How is this Insightful? Depression does not only affect people of weak mind or body.
Alan Turing commited suicide. I'm sure there are many other examples of incredible people who ended their own lives.
You're attempting to apply value judgements to natural selection. This is a fallacy. Natural selection is just how we describe the fact that those who have genetic traits that better allow them to pass on their dna to the next generation, will tend to be better represented genetically in future generations. If you are depressed and kill yourself, this does not necessarily make you a 'worse' person, any more than if you walk outside and get mowed over by a drunk driver. But both of these actions will eliminate you from the gene pool, and hence are both natural selection in action.
They're just like any other large company who are more concerned about their stock price and making money - than about taking care of their end-users.
Can I get a "Duh"? Google is a public company with a responsibility to their shareholders - otherwise known as their owners. What do you propose they do, stop trying to make money? I mean really, if you think making money is so evil, why accept compensation for your job - just work for free and stay good!
Complaining about corporations trying to maximize profit is kinda missing the point. The very purpose of their existence is to make money...that's why people invest in them.
I do have one complaint: typical random encounters are often not nearly interactive enough. They encourage the whole "everybody just fight" syndrome that the final fantasy games turned into an epidemic. Of course, that's par for the course for about 98% of rpgs.
I may be overly sensitive to this one just because I recently completed both the Digital Devil Saga games, which truly forced the player to think about their actions in every encounter. They're both really excellent games, and I'd recommend them to anyone who doesn't mind a little bit of a challenge in their rpgs. (Then you can see if you can track down Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, which makes the DDS games look easy. If you have the patience to finish it, it's very good, however.)
If you liked the past DW games, then you'll like DQ8, cause it's basically the same thing. Sure, the graphics are much prettier and the story is a lot better, but in essense the gameplay comes down to the same thing it always was. This game will involve some grinding for levels and gold, but that shouldn't be surprising given that all the games were like that. It's not an interactive movie like a modern FF game, but that, to me, makes it more fun in many respects.
I'm not an astronomer either, having just taken a couple of courses in college, but my professors seemed to frame the massive impact theory as more 'the best explanation we have for right now.' It had the advantage of explaining things like the size of the moon, the composition, its unusual distance and orbital velocity (which just don't fit for a capture). It's not perfect (especially if the larger solar system creation model doesn't hold up), but it's the only explanation that doesn't have especially glaring holes in it.
Because, in evolutionary terms, exhausting the resources another species uses and/or exploiting resources that they can't is crushing and ousting another species. Also, in the time periods we're talking about, 1000 years is barely a blink of the eye.
We go to the moon in this decade... The space race was won by people with drive and ambition. These days NASA is full of over-educated monkeys who cringe at their own shadow.
Over-educated? They're fucking rocket scientists. A lot of education is generally considered a prerequisite. NASA's problems would seem to have a lot more to do with bureaucracy, politics, and lack of budget than, say, knowing too much.
'Designing as you go' is the opposite of design. The whole point of designing is to plan out what you're going to do ahead of time. It's a shame more software companies don't seem to realize this.
How prevalent is this practice? It would be pretty silly to say I've never noticed it (it's hard for one person to check this by themselves), but I was certainly not aware that it happened.
Hard to say for the online world, but price discrimination is common...you just probably don't recognize it. Different groups tend to be willing to pay different prices. For example, the types of people who clip coupons tend to be more bargain-conscious...and have you ever seen someone offer a discount with a student id?
I suppose it could have been a marketing ploy: make the Xbox security circumventable (although not so much so as to prevent plausible deniability) and allow a user base to grow based on piracy ripping off your platform partners. Then once your userbase is established, upgrade to a secure model, knowing that you'll take most of your users with you.
Because that approach worked so well for the Dreamcast.
This guy seems to view college as a way to train yourself in a discipline, and refine your skills. I couldn't disagree more. College is when you educate yourself, and enrich yourself, and expand your horizons. It's when you meet the people who you hang out with because you actually like them, not because their locker happened to be near yours in high school. It's when you have more freedom than ever to go out and do what you want, without the obligations of life and the restrictions of high school tying you down. It's when you find out just what it is you really like doing, and who you are. I can't imagine a better way to become a boring, pitiful waste of a human being than his recommendation of 'take programming classes, do programming research projects, and then you can take a few math classes for some real variety.'
It's not that I have anything against technical work, but really, you're gonna be doing that shit for the rest of your life if you get a job in it. Go out, find some beer, and drink it, for god's sake. Enjoy yourself. He disses social sciences because they're not logical, and subject to trends. He specifically disses on philosophy classes, because they don't teach you in a useful way. That is completely missing the point. They aren't engineering classes. You're not supposed to go through a giant textbook of information and have more thrown at you in lectures. The point of a philosophy class or a literature class is to have a subject that you can go in and discuss. Anyone who can read Nietzsche or Plato or Spinoza and not have a reaction of some sort, and a desire to tell others about it, is just a boring person.
Don't let yourself be pigeonholed like this. Don't be the typical boring engineer who can program anything but can't get a date to save his fucking life. Chances are if you're majoring in Computer Science you're already pretty damn good with computers. Go learn about something else, while the information is easily accessible and you don't have other obligations breathing down your neck. If you think you're smart, then find a way to apply your brain to something else other than the same old shit. Try out some shit that you didn't think you'd be interested in...you might be surprised. And don't forget to have some fun, because if you follow this guy's program, you're not gonna have a lot of chance later.
I know a lot of you think programming is really fun. But trust me, if you go out and look, you'll find other things that are more fun, too.
I personally think this review of Katamari Damacy over at insert credit is one of the best reviews of a video game I've ever seen. It really cuts to the heart of what games are all about and why this silly little game is so fun. Made more of an impression on me than most of the reviews linked from this article. I ran into it by accident on Google one day, and now I read the site pretty regularly. Was very impressed.
That's one of the other things that I think is interesting about this product. It's really the only MMO that has an extremely long history, where there are millions and millions of people that are already dedicated to that franchise. They're already tied into the storylines, the characters and what have you, and as a result of that we think that we have a built in audience that is going to be interested in checking it out.
Uhm, I don't suppose you've ever heard of Star Wars Galaxies? There are, apparantly, people who are just a tiny bit attached to this "Star Wars" franchise as well. And that made it such a great game, too...
And, y'know, while on that subject...isn't talking about Warcraft in terms of its grand plot about on the same level as talking about the original Doom that way? I've played the games since the first one, and I haven't gotten much more out of the plot other than "Orcs kill humans, and then humans kill orcs." Admittedly, that may be because I filtered most of it out, but I still hardly think it's a crowning achievement that people are extremely attached to, character-wise or plot-wise...
I think anybody who's ever coded anything of even a moderate size, much less a giant project of the scale of what Blizzard would be taking on, knows that the unexpected just happens sometimes and it can set you back weeks, or more. Predictions of how long software projects will take are usually more accurately called "guesses". And trying to get a project out by a deadline no matter what usually means "Ship it with the bugs, we'll patch it later." I don't think Blizzard should be criticized for *not* taking this approach.
Of course, it's not like Blizzard products have never shipped with a bug in them. But I think the entire idea of polishing a product until they're sure it's worth putting out is a good one. Lots of good games have been ruined by being pushed out too early. And while Blizzard's development cycle is quite long, they don't seem to have a vaporware problem, either.
Course, Blizzard seems to have almost nothing to do with this game, so we'll see if they hold it up to the same standards since their name's gonna be on it.
I definitely agree. Seems like every time I see a little kid walking around these days they're quite overweight, which I suspect is because of the phenomenon that you're describing. Not that I don't think TV and video games have a place for kids, since they develop other sorts of skills (How many of us know the alphabet from watching sesame street? And video games develop things like hand-eye coordination and problem-solving skills.), but parents have to draw the line somewhere.
And childhood games also teach kids what bastards people can be, which I think is a valuable lesson that needs learned early on.
One of my pet fantasies as graphics get more realistic is to get into young kids' games. You know, things like "tag", "hide and seek" - the things I really did. Disgusting idea really, worse than battery-powered kid's vehicles. Even worse, I'll bet such a game would sell. I think I'd cry all the way to the bank. I'm happy I don't have time to even try such a thing.
Something like, I dunno, Capture the Flag? And Splinter Cell multiplayer is basically hide and seek where everyone's both hiding and seeking at the same time. I can't think of a direct analog of tag offhand, but I'm sure it's out there.
Thing about kids games is that they're often pretty much archetypes of games...games boiled down to the purest form it can be in and still be a game. These tend to translate pretty well to any medium. Frankly if you could find a popular kid's game that hasn't been translated to FPS form yet, you could probably design a killer mod...
You can play diplomacy online, which makes the player requirement a lot easier. There are public servers available for playing diplomacy...although I can't remember more information, and I'm too lazy to google it. It's a lot easier to backstab people online, too. It's all part of the game.
There's all sorts of wiggle room in the numbers however.
Say my distributers come and tell me that they have taken over 10m+ orders for my game. Do I setup servers to handle that load, or do I set it up for the more reasonable estimate of around 2-5mil due to the fact that, while 10m+ copies may be sitting on the shelves, only a fraction of those will be purchased.
Now, granted, in H2's case, it's a sizable fraction, but how many other titles sell out completely? I'm willing to bet there have been so few that you can name the last 5 off the top of your head.
Actually, there are quite a number of statistical tools you can use to predict this 'wiggle room.' Companies do this all the time when they're trying to decide what inventory levels to maintain. You can calculate a 'Service Level,' which is just saying that in, say, 95% of scenerios you won't stock out.
Now, we're talking about network traffic and not inventory, but it wouldn't be hard to translate the data. I'm amazed that Valve didn't do this. That's just bad business. Maybe their forecasting tools were just shit.
Mental popcorn? 2500+ pages of historical fiction contemplating the roots of our modern scientific, social, political, and financial systems is mental popcorn? I mean, it seemed to me like the whole Baroque Cycle was trying to get at the roots of modern thought. That's not popcorn to me.
Of course, as a caveat, I'll point out that I consider there to be a big difference between the plot of a novel and what it's about.
About the timetable for release, it makes perfect sense. Every generation, you get one console out that's much earlier than the others (genesis, ps2, etc.), and usually by the end of the generation it's looking pretty long in the tooth hardware-wise. On the other hand, if you're the last one to release, the competitors get a huge established customer base that's hard to compete with. Now, admittedly Sony was successful in releasing the ps2 earlier than the gamecube or xbox (but look at the dreamcast), but the ps2's strategy was largely to build off the established ps1 customer base, and that won't work as well for nintendo.
If they release around the same time as Sony, people will have to make the decision of whether to buy a ps3 or a Revolution. It'll be interesting to see what choices people make.
> You need to be able to convince other countries that your side is right. Bush has failed to do that
Italy, Poland, GB, Japan, Korea, and for a time the Phillipines, Spain,... Disagree with you. But even if they did not you dont wait for (as Zell Miller put it) Paris to tell us when we can defend ourselves. If we went in alone so be it, the Iraqi's kidnapped a french Journalist because of the headscarf ban in french shcools, even though they fought hard against the war.
Yes, there was more diversity in international opinion than some would have you believe. So how do you decide on a course of action when international opinion is split? By working through international organizations designed to do just that.
And incidentally, kidnapped French journalists really have nothing to do with whether the war was right or not. The only relevance here is that tossing a country into a state of chaos and war tends to create a pretty good environment for those types to operate in. But that's pretty much a side effect of it being a war.
> Bush FAILED to convince the international community and America on the presence of WMD in Iraq.
Yup, but sarin laced shells have been found in Iraq.
Uhm, recent findings were very clear that there were no WMD programs, and no efforts to develop WMD programs. Any suggestion otherwise is simply factually wrong. Note that doesn't necessarily mean that Bush made the wrong decision...whether he truly believed that there were WMDs when the war started is far more relevant. In other words, if the intelligence Bush was getting truly had him convinced that WMDs were in Iraq, then he can't be faulted for acting on that belief. Now, he might be faulted for intelligence failures, or for misrepresenting the intelligence he was receiving...these are different, yet important, issues.
> Bush FAILED to convince our allies to come to our side, some of whom have been our ally for over 50 years.
France has always been an ally of convience and we can do without the Germans. The Tussians were a dissapointment, but seing as they (like france) had a good deal of money owed them its not suprising.
France is not an ally of convenience. France is a country that shares an extremely similar cultural heritage, and is an important economic partner. And considering that they're part of the EU, which is rather important these days, you know, it doesn't seem wise to arbitrarily piss them off. And incidentally, all the venom against France is particularly childish and irrational. "What'd France ever do for us...they just rolled over in WWII and they're all snooty and stuff." Hm, how about the fact that without their military support in the Revolution, we would not be a country right now. Historical, cultural, and economic ties. Yeah, why would we ever want to ally with them...
And we can "do without" Germany? Your diatribe is beginning to sound like pre-WW2 isolationism, and similar attitudes seem to be spreading across much of the country. "We don't need the rest of the world!" That sort of view combined with an apparant willingness to invade other sovereign nations without international support is quite dangerous.
> 90% American soldiers and the American taxpayers are funding 90% of cost to rebuild Iraq, which is now at over $200 billion. The UK makes up another 5%. Big fucking whoop.
I dont care if we had to foot 100% of the bill. You dont wait for france when you have to fight. The UN sits by for a decade and does nothing except the oil for food scam, they watch genocide in sudan and do nothing, and we are supposed to wait for them the be ready to go into Iraq?
Again, your isolation of France in attempt to ridicule it makes you look foolish.
Essentially you're saying you don't support the UN (and before you accuse me of putting words in your mouth, think about the implications of what you wrote). The UN has abs
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Just have Sony cut checks to third party developers to make exclusive games for the PS3. Microsoft does this now.
And as evidenced by their complete domination of the market with the Xbox, this strategy is flawless.
How is this Insightful? Depression does not only affect people of weak mind or body.
Alan Turing commited suicide. I'm sure there are many other examples of incredible people who ended their own lives.
You're attempting to apply value judgements to natural selection. This is a fallacy. Natural selection is just how we describe the fact that those who have genetic traits that better allow them to pass on their dna to the next generation, will tend to be better represented genetically in future generations. If you are depressed and kill yourself, this does not necessarily make you a 'worse' person, any more than if you walk outside and get mowed over by a drunk driver. But both of these actions will eliminate you from the gene pool, and hence are both natural selection in action.
They're just like any other large company who are more concerned about their stock price and making money - than about taking care of their end-users.
Can I get a "Duh"? Google is a public company with a responsibility to their shareholders - otherwise known as their owners. What do you propose they do, stop trying to make money? I mean really, if you think making money is so evil, why accept compensation for your job - just work for free and stay good!
Complaining about corporations trying to maximize profit is kinda missing the point. The very purpose of their existence is to make money...that's why people invest in them.
I do have one complaint: typical random encounters are often not nearly interactive enough. They encourage the whole "everybody just fight" syndrome that the final fantasy games turned into an epidemic. Of course, that's par for the course for about 98% of rpgs.
I may be overly sensitive to this one just because I recently completed both the Digital Devil Saga games, which truly forced the player to think about their actions in every encounter. They're both really excellent games, and I'd recommend them to anyone who doesn't mind a little bit of a challenge in their rpgs. (Then you can see if you can track down Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, which makes the DDS games look easy. If you have the patience to finish it, it's very good, however.)
If you liked the past DW games, then you'll like DQ8, cause it's basically the same thing. Sure, the graphics are much prettier and the story is a lot better, but in essense the gameplay comes down to the same thing it always was. This game will involve some grinding for levels and gold, but that shouldn't be surprising given that all the games were like that. It's not an interactive movie like a modern FF game, but that, to me, makes it more fun in many respects.
I'm not an astronomer either, having just taken a couple of courses in college, but my professors seemed to frame the massive impact theory as more 'the best explanation we have for right now.' It had the advantage of explaining things like the size of the moon, the composition, its unusual distance and orbital velocity (which just don't fit for a capture). It's not perfect (especially if the larger solar system creation model doesn't hold up), but it's the only explanation that doesn't have especially glaring holes in it.
In that case, this story belongs in a slashback, not a new article. Honestly, why Zonk hasn't yet been fired for incompetance is beyond me.
The same reason JonKatz wasn't fired? Incompetent editors aren't exactly new.
Because, in evolutionary terms, exhausting the resources another species uses and/or exploiting resources that they can't is crushing and ousting another species. Also, in the time periods we're talking about, 1000 years is barely a blink of the eye.
We go to the moon in this decade... The space race was won by people with drive and ambition. These days NASA is full of over-educated monkeys who cringe at their own shadow.
Over-educated? They're fucking rocket scientists. A lot of education is generally considered a prerequisite. NASA's problems would seem to have a lot more to do with bureaucracy, politics, and lack of budget than, say, knowing too much.
'Designing as you go' is the opposite of design. The whole point of designing is to plan out what you're going to do ahead of time. It's a shame more software companies don't seem to realize this.
How prevalent is this practice? It would be pretty silly to say I've never noticed it (it's hard for one person to check this by themselves), but I was certainly not aware that it happened.
Hard to say for the online world, but price discrimination is common...you just probably don't recognize it. Different groups tend to be willing to pay different prices. For example, the types of people who clip coupons tend to be more bargain-conscious...and have you ever seen someone offer a discount with a student id?
I suppose it could have been a marketing ploy: make the Xbox security circumventable (although not so much so as to prevent plausible deniability) and allow a user base to grow based on piracy ripping off your platform partners. Then once your userbase is established, upgrade to a secure model, knowing that you'll take most of your users with you.
Because that approach worked so well for the Dreamcast.
You do realize the GPL expressly allows people to sell your free contributions, right?
This guy seems to view college as a way to train yourself in a discipline, and refine your skills. I couldn't disagree more. College is when you educate yourself, and enrich yourself, and expand your horizons. It's when you meet the people who you hang out with because you actually like them, not because their locker happened to be near yours in high school. It's when you have more freedom than ever to go out and do what you want, without the obligations of life and the restrictions of high school tying you down. It's when you find out just what it is you really like doing, and who you are. I can't imagine a better way to become a boring, pitiful waste of a human being than his recommendation of 'take programming classes, do programming research projects, and then you can take a few math classes for some real variety.'
It's not that I have anything against technical work, but really, you're gonna be doing that shit for the rest of your life if you get a job in it. Go out, find some beer, and drink it, for god's sake. Enjoy yourself. He disses social sciences because they're not logical, and subject to trends. He specifically disses on philosophy classes, because they don't teach you in a useful way. That is completely missing the point. They aren't engineering classes. You're not supposed to go through a giant textbook of information and have more thrown at you in lectures. The point of a philosophy class or a literature class is to have a subject that you can go in and discuss. Anyone who can read Nietzsche or Plato or Spinoza and not have a reaction of some sort, and a desire to tell others about it, is just a boring person.
Don't let yourself be pigeonholed like this. Don't be the typical boring engineer who can program anything but can't get a date to save his fucking life. Chances are if you're majoring in Computer Science you're already pretty damn good with computers. Go learn about something else, while the information is easily accessible and you don't have other obligations breathing down your neck. If you think you're smart, then find a way to apply your brain to something else other than the same old shit. Try out some shit that you didn't think you'd be interested in...you might be surprised. And don't forget to have some fun, because if you follow this guy's program, you're not gonna have a lot of chance later.
I know a lot of you think programming is really fun. But trust me, if you go out and look, you'll find other things that are more fun, too.
I personally think this review of Katamari Damacy over at insert credit is one of the best reviews of a video game I've ever seen. It really cuts to the heart of what games are all about and why this silly little game is so fun. Made more of an impression on me than most of the reviews linked from this article. I ran into it by accident on Google one day, and now I read the site pretty regularly. Was very impressed.
Good?
From the article, about WoW:
That's one of the other things that I think is interesting about this product. It's really the only MMO that has an extremely long history, where there are millions and millions of people that are already dedicated to that franchise. They're already tied into the storylines, the characters and what have you, and as a result of that we think that we have a built in audience that is going to be interested in checking it out.
Uhm, I don't suppose you've ever heard of Star Wars Galaxies? There are, apparantly, people who are just a tiny bit attached to this "Star Wars" franchise as well. And that made it such a great game, too...
And, y'know, while on that subject...isn't talking about Warcraft in terms of its grand plot about on the same level as talking about the original Doom that way? I've played the games since the first one, and I haven't gotten much more out of the plot other than "Orcs kill humans, and then humans kill orcs." Admittedly, that may be because I filtered most of it out, but I still hardly think it's a crowning achievement that people are extremely attached to, character-wise or plot-wise...
I think anybody who's ever coded anything of even a moderate size, much less a giant project of the scale of what Blizzard would be taking on, knows that the unexpected just happens sometimes and it can set you back weeks, or more. Predictions of how long software projects will take are usually more accurately called "guesses". And trying to get a project out by a deadline no matter what usually means "Ship it with the bugs, we'll patch it later." I don't think Blizzard should be criticized for *not* taking this approach.
Of course, it's not like Blizzard products have never shipped with a bug in them. But I think the entire idea of polishing a product until they're sure it's worth putting out is a good one. Lots of good games have been ruined by being pushed out too early. And while Blizzard's development cycle is quite long, they don't seem to have a vaporware problem, either.
Course, Blizzard seems to have almost nothing to do with this game, so we'll see if they hold it up to the same standards since their name's gonna be on it.
I definitely agree. Seems like every time I see a little kid walking around these days they're quite overweight, which I suspect is because of the phenomenon that you're describing. Not that I don't think TV and video games have a place for kids, since they develop other sorts of skills (How many of us know the alphabet from watching sesame street? And video games develop things like hand-eye coordination and problem-solving skills.), but parents have to draw the line somewhere.
And childhood games also teach kids what bastards people can be, which I think is a valuable lesson that needs learned early on.
One of my pet fantasies as graphics get more realistic is to get into young kids' games. You know, things like "tag", "hide and seek" - the things I really did. Disgusting idea really, worse than battery-powered kid's vehicles. Even worse, I'll bet such a game would sell. I think I'd cry all the way to the bank. I'm happy I don't have time to even try such a thing.
Something like, I dunno, Capture the Flag? And Splinter Cell multiplayer is basically hide and seek where everyone's both hiding and seeking at the same time. I can't think of a direct analog of tag offhand, but I'm sure it's out there.
Thing about kids games is that they're often pretty much archetypes of games...games boiled down to the purest form it can be in and still be a game. These tend to translate pretty well to any medium. Frankly if you could find a popular kid's game that hasn't been translated to FPS form yet, you could probably design a killer mod...
You can play diplomacy online, which makes the player requirement a lot easier. There are public servers available for playing diplomacy...although I can't remember more information, and I'm too lazy to google it. It's a lot easier to backstab people online, too. It's all part of the game.
There's all sorts of wiggle room in the numbers however.
Say my distributers come and tell me that they have taken over 10m+ orders for my game. Do I setup servers to handle that load, or do I set it up for the more reasonable estimate of around 2-5mil due to the fact that, while 10m+ copies may be sitting on the shelves, only a fraction of those will be purchased.
Now, granted, in H2's case, it's a sizable fraction, but how many other titles sell out completely? I'm willing to bet there have been so few that you can name the last 5 off the top of your head.
Actually, there are quite a number of statistical tools you can use to predict this 'wiggle room.' Companies do this all the time when they're trying to decide what inventory levels to maintain. You can calculate a 'Service Level,' which is just saying that in, say, 95% of scenerios you won't stock out.
Now, we're talking about network traffic and not inventory, but it wouldn't be hard to translate the data. I'm amazed that Valve didn't do this. That's just bad business. Maybe their forecasting tools were just shit.
Mental popcorn? 2500+ pages of historical fiction contemplating the roots of our modern scientific, social, political, and financial systems is mental popcorn? I mean, it seemed to me like the whole Baroque Cycle was trying to get at the roots of modern thought. That's not popcorn to me.
Of course, as a caveat, I'll point out that I consider there to be a big difference between the plot of a novel and what it's about.
About the timetable for release, it makes perfect sense. Every generation, you get one console out that's much earlier than the others (genesis, ps2, etc.), and usually by the end of the generation it's looking pretty long in the tooth hardware-wise. On the other hand, if you're the last one to release, the competitors get a huge established customer base that's hard to compete with. Now, admittedly Sony was successful in releasing the ps2 earlier than the gamecube or xbox (but look at the dreamcast), but the ps2's strategy was largely to build off the established ps1 customer base, and that won't work as well for nintendo.
If they release around the same time as Sony, people will have to make the decision of whether to buy a ps3 or a Revolution. It'll be interesting to see what choices people make.
> You need to be able to convince other countries that your side is right. Bush has failed to do that
... Disagree with you. But even if they did not you dont wait for (as Zell Miller put it) Paris to tell us when we can defend ourselves. If we went in alone so be it, the Iraqi's kidnapped a french Journalist because of the headscarf ban in french shcools, even though they fought hard against the war.
Italy, Poland, GB, Japan, Korea, and for a time the Phillipines, Spain,
Yes, there was more diversity in international opinion than some would have you believe. So how do you decide on a course of action when international opinion is split? By working through international organizations designed to do just that.
And incidentally, kidnapped French journalists really have nothing to do with whether the war was right or not. The only relevance here is that tossing a country into a state of chaos and war tends to create a pretty good environment for those types to operate in. But that's pretty much a side effect of it being a war.
> Bush FAILED to convince the international community and America on the presence of WMD in Iraq.
Yup, but sarin laced shells have been found in Iraq.
Uhm, recent findings were very clear that there were no WMD programs, and no efforts to develop WMD programs. Any suggestion otherwise is simply factually wrong. Note that doesn't necessarily mean that Bush made the wrong decision...whether he truly believed that there were WMDs when the war started is far more relevant. In other words, if the intelligence Bush was getting truly had him convinced that WMDs were in Iraq, then he can't be faulted for acting on that belief. Now, he might be faulted for intelligence failures, or for misrepresenting the intelligence he was receiving...these are different, yet important, issues.
> Bush FAILED to convince our allies to come to our side, some of whom have been our ally for over 50 years.
France has always been an ally of convience and we can do without the Germans. The Tussians were a dissapointment, but seing as they (like france) had a good deal of money owed them its not suprising.
France is not an ally of convenience. France is a country that shares an extremely similar cultural heritage, and is an important economic partner. And considering that they're part of the EU, which is rather important these days, you know, it doesn't seem wise to arbitrarily piss them off. And incidentally, all the venom against France is particularly childish and irrational. "What'd France ever do for us...they just rolled over in WWII and they're all snooty and stuff." Hm, how about the fact that without their military support in the Revolution, we would not be a country right now. Historical, cultural, and economic ties. Yeah, why would we ever want to ally with them...
And we can "do without" Germany? Your diatribe is beginning to sound like pre-WW2 isolationism, and similar attitudes seem to be spreading across much of the country. "We don't need the rest of the world!" That sort of view combined with an apparant willingness to invade other sovereign nations without international support is quite dangerous.
> 90% American soldiers and the American taxpayers are funding 90% of cost to rebuild Iraq, which is now at over $200 billion. The UK makes up another 5%. Big fucking whoop.
I dont care if we had to foot 100% of the bill. You dont wait for france when you have to fight. The UN sits by for a decade and does nothing except the oil for food scam, they watch genocide in sudan and do nothing, and we are supposed to wait for them the be ready to go into Iraq?
Again, your isolation of France in attempt to ridicule it makes you look foolish.
Essentially you're saying you don't support the UN (and before you accuse me of putting words in your mouth, think about the implications of what you wrote). The UN has abs