on net neutrality on the Net, it seems to me that what we're seeing here is a frantic attempt to chase after escaping revenue -- as VOIP becomes more popular, the interchanges and long-distance trunks won't get as much traffic so the telcos will lose the charges they levied on that traffic -- by making it legal for them to say "Nice VOIP setup you have there. Be a shame if a surge in bandwidth usage disrupted its packet traffic and garbled conversations. But we'll cut you a deal; if you pay a 20% surcharge on your bandwidth rate, we'll see that your packets get a high priority, so they'll go through without interruption."
such as the temperatures recorded at sites that used to be in rural areas, but are now in suburban or urban areas, due to the growth of cities. The global-warming advocates admit that the urbanization itself causes the temperature readings to increase, but that they apply a correction factor to account for that increase. However, if you press them for details on the correction factor, it's based on estimates of how much a given amount of urbanization will increase the temperature -- making the resultant temperature data suspect. There are other 'corrections' that result in the warming being overstated, such as reduction in nighttime cooling due to increased cloudiness and other factors, which results in overstatement of temperature increases. For example, this page shows how improper data collection and adjustment skews the data (in this case, the premise that moving the data collection station can eliminate the urban heat island warming); after applying an empirical correction for the urban heat island, the average temperature at the Sydney station has decreased over the last century. While one data point is functionally useless for projecting an overall trend, it does illustrate the lack of scientific rigor in the collection of temperature data.
However, there are limits to what is practical to do in the interests of making a game playable, particularly with MMORPGs. For example, in NCSoft's 'City of Heroes', you can beat up on a group of Freakshow on the streets of Brickstown, and the other members of the group will react and attack you as soon as you attack the first member of the group -- but the other group of Freakshow fifty feet down the street won't bat an eyelash, even if one of the group you're attacking runs away past them and you fire a blast of lightning through the group at the fleeing villain. Now, on the one hand, not having every member of a villain group within a half-mile of an attack on some of their members serves to keep a character from being overwhelmed by opponents, while allowing for the number of opponents available to all the players in the zone high enough to make play enjoyable. On the other hand, the artificiality of having mobs standing around in what would be clear sight of a battle (and superhero battles would be more attention-getting than simple gunfights, with fire, energy, lightning, ice, and other attacks going off in different directions and people getting knocked around, sometimes dozens of feet) is somewhat immersion-breaking. But the genre is superheroes; hanging out on the edges, looking to kite one villain and get them to pull away from the rest of their group, so you can whack them and do it again doesn't feel heroic, so the aggro ranges have to be set to allow players to jump into a fight without worrying that all the other villains on the street in a five-block radius are going to zerg them the moment the first zapblast lights up the area.
My laptop has three nice, bright blue status LEDs just below the display, where they're shining in your eyes all the time you're using the laptop -- which is why my laptop has a small rectangle of painter's tape over the LED slots, which obscure them just enough so that they don't distract too much from the display. The lack of any kind of brightness control is, after the decision to put the status LEDs there in the first place, the unit's most annoying design flaw.
The problem is that the companies already benefit from legislation that restricts or eliminates competition. You cite a 10mbps 'standard rate' -- and I will assume here that you meant a 10Mbps rate, not ten millibits per second -- what prevents a provider who has an existing (and government-maintained) monopoly on high-speed service in an area to decide that its 'standard rate' is now 100kbps (still faster than 56k dialup), with a $50/month charge to get 1Mbps access, and a $100/month charge to get 10Mbps access? Or the provider, whose board of directors has a preponderance of individuals with strong religous beliefs, suddenly deciding that they can't in all conscience operate a company that provides access to 'immoral' content and implements blocking for any site that serves porn, nudity, excessive violence, abortion-rights views, or any other opinion they disapprove of?
Unfortunately, the "We've got the most sophisticated and high-tech military in the world; the Iraqis don't have a chance against us" attitude was very real... and as far as defeating the Iraqi military went, it was correct. However, Shrub sent in troops without a clear plan for what we would do after Saddam was pulled down. From what I've seen, his expectation was that the Iraqis, grateful for having had Saddam's boot pulled off their necks, would rally around their American liberators and spontaneously form a cooperative, peaceful democracy. Instead, the Shiite majority took it as the opportunity to get their 'fair' share of the power, the Sunni minority that got pushed off the top of the heap started a guerilla campaign to bleed the occupying military white, and the Kurds took it as an opportunity to carve their own (hopefully) autonomous homeland back out of Iraq.
Iraq was a country created artificially by the British from territory seized from the Ottoman Turks after WWI, having been formed from three culturally distinct regions that have, over the country's history, provided sufficient internal conflict and despotism to establish a steady turnover in power until Saddam Hussein seized control. For all of his excesses in putting down resistance to his government, he did achieve a continuity of government beyond what Iraq had previously experienced.
From watching the 'reconstruction' of Iraq, I am reminded of two of the mottoes of the Interplanetary Relations Bureau from Lloyd Biggles' stories: "Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny." and "Democracy is not a form of government, it is a state of mind. People can not be arbitrarily placed in a state of mind." Shrub's actions in pushing the Iraqis into forming a democratic government appear driven by what he wants to have happen, not what it is practical for the Iraqis to achieve in a reasonable amount of time.
This is going to bring a whole new meaning to "blue screen of death".