Not only do they have a desire to strengthen support for their believes[sic] through an education system...
Which is different from anyone else how? Those who believe in macro-evolution (I happen to be one) also wish to strengthen support for our beliefs.
And regarding proof of the supernatural, the scientific method requires that one assume objectivity. What if looking for data influenced the data themselves? E.g. what looking for ghosts drove them away? What if testing God caused Him to ignore one?
Actually, this paper does a good job defending the Electoral College. The author argues that the college is a prime reason that our government has been so stable (only one civil war since our founding). Among its effects is that it demands that any president have a widespread geographic base and build meaningful coalitions.
Yes, parts of the system are relics of the days of poor communication, but parts are quite important.
For the same reason that.gov is US,.com is US and so on. The non-country-specific TLAs are assumed to be in the US, due to the fact that the net was developed here.
I don't think the Iraqis would consider us liberators since they are dying under the heel of a foreign invader.
The Iraqis are dying under a foreign invader, but it's not us: it's the Iranians, and the Syrians, and the Arabians. That is, those currently opposing us in Iraq are almost entirely foreigners.
It's true that Iraqis died when we invaded, but it's also true the Frenchmen died when we invaded France. We've taken pains to cause as few civilian casualties as possible.
As for the cause of the war, there were multiple reasons: before the war, the WMD angle seemed the most convincing since it was universally believed that Hussein was developing them. Given the Syrian connexion, I tend to think that the world's intelligence agencies were not incorrect. There were also some very strong ties to anti-US terrorists (no, I don't believe he had a plan in 11 September); there's also the fact that the only way to get some long-term stability in the region is to institute some regime change, and Saddam Hussein's was one regime we could legally and easily change.
When I visited London (the City of Cities, the modern Rome, the Queen of Civilisation), I was quite proud of my president (despite not voting for him--I voted for Browne) and my nation. We had, after all, recently liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban and were on the cusp of liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein.
Many old-Mac afficianados rightly point out that the user interface on the old Macs was in many regards much better. Yes, good virtual memory is great; yes, true multitasking is great; yes, protected memory is great (although there was this one cool old Mac program which would let you change numbers in memory--thereby allowing one to cheat wildly at games): but those are just things which should be under the covers. There's no fundamental reason that the old-Mac interface couldn't have had them.
As for the brushed metal interface, that's just a theme, and themes do no good useability make. Check out Ask Tog or Jakob Nielsen for some work on what real useability means.
Hey--I'm a Unix geek, and I think that it's cool that Macs now have a Unix layer. I just think that it's sad that they've lost much of their original UI advantages.
As has already been pointed out, minimum wage is NOT usually enough to survive on.
Where is it written that one must make enough to survive on one's own? Where is it written that upon turning 16 one must be able to survive unaided, and that at 18 one should be able to support a wife and three children?
A 16-year-old can live on his parents; his earnings go towards luxuries. There's nothing magic about turning 18 or 21 either: if one's skills are insufficiently developed, maybe it's better to stay at home until one has improved one's lot.
Yeah, it's nice to live on one's own, but that's a luxury the vast majority of the human race has gone without. The fact that so many of us are able to do so, and in fact have come to regard it as a right, indicates how stunningly potent our economy is: what was a dream for King David is reality for today's pauper.
Anyway, here in Denver one can get a flat for about $400/month (there's cheaper yet available, actually: I don't know how low it goes). At 160 workhours in the month (there are actually more, but...) that's $2.50/hour. One can eat for $2/day: that's $0.39/hr (I lived for $7/wk for three months seven years ago). Add busfare of $2.50/day (0.32/hr), electricity of $20/month ($0.13/hr) and $50/month to buy clothing ($0.32/hr)--which is much more than I spend--and one comes to a grand total of $3.91/hr, the vast majority of which was housing (and hence which could be reduced by sharing quarters). I daresay one could get it under $3/hr with some effort. It's not a pleasant life, but it's better than most people in the world have had for most of history. One would have the library for entertainment and city parks for exercise. One wouldn't have a car, or cable TV, or a computer (although that's available at the library)--but those are luxuries.
But fortunately we all want to better ourselves, and the fellow scrabbling around at $3/hr is likely to want to do better for himself, so he'll work hard and earn more. You make more now than you did when you were first employed, no? And it probably wasn't through the goodness of your employer's heart, but because you earned it.
The basic philosophy behind minimum wage laws is that if you work a full work week, you should be able to have enough money to feed, clothe and otherwise care for you and your immediate family.
Which is stupid. There are a large number of people, quite capable of working, who do not need to feed, clothe or shelter a family: children. Teenagers, in particular. There's another large number of folks who don't need to care for a family: single people. There's another group of folks who only need to care for one person: childless husbands. Then there are couples where both spouses work.
In the absence of minimum wage laws jobs have only to pay well enough to improve the quality of life beyond joblessness, which doesn't need to mean that it necessarily actually provides anything approximating a quality of life we would consider "humane."
Do you only pay enough at the grocer's to improve his life slightly past joblessness? Of course not. Why then should employers--who are as much consumers of labour as you are of vegetables and soft drinks--do so? Employers need employees, just like you need food: without them, their businesses die. They may not pay as much as the employees might like, but then I'm fairly certain that Safeway would love to sell you apples at $26/ea.
However, it's an argument bred from shortsightedness, pessimism and laziness, from the belief that it is acceptable to merely aim for survival, instead of a healthy world economy which serves all, and that it is foolish to even try to do better.
Your argument is bred from shortsightedness and ignorance of economic reality. The free market is the single best way to improve the lot in life of all mankind. Measures such as the minimum wage drive inflation and decrease the overall quality of life. Market-clearing wages and prices are the sole way to make the most people the happiest.
I like the idea of backed currency, but I'm not too partial on the Liberty Dollar folks. The problem is that anyone who accepts their currency is going to be shafted in the end. The waiter who accepts it, or the cashier who does the same, will be the one who ends up not being able to deposit it in the bank and gets stuck with a piece of paper (or coin) worth approximately half what he thought it was.
It wouldn't bother me if the $L10 silver coin were worth $10, and so on.
OTOH, I do like the look of their money, and I might even order some of it just because it's so pretty.
Sigh--that's the kind of economic illiteracy which will spell the doom of our nation.
If a candy bar is worth 50 cents to you but costs $7, will you buy it? Of course not--you'll do without. Likewise, if a job is worth $2/hr, but costs $5/hr, it won't be done. The effect of the minimum wage is thus to change that job from a $2/hr job to a $0/hr job.
There are plenty of jobs which can be satisfactorily performed by those who don't need to buy food, water or shelter: we call these people teenagers. Why should a job be done for more money when it can be done for less?
Note that low wages are not actually a problem in the US. My kid brother makes $9/hour working in fast food, for Pete's sake! Employers pay more than the legal minimum wage precisely because jobs are actually worth more than that, and because they realise that they are in competition with other employers for labour (even when I was a kid working in fast food, I made more than minimum wage).
Indeed, what the Congress typically does is wait until the prevailing wage is well above the minimum, and then adjust the minimum to be slightly therebelow. This minimises the economic disruption an actual minimum wage would cause.
Or, to put it differently, if a minimum wage of $7/hr is such a good idea, why not make it $1,000/hr and make everyone rich? Work that out, and you'll understand.
I'd purchase the $18 toaster, seeing that it was made more efficiently.
Back in college I was an office boy earning $4.15/hour, but the work I was doing was worth maybe $2/hour. Minimum wage laws are stupid--and ironically enough, end up hurting those at the low end of the job market (by pricing them out of jobs).
You forgot g: they are dressed for the bloody temperature outside. I'm curious why it is that some *@#% feel it necessary to keep the interior of a building at subtropical temperatures in the middle of winter.
Actually, colonisation of the Americas was an utterly horrid investment. Note that Spain and Portugal are hardly the world powers they were--much of this is attributed to the drain their colonial efforts were. ISTR something about all that gold actually making them poorer in real terms, ironically enough.
As for the space program, surely that money could have yielded better results if invested in actual pure science research, rather than rah-rah, aren't-we-great PR stunts? The scientific value of sending men to the moon (or Mars) is rather exceedingly small, after all.
Making the net loop area zero prevents the transmission line from acting as a giant DC generator and blowing out the switchgear, causing major blackouts (this happened in Canada in the 1970s, IIRC).
If that's so, surely it could be harnessed to produce cheap power, no?
Hundreds of thousands (millions?) of species have died out in the past, and more will in the future. Fortunately, new species arise and adapt as well. It's all part of the natural course of things.
If we should ever get off our rears and start colonising the oceans, we're going to be forced to exterminate most of the large life therein, given that it's so deadly. It's not much different from the aboriginal Americans hunting mammoths, camels, horses and everything else they could to extinction. Hopefully we'll be a bit smarter about it, and maybe we'll figure out a way to keep some of the species in preserves of some sort.
Saying God speaks through you is a way of saying your infallible.
Nice job of clipping the bit where I demonstrated that it's exactly not that. But of course, I should know not to expect intellectual honesty from a leftist.
I'm still waiting for the source of your supposed quote, and am still waiting for the context of the quote (that is, the full text of the remarks).
Rumsfeld said he "knew" where the WMD's were. Its pretty obvious he didn't since there weren't any and if he "knew" where they were he would have found them.
He had intelligence which specified that they were at X, Y and Z. The intel was incorrect. This isn't rocket science.
Or do you expect him to have personally verified the locations, but visiting them and perhaps scrawling 'Rummy wuz here' thereon? C'mon! All the evidence says that he did believe that he knew where WMDs were.
...Clinton and the whole world didn't launch an invasion based on flawed intelligence...
Clinton launched more missiles into Iraq than George H.W. Bush did!
More to the point, WMDs were not the sole reason for the invasion of Iraq. There were multiple, mutually-supporting reasons. At the time, we focused on WMDs because the evidence was so compelling, and because it was something the world agreed on (we didn't need to convince Putin that Iraq had WMDs; trying to convince him that dictators are Bad News would have been somewhat futile...). Executive decisions are made on the basis of partial, sometimes flawed intelligence. I have seen nothing to date which leads me to believe that the current administration were anything but correct to act as they did based on the information they had at the time.
My personal read on the situation is that Iraq was the one Middle East state wherein we were able to go to war and effect regime change with a sold casus belli. We need to go to war and effect regime change somewhere in the Middle East in order to indicate to Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Pakistan et al. that we're serious, and that if they continue to support terrorism we will destroy them. Since we were already at war with Iraq; since Iraq had violated the terms of the cease-fire; since it did not fully comply with its international obligations; since it was a monstrous and tyrannical regime; since we believed it to be a clear danger to the stability of the region; since we believed it to posess weapons of mass destruction; since Iraq had dealt with al Qaida; since we had international backing--for all those reasons we were able to re-open hostilities. But the underlying reason was a pressing need to demonstrate our serious intent.
Which has worked--note how Qaddafi has surrendered his program; note how Pakistan is co-operating pretty well in the hunt; note how the typical state sponsors of terrorism are behaving in a much more circumspect manner than before.
Bush and Blair did, big, big difference. The rest of the world was telling them not to.
Rest of the world?!? Um, there are dozens of other nations in this with us. Yes, France, Germany and Russia opposed us--but given that they were in Hussein's pocket, wouldn't one have expected that? Given that they profited quite well from him, wouldn't one have expected that? Yes, a motley collection of tinpot dictators across the world opposed our toppling of a tinpot dictator on the other side of the world: somehow I'm unopposed.
Besides the US and UK, we are backed by Austrialia, New Zealand, Kuwait, Eritrea,
Ethiopia,
Uganda,
Rwanda,
Angola,
Portugal,
Denmark,
Norway,
Netherlands,
Iceland,
Italy,
Estonia,
Latvia,
Lithuania,
Poland,
Czech Republic,
Slovakia,
Hungary,
Albania,
Macedonia,
Romania,
Bulgaria,
Turkey,
Ukraine,
Moldova,
Japan,
South Korea,
Singapore,
Philippines,
Afghanistan,
Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan,
Azerbaijan,
Georgia,
Marshall Islands,
Micronesia,
Solomon Islands,
Mongolia,
Palau,
Tonga,
Thailand,
El Salvador,
Colom
Even if I accept the premise that the number of language bindings is significantly higher for GTK (I think it's a myth), you could just as easily argue that the bindings for Qt are lower because people are happy with C++ and frustrated with C (i.e. there's no need for lots of language bindings for Qt because it's nice enough already).
Well, I listed the bindings for gtk+; can you point me to a listing of bindings for Qt? I'd be happy to be shown wrong.
As for the idea that there's no need for other languages because there are C++ bindings, that's complete and utter poppycock. Different languages are good at different things, and many people would rather write in a Lisp, or Haskell, or what-have-you than in C++ (or C, or what-have-you). There are enough languages out there and enough adherents thereof that the lack of bindings bespeaks either a lack of interest in Qt or the difficulty of binding Qt and most languages. I'm inclined to think that it's a little bit of both.
"Better" in what sense? The alternatives you list have nowhere near the developer mindshare of C++, and so will be more of a barrier to entry.
Better in the sense of being better, more capable, more powerful, more elegant, more attractive languages. As Paul Graham has demonstrated, language choice is key: a good hacker using a good language is dozens of times more productive than a good hacker using a poor language, and exponentially more productive than a piss-poor programmer using a piss-poor language.
Huh? KDE, the most popular Free Software desktop environment, is based around C++.
And that has exactly nil effect on every other free software project out there. Like I wrote, the vast majority of free software is written in C; thus the community has judged C++ and found it wanting. Hell, there's quite possibly more actively maintained free software written in Java, another unacceptable language.
Sure, you can make a survey prove anything you want. And frankly I don't care. Button ordering seems like a small deal for me - but I can vividly imagine that for some people this is a very big deal - and frankly I think the Gnome "let's play different from everybody else" attitude here is lame.
Did you just ignore the bit where I said that usability studies proved this twenty years ago? Did you miss the bit about things being this way on the Mac?
Good science is not about 'proving anything one wants'; it's about testing hypotheses. Usability studies demonstrated a fact about button ordering. That Windows and KDE got it wrong makes that fact no less true.
I'd like a reputable reference for the 'God told me to strike at al Qaida' quote--and context, of course. The 'I trust the God speaks through me' quote is inoffensive to me: in context it simply reflects that he believes that what he's doing is right, else he wouldn't be doing it. What man doesn't believe that what he does is right?
Hussein did have ties to al Qaida: the administration is correct to point this out. It does not appear at the moment that they had ties to the 11 September operation, but I do not recall any official source stating that. The reputed Prague meeting is still up in the air: last I heard, Czech intelligence stood behind their report while the CIA (the same CIA which misreported the location of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and the same CIA which was close to 100% certain that Iraq had WMDs) flat-out denies it.
As I noted, every intelligence agency in the world believed that Hussein had WMDs. At the moment it appears that they were all incorrect. Why that is so is an interesting question. Were Hussein's underlings reporting progress they weren't making, in order to line their own pockets with weapons money? Were the intelligence agencies afraid to report things were safe, in case they were wrong? Were the intelligence agencies exaggerating the likelihood of Iraqi WMD programmes in order to increase their own funding?
Lastly, I don't see how you can fault the administration for believing its intelligence apparatus. Clinton believed in Iraqi WMDs for the exact same reason that Bush believed in them: the CIA and every single other major intelligence agency agreed that he had them. Why is a Republican administration supposed to be omniscient when a Democratic administration gets a free pass?
Slashdot Mirror
Which is different from anyone else how? Those who believe in macro-evolution (I happen to be one) also wish to strengthen support for our beliefs.
And regarding proof of the supernatural, the scientific method requires that one assume objectivity. What if looking for data influenced the data themselves? E.g. what looking for ghosts drove them away? What if testing God caused Him to ignore one?
Yes, parts of the system are relics of the days of poor communication, but parts are quite important.
Anyway, as time passes no doubt its speed will improve.
OTOH, my employee orientation was called 'Becoming One Voice,' which sounds horribly socialist/fascist.
For the same reason that .gov is US, .com is US and so on. The non-country-specific TLAs are assumed to be in the US, due to the fact that the net was developed here.
It would be even better as chicago.il.us.
The Iraqis are dying under a foreign invader, but it's not us: it's the Iranians, and the Syrians, and the Arabians. That is, those currently opposing us in Iraq are almost entirely foreigners.
It's true that Iraqis died when we invaded, but it's also true the Frenchmen died when we invaded France. We've taken pains to cause as few civilian casualties as possible.
As for the cause of the war, there were multiple reasons: before the war, the WMD angle seemed the most convincing since it was universally believed that Hussein was developing them. Given the Syrian connexion, I tend to think that the world's intelligence agencies were not incorrect. There were also some very strong ties to anti-US terrorists (no, I don't believe he had a plan in 11 September); there's also the fact that the only way to get some long-term stability in the region is to institute some regime change, and Saddam Hussein's was one regime we could legally and easily change.
When I visited London (the City of Cities, the modern Rome, the Queen of Civilisation), I was quite proud of my president (despite not voting for him--I voted for Browne) and my nation. We had, after all, recently liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban and were on the cusp of liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein.
As for the brushed metal interface, that's just a theme, and themes do no good useability make. Check out Ask Tog or Jakob Nielsen for some work on what real useability means.
Hey--I'm a Unix geek, and I think that it's cool that Macs now have a Unix layer. I just think that it's sad that they've lost much of their original UI advantages.
Where is it written that one must make enough to survive on one's own? Where is it written that upon turning 16 one must be able to survive unaided, and that at 18 one should be able to support a wife and three children?
A 16-year-old can live on his parents; his earnings go towards luxuries. There's nothing magic about turning 18 or 21 either: if one's skills are insufficiently developed, maybe it's better to stay at home until one has improved one's lot.
Yeah, it's nice to live on one's own, but that's a luxury the vast majority of the human race has gone without. The fact that so many of us are able to do so, and in fact have come to regard it as a right, indicates how stunningly potent our economy is: what was a dream for King David is reality for today's pauper.
Anyway, here in Denver one can get a flat for about $400/month (there's cheaper yet available, actually: I don't know how low it goes). At 160 workhours in the month (there are actually more, but...) that's $2.50/hour. One can eat for $2/day: that's $0.39/hr (I lived for $7/wk for three months seven years ago). Add busfare of $2.50/day (0.32/hr), electricity of $20/month ($0.13/hr) and $50/month to buy clothing ($0.32/hr)--which is much more than I spend--and one comes to a grand total of $3.91/hr, the vast majority of which was housing (and hence which could be reduced by sharing quarters). I daresay one could get it under $3/hr with some effort. It's not a pleasant life, but it's better than most people in the world have had for most of history. One would have the library for entertainment and city parks for exercise. One wouldn't have a car, or cable TV, or a computer (although that's available at the library)--but those are luxuries.
But fortunately we all want to better ourselves, and the fellow scrabbling around at $3/hr is likely to want to do better for himself, so he'll work hard and earn more. You make more now than you did when you were first employed, no? And it probably wasn't through the goodness of your employer's heart, but because you earned it.
Which is stupid. There are a large number of people, quite capable of working, who do not need to feed, clothe or shelter a family: children. Teenagers, in particular. There's another large number of folks who don't need to care for a family: single people. There's another group of folks who only need to care for one person: childless husbands. Then there are couples where both spouses work.
In the absence of minimum wage laws jobs have only to pay well enough to improve the quality of life beyond joblessness, which doesn't need to mean that it necessarily actually provides anything approximating a quality of life we would consider "humane."
Do you only pay enough at the grocer's to improve his life slightly past joblessness? Of course not. Why then should employers--who are as much consumers of labour as you are of vegetables and soft drinks--do so? Employers need employees, just like you need food: without them, their businesses die. They may not pay as much as the employees might like, but then I'm fairly certain that Safeway would love to sell you apples at $26/ea.
However, it's an argument bred from shortsightedness, pessimism and laziness, from the belief that it is acceptable to merely aim for survival, instead of a healthy world economy which serves all, and that it is foolish to even try to do better.
Your argument is bred from shortsightedness and ignorance of economic reality. The free market is the single best way to improve the lot in life of all mankind. Measures such as the minimum wage drive inflation and decrease the overall quality of life. Market-clearing wages and prices are the sole way to make the most people the happiest.
It wouldn't bother me if the $L10 silver coin were worth $10, and so on.
OTOH, I do like the look of their money, and I might even order some of it just because it's so pretty.
If a candy bar is worth 50 cents to you but costs $7, will you buy it? Of course not--you'll do without. Likewise, if a job is worth $2/hr, but costs $5/hr, it won't be done. The effect of the minimum wage is thus to change that job from a $2/hr job to a $0/hr job.
There are plenty of jobs which can be satisfactorily performed by those who don't need to buy food, water or shelter: we call these people teenagers. Why should a job be done for more money when it can be done for less?
Note that low wages are not actually a problem in the US. My kid brother makes $9/hour working in fast food, for Pete's sake! Employers pay more than the legal minimum wage precisely because jobs are actually worth more than that, and because they realise that they are in competition with other employers for labour (even when I was a kid working in fast food, I made more than minimum wage).
Indeed, what the Congress typically does is wait until the prevailing wage is well above the minimum, and then adjust the minimum to be slightly therebelow. This minimises the economic disruption an actual minimum wage would cause.
Or, to put it differently, if a minimum wage of $7/hr is such a good idea, why not make it $1,000/hr and make everyone rich? Work that out, and you'll understand.
Back in college I was an office boy earning $4.15/hour, but the work I was doing was worth maybe $2/hour. Minimum wage laws are stupid--and ironically enough, end up hurting those at the low end of the job market (by pricing them out of jobs).
You forgot g: they are dressed for the bloody temperature outside. I'm curious why it is that some *@#% feel it necessary to keep the interior of a building at subtropical temperatures in the middle of winter.
What's really annoying is that I was using /. before there were any user accounts, but waited so long that I've a relatively high UID. Sigh...
As for the space program, surely that money could have yielded better results if invested in actual pure science research, rather than rah-rah, aren't-we-great PR stunts? The scientific value of sending men to the moon (or Mars) is rather exceedingly small, after all.
If that's so, surely it could be harnessed to produce cheap power, no?
Many people use it that way, but they're wrong. There are people who write 'womyn' or 'waitron,' and they're just as wrong.
Humanity is not the problem; indeed, humanity is our only hope for a solution. That's because the noun 'humanity' refers to the state of being humane.
The word you were looking for is 'mankind.'
If we should ever get off our rears and start colonising the oceans, we're going to be forced to exterminate most of the large life therein, given that it's so deadly. It's not much different from the aboriginal Americans hunting mammoths, camels, horses and everything else they could to extinction. Hopefully we'll be a bit smarter about it, and maybe we'll figure out a way to keep some of the species in preserves of some sort.
Nice job of clipping the bit where I demonstrated that it's exactly not that. But of course, I should know not to expect intellectual honesty from a leftist.
I'm still waiting for the source of your supposed quote, and am still waiting for the context of the quote (that is, the full text of the remarks).
Rumsfeld said he "knew" where the WMD's were. Its pretty obvious he didn't since there weren't any and if he "knew" where they were he would have found them.
He had intelligence which specified that they were at X, Y and Z. The intel was incorrect. This isn't rocket science.
Or do you expect him to have personally verified the locations, but visiting them and perhaps scrawling 'Rummy wuz here' thereon? C'mon! All the evidence says that he did believe that he knew where WMDs were.
Clinton launched more missiles into Iraq than George H.W. Bush did!
More to the point, WMDs were not the sole reason for the invasion of Iraq. There were multiple, mutually-supporting reasons. At the time, we focused on WMDs because the evidence was so compelling, and because it was something the world agreed on (we didn't need to convince Putin that Iraq had WMDs; trying to convince him that dictators are Bad News would have been somewhat futile...). Executive decisions are made on the basis of partial, sometimes flawed intelligence. I have seen nothing to date which leads me to believe that the current administration were anything but correct to act as they did based on the information they had at the time.
My personal read on the situation is that Iraq was the one Middle East state wherein we were able to go to war and effect regime change with a sold casus belli. We need to go to war and effect regime change somewhere in the Middle East in order to indicate to Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Pakistan et al. that we're serious, and that if they continue to support terrorism we will destroy them. Since we were already at war with Iraq; since Iraq had violated the terms of the cease-fire; since it did not fully comply with its international obligations; since it was a monstrous and tyrannical regime; since we believed it to be a clear danger to the stability of the region; since we believed it to posess weapons of mass destruction; since Iraq had dealt with al Qaida; since we had international backing--for all those reasons we were able to re-open hostilities. But the underlying reason was a pressing need to demonstrate our serious intent.
Which has worked--note how Qaddafi has surrendered his program; note how Pakistan is co-operating pretty well in the hunt; note how the typical state sponsors of terrorism are behaving in a much more circumspect manner than before.
Bush and Blair did, big, big difference. The rest of the world was telling them not to.
Rest of the world?!? Um, there are dozens of other nations in this with us. Yes, France, Germany and Russia opposed us--but given that they were in Hussein's pocket, wouldn't one have expected that? Given that they profited quite well from him, wouldn't one have expected that? Yes, a motley collection of tinpot dictators across the world opposed our toppling of a tinpot dictator on the other side of the world: somehow I'm unopposed.
Besides the US and UK, we are backed by Austrialia, New Zealand, Kuwait, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Angola, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Iceland, Italy, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Philippines, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Solomon Islands, Mongolia, Palau, Tonga, Thailand, El Salvador, Colom
Well, I listed the bindings for gtk+; can you point me to a listing of bindings for Qt? I'd be happy to be shown wrong.
As for the idea that there's no need for other languages because there are C++ bindings, that's complete and utter poppycock. Different languages are good at different things, and many people would rather write in a Lisp, or Haskell, or what-have-you than in C++ (or C, or what-have-you). There are enough languages out there and enough adherents thereof that the lack of bindings bespeaks either a lack of interest in Qt or the difficulty of binding Qt and most languages. I'm inclined to think that it's a little bit of both.
"Better" in what sense? The alternatives you list have nowhere near the developer mindshare of C++, and so will be more of a barrier to entry.
Better in the sense of being better, more capable, more powerful, more elegant, more attractive languages. As Paul Graham has demonstrated, language choice is key: a good hacker using a good language is dozens of times more productive than a good hacker using a poor language, and exponentially more productive than a piss-poor programmer using a piss-poor language.
Huh? KDE, the most popular Free Software desktop environment, is based around C++.
And that has exactly nil effect on every other free software project out there. Like I wrote, the vast majority of free software is written in C; thus the community has judged C++ and found it wanting. Hell, there's quite possibly more actively maintained free software written in Java, another unacceptable language.
Did you just ignore the bit where I said that usability studies proved this twenty years ago? Did you miss the bit about things being this way on the Mac?
Good science is not about 'proving anything one wants'; it's about testing hypotheses. Usability studies demonstrated a fact about button ordering. That Windows and KDE got it wrong makes that fact no less true.
Hussein did have ties to al Qaida: the administration is correct to point this out. It does not appear at the moment that they had ties to the 11 September operation, but I do not recall any official source stating that. The reputed Prague meeting is still up in the air: last I heard, Czech intelligence stood behind their report while the CIA (the same CIA which misreported the location of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and the same CIA which was close to 100% certain that Iraq had WMDs) flat-out denies it.
As I noted, every intelligence agency in the world believed that Hussein had WMDs. At the moment it appears that they were all incorrect. Why that is so is an interesting question. Were Hussein's underlings reporting progress they weren't making, in order to line their own pockets with weapons money? Were the intelligence agencies afraid to report things were safe, in case they were wrong? Were the intelligence agencies exaggerating the likelihood of Iraqi WMD programmes in order to increase their own funding?
Lastly, I don't see how you can fault the administration for believing its intelligence apparatus. Clinton believed in Iraqi WMDs for the exact same reason that Bush believed in them: the CIA and every single other major intelligence agency agreed that he had them. Why is a Republican administration supposed to be omniscient when a Democratic administration gets a free pass?