Now now, an old copy of WinME might be handy to hang onto for one reason: MS-DOS 8.0. They hid the bajeezus out of it, but it's still the final version of MS-DOS. Since then, all you've got is FreeDOS and maybe future iterations of IBM's PC-DOS 2000.
" I listen to Neal Boortz........a famous talk show host
I'm sure I'm not alone when i say, Who?
The Liberal Media [airamericaradio.com] Finally a response to ignorant hatemongerers."
+1 Funny
At any rate, he's more or less one of the "ignorant hatemongerer(ererer)s" you refer to, a conservative libertarian talk show host on AM radio. In a nutshell, imagine if Rush was against the War on Drugs and in favor of gay marriage.
My computer has now been cleansed. The good people at Vision Computers got rid of all the adware and spyware that had so clogged my operating system that the 'puter just quit working. Once the computer was back home and on line the very first thing I did was download the Mozilla Firefox internet browser. So long to Internet Explorer. It seems that every day some hacker somewhere finds a new security hole in IE that they then use to download rat feces into your computer. No more for me. We'll see if things stay clean for a while.
07/22/04
Since I switched to the Firefox Mozilla internet browser I have had not one single popup while cruising through the Internet. Not one popup. Not one spyware or adware file. Not one. If I had listened to the Winsome Web Wench when she told me to do this months ago I might have saved myself a spot of trouble.
07/23/04
What web browser is Neal now using? Mozilla's Firefox. The down side? Our online broadcast won't work with it. Now, some listeners have reported that they are able to listen online with a Mozilla browser by going directly to Stream Audio's website, clicking to listen to WSB there. I haven't been able to get that to work, even with pop-up blocking turned off, but it may be the software build I'm using. It's worth a try. --ww
If anything, I think it shows that Firefox is ready for the non-geek crowd. If nothing else this has probably proved to be free advertising.
"Download the NEW Netscape® 7.2 browser (built with Mozilla)"
It covers both bases. Management sees the word "Netscape" while the IT lackeys see "Mozilla."
Re:Why use NS instead of Mozilla?
on
Netscape 7.2 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I used NS 7.1 before I switched to Firefox last month (long story), and if 7.2 is anything like 7.1 was, it's more or less a suite of Microsoft alternatives.
The core software is essentially Mozilla (less ChatZilla). The only big differences are the introduction of profiles for storing multiple configuration settings (for all those home users that have several people using the same user account, I s'pose), an "activation" process (yadda) that sets you up with a netscape.net webmail account (which I imagine is the same domain used by customers of that new Netscape-branded ISP, if such customers exist) accessable through Mail. Netscape Mail can also do a few things that Mozilla Mail can't do because of licensing issues, such as access AOL e-mail accounts and import mail from Netscape Communicator 4.7 directly.
In lieu of ChatZilla it comes with an integrated AIM and ICQ client. Among other bells and whistles the client can be in a stand-alone window or in a sidebar. The only real downside is that you can't be in both AIM and ICQ at the same time (or has that been fixed in 7.2?). Note also that during the "activation" process that they'll use your pre-existing AIM handle as your user account name for your netscape.net webmail address.
On top of that there are some other bundled apps, mostly other things that AOL also now owns. There's a Radio@Netscape ("Plus") client (think "Radio@AOL") that's still based on the old Spinner software as opposed to the Real stuff that you get as the stand-alone product (unforunately I could never get it to work). WinAmp 2.8 is included, along with a default "netscape" skin that tries to match the "Modern" theme in Mozilla (but fails, IMO) along with changing the title bar to read "Netscape Winamp."
(I find it interesting that the versions of Spinner and Winamp included with 7.1 were both older versions that happened to be the last versions where they didn't suck, at least in the opinions of most people I've seen.)
They also try to bundle a RealPlayer client, but I'll be damned if I'll install that. I'd assume that it's also been massaged to look like Netscape.
And, because they're AOL, "Free AOL for (pi)e7 hours!" links will magically appear on your desktop and start menu, but they go away upon deletion.
At any rate, it's probably not worth the download for you, but it might be worth sending your parents/grandparents/other people that get free tech support from you. Now when is AOL going to make Netscape its default browser? They saw the light in their CompuServe acquisition, so why not for their core customers?
"(a desperate attempt by Swatch, who has put every useful gadget and more onto a watch, to produce new required features to drive watch sales)"
I swear, the whole.beat system has got to be the stupidest thing I have ever come across (and Sega was even stupider for implementing it in PSO!).
We already have a very nice time standard for the internet. It's called "Coordinated Universal Time" or UTC for short (because the acronym UTC confuses speakers of all languages equally). The internet even has its own protocol for distributing UTC to various machines. The only problem one might have with UTC is the possibility of leap seconds cropping up every now and then, but all you need to do is poll your favorite NTP server and your clock will be back on track.
But Swatch has to go and break things for the sole purpose of trying to be "cool."
First off, they're stupid enough to use the length of a mean solar day as their standard, which means they inherit the problems of UTC. They could have tried some different standard, something that made their "beat" system an actual alternative to UTC instead of simply dressing it up in a new set of clothes, but that might have resembled innovation too much. The only difference now is that we talk about leap beats instead of leap seconds.
Then they go off and break the Prime Meridian. Ever since Harrison started to build his little trinkets (now he could build a watch!) over two centuries ago just about everybody has been using the line of longitude passing through Greenwich, England. But no, God forbid they conform to anything vaguely resembling a standard, they have to pick their own meridian. Continuing with their theme of "just dress up UTC," they don't actually pick the meridian going through Swatch headquarters, they pick the nearest multiple of 15 degrees from the Greenwich Meridian.
But the real flaw in the system, the one that drives the final nail in the coffin of this God-awful idea that can serve as a symbol of the dot-com bubble all too well, was the idea of dividing the day into an even 1000 "beats." Yay. 1000. A nice round number. It's just like SI. Except we already have SI!!!. And the SI unit of time is not the mean solar day, it is the second! Everything is seconds! 60 seconds in a minute! 3600 seconds in an hour! 86,400 seconds in an SI day! And now we have 86.4 seconds in a beat? Yay! We now have the first man-made unit of time that isn't an integer number of seconds! At a time when people such as myself catch hell from self-styled "metric" zealots for measuring things in units of 0.3048 m and 0.45359237 kg, Swatch has now developed a system of measuring time that everybody can agree is fucked up!
Swatch could have done something neat. They could have been constructively different instead of just being different in an effort to be "cool" (which they apparently also failed miserably at). How about a system of time that does nothing but count off integer seconds? No minutes, hours, days or years, just seconds. They pick some arbitrary time to start counting from (say, 2000 January 1 00:00:00 UTC or 1999 December 31 12:00:00 UTC, since "Y2K" was so freakin' trendy at the time) and have a watch that tells you how many hectoseconds it's been since then (they could even call them "beats" instead). It'd be simple, it'd be different, and it'd have absolutely nothing to do with "time in the real world" (since so few people are able to divide any given integer by 864 in their heads). And it'd have an advantage over all the other time standards widely used today in that it is purely SI (UTC has that leap-second fudge factor to add into TAI, and even the TAI put out by BIPM ticks off an MJD every 86,400 s). The only problem I'd have with it then is the fact that the WWVB signal doesn't carry information on the current offset between UTC and TAI (and NTP does even less), which would mean having to put the TAI offset into my radio-controlled watch by hand, but I'd put up with it for the niftiness factor alone.
Does Swatch even offer a radio-controlled watch, or is keeping accurate time not important enough a feature to put into one of their watches?
"(The $27 million donation in 2002? Came from UAE Red Crescent, not from the UAE.)"
What part of "gives a part of their paycheck to charity" did you have the most trouble with?
I mean, really! Not only should a government act as a charity with its compulsory "contributions" but it should also be the only entity that should be in charge of that distribution of money? What don't you want nationalized?
No no, this would be a manned ballistic missile. Manned cruise missiles (the ones that follow the surface of the earth) were already developed and perfected by the Japanese in the 1940's.
"(Dubai) gets a multi billion dollar tacky las vegas style exhibit while millions in Sudan and Africa starve, imagine how many water pipes and medical supplies you could buy for 2.3 billion large"
All the devout Muslims in Dubai are already tithing to charities as required by their faith. Just how much of their paychecks do you think they should be required to part with?
"Yeah... I think the sticking point was "Can you please provide any real evidence why you're asking for this man's head, or are you just a bunch of numbskulls on a witchhunt?""
More like the "Let us see the evidence so that we can try him in our own courts" was the sticking point. That one I found amusing, since it suggested that would have been acceptable to the Taliban our roles had been reversed.
The Taliban was well aware what had happened and who was responsible but falsely believed any and all evidence went up in smoke (US intelligence piecing together who exactly was responsible within hours of the attacks, complete with photographs of the men and their life-stories, was not part of the plan). It was more an attempt to foster doubt than to buy time. Their goal was to foster support in the international community by looking like the wronged little guy being picked on by the Big Bad Great Satan. They were hoping to win others to their cause (at least in the Muslim world) in order to set the stage for another Vietnam.
After all, by that point they already had bin Laden's own confession to the African embassy bombings and they didn't see fit to "try" the man in their own courts, let alone extradite him to anywhere (neutral or otherwise)
"If it happened in any other western country, he certainly would have been locked away, rather than killed. The United States is the only Western industrialized nation that practices the death penalty."
Then by your logic we should be up to our armpits with attacks by other such self-styled "militia" groups.
"Are you suggesting that wanting to experience different cultures makes you a racist?"
No, I'm suggesting that flouting (what you believe to be) your exposure to different cultures is a pretty good indicator that you have some inherent race issues going on in your mind, of the "all black people are good at basketball" variety.
"Noticing things about your surroundings is called being observant."
Depends on how you interpret what you're observing. "I have friends with a different background/skin color" doesn't mean "I know about people who have a different background/skin color."
"There is no diesel equivalent for the catalitic converter. So diesel is inherently more polluting."
Gasoline-powered Otto Cycle engines can't achieve the same compression ratios as a diesel engine, which gives the diesel more power output per unit mass of fuel. Less fuel consumed means less exhaust output which means inherently cleaner.
"In addition, there has been studies that have found the ultra-fine particles exhausted by diesel engines causes cancer. Not something we want more of."
Are they similar to the carcinogens put out by gasoline engines in larger quantities?
"But on a much simpler level, people don't drive diesel cars because you can't find inexpensive diesel cars in the US."
Depends where you look, but often diesel fuel can be found available at a lower price than gasoline, which (combined with the inherent fuel efficiency) can make the price difference pay for itself.
"If Western civil society had simply condemned the act, given the Taliban 30 days to deliver the criminals"
Was a week not long enough? What about the requests for extradition for acts before September 2001, such as the bombing of the African embassies?
"And been very careful to not kill a single innocent civilian, Al Quaeda would have been ostracised by their own support base."
Why? Because we bent over backwards to suit their double standard? It is not enough to try our best to prevent those innocent deaths, even when compared to the al Qaeda tactics that deliberately target civillians? And this is before we get into the nasty details over disagreements over just who was a civillian and who was not (such as "devout worshippers" at a holy cite that were operating a piece of equipment that "just happened" to look and operate like an anti-aircraft battery...)
And what reason is there to believe that, even if we did meet that double standard, al Qaeda would loose support?
"Western civil society has guaranteed Al Quaeda a place in history and guaranteed a generation or two of on-going fighting that will cause the deaths of many, many more people."
And what if Western inaction would have caused the deaths of many more? Which was worse for Afghanistan, outside military intervention in 2001, or a decade under the Taliban? Is it better that those people die by the hands of their countrymen, even if more people die and in far uglier ways?
"I think every country faced with local terrorists has learnt through bitter experience that force does not solve this kind of problem. Dialogue and negotiation are always, finally, the only way to end the cycle of violence."
So, instead of giving Timothy McVeigh a lethal injection we should simply have had a talk with him and then let him go about his business?
"This lesson has been learnt by the British in Northern Ireland, by the Spanish in the Basque Country, by the French in Sardinia, the Sri Lankans"... Or by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, or by the Shia in Iraq, or...
"Nothing short of genocide - and even that is not certain - will stop more embittered and manipulated youths growing up to fill the gaps left by arrest, detention, assassination."
Even if those doing the manipulations are wrong? Is the majority always right?
"Because of Saddam and the Baath Party, America punished a whole population. Thus its bombs and its embargo killed millions of Iraqi Muslims."
Interesting little twist there. The US did contribute to the Oil for Food program (just not as much as some other players), and yet the US is found responsible for Hussein's witholding of those supplies from the Iraqi populace?
"And because of Osama bin Laden, America surrounded Afghans and bombed them,"
And here I thought Arabs would understand something like "the friend of my enemy is my enemy." It sounds as if al Qaeda, through their friends in the Taliban, got to use Afghanistan as one of the world's largest examples of a human shield and gets to blame the US for continuing anyway...
And this also neglects the number of Afghans the Taliban itself killed off. Or were those really Americans disugised as members of the Taliban in those soccer stadiums?
"God said to assault whoever assaults you, in a like manner..."
So this is making up for all the times non-uniformed, undeclared US combattants knowingly and deliberately attacked civillian population centers? Saying this is a "like manner" stretches things beyond the breaking point, and I find it interesting that a (supposedly) devout Muslim would do this to the words of the Prophet.
"In killing Americans who are ordinarily off limits, Muslims should not exceed four million non-combatants, or render more than ten million of them homeless."
I'm curious to see if there were any sources for such numbers, and how these deaths were determined to be caused by the US as opposed to examples such as the Taliban and the Ba'ath Party.
"The American position obliged Muslims to force the Americans out of the arena first to enable them to focus on their Jewish enemy."
Von Schlieffen is on the phone. He wants his failed strategy back.
"But it is rational in its twisted way."
No, I'd say it only sounds rational, which is the way it is intended (it is, after all, propaganda). You don't get many supporters by saying "We're evil! We hate freedom! We like killing people!" You instead dress your arguments up in a nice suit and tie and make them look presentable and sensable, much like calling for a ban on dihydrogen monoxide or claiming to point to Netcraft statistics that determine whether an OS is dying.
Slashdot Mirror
"WinME - ABSOLUTE TRASH."
Now now, an old copy of WinME might be handy to hang onto for one reason: MS-DOS 8.0. They hid the bajeezus out of it, but it's still the final version of MS-DOS. Since then, all you've got is FreeDOS and maybe future iterations of IBM's PC-DOS 2000.
" Mike McGarvey of Eidos also commented on the rise of the mega-publisher through continued mergers:"
MEGATON!
I'm sure I'm not alone when i say, Who?
The Liberal Media [airamericaradio.com] Finally a response to ignorant hatemongerers."
+1 Funny
At any rate, he's more or less one of the "ignorant hatemongerer(ererer)s" you refer to, a conservative libertarian talk show host on AM radio. In a nutshell, imagine if Rush was against the War on Drugs and in favor of gay marriage.
At any rate, a quick search on Google turns up these:If anything, I think it shows that Firefox is ready for the non-geek crowd. If nothing else this has probably proved to be free advertising.
"Download the NEW Netscape® 7.2 browser (built with Mozilla)"
It covers both bases. Management sees the word "Netscape" while the IT lackeys see "Mozilla."
I used NS 7.1 before I switched to Firefox last month (long story), and if 7.2 is anything like 7.1 was, it's more or less a suite of Microsoft alternatives.
The core software is essentially Mozilla (less ChatZilla). The only big differences are the introduction of profiles for storing multiple configuration settings (for all those home users that have several people using the same user account, I s'pose), an "activation" process (yadda) that sets you up with a netscape.net webmail account (which I imagine is the same domain used by customers of that new Netscape-branded ISP, if such customers exist) accessable through Mail. Netscape Mail can also do a few things that Mozilla Mail can't do because of licensing issues, such as access AOL e-mail accounts and import mail from Netscape Communicator 4.7 directly.
In lieu of ChatZilla it comes with an integrated AIM and ICQ client. Among other bells and whistles the client can be in a stand-alone window or in a sidebar. The only real downside is that you can't be in both AIM and ICQ at the same time (or has that been fixed in 7.2?). Note also that during the "activation" process that they'll use your pre-existing AIM handle as your user account name for your netscape.net webmail address.
On top of that there are some other bundled apps, mostly other things that AOL also now owns. There's a Radio@Netscape ("Plus") client (think "Radio@AOL") that's still based on the old Spinner software as opposed to the Real stuff that you get as the stand-alone product (unforunately I could never get it to work). WinAmp 2.8 is included, along with a default "netscape" skin that tries to match the "Modern" theme in Mozilla (but fails, IMO) along with changing the title bar to read "Netscape Winamp."
(I find it interesting that the versions of Spinner and Winamp included with 7.1 were both older versions that happened to be the last versions where they didn't suck, at least in the opinions of most people I've seen.)
They also try to bundle a RealPlayer client, but I'll be damned if I'll install that. I'd assume that it's also been massaged to look like Netscape.
And, because they're AOL, "Free AOL for (pi)e7 hours!" links will magically appear on your desktop and start menu, but they go away upon deletion.
At any rate, it's probably not worth the download for you, but it might be worth sending your parents/grandparents/other people that get free tech support from you. Now when is AOL going to make Netscape its default browser? They saw the light in their CompuServe acquisition, so why not for their core customers?
We're talking about Windows here. What Windows program doesn't make changes the registry?
"and it'll go 'round and 'round until you need to access it later."
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Would you rather it be compared to California (about the size of California)?
"the National Academy of Sciences found NOTHING to warrant the claim of a causal link between elecromagnetics OF ANY FORM and cancer."
Thanks, now I feel better about getting those multiple chest xrays.
"(a desperate attempt by Swatch, who has put every useful gadget and more onto a watch, to produce new required features to drive watch sales)"
.beat system has got to be the stupidest thing I have ever come across (and Sega was even stupider for implementing it in PSO!).
I swear, the whole
We already have a very nice time standard for the internet. It's called "Coordinated Universal Time" or UTC for short (because the acronym UTC confuses speakers of all languages equally). The internet even has its own protocol for distributing UTC to various machines. The only problem one might have with UTC is the possibility of leap seconds cropping up every now and then, but all you need to do is poll your favorite NTP server and your clock will be back on track.
But Swatch has to go and break things for the sole purpose of trying to be "cool."
First off, they're stupid enough to use the length of a mean solar day as their standard, which means they inherit the problems of UTC. They could have tried some different standard, something that made their "beat" system an actual alternative to UTC instead of simply dressing it up in a new set of clothes, but that might have resembled innovation too much. The only difference now is that we talk about leap beats instead of leap seconds.
Then they go off and break the Prime Meridian. Ever since Harrison started to build his little trinkets (now he could build a watch!) over two centuries ago just about everybody has been using the line of longitude passing through Greenwich, England. But no, God forbid they conform to anything vaguely resembling a standard, they have to pick their own meridian. Continuing with their theme of "just dress up UTC," they don't actually pick the meridian going through Swatch headquarters, they pick the nearest multiple of 15 degrees from the Greenwich Meridian.
But the real flaw in the system, the one that drives the final nail in the coffin of this God-awful idea that can serve as a symbol of the dot-com bubble all too well, was the idea of dividing the day into an even 1000 "beats." Yay. 1000. A nice round number. It's just like SI. Except we already have SI!!!. And the SI unit of time is not the mean solar day, it is the second! Everything is seconds! 60 seconds in a minute! 3600 seconds in an hour! 86,400 seconds in an SI day! And now we have 86.4 seconds in a beat? Yay! We now have the first man-made unit of time that isn't an integer number of seconds! At a time when people such as myself catch hell from self-styled "metric" zealots for measuring things in units of 0.3048 m and 0.45359237 kg, Swatch has now developed a system of measuring time that everybody can agree is fucked up!
Swatch could have done something neat. They could have been constructively different instead of just being different in an effort to be "cool" (which they apparently also failed miserably at). How about a system of time that does nothing but count off integer seconds? No minutes, hours, days or years, just seconds. They pick some arbitrary time to start counting from (say, 2000 January 1 00:00:00 UTC or 1999 December 31 12:00:00 UTC, since "Y2K" was so freakin' trendy at the time) and have a watch that tells you how many hectoseconds it's been since then (they could even call them "beats" instead). It'd be simple, it'd be different, and it'd have absolutely nothing to do with "time in the real world" (since so few people are able to divide any given integer by 864 in their heads). And it'd have an advantage over all the other time standards widely used today in that it is purely SI (UTC has that leap-second fudge factor to add into TAI, and even the TAI put out by BIPM ticks off an MJD every 86,400 s). The only problem I'd have with it then is the fact that the WWVB signal doesn't carry information on the current offset between UTC and TAI (and NTP does even less), which would mean having to put the TAI offset into my radio-controlled watch by hand, but I'd put up with it for the niftiness factor alone.
Does Swatch even offer a radio-controlled watch, or is keeping accurate time not important enough a feature to put into one of their watches?
One doesn't need to "assume" when one has the Twentieth Century to look back on.
"An internet is any network that uses, surprise surprise, the "internet protocol"."
And I suppose "england" is any area of the world where they speak english.
"(The $27 million donation in 2002? Came from UAE Red Crescent, not from the UAE.)"
What part of "gives a part of their paycheck to charity" did you have the most trouble with?
I mean, really! Not only should a government act as a charity with its compulsory "contributions" but it should also be the only entity that should be in charge of that distribution of money? What don't you want nationalized?
"for non-hysterical/factually inaccurate information about the Federal reserve."
Not any more. It appears the article was altered not long after you posted this link.
"PS The Fed was created on 12/23 not 12/24."
Maybe the parent poster lives in Guam...
No no, this would be a manned ballistic missile. Manned cruise missiles (the ones that follow the surface of the earth) were already developed and perfected by the Japanese in the 1940's.
"Had a Hoser Flight Operator Detector to ensure it was not being flown by the enemy."
:)
Would they be the enemies to Canada's north or the ones to Canada's south?
"(Dubai) gets a multi billion dollar tacky las vegas style exhibit while millions in Sudan and Africa starve, imagine how many water pipes and medical supplies you could buy for 2.3 billion large"
All the devout Muslims in Dubai are already tithing to charities as required by their faith. Just how much of their paychecks do you think they should be required to part with?
"Yeah... I think the sticking point was "Can you please provide any real evidence why you're asking for this man's head, or are you just a bunch of numbskulls on a witchhunt?""
More like the "Let us see the evidence so that we can try him in our own courts" was the sticking point. That one I found amusing, since it suggested that would have been acceptable to the Taliban our roles had been reversed.
The Taliban was well aware what had happened and who was responsible but falsely believed any and all evidence went up in smoke (US intelligence piecing together who exactly was responsible within hours of the attacks, complete with photographs of the men and their life-stories, was not part of the plan). It was more an attempt to foster doubt than to buy time. Their goal was to foster support in the international community by looking like the wronged little guy being picked on by the Big Bad Great Satan. They were hoping to win others to their cause (at least in the Muslim world) in order to set the stage for another Vietnam.
After all, by that point they already had bin Laden's own confession to the African embassy bombings and they didn't see fit to "try" the man in their own courts, let alone extradite him to anywhere (neutral or otherwise)
"If it happened in any other western country, he certainly would have been locked away, rather than killed. The United States is the only Western industrialized nation that practices the death penalty."
Then by your logic we should be up to our armpits with attacks by other such self-styled "militia" groups.
"Are you suggesting that wanting to experience different cultures makes you a racist?"
No, I'm suggesting that flouting (what you believe to be) your exposure to different cultures is a pretty good indicator that you have some inherent race issues going on in your mind, of the "all black people are good at basketball" variety.
"Noticing things about your surroundings is called being observant."
Depends on how you interpret what you're observing. "I have friends with a different background/skin color" doesn't mean "I know about people who have a different background/skin color."
"Gmail is so wide spread, how can they not get the trademark? And fp?"
That's exactly the problem: Google didn't get fp at the USPTO.
"There is no diesel equivalent for the catalitic converter. So diesel is inherently more polluting."
Gasoline-powered Otto Cycle engines can't achieve the same compression ratios as a diesel engine, which gives the diesel more power output per unit mass of fuel. Less fuel consumed means less exhaust output which means inherently cleaner.
"In addition, there has been studies that have found the ultra-fine particles exhausted by diesel engines causes cancer. Not something we want more of."
Are they similar to the carcinogens put out by gasoline engines in larger quantities?
"But on a much simpler level, people don't drive diesel cars because you can't find inexpensive diesel cars in the US."
Depends where you look, but often diesel fuel can be found available at a lower price than gasoline, which (combined with the inherent fuel efficiency) can make the price difference pay for itself.
"If Western civil society had simply condemned the act, given the Taliban 30 days to deliver the criminals"
... Or by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, or by the Shia in Iraq, or...
Was a week not long enough? What about the requests for extradition for acts before September 2001, such as the bombing of the African embassies?
"And been very careful to not kill a single innocent civilian, Al Quaeda would have been ostracised by their own support base."
Why? Because we bent over backwards to suit their double standard? It is not enough to try our best to prevent those innocent deaths, even when compared to the al Qaeda tactics that deliberately target civillians? And this is before we get into the nasty details over disagreements over just who was a civillian and who was not (such as "devout worshippers" at a holy cite that were operating a piece of equipment that "just happened" to look and operate like an anti-aircraft battery...)
And what reason is there to believe that, even if we did meet that double standard, al Qaeda would loose support?
"Western civil society has guaranteed Al Quaeda a place in history and guaranteed a generation or two of on-going fighting that will cause the deaths of many, many more people."
And what if Western inaction would have caused the deaths of many more? Which was worse for Afghanistan, outside military intervention in 2001, or a decade under the Taliban? Is it better that those people die by the hands of their countrymen, even if more people die and in far uglier ways?
"I think every country faced with local terrorists has learnt through bitter experience that force does not solve this kind of problem. Dialogue and negotiation are always, finally, the only way to end the cycle of violence."
So, instead of giving Timothy McVeigh a lethal injection we should simply have had a talk with him and then let him go about his business?
"This lesson has been learnt by the British in Northern Ireland, by the Spanish in the Basque Country, by the French in Sardinia, the Sri Lankans"
"Nothing short of genocide - and even that is not certain - will stop more embittered and manipulated youths growing up to fill the gaps left by arrest, detention, assassination."
Even if those doing the manipulations are wrong? Is the majority always right?
"Because of Saddam and the Baath Party, America punished a whole population. Thus its bombs and its embargo killed millions of Iraqi Muslims."
..."
Interesting little twist there. The US did contribute to the Oil for Food program (just not as much as some other players), and yet the US is found responsible for Hussein's witholding of those supplies from the Iraqi populace?
"And because of Osama bin Laden, America surrounded Afghans and bombed them,"
And here I thought Arabs would understand something like "the friend of my enemy is my enemy." It sounds as if al Qaeda, through their friends in the Taliban, got to use Afghanistan as one of the world's largest examples of a human shield and gets to blame the US for continuing anyway...
And this also neglects the number of Afghans the Taliban itself killed off. Or were those really Americans disugised as members of the Taliban in those soccer stadiums?
"God said to assault whoever assaults you, in a like manner
So this is making up for all the times non-uniformed, undeclared US combattants knowingly and deliberately attacked civillian population centers? Saying this is a "like manner" stretches things beyond the breaking point, and I find it interesting that a (supposedly) devout Muslim would do this to the words of the Prophet.
"In killing Americans who are ordinarily off limits, Muslims should not exceed four million non-combatants, or render more than ten million of them homeless."
I'm curious to see if there were any sources for such numbers, and how these deaths were determined to be caused by the US as opposed to examples such as the Taliban and the Ba'ath Party.
"The American position obliged Muslims to force the Americans out of the arena first to enable them to focus on their Jewish enemy."
Von Schlieffen is on the phone. He wants his failed strategy back.
"But it is rational in its twisted way."
No, I'd say it only sounds rational, which is the way it is intended (it is, after all, propaganda). You don't get many supporters by saying "We're evil! We hate freedom! We like killing people!" You instead dress your arguments up in a nice suit and tie and make them look presentable and sensable, much like calling for a ban on dihydrogen monoxide or claiming to point to Netcraft statistics that determine whether an OS is dying.