And I'm pissed that it's NOT in the second edition (at least it couldn't easily be found). I was trying to impress this chick at B&N the other day by showing her how I understood that longass expression and low-and-behold, the back page where it's SUPPOSED to be is filled with a 3 line regex - not very impressive after you've made a huge deal about a full-page regex. Fortunately it all worked out since I had the original at home, and I was like "well, you'll just have to come over to MY place to check out the big regex".;-)
When I read this book, I found myself in amazement at the enormous powers of regexes--you can do almost anything with them!
However, it never occured to me, oddly, to use regexes as a tool of seduction. I guess I just don't understand the ladies.
"2. If it does, then their own distribution would have contained code that violated their IP."
People keep making this point, and it baffles me. They own the code, so it matters not one whit that it's in their own distribution. That's the one case where there isn't an infringment. It's theirs. How complicated is this?
"Inflation is the reduced purchasing power of a given amount of currency."
...to which an AC responded:
"Wrong. Now THAT'S ignorant."
in.fla.tion: 2 An increase of money and credit relative to available goods resulting in a substantial and continuing rise in the general price level.
Where'd you find that definition? A general purpose dictionary? It is not a correct definition...except that I just noticed that you chose the secondary definition.
Inflation is nothing more and nothing less than a general increase in prices, which is exactly synonymous with my previous definition. It is not--I repeat not--exclusively defined in terms of a result of an increase in the money supply.
"If inflation were truly just demand exceeding supply, we'd have nice little cycles. One year, $1 would buy you a candy bar. The next year, the candy bar would be $1.17. The year after that, maybe $0.87. Then $0.92. Then $1.15. But you don't see that, do you, Einstein?"
No, because you're wrong. As long as demand exceeds supply, prices will increase. I have no idea why you assume a cycle unless you're assuming that demand will decrease as a result of inflation, which is correct. But then, inflation will cease because demand no longer exceeds supply, which is my point. However, why do you assume deflation?
"Inflation has been on a constant increase.
No it hasn't. You probably meant that "inflation has been constant"--but if you can't be bothered to avoid making such a elementary mistake, why should you expect to have any credibility at all?
"The loaf of bread is the same loaf of bread. The money has less purchasing power. Period."
And your point is...what?
"Why? Because the govenment and the fed play their loan/payback game (with interest), continually increasing the supply of "money" in the united states."
Ah. That's not necessarily why inflation is nearly continuous through the years. Again, inflation is demand exceeding supply. Lots of things can cause this. One is simply that people have the expectation that they will have higher earnings in the future and thus it's safe for them to spend today instead of to save. Another is increased availabity and utilization of credit (which is exactly the same thing as an increase in the money supply!). Something that doesn't necessarily require a central bank.
As you know, the mechanism with which a central bank influences the money supply is not merely printing more money, but rather loaning the money to banks who, in turn, loan it to indivudal borrowers. Thus, borrowers have money they otherwise wouldn't have had, and they spend it. Demand exceeds supply (assuming that they were in equilibrium beforehand). The monetarist formulation of this sort of inflation is just another version of the demand/supply relationship.
The idea that you can't have inflation in the absence of a central bank that indirectly increases the money supply is profoundly ignorant. It's not only ignorant of basic macroeconomics, it's ignorant of history.
"I'll give you some terms to look up and you can educate yourself: federal reserve, fiat, fraud, confidence, inflation, gold, backed, interest, credit, money. Knock yourself out."
A nice little list tilted toward a cranky, economically ignorant, American, naive, ideological, gold-standarist view.
"When a currency is backed by something that cannot be exponentially duplicated, it cannot be inflated."
That's just ignorant. Inflation is the reduced purchasing power of a given amount of currency. If you used gold bars as currency, you could still have inflation. The only supposed limit on inflation in your gold economy is the limit on the money supply (gold). But you could do the exact same thing with a floating currency: just don't print more money. Except that doesn't work. If the money supply wasn't increased when there were inflationary pressures, people would account for the inflation by utilizing a barter economy as necessary to take up the slack.
Inflation doesn't happen because governments print money. Inflation happens when aggregate demand exceeds supply. Period. The end. Learn some economics.
"There is nothing inherently special about gold...it's only valuable because people perceive it to be valuable. A long time ago some people agreed to use it as currency for goods and services. Same deal with paper money now."
Yes. Ultimately, that's completely true and the gold standard loonies fail to appreciate this. However, they're likely to say that gold is a tangible thing that has utility--whereas a floating currency is backed by nothing. The problem with this view is two-fold. First, gold has utility only because people think it has utility, and, anyway, its valuation has not very much to do with that actual practical utility. Mostly, it's valuable because it's pretty. But, secondly, a floating currency is backed by something--the word of the government that issues it. Just because that trust isn't tangible doesn't mean that it has no value. Of course it has value, and, in fact, its value fluctuates on the open market just like the value of gold does.
The gold standard loonies are not really worth arguing with. They don't understand simple economics.
I know I feel so much better when my currency is backed by gold. Because, you know, gold is so shiny. It's the shininess that gives it its intrinsic value.
The Star Wars MMORPG will be very successful. Count on it.
It's just silly that some people are claiming that only sword and scorcery style games can be popular as MMOGs. That this has been the case is an accident of history. Someone could have said the same thing (and probably did) about SF themed RTS games until Warcraft came along.
Learn Homeric and Attic Greek; and translate portions of Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament
Learn French and translate various writers -- Montaigne, for example
Read almost all of these books, in whole or in part -- a list which includes everything from Plato to Shakespeare to Heidegger to Smith to Austen to Marx
Study mathematics all four years, working from Euclid's Elements, through Newton and Leibniz's invention of the Calculus, and on through non-Euclidean geometry, Cantor, and others
Study music for one year; including history, theory, composition, and limited performance
Study laboratory science for three years; reading primary works and recapitulating experimentation spanning, for example, Lavoisier to Dalton to Miliken, Galen to Darwin, Newton to Einstein, and others
A partial semester of painting and sculpture
This is not just a gloss on the the so-called "Great Books"; and it's certainly not purely humanities or an impoverished "history or science" curriculum, either. It's heavy on both the math/science and on literature/philosophy -- not to mention that the year of music is the equivalent in some ways to more than a year at conservatory. Finally, it's really a lot of very difficult work.
Of course, it's not called a "university", it's called a "college" since it's integral and singular. This is what higher education was like in the past, and it indeed does live on in the US. St. John's is in fact the third oldest college in the US (behind William & Mary and Harvard); but the "New Program" has only existed since 1929.
Why don't you subscribe to or at least take a look the ISP-Caching mailing list?
Re:I thought so.
on
Genome Surprise
·
· Score: 4, Informative
People are trying to explain this in different ways, but let's make it clear and simple:
The modern concept of race is that groups of people that are readily identifiable via a few physical traits (primarily skin color, but also face and eye shape, height, etc.) are more closely genetically related, on average, to each other than to they are to other groups.
This has been proven to be false.
It doesn't have to be false. Populations do diverge genetically, that's certain. And human populations could have diverged in ways that are expressed uniquely as gross anatomical differences. But they haven't.
A key word in that previous paragraph is "uniquely". You see, for something like skin color to be a reliable indicator of genetic relatedness, the skin color has to have a one-to-one correspondence with the genetic variation that causes it.[1] For example, I happen to have a rare genetic disease that is a mutation on the gene that controls collagen. As far as anyone knows, this mutation exists only among a few people in the world that have a common ancestor. So if you find this mutation, then you've found someone related to me. Put another way, if you find someone with the disease I have, they're related to me.
In contrast, there are other mutations on the collagen gene that exist among many unrelated people. It's a common mutation. If you find someone with that corresponding disease, there's no guarantee that they're related to someone else with that disease.
Now, the problem is that all of the features that are associated with how people define "race" are like the latter example, not the former. That is, genetically unrelated people can have dark skin. Dark skin can and has arisen among unrelated populations. Worse, dark and light skin has arisen among relatively closely related populations such that a given light skinned population is more closely related to a given dark skinned population than it is to another light skinned population. So, looking at the human race as a whole, skin color is an unreliable indicator of genetic relatedness.
Within a population that is reasonably restricted, however, it can be a reliable indicator of relatedness. Almost all African Americans have a common ancestor from west Africa. But west Africans are not closely related to some other dark skinned Africans. So, for example, while African Americans share a tendency to having the gene that causes sickle cell anemia, other dark skinned people--including many other African peoples--do not.
The reason this is all very important is because the modern idea of race has been assumed to have been validated on the basis of genetics. Furthermore, since it's assumed that members of a "race" are closely related genetically, and since it's obviously true that genetically closely related individuals are likely to share a lot of traits, it's been assumed that members of a race share lots of similar traits. Thus, people have argued about gross differences between races in the matter of intelligence, athletic ability, temperment, what have you. And if race did reliably indicate genetic relatedness, then these assumptions might have some merit. But since race is not an indicator of genetic relatedness, it can't be (in this respect[2]) an indicator of similarity in these traits.
Since the whole modern notion of race rests upon this assumption of relatedness and shared traits, and that notion is false, this is why some people say that the concept of race is scientifically false. They're not saying that genetics is false, or that genes don't control the expression of the various features associated with race. They are saying that the particular kind of relationship imagined between genetics and race doesn't exist.
And, in the end, what you're left with is a very messy sociological conception of race which has everything to do with local cultural standards and nothing at all to do with genetics in a meaningful way.
"In english, 'like' or 'as' is often used to show a similarity between two different concepts. This is sometimes called a 'simile'. Hard to understand, I know."
In contrast, people seem to grasp the concept of "sarcasm" quite well.
Americans have this really strange idea that their undergraduate educations are really good, when in fact they're actually very, very poor compared to the rest of the world. CS degrees are no different.
"
If there is a "soul", where does it come from? Does it just "fill in" to the bodily form when the conditions are right or are we assuming that the soul is a funtion of bio-chemistry?"
I'm in charge of this. Right now, the anima emplacement process is mostly automatic; complex metaphysical machinery (MM) operates 24/7 ensuring that life on Earth continues.
However, new forms resulting from biotechne will not be recognized by MM--at least initially--so I'll have to take care of each case individually.
"You are a nutcase, I took too many astronomy classes to mix this up."
What shitty school did you take astronomy classes from? Where do you think the Earth got its heavy elements? Why would the Earth have u-235 but not the Sun? The Sun has elements up to uranium in trace amounts just like the Earth does, and from the same source (supernovae remnants). But since the Sun is really, really big, it's got a whole bunch more of it.
You were absolutely unambiguous in your original statement:
"The Sun does not possess any nuclear materials heavy enough to produce 'nukelar' weapons."
You used the word "possess", not "produce". The Sun possesses the heavy elements in roughly the same relative proportions as the Earth. That includes fissionable elements.
What you wrote was flat-out wrong. Did you mean "produce" instead of "possess"? Perhaps, if you're not a native speaker.
"
Really, the most objective way to analyze that claim is to look at how many windows users open on their own workstation, versus how many remoted X applications they run. Compare that percentage. Then take a look at how much more complex X was made to handle the eventuality of having to handle remote windows, etc, etc. Is it worth it?
Me personally, I don't think so."
I think the people that disdain network transparency are being short-sighted. The reason that people don't run applications remotely is because a) they don't think they need to, and b) it takes a lot of effort. That's the average user.
It's true that this (application) client/server paradigm is tilted heavily toward the idea of centralized servers accessed by smaller clients. And where this topology exists and is necessary, people use X this way and it matters. For average users, it doesn't.
But that's the status quo, and it won't last.
We're going to inevitably move to a distributed computing model, and it only makes sense to do this on a per-application basis as a first step. Almost all the pieces are there. The piece that isn't there is a mechanism that matches slack to need transparently.
In my (years past, not current) daily use of UNIX workstations, I would manually spread my workload around to different boxes just because it made sense to do so. But it was a pain. Imagine if that were automatic and transparent.
In my opinion, X's network transparency will once again become incredibly useful. It's utility just needs to be properly leveraged.
Re:What does "supporting the troops" mean, exactly
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"
As someone from a country that never fights wars, I am confused by the constant pledges from Americans that they "support the troops", whether they're for or against the war."
There's two reasons for this, one common sensical and the other historical.
Common sense says that the the soldiers out there who are risking their lives fighting for one's country are not the people who make the decisions to go to war; and, in fact, are probably not the most politically astute people, either. They're not responsible for the decision to fight, and they're compelled to do so on punishment of execution for desertion. They are mostly going to be ordinary people, probably some you might have gone to school with, or are the brothers and sisters and sons and daughters of people you know, or of your neighbors. They are, loosely speaking, kindred. They are merely tools in the execution of a political policy, and some of them will die for it. That alone is enough reason to morally support them, as individual human beings.
Of course, all this is probably true of the bulk of the enemy forces, as well. Except they're not kindred in any sense, and that makes all the difference. Whether it should or not is another question. But it does to most people.
The historical reason for this sort of expression from Americans, whether or not they oppose the war, has to do with the legacy of Vietnam. During Vietnam, many American protesters explicitly condemned all the US soldiers, and there were news photos and accounts of them being spit upon by protesters when they returned home. In the years after the war, there was a growing realization that--especially because of conscription--these soldiers were as often as not as much victims of the US war machine as anyone else. For liberals, there was a realization that it was the underclass, including many African-Americans, who disproportionately made up the young men that were conscripted into the military. There was also growing guilt by a portion of the anti-war left that avoided the draft through student deferrments and other loopholes. The end result was a legacy of shame for so villifying the young men who were conscripted and forced into a war that maimed them or took their lives. And so in the American psyche as a whole, there is now a strong desire--because of the common sense reasons I mention above and because of recent history--to be careful not to blame the soldiers for what their political bosses command them to do.
All that begs the question of the issue of when the line is crossed from doing what is considered "acceptable" in wartime, to comitting war crimes. There's no doubt that some US soldiers committed war crimes in Vietnam, such as in the Mai Lai massacre. And, of course, other military forces at other times in recent history have committed atrocities. Clearly, they are not deserving of anyone's support. But I, for one, don't think that US forces are any more likely to commit a war crime than any one else, and, in fact, are better-than-average in this regard; so it seems to me to assume innocence until guilt is proven. So, in general, I support the US troops because I think they are blameless. Of course, if one is a pacifist, one may disagree.
In some sense I support the Iraqi troops, as well; except that, of course, they're trying to kill the US troops that I preferentially support. Wouldn't it be nice if only the people who actually create the conditions for a war and make the decisions about fighting the war were the ones to actually fight it? It has always seemed one of the most abhorrent aspects of war to me that the political masters who wage the war are hardly ever at any risk. And just regular folk--poor folk, usually--are the one's that actually pay the price for the decision with their lives. Hmm. It occurs to me that the political leaders on the losing side should have (or be forced to have) the honor to "fall on their swords". I wonder if Bush's own life were on the line if he would have pursued this war so aggressively. Somehow, I think not.
It's because public school books in the US are essentially "made to order", where the customer defining the specifications are the larger states and then the review process that books are put through. Idiosyncratic books like this author produces have absolutely no chance at being sold to these large markets. None.
College textbooks are just not the same kind of thing.
Believe me, I know about this stuff. A whole bunch of my friends are textbook editors, and my closest friend is actually a junior high science textbook editor. (I'm sending him the link to this story, of course.) It's a messed-up industry, but a lot of these people, like my friend, do the best jobs they can do in difficult circumstances.
This isn't influenza, as far as they know. They haven't identified a pathogen. They don't know whether its a bacteria or virus. I repeat: they don't know what this is. They'll naturally try both antibiotics and antivirals until they figure it out.
SARS is acting like an airborne pathogen, which is scary.
Slashdot Mirror
However, it never occured to me, oddly, to use regexes as a tool of seduction. I guess I just don't understand the ladies.
Sheesh.
I thought the FCC stopped using power-into-the-antenna and switched to a field strength measurement standard? Or is this just for certain bandwidths?
Inflation is nothing more and nothing less than a general increase in prices, which is exactly synonymous with my previous definition. It is not--I repeat not--exclusively defined in terms of a result of an increase in the money supply.
No, because you're wrong. As long as demand exceeds supply, prices will increase. I have no idea why you assume a cycle unless you're assuming that demand will decrease as a result of inflation, which is correct. But then, inflation will cease because demand no longer exceeds supply, which is my point. However, why do you assume deflation? No it hasn't. You probably meant that "inflation has been constant"--but if you can't be bothered to avoid making such a elementary mistake, why should you expect to have any credibility at all? And your point is...what? Ah. That's not necessarily why inflation is nearly continuous through the years. Again, inflation is demand exceeding supply. Lots of things can cause this. One is simply that people have the expectation that they will have higher earnings in the future and thus it's safe for them to spend today instead of to save. Another is increased availabity and utilization of credit (which is exactly the same thing as an increase in the money supply!). Something that doesn't necessarily require a central bank.As you know, the mechanism with which a central bank influences the money supply is not merely printing more money, but rather loaning the money to banks who, in turn, loan it to indivudal borrowers. Thus, borrowers have money they otherwise wouldn't have had, and they spend it. Demand exceeds supply (assuming that they were in equilibrium beforehand). The monetarist formulation of this sort of inflation is just another version of the demand/supply relationship.
The idea that you can't have inflation in the absence of a central bank that indirectly increases the money supply is profoundly ignorant. It's not only ignorant of basic macroeconomics, it's ignorant of history.
A nice little list tilted toward a cranky, economically ignorant, American, naive, ideological, gold-standarist view.Here's a couple of terms for you to look up:
Demand-Pull Inflation
Cost-Push Inflation
Inflation doesn't happen because governments print money. Inflation happens when aggregate demand exceeds supply. Period. The end. Learn some economics.
The gold standard loonies are not really worth arguing with. They don't understand simple economics.
I know I feel so much better when my currency is backed by gold. Because, you know, gold is so shiny. It's the shininess that gives it its intrinsic value.
It's just silly that some people are claiming that only sword and scorcery style games can be popular as MMOGs. That this has been the case is an accident of history. Someone could have said the same thing (and probably did) about SF themed RTS games until Warcraft came along.
Uh oh.
Learn Homeric and Attic Greek; and translate portions of Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament
Learn French and translate various writers -- Montaigne, for example
Read almost all of these books, in whole or in part -- a list which includes everything from Plato to Shakespeare to Heidegger to Smith to Austen to Marx
Study mathematics all four years, working from Euclid's Elements, through Newton and Leibniz's invention of the Calculus, and on through non-Euclidean geometry, Cantor, and others
Study music for one year; including history, theory, composition, and limited performance
Study laboratory science for three years; reading primary works and recapitulating experimentation spanning, for example, Lavoisier to Dalton to Miliken, Galen to Darwin, Newton to Einstein, and others
A partial semester of painting and sculpture
This is not just a gloss on the the so-called "Great Books"; and it's certainly not purely humanities or an impoverished "history or science" curriculum, either. It's heavy on both the math/science and on literature/philosophy -- not to mention that the year of music is the equivalent in some ways to more than a year at conservatory. Finally, it's really a lot of very difficult work.
Of course, it's not called a "university", it's called a "college" since it's integral and singular. This is what higher education was like in the past, and it indeed does live on in the US. St. John's is in fact the third oldest college in the US (behind William & Mary and Harvard); but the "New Program" has only existed since 1929.
Why don't you subscribe to or at least take a look the ISP-Caching mailing list?
The modern concept of race is that groups of people that are readily identifiable via a few physical traits (primarily skin color, but also face and eye shape, height, etc.) are more closely genetically related, on average, to each other than to they are to other groups.
This has been proven to be false.
It doesn't have to be false. Populations do diverge genetically, that's certain. And human populations could have diverged in ways that are expressed uniquely as gross anatomical differences. But they haven't.
A key word in that previous paragraph is "uniquely". You see, for something like skin color to be a reliable indicator of genetic relatedness, the skin color has to have a one-to-one correspondence with the genetic variation that causes it.[1] For example, I happen to have a rare genetic disease that is a mutation on the gene that controls collagen. As far as anyone knows, this mutation exists only among a few people in the world that have a common ancestor. So if you find this mutation, then you've found someone related to me. Put another way, if you find someone with the disease I have, they're related to me.
In contrast, there are other mutations on the collagen gene that exist among many unrelated people. It's a common mutation. If you find someone with that corresponding disease, there's no guarantee that they're related to someone else with that disease.
Now, the problem is that all of the features that are associated with how people define "race" are like the latter example, not the former. That is, genetically unrelated people can have dark skin. Dark skin can and has arisen among unrelated populations. Worse, dark and light skin has arisen among relatively closely related populations such that a given light skinned population is more closely related to a given dark skinned population than it is to another light skinned population. So, looking at the human race as a whole, skin color is an unreliable indicator of genetic relatedness.
Within a population that is reasonably restricted, however, it can be a reliable indicator of relatedness. Almost all African Americans have a common ancestor from west Africa. But west Africans are not closely related to some other dark skinned Africans. So, for example, while African Americans share a tendency to having the gene that causes sickle cell anemia, other dark skinned people--including many other African peoples--do not.
The reason this is all very important is because the modern idea of race has been assumed to have been validated on the basis of genetics. Furthermore, since it's assumed that members of a "race" are closely related genetically, and since it's obviously true that genetically closely related individuals are likely to share a lot of traits, it's been assumed that members of a race share lots of similar traits. Thus, people have argued about gross differences between races in the matter of intelligence, athletic ability, temperment, what have you. And if race did reliably indicate genetic relatedness, then these assumptions might have some merit. But since race is not an indicator of genetic relatedness, it can't be (in this respect[2]) an indicator of similarity in these traits.
Since the whole modern notion of race rests upon this assumption of relatedness and shared traits, and that notion is false, this is why some people say that the concept of race is scientifically false. They're not saying that genetics is false, or that genes don't control the expression of the various features associated with race. They are saying that the particular kind of relationship imagined between genetics and race doesn't exist.
And, in the end, what you're left with is a very messy sociological conception of race which has everything to do with local cultural standards and nothing at all to do with genetics in a meaningful way.
Americans have this really strange idea that their undergraduate educations are really good, when in fact they're actually very, very poor compared to the rest of the world. CS degrees are no different.
However, new forms resulting from biotechne will not be recognized by MM--at least initially--so I'll have to take care of each case individually.
A damn nuisance, if you ask me.
I saw it here in Austin, TX, not that large of a city, and the theater was packed.
You were absolutely unambiguous in your original statement:
You used the word "possess", not "produce". The Sun possesses the heavy elements in roughly the same relative proportions as the Earth. That includes fissionable elements.What you wrote was flat-out wrong. Did you mean "produce" instead of "possess"? Perhaps, if you're not a native speaker.
We just can't get to it.
It's true that this (application) client/server paradigm is tilted heavily toward the idea of centralized servers accessed by smaller clients. And where this topology exists and is necessary, people use X this way and it matters. For average users, it doesn't.
But that's the status quo, and it won't last.
We're going to inevitably move to a distributed computing model, and it only makes sense to do this on a per-application basis as a first step. Almost all the pieces are there. The piece that isn't there is a mechanism that matches slack to need transparently.
In my (years past, not current) daily use of UNIX workstations, I would manually spread my workload around to different boxes just because it made sense to do so. But it was a pain. Imagine if that were automatic and transparent.
In my opinion, X's network transparency will once again become incredibly useful. It's utility just needs to be properly leveraged.
Common sense says that the the soldiers out there who are risking their lives fighting for one's country are not the people who make the decisions to go to war; and, in fact, are probably not the most politically astute people, either. They're not responsible for the decision to fight, and they're compelled to do so on punishment of execution for desertion. They are mostly going to be ordinary people, probably some you might have gone to school with, or are the brothers and sisters and sons and daughters of people you know, or of your neighbors. They are, loosely speaking, kindred. They are merely tools in the execution of a political policy, and some of them will die for it. That alone is enough reason to morally support them, as individual human beings.
Of course, all this is probably true of the bulk of the enemy forces, as well. Except they're not kindred in any sense, and that makes all the difference. Whether it should or not is another question. But it does to most people.
The historical reason for this sort of expression from Americans, whether or not they oppose the war, has to do with the legacy of Vietnam. During Vietnam, many American protesters explicitly condemned all the US soldiers, and there were news photos and accounts of them being spit upon by protesters when they returned home. In the years after the war, there was a growing realization that--especially because of conscription--these soldiers were as often as not as much victims of the US war machine as anyone else. For liberals, there was a realization that it was the underclass, including many African-Americans, who disproportionately made up the young men that were conscripted into the military. There was also growing guilt by a portion of the anti-war left that avoided the draft through student deferrments and other loopholes. The end result was a legacy of shame for so villifying the young men who were conscripted and forced into a war that maimed them or took their lives. And so in the American psyche as a whole, there is now a strong desire--because of the common sense reasons I mention above and because of recent history--to be careful not to blame the soldiers for what their political bosses command them to do.
All that begs the question of the issue of when the line is crossed from doing what is considered "acceptable" in wartime, to comitting war crimes. There's no doubt that some US soldiers committed war crimes in Vietnam, such as in the Mai Lai massacre. And, of course, other military forces at other times in recent history have committed atrocities. Clearly, they are not deserving of anyone's support. But I, for one, don't think that US forces are any more likely to commit a war crime than any one else, and, in fact, are better-than-average in this regard; so it seems to me to assume innocence until guilt is proven. So, in general, I support the US troops because I think they are blameless. Of course, if one is a pacifist, one may disagree.
In some sense I support the Iraqi troops, as well; except that, of course, they're trying to kill the US troops that I preferentially support. Wouldn't it be nice if only the people who actually create the conditions for a war and make the decisions about fighting the war were the ones to actually fight it? It has always seemed one of the most abhorrent aspects of war to me that the political masters who wage the war are hardly ever at any risk. And just regular folk--poor folk, usually--are the one's that actually pay the price for the decision with their lives. Hmm. It occurs to me that the political leaders on the losing side should have (or be forced to have) the honor to "fall on their swords". I wonder if Bush's own life were on the line if he would have pursued this war so aggressively. Somehow, I think not.
College textbooks are just not the same kind of thing.
Believe me, I know about this stuff. A whole bunch of my friends are textbook editors, and my closest friend is actually a junior high science textbook editor. (I'm sending him the link to this story, of course.) It's a messed-up industry, but a lot of these people, like my friend, do the best jobs they can do in difficult circumstances.
Why is this story only appearing now? SXSW has been going on for days, and it is just now ended.
You're right. But some other media outlets have been calling it "flu".
SARS is acting like an airborne pathogen, which is scary.