What if AMD's chips were better than Intel's in every conceivable aspect (price, preformance, power dissipation, etc) and they can only manage a 20% market share? Doesn't that scream that's there's an artificial constraint placed on the market somehow?
Sure- there is an artificial constraint at play here, but that constraint is AMD's lack of foresight to invest in manufacturing technology and capacity like Intel has. Quite simple, AMD lacks the ability to fill the kind of volume and low defect rates that the large OEM suppliers like Dell and HP require from their suppliers.
You might recall 5 or 6 years ago when AMD proudly announced that they had partnered with UMC to manufacture their chips, and AMD's CEO declared that now "AMD will not need to expend billions and billions of dollars on incremental production facilities to achieve our market share objectives." Of course that partnership ended up falling through, and now AMD CEO Hector Ruiz has publicly stated that AMD is capacity constrained- they are selling every chip that they can make. Manufacturing capacity doesn't just magically appear- it takes a lot of time and a huge amount of money- neither of which AMD is spent enough of.
AMD's position in the market today is a direct result of the poor decisions they have been making for years now. You cannot blame Intel for that.
You are right- the playing field is not even, but not for the reasons you are thinking. The dirty little secret of the semiconductor industry is that it is more about manufacturing than it is about the actual features that are on your chips. Nobody else in the industry can hold a candle to Intel's manufacturing capabilities. Its not even close. From 300mm wafers to 65nm-going-on-45nm Fabs all over the world, they are in their own league. When we are talking about the volume that companies like Dell and HP require, Intel is the only player.
This isn't the result of sneaky or unethical behavior- this is the result of Intel investing billions of dollars in Fab capacity and manufacturing R&D every year, even in down markets! AMD hasn't made these same investments. The result? AMD has maxed out their production capacity, and they are selling every chip they make. Those barriers that you spoke of are a self-inflicted reality- AMD just can't meet the capacity that would be required for them to fully exploit their market potential. They are their only roadblock, and they can't blame that on Intel.
the cold hard truth is that science is a very lopsided mistress, and when you have 99.9 percent of all climatologists saying that extreme temperature variations are very likely to have a very high probability of accellerating (what you call Global Warming), the 0.1 percent who disagree because they get their funding from Exxon-Mobil get their feelings hurt.
I would _love_ to know where you got the idea that 99.9% of climatologists agree on anything (I am guessing you retrieved this "statistic" from an unpleasant bodily orifice on your backside).
Now, we know:
a. Global warming (accelerated rapid change) is happening now; b. Global warming (arc) is speeding up, tenfold in just the last five years; and
Not so fast there. Global temperatures have not increased at all since 1998 (in fact, they have decreased a little). Before you dismiss this as too small of a time period to draw any conclusions from, ask yourself if the 28 year warming period that preceded that (1970-1998) is any different. When we are talking about the scale of global climate change, a 28 year sample is just as insignificant as an 8 year sample.
c. Anyone with their heads still stuck in the sounds will be ten feet under water within ten years.
We "know" this, eh? Maybe you should consider the possibility that you are using the same of irrational logic that you accuse the "other side" of using. You should also strongly consider the possibility that you have no idea what you are talking about.
From the/. article summary: Under the new rules, a junk faxer could visit your website and call that an existing business relationship.
From the PDF that he linked to: Merely visiting a website, without taking additional steps to request information or provide contact information, also does not create an EBR.
Perhaps I should have been more clear- there is no connection between them that is worth a crap. The fact that a former coworker of Rove who happens to donate to a lot of political causes also donated to SBVT is hardly compelling. You can play these Kevin Bacon games with anything. Are you "connected" to everything that your former coworkers do?
Also, I would love to see how you think that Rove is connected to O'Neill. O'Neill vocally spoke out against John Kerry for the better part of 3 decades- it was no surprise he would come out strongly against Sen. Kerry when he decided to run for President. Was this all part of an elaborate plot by Rove to score some points in the 2004 election? I know that Rove has achieved super-villain status among Bush's political opponents, but don't you think that time travel just might be a little beyond his abilities?
This seems like a common problem for Democrats. They have to believe that their Republican opponents are complete idiots, but at the same time they have to explain how this so-called idiot keeps out-smarting them. That is how the evil behind-the-scenes-genius is so easy for them to accept. For Ronald Reagan, it was Dick Wirthlin. For George W Bush, it is Karl Rove.
There is no evidence that Karl Rove had anything to do with the push-polling in South Carolina about Senator McCain, nor is there any connection between Karl Rove and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Karl Rove is not the evil genius that you so desperately want to believe he is.
The current administration has secretly authorized the NSA to break the law by warrantlessly monitoring all of us [Americans] that are making extraterritorial phone calls.
Everything that is publicly known about this executive order, including the briefings that members of Congress have received about the program over the past 5 years, says that the wiretaps were only authorized if at least one party on an international phone call was a known member of Al Qaeda. The Washington Post link that you provided does not contradict this. As I hope you know, we are currently at war with Al Qaeda, and Congress has given the President some special war-time authority to help combat them.
If conducting international business or having a chat with friends & family outside the country (perhaps Canada or Mexico) constitutes seditious behavior worthy of summary warrantless monitoring, then count a very great number of Americans under suspicion. A fishing expedition of the sort that the 4th Amendment was meant to prevent.
It doesn't. Nobody is saying that it does, and straw man arguments like this do not help your position.
There is still very little that is known about this secret program, and I think its pretty sad that you have already made up your mind about something that you know so little about. I have my concerns about the program, but we have constitutional processes defined to guard against abuses of power, and they have already been set in motion to look into this program.
2. In case you haven't read the news lately I'll be succinct: the current administration is spying on all of us.
Spying on all of us? Speak for yourself, but not all of us are having international phone calls with known members of Al Qaeda, because this is the only group of people that were affected by this executive order. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say that there are very few of us that are affected by it, and the government should be interested in those few.
Repeat after me: depicting Mohammad is forbiden only for Muslims
Thats not even true. From this article by Amir Taheri:
There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments -- which include a ban on depicting God -- as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is "an absolute principle of Islam" is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.
The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers. There is no space here to provide an exhaustive list, but these are some of the most famous:
A miniature by Sultan Muhammad-Nur Bokharai, showing Muhammad riding Buraq, a horse with the face of a beautiful woman, on his way to Jerusalem for his M'eraj or nocturnal journey to Heavens (16th century); a painting showing Archangel Gabriel guiding Muhammad into Medina, the prophet's capital after he fled from Mecca (16th c.); a portrait of Muhammad, his face covered with a mask, on a pulpit in Medina (16th c.); an Isfahan miniature depicting the prophet with his favorite kitten, Hurairah (17th c.); Kamaleddin Behzad's miniature showing Muhammad contemplating a rose produced by a drop of sweat that fell from his face (19th c.); a painting, "Massacre of the Family of the Prophet," showing Muhammad watching as his grandson Hussain is put to death by the Umayyads in Karbala (19th c.); a painting showing Muhammad and seven of his first followers (18th c.); and Kamal ul-Mulk's portrait of Muhammad showing the prophet holding the Quran in one hand while with the index finger of the other hand he points to the Oneness of God (19th c.).
It's interesting that you have such a long spin when the facts are simple, as you could see from the overwhelming evidence to which I linked in my post. If Rumsfeld adequately supplied our troops with body armor, thousands of them wouldn't be maimed today.
Again, you have completely missed the point. Of course increasing troop armor would make them safer (Duh!). Using that standard, no US troops have ever been adequately armored- ever! As I said before, singling out Rumsfeld for this is disingenuous and smacks of political opportunism.
Citing hyperbolic strawmen like "100% perfection" as defense from the well-documented criticism that Rumsfeld doesn't adequately equip our troops is positively Rumsfeldian.
Well, if not 100% perfection, what exactly are you arguing for? Rumsfeld sent the most heavily armored and well equipped troops we have ever had to battle in Iraq. You assert that this was not adequate (again- Duh!), so what then is your standard for adequately arming our troops?
But your slavish devotion to official Rumsfeld spin shows where you turn my Vietnam reference into another strawman. What I said was precisely "an indulgence in warmongering, and for the Secretary of Defense to aim for victory with a victory strategy, not just an endless war", not that it was a "military defeat". That it was a political defeat of our own troops, by the Secretary of Defense.
You claimed that we had learned a lesson in Vietnam, but it is clear from your ramblings that you don't understand what that lesson was, because you are fighting to repeat the same mistakes.
But you're such a warmonger that all you can do is repeat Pentagon talking points when I push your button. Like your unnecessary kneejerk pledge of allegience to our troops, blurted in the middle of your spin. You've got a great career ahead of you in the 24 hour propaganda machine.
Are you really that insecure in your beliefs that the only way you can accept somebody disagreeing with you is by convincing yourself that they are a knee-jerk, brainwashed propagandist?
We're not supporting our troops with enough body armor.
This is exactly what I am talking about. In a perfect world we would outfit each soldier with a robotic titanium shell to completely protect them from the hazards of the battlefield. We all know that our world is far from perfect. The fact is, our troops in Iraq have the best body armor of any military force in our history. They have more body armor than our troops did in the first Gulf War, our troops in Vietnam, our troops in Korea, and our troops in WWII! And those unarmored Humvees that have received so much attention? For the most part they replaced open-air Jeeps that often didn't even have doors or windshields.
Of course, this doesn't mean that our troops shouldn't have more armor, but to claim that this is some sort of proof of Bush Administration incompetence while ignoring the historical perspective is disingenuous at best. That is what Donald Rumsfeld was saying- if you are waiting for 100% perfect conditions before you do anything, then you will be waiting forever, because there is always something more that could be done.
I have the utmost respect for the men and women of our military. They knowingly risk their lives for our cause, and they are heroes because of it.
It is interesting that you bring up Vietnam. Our loss in Vietnam was not a military defeat- it was a political one. Yes- we need to avoid the mistakes that were made in Vietnam, but before we can do that we need to understand just what those mistakes were. Here is an opinion piece by former Sec of Defense Melvin Laird. I hope you read it. Iraq is a very winnable war- we have already made tremendous progress towards our goals. But our future success there depends just as much on what happens here as what happens in the ground in Iraq. Wavering in our commitment to finish what we started is a sure-fire way to turn this into another Vietnam.
The illegal WMD programs that were discovered in Iraq after our invasion were very real. The ISG report makes it very clear that Iraq was in blatant violation of its disarmament obligations.
True, we didn't find the old decaying stockpiles that we thought we would find. Instead we found illegal infrastructure, precursor elements, and research programs to make brand new weapons- all of which was hidden from the UN inspectors prior to the invasion. If you hadn't already made your mind up about this, you would see that this is actually worse.
And by the way, the story of what actually happened to Saddam's WMD stockpiles isn't over yet.
Please list the goals that you have made ( citing original sources ) and explain how you believe they have been achieved.
Are you serious? Ok- here is a start:
Topple the Baath regime from power
Remove one of the largest state sponsors of terrorism in the world
Form a provisional Governing Council
Write an interim Constitution
Transfer sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government
Hold elections for an assembly to write a constitution
Write a democratic constitution
Ratify the new constitution in a popular election
Hold the first parliamentary elections in Iraq in 50 years to elect a permanent assembly
All of these were achieved on schedule in spite of a bitter insurgency, and they were done with huge public support (as evidenced by the large voter turnout at the elections).
I'll start you off
1) Find Saddams huge arsenal of Weapons Of Mass destruction.
Our pre-war intelligence was just about as wrong as it could get- we didn't find the decade-old decaying stockpiles that we thought we would find, but we did find dozens of hidden and proscribed weapons that we had no idea about before the invasion. It was the discovery of these hidden weapons programs that led David Kay to declare that Iraq was even more dangerous than we had thought before we invaded.
What makes you think that we thought that we would be out of the country by now? The fact is that we have achieved every goal that we have made, and we have done it on schedule and with huge public support.
When you don't have a warmonger Sect'y Defense like Rumsfeld, you don't go to war when your army isn't ready.
Not ready? The US Forces that have been sent to Afghanistan and Iraq by this administration are the best equipped, most heavily armored, and most "ready" troops that this country has ever had.
Yes, but only because his "change of heart" may let him stop a motion to allow for early voting. A paper trail cannot be put into place in time for the November elections.
Why on earth do you think that? Diebold has been selling voting units that produce paper receipts for over a year now. Maryland could just use those.
The proposals that President Bush put on the table last year were pretty minor adjustments: limiting benefits for wealthy retirees, indexing benefits to prices instead of wages, increasing the retirement age, and changing benefits to create a disincentive for early retirement. The President's opponents crapped on every single one of these proposals while at the same time offering no solutions of their own. Instead, they intentionally obfuscated the issue by trying to equate the President's proposal for personal retirement accounts (which was never meant to address the solvancy problem) with his social security reform initiatives. The result is that Social Security is still broken, and it will soon be spending more in benefits that it is taking in from payroll taxes.
Yes- that is the kind of childish partisanship that the Democrats were applauding during the State of the Union address last night. Minor adjustments or not, Social Security is still broken, and for some reason the Democrats like that.
If anybody has any doubt as to why this "scandal" has been dismissed by everybody except the fringe Bush-haters who think everything is a scandal, look no further than this post. The fact that the President has the inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches like this means that there is no conflict here. This is quite simple, and its a little sad that I have to point it out.
Ahh, yes, let's make excuses and tow the Republican party line! The mayor of New Orleans was an incompetent boob, and that changes absolutely nothing about how dreadfully slow and stupidly organized the federal response was.
I've got news for you- the federal response to storms has always been slow. In fact, their response to Katrina was faster than the federal response to Hurricanes Andrew, Floyd, and Hugo. Don't you remember Jesse Jackson out there in 1999 criticizing FEMA because it took them 3 weeks to get supply trailers into North Carolina after Floyd hit? Director's Witt response was that had been "too wet" to get supplies in faster. FEMA is not a first responder, and it has never been a first responder in it's 25 year existence, and it really is impressive how much they were able to do in the face of unprecidented devestation in the area. Just think of the logistical nightmare of getting a convoy of trucks into an area with no electricity, communications, gas stations, and with impassible streets that are flooded and full of debris!
I think President Bush's biggest failure in this was not a lack of federal response- Katrina prompted the biggest and most impressive (although imperfect) federal disaster responses that this country has ever undertaken. No, President Bush's failure was purely PR. Eating birthday cake with John McCain and playing guitar in California while people were struggling to survive on the Gulf coast was just plain stupid. It gave the partisan Bush haters some unnecessary ammo. Of course mistakes were made, but the fact that there are less than 200 dead in New Orleans speaks volumes.
That's a lie. The levees were designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane. City officials fully recognized that this was insufficient, and the levees were/are in the process of being upgraded to withstand the full force of a category 5 hurricane. Unfortunately, however, given the enormous size of the levees, this is not an overnight process. There are several years remaining until the scheduled completion of the upgrades.
There was no plan to upgrade the levees to withstand a category 5 hurricane, or even a category 4 hurricane. According to the Army Corps of Engineers, the plans that were in progress were designed to protect against the surge from a storm "equivalent to a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane".
How would it have been possible for AMD to have done better if they are absolutely maxed out in manufacturing capacity as it is right now? The best point that Intel made in this legal filing was that they have invested billions of dollars on new fabs and manufacturing technologies over the past several years, and AMD has not. Intel's investment has paid off, but AMD is unable to meet their demand. There is nobody to blame for that but AMD.
Escalation kills. What else matters? I don't care who has the weapons. If the weapons exist, people will die. There is no "right hands" for a weapon. I don't trust my country more than any other.
You are right. Every time there are "disagreements", like how Poland disagreed with Hitler, or Kuwait disagreed with Saddam Hussein, we should just all sit around at a campfire and sing songs together instead of fighting.
Slashdot Mirror
What if AMD's chips were better than Intel's in every conceivable aspect (price, preformance, power dissipation, etc) and they can only manage a 20% market share? Doesn't that scream that's there's an artificial constraint placed on the market somehow?
Sure- there is an artificial constraint at play here, but that constraint is AMD's lack of foresight to invest in manufacturing technology and capacity like Intel has. Quite simple, AMD lacks the ability to fill the kind of volume and low defect rates that the large OEM suppliers like Dell and HP require from their suppliers.
You might recall 5 or 6 years ago when AMD proudly announced that they had partnered with UMC to manufacture their chips, and AMD's CEO declared that now "AMD will not need to expend billions and billions of dollars on incremental production facilities to achieve our market share objectives." Of course that partnership ended up falling through, and now AMD CEO Hector Ruiz has publicly stated that AMD is capacity constrained- they are selling every chip that they can make. Manufacturing capacity doesn't just magically appear- it takes a lot of time and a huge amount of money- neither of which AMD is spent enough of.
AMD's position in the market today is a direct result of the poor decisions they have been making for years now. You cannot blame Intel for that.
You are right- the playing field is not even, but not for the reasons you are thinking. The dirty little secret of the semiconductor industry is that it is more about manufacturing than it is about the actual features that are on your chips. Nobody else in the industry can hold a candle to Intel's manufacturing capabilities. Its not even close. From 300mm wafers to 65nm-going-on-45nm Fabs all over the world, they are in their own league. When we are talking about the volume that companies like Dell and HP require, Intel is the only player.
This isn't the result of sneaky or unethical behavior- this is the result of Intel investing billions of dollars in Fab capacity and manufacturing R&D every year, even in down markets! AMD hasn't made these same investments. The result? AMD has maxed out their production capacity, and they are selling every chip they make. Those barriers that you spoke of are a self-inflicted reality- AMD just can't meet the capacity that would be required for them to fully exploit their market potential. They are their only roadblock, and they can't blame that on Intel.
the cold hard truth is that science is a very lopsided mistress, and when you have 99.9 percent of all climatologists saying that extreme temperature variations are very likely to have a very high probability of accellerating (what you call Global Warming), the 0.1 percent who disagree because they get their funding from Exxon-Mobil get their feelings hurt.
I would _love_ to know where you got the idea that 99.9% of climatologists agree on anything (I am guessing you retrieved this "statistic" from an unpleasant bodily orifice on your backside).
Now, we know:
a. Global warming (accelerated rapid change) is happening now;
b. Global warming (arc) is speeding up, tenfold in just the last five years; and
Not so fast there. Global temperatures have not increased at all since 1998 (in fact, they have decreased a little). Before you dismiss this as too small of a time period to draw any conclusions from, ask yourself if the 28 year warming period that preceded that (1970-1998) is any different. When we are talking about the scale of global climate change, a 28 year sample is just as insignificant as an 8 year sample.
c. Anyone with their heads still stuck in the sounds will be ten feet under water within ten years.
We "know" this, eh? Maybe you should consider the possibility that you are using the same of irrational logic that you accuse the "other side" of using. You should also strongly consider the possibility that you have no idea what you are talking about.
From the /. article summary:
Under the new rules, a junk faxer could visit your website and call that an existing business relationship.
From the PDF that he linked to:
Merely visiting a website, without taking additional steps to request information or provide contact information, also does not create an EBR.
Lets quit with the hysterics, ok?
Perhaps I should have been more clear- there is no connection between them that is worth a crap. The fact that a former coworker of Rove who happens to donate to a lot of political causes also donated to SBVT is hardly compelling. You can play these Kevin Bacon games with anything. Are you "connected" to everything that your former coworkers do?
Also, I would love to see how you think that Rove is connected to O'Neill. O'Neill vocally spoke out against John Kerry for the better part of 3 decades- it was no surprise he would come out strongly against Sen. Kerry when he decided to run for President. Was this all part of an elaborate plot by Rove to score some points in the 2004 election? I know that Rove has achieved super-villain status among Bush's political opponents, but don't you think that time travel just might be a little beyond his abilities?
I assumed no such thing, but I guess that is a convenient way for you to side-step a substantive argument.
This seems like a common problem for Democrats. They have to believe that their Republican opponents are complete idiots, but at the same time they have to explain how this so-called idiot keeps out-smarting them. That is how the evil behind-the-scenes-genius is so easy for them to accept. For Ronald Reagan, it was Dick Wirthlin. For George W Bush, it is Karl Rove.
There is no evidence that Karl Rove had anything to do with the push-polling in South Carolina about Senator McCain, nor is there any connection between Karl Rove and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Karl Rove is not the evil genius that you so desperately want to believe he is.
I would mod you "scary because it is true" but such tag does not exist.
Wait- you think that Karl Rove is actually trying to burn people's books?
This post isn't "true". It is a political troll that is based on nothing more than hate-filled partisan fantasy.
I'm sorry, that's incorrect.
.
The current administration has secretly authorized the NSA to break the law by warrantlessly monitoring all of us [Americans] that are making extraterritorial phone calls
Everything that is publicly known about this executive order, including the briefings that members of Congress have received about the program over the past 5 years, says that the wiretaps were only authorized if at least one party on an international phone call was a known member of Al Qaeda. The Washington Post link that you provided does not contradict this. As I hope you know, we are currently at war with Al Qaeda, and Congress has given the President some special war-time authority to help combat them.
If conducting international business or having a chat with friends & family outside the country (perhaps Canada or Mexico) constitutes seditious behavior worthy of summary warrantless monitoring, then count a very great number of Americans under suspicion. A fishing expedition of the sort that the 4th Amendment was meant to prevent.
It doesn't. Nobody is saying that it does, and straw man arguments like this do not help your position.
There is still very little that is known about this secret program, and I think its pretty sad that you have already made up your mind about something that you know so little about. I have my concerns about the program, but we have constitutional processes defined to guard against abuses of power, and they have already been set in motion to look into this program.
2. In case you haven't read the news lately I'll be succinct: the current administration is spying on all of us.
Spying on all of us? Speak for yourself, but not all of us are having international phone calls with known members of Al Qaeda, because this is the only group of people that were affected by this executive order. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say that there are very few of us that are affected by it, and the government should be interested in those few.
Thats not even true. From this article by Amir Taheri:
It's interesting that you have such a long spin when the facts are simple, as you could see from the overwhelming evidence to which I linked in my post. If Rumsfeld adequately supplied our troops with body armor, thousands of them wouldn't be maimed today.
Again, you have completely missed the point. Of course increasing troop armor would make them safer (Duh!). Using that standard, no US troops have ever been adequately armored- ever! As I said before, singling out Rumsfeld for this is disingenuous and smacks of political opportunism.
Citing hyperbolic strawmen like "100% perfection" as defense from the well-documented criticism that Rumsfeld doesn't adequately equip our troops is positively Rumsfeldian.
Well, if not 100% perfection, what exactly are you arguing for? Rumsfeld sent the most heavily armored and well equipped troops we have ever had to battle in Iraq. You assert that this was not adequate (again- Duh!), so what then is your standard for adequately arming our troops?
But your slavish devotion to official Rumsfeld spin shows where you turn my Vietnam reference into another strawman. What I said was precisely "an indulgence in warmongering, and for the Secretary of Defense to aim for victory with a victory strategy, not just an endless war", not that it was a "military defeat". That it was a political defeat of our own troops, by the Secretary of Defense.
You claimed that we had learned a lesson in Vietnam, but it is clear from your ramblings that you don't understand what that lesson was, because you are fighting to repeat the same mistakes.
But you're such a warmonger that all you can do is repeat Pentagon talking points when I push your button. Like your unnecessary kneejerk pledge of allegience to our troops, blurted in the middle of your spin. You've got a great career ahead of you in the 24 hour propaganda machine.
Are you really that insecure in your beliefs that the only way you can accept somebody disagreeing with you is by convincing yourself that they are a knee-jerk, brainwashed propagandist?
We're not supporting our troops with enough body armor.
This is exactly what I am talking about. In a perfect world we would outfit each soldier with a robotic titanium shell to completely protect them from the hazards of the battlefield. We all know that our world is far from perfect. The fact is, our troops in Iraq have the best body armor of any military force in our history. They have more body armor than our troops did in the first Gulf War, our troops in Vietnam, our troops in Korea, and our troops in WWII! And those unarmored Humvees that have received so much attention? For the most part they replaced open-air Jeeps that often didn't even have doors or windshields.
Of course, this doesn't mean that our troops shouldn't have more armor, but to claim that this is some sort of proof of Bush Administration incompetence while ignoring the historical perspective is disingenuous at best. That is what Donald Rumsfeld was saying- if you are waiting for 100% perfect conditions before you do anything, then you will be waiting forever, because there is always something more that could be done.
I have the utmost respect for the men and women of our military. They knowingly risk their lives for our cause, and they are heroes because of it.
It is interesting that you bring up Vietnam. Our loss in Vietnam was not a military defeat- it was a political one. Yes- we need to avoid the mistakes that were made in Vietnam, but before we can do that we need to understand just what those mistakes were. Here is an opinion piece by former Sec of Defense Melvin Laird. I hope you read it. Iraq is a very winnable war- we have already made tremendous progress towards our goals. But our future success there depends just as much on what happens here as what happens in the ground in Iraq. Wavering in our commitment to finish what we started is a sure-fire way to turn this into another Vietnam.
The illegal WMD programs that were discovered in Iraq after our invasion were very real. The ISG report makes it very clear that Iraq was in blatant violation of its disarmament obligations.
True, we didn't find the old decaying stockpiles that we thought we would find. Instead we found illegal infrastructure, precursor elements, and research programs to make brand new weapons- all of which was hidden from the UN inspectors prior to the invasion. If you hadn't already made your mind up about this, you would see that this is actually worse.
And by the way, the story of what actually happened to Saddam's WMD stockpiles isn't over yet.
Are you serious? Ok- here is a start:
All of these were achieved on schedule in spite of a bitter insurgency, and they were done with huge public support (as evidenced by the large voter turnout at the elections).
I'll start you off
1) Find Saddams huge arsenal of Weapons Of Mass destruction.
Our pre-war intelligence was just about as wrong as it could get- we didn't find the decade-old decaying stockpiles that we thought we would find, but we did find dozens of hidden and proscribed weapons that we had no idea about before the invasion. It was the discovery of these hidden weapons programs that led David Kay to declare that Iraq was even more dangerous than we had thought before we invaded.
What makes you think that we thought that we would be out of the country by now? The fact is that we have achieved every goal that we have made, and we have done it on schedule and with huge public support.
When you don't have a warmonger Sect'y Defense like Rumsfeld, you don't go to war when your army isn't ready.
Not ready? The US Forces that have been sent to Afghanistan and Iraq by this administration are the best equipped, most heavily armored, and most "ready" troops that this country has ever had.
Yes, but only because his "change of heart" may let him stop a motion to allow for early voting. A paper trail cannot be put into place in time for the November elections.
Why on earth do you think that? Diebold has been selling voting units that produce paper receipts for over a year now. Maryland could just use those.
The proposals that President Bush put on the table last year were pretty minor adjustments: limiting benefits for wealthy retirees, indexing benefits to prices instead of wages, increasing the retirement age, and changing benefits to create a disincentive for early retirement. The President's opponents crapped on every single one of these proposals while at the same time offering no solutions of their own. Instead, they intentionally obfuscated the issue by trying to equate the President's proposal for personal retirement accounts (which was never meant to address the solvancy problem) with his social security reform initiatives. The result is that Social Security is still broken, and it will soon be spending more in benefits that it is taking in from payroll taxes.
Yes- that is the kind of childish partisanship that the Democrats were applauding during the State of the Union address last night. Minor adjustments or not, Social Security is still broken, and for some reason the Democrats like that.
Are you kidding? Do you realize just how many possible "usage patterns" there are?
If anybody has any doubt as to why this "scandal" has been dismissed by everybody except the fringe Bush-haters who think everything is a scandal, look no further than this post. The fact that the President has the inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches like this means that there is no conflict here. This is quite simple, and its a little sad that I have to point it out.
Ahh, yes, let's make excuses and tow the Republican party line! The mayor of New Orleans was an incompetent boob, and that changes absolutely nothing about how dreadfully slow and stupidly organized the federal response was.
I've got news for you- the federal response to storms has always been slow. In fact, their response to Katrina was faster than the federal response to Hurricanes Andrew, Floyd, and Hugo. Don't you remember Jesse Jackson out there in 1999 criticizing FEMA because it took them 3 weeks to get supply trailers into North Carolina after Floyd hit? Director's Witt response was that had been "too wet" to get supplies in faster. FEMA is not a first responder, and it has never been a first responder in it's 25 year existence, and it really is impressive how much they were able to do in the face of unprecidented devestation in the area. Just think of the logistical nightmare of getting a convoy of trucks into an area with no electricity, communications, gas stations, and with impassible streets that are flooded and full of debris!
I think President Bush's biggest failure in this was not a lack of federal response- Katrina prompted the biggest and most impressive (although imperfect) federal disaster responses that this country has ever undertaken. No, President Bush's failure was purely PR. Eating birthday cake with John McCain and playing guitar in California while people were struggling to survive on the Gulf coast was just plain stupid. It gave the partisan Bush haters some unnecessary ammo. Of course mistakes were made, but the fact that there are less than 200 dead in New Orleans speaks volumes.
That's a lie. The levees were designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane. City officials fully recognized that this was insufficient, and the levees were/are in the process of being upgraded to withstand the full force of a category 5 hurricane. Unfortunately, however, given the enormous size of the levees, this is not an overnight process. There are several years remaining until the scheduled completion of the upgrades.
There was no plan to upgrade the levees to withstand a category 5 hurricane, or even a category 4 hurricane. According to the Army Corps of Engineers, the plans that were in progress were designed to protect against the surge from a storm "equivalent to a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane".
How would it have been possible for AMD to have done better if they are absolutely maxed out in manufacturing capacity as it is right now? The best point that Intel made in this legal filing was that they have invested billions of dollars on new fabs and manufacturing technologies over the past several years, and AMD has not. Intel's investment has paid off, but AMD is unable to meet their demand. There is nobody to blame for that but AMD.
Escalation kills. What else matters? I don't care who has the weapons. If the weapons exist, people will die. There is no "right hands" for a weapon. I don't trust my country more than any other.
You are right. Every time there are "disagreements", like how Poland disagreed with Hitler, or Kuwait disagreed with Saddam Hussein, we should just all sit around at a campfire and sing songs together instead of fighting.
Why didn't anybody think of that before?