But, increasingly, we are discovering that the plums they "cherry picked" hadn't been in the pudding until they had them put there.
See now, here's where I have to ask... what is "we are discovering", and just "who" is doing this discovering.
We, the American people. The public. People whole follow the news, who watch C-SPAN or even The Daily Show, who look things up rather than just letting them slide by. By "we are discovering" I mean that, by paying attention, we are finding out things we didn't know before. To wit, that the things the Bush administration claimed they were being told by various sources were actually things that they told those sources to tell them.
They (esp. Cheney) went to great lengths to make sure that the spin they wanted was included in reports, news stories, etc. so that they could subsequently quote it.
Calling someone and saying you want a report colored a certain way is no different than a Phd student having his thesis get altered at the request of his adviser.
Where do you get this impression that people that work for you are entitled to write whatever they want? As the boss, you are perfectly entitled to get them to color whatever report they write as you believe the world to be. If you don't like it, then you can quit!
Ah, but then if you try to paint the report as an independent source of factual information to which you are simply responding (rather than a contrived source of spin that you engineered to justify your actions) you are....wait for it...lying!.
I agree that they could pay (with their own money of course) for "reports" that said anything they wanted. But they could not then honestly claim (as the Bush administration repeatedly has) that they "learned" these things from these "reports."
In your example, and I think this is where we disagree, is that the conman isn't lying. He's not lying, because he believes what he is saying. Lying to me is telling someone something you believe is true, when you believe that to be false. That's all that it is and all that is required. Thus, in my world view... if Bush goes, and as you say, cherry picks supportive information from various sources and uses that bolster his argument, that's not lying, that's salesmanship, an entirely different thing.
If that were as far as it went I might agree with you. But, increasingly, we are discovering that the plums they "cherry picked" hadn't been in the pudding until they had them put there. They (esp. Cheney) went to great lengths to make sure that the spin they wanted was included in reports, news stories, etc. so that they could subsequently quote it.
That, IMHO, pushes it over the threshold into lying even by the abysmally low relativist's standard.
To the extent that I am "just spewing talking points" you are surely doing the same.
Specifically, you seem to have bought into the (recent) Republican embrace of what used to be a Democratic mainstay, the relativism of truth and honesty. Under this definition a whacked out con man who tells you he's going to give you magic powers isn't lying if he believes his own lies.
Calling something "a talking point" doesn't (as you seem to assume) have any bearing on it's truth or falsity. Your reasoning in this regard seems to follow the pattern:
The devil quotes scripture
Bob quotes scripture
Bob is the devil
....which is clearly invalid. The fact that the DFC or whoever said something doesn't mean that anyone else who notes the same facts is the DFC or that the facts aren't true anymore.
Combining these, you are effectively using two standards for evaluating claims; pro-Bush, statements must only be believed by someone, somewhere, to be acceptable, whereas anti-Bush statements must never have been made by any Democrats or they will be dismissed as "talking points" and implicitly ignored.
You seem to hold the Democrats in much higher regard than I do. I happen to believe they are, overall, a bunch of nitwits.
Global warming and Al Gore have nothing to do with this argument.
The whole "Bush lied" argument, is just ridiculous, and the worst part of you're argument is that you have absolute no proof that he did not believe what he said, when he said. None. You are asking me to prove that Bush told the truth and refute all your dumb points is like asking someone to prove they are not a witch by drowning.
So being forced to stick to the facts is akin to drowning?
But seriously, there are two key points here, and you are (intentionally or unintentionally) conflating them. The first, I am not expecting you to prove that Bush told the truth, since most of the claims in question are now known to have been untrue, and even the Bush administration admits this. But the second, that they knew (or should have known) that the claims were untrue at the time they made them is where the thrust of our argument are actually directed.
To that end, the damning evidence against the Bush administration is that in each case they presented their false statements as if they came from some independent source (the NIE, our alies, the press, etc.) when in each case we now know (via leaks, sworn testimony, contemporaneous documents, etc.) that they had themselves fed the information to the sources they were supposedly quoting. Most of the cases follow the pattern:
Alice: Hey Bob, say "Cheney is a girl"
Bob: "Cheney is a girl"
Alice: "Bob has recently reported that, contrary to what you all think, Cheney is in fact a girl!"
This is lying, with a thin skin of grade school level frosting, no better than telling a judge that it wasn't perjury 'cause you had your fingers crossed.
It depends on how varied your projects are; if all you ever do (as a company) is produce slight variations on a single theme, it should go fine. If you need to develop everything from hard real time embedded apps to web 2.7 social networking goo, you're screwed.
Baloney (unless by "giant lie" you mean "a set of undisputed facts that I don't like").
No....all of your supposed facts are disputed, really more talking points you've been spoon-fed by your DNC masters.
If you're going to dispute them, go ahead and do it. But do it by citing some sort of externally verifiable source (say, like a news report or a public document) cut out the creepy Democrats-are-everywhere paranoia, OK? I'm not a Democrat, I'm not talking about, for, or on behalf of the Democrats. They have nothing to do with this and the only reason they keep cropping up here is that you seem to be obsessed with them.
The Bush administration made a whole bunch of public statements in the lead up to the Iraq war. We have learned since that many of those statements were not true, and that they knew (or damned well should have known) that they were not true when they made them. I call that lying.
If you want to dispute any step of this reasoning feel free. If you just want to blather about your fear of Democrats controlling everyone who disagrees with you, go soak your head.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Do you honestly believe that the Democrats could ever get together and agree on a coherent set of talking points and get people to spread them? Seriously?
You think that the Intelligence agencies of foreign countries get their information directly from the President and Vice President of the USA? moron.
No, I don't think that, and if you would learn how to read you would have realized that. The Bush administration passed the information on, as, again, has been widely reported.
You can certainly make the case that intelligence was wrong. You can make the case that the ease with which the war would be finished was mistaken. You can say that it has cost us a pile of money.
Thank you, I do.
But these other comments are just nonsense. Go ahead and hate President Bush if you insist, but please try to base it on something at least semi reasonable. You owe it to yourself so that you won't look like a complete moron.
I would love to hate him for something semi-reasonable (I'd actually prefer even more not to hate him at all) but I am constrained by the fact that the only thing I have to judge him on is his conduct in office; if the un-American, inept, and dishonest things he says and does are not even semi-reasonable the fault is his, not mine.
The whole point of your entire argument is a giant lie, that's what I'm getting at.
Baloney (unless by "giant lie" you mean "a set of undisputed facts that I don't like").
The entire reason for your trail of reasoning is to exculpate the Democratic Party from their support for the war.
This is what I mean about you coming off like you are just spewing talking points without regard for how well they fit in the context. When have I said anything about exculpating the Democratic party? You're the one who keeps bringing them up. The only time I mentioned them was to say that they were stupid and that Bush's duplicity didn't have anything to do with that fact, the two being logically unrelated. So (unless by "exculpate" you mean "denigrate in a public forum") again I say baloney!
The simple truth of the matter is, the entire country wanted to have a war with Iraq, for a million reasons, but, pretty much, people were sick of arabs in general and Saddam in particular. It's like, if there's a guy that's robbed twenty stores on a block, and then, he gets executed for killing someone, it's really not so bad that he gets executed for a crime he didn't commit because he was a bad guy anyway.
Unless by "simple truth" you mean "racist rant buried in a glib generalization and topped off with a bad analogy" this too is baloney.
The entire country demonstrably didn't want to go to war with Iraq, or anyone else. They wanted Osama Bin Laden captured and tried for his crimes. That was the whole reason for the big sell-job on going to war with Iraq (and the fact that the Bush administration themselves saw it as a sell-job is aptly demonstrated by the fact that they referred to the process as "selling the war" and to the war itself as a "product").
blah blah Democrats blah blah Hanoi Jane blah blah
Vietnam blah blah Democrats blah Haiti blah blah blah Panama...
If you want to play dueling irrelevancies I can do that too. Chipmunks blah blah Democrats blah blah tungsten blah blah refrigerate blah blah Democrats blah blah...baloney.
But of course the Democrats, great though there faults may be, did not cause the Bush administration to lie to the American people, and (unless you are claiming that they somehow control Bush and are just using him to distract the American people from their stipulated stupidity) I suspect you realize that repeatedly dragging them into this discussion is just more baloney.
First off, learn to read. I didn't say anything about Obama, or carbon caps, or global warming, or any of that stuff, and your assumptions about what I would have said are faulty.
Second, to the extent that your points are on topic they are generally illogical, and sound more like memorized talking points that rational responses to what I said. For instance, you try to justify Bush lying when the point in question is whether or not he did lie, not whether or not it was justified. And what congress did with the information they were given is irrelevant to the question of Bush's honesty in saying that the information they saw was "the same" as what he saw. The information was not the same, he knew it, he lied when he said it was the same, and the stupidity of the Democrats in not seeing this isn't germane.
Finally, when you do make an on topic factual claim, it's wrong. For example:
Even the "he tried to kill my daddy claim" was a lie; there is no credible evidence that Sadam ever tried to kill Bush Sr
Uh, no. Bill Clinton actually broke up a plan by Saddam to try and whack Bush Sr on a trip to Kuwait.
The review, conducted for the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command, combed through 600,000 pages of Iraqi intelligence documents seized after the fall of Baghdad, as well as thousands of hours of audio- and videotapes of Saddam's conversations with his ministers and top aides. The study found that the IIS kept remarkably detailed records of virtually every operation it planned, including plots to assassinate Iraqi exiles and to supply explosives and booby-trapped suitcases to Iraqi embassies. But the Pentagon researchers found no documents that referred to a plan to kill Bush. The absence was conspicuous because researchers, aware of its potential significance, were looking for such evidence. "It was surprising," said one source familiar with the preparation of the report (who under Pentagon ground rules was not permitted to speak on the record). Given how much the Iraqis did document, "you would have thought there would have been some veiled reference to something about [the plot]."
...which continues to agree with what the CIA was saying as far back as 1993, less than a month after the event. The fact that Clinton acted on the story says more about Clinton's judgment than the truth of the story. In any case, Clinton didn't "break up" the plan, or claim to; he just retaliated. And unless you are trying to argue something along the lines of "Clinton acted on this rumor, so it must be true" I think you'd better just give up.
--MarkusQ
P.S. If you are trying to argue that Clinton's actions are an unassailable proof that something is true, please let me know. I could have some fun with that one. Seriously.
I agree with you for the most part, but you should note that you can't lie about speculation. If their estimates were wrong, then they were wrong, but by their nature you can't lie about something that hasn't happened yet that you don't have any real foreknowledge of.
The Intelligence estimate for Iran, released some time ago, shows the sort of lying that goes on. The intelligence community is saying one thing, the politicians are saying another.
There might be a case there if the administration hadn't manipulated the NIE process (and dozens of related processes) to the extent they demonstrably have. It's the same basic stunt big tobacco pulled, but scaled up and with a few twists added.
Suppose you are faced with a report that is going to say "SiO, with/. id 472011, posted in July of 2008." If you have the ability to appoint the people who are going to edit the report, approve it or send it back for rewrite, classify and declassify it, you can put it through a series of transmogrifications like so:
SiO, with/. id 472011, posted in July of 2008.
SiO posted to slashdot in July of 2008. His user ID is 472011.
SiO posted to slashdot in 2008. His/her user ID is probably 472011.
SiO may have posted to slashdot under his/her user ID is which probably 472011, but other interpretations of the data are possible .
Anything is possible; maybe SiO posted to slashdot as user ID 472011, maybe he's the great satan, who knows?
(REDACTED) SiO posted to slashdot as user ID (REDACTED) he's the great satan (REDACTED)
Summary: SiO is the great satan
If you push the report through such a process putting the information into the chanel and then quoting it back while ommiting what was there before and then come out saying "SiO is the great satan" you are lying. Saying "scientists disagree" or "there is no consensus among the intelligence community" (even if these things are true) does not change the fact that the core message is a lie which you are trying to launder to hide your hand in it.
That was the modus operandi in most if not all of the instance I cited. They were lying, and they knew it. The fact that they went to great lengths to make it look like they were just citing information from some external source isn't a viable excuse, it's additional evidence of their culpability.
President Bush didn't lie about anything re:Iraq. If you've got a problem with anything he said, take it up with the intelligence community.
At first I thought you were joking.
Bush, Cheney, et al told so many lies in the lead up to the Iraq war that it's difficult to keep track of them all. Just off the top of my head (and sticking to things we know):
Bush used the claim that our allies had "learned" about Sadam's attempts to purchase yellowcake in the state of the union address, even after he had been told that the intelligence community had debunked it. He also failed to mention that our allies had "learned" this non-fact from the Bush administration.
Cheney claimed that they "knew" Sadam had bio-weapon lans and "knew where they were"
They all claimed that we would be "greeted as liberators"
They claimed that the war would "pay for itself"
Remember "mission accomplished"?
Even the "he tried to kill my daddy claim" was a lie; there is no credible evidence that Sadam ever tried to kill Bush Sr.
They planted stories in the press ("the smoking gun that is a mushroom cloud", "able to strike in 45 minutes") through gullible reporters and then "responded" to the stories as if they were based in fact when they were nothing but talking points they themselves had planted.
They said that congress had seen "the same intelligence information we have" when in fact that was not the case; congress had been shown a carefully cheery picked version sculpted to make the case for war
They claimed that Iraq was involved in 9/11
...and on and on and on.
To claim that they didn't lie about anything regarding Iraq is either a sign of coolaid overdose, sock puppetry, or terminal cluelessness.
The answer to this is that yellowcake had been accumulated by a madman who would have liked to make it into a weapon if he had been given enough time which he wasn't.
The yellowcake in question has been sitting there for close to twenty years, maybe longer. Sadam might have had dreams of making a weapon with it back in the 1980's, when he had (or thought he had) support from the US, but the program was shut down dead by the early nineties and never got going again. Nor would it have even without the US led invasion and occupation. To say that it "was being accumulated," etc. grossly misstates the actual situation.
Maybe because the HARDEST part of the process is getting the yellowcake?
Nuts. Unless you've got some super secret enrichment technique that you haven't shared with the rest of us, you are quite simply dead wrong. Yellowcake is just a mix of uranium salts, and making it is no more complicated than any typical mining operation; drill some holes, crush some rock, and leach the minerals out with a suitable leaching agent. Dry the result and repeat. You don't need specialized equipment, or even a great deal of skill. It is a low tech, low precision step.
Enrichment, on the other hand, is a bear, requiring precision engineering, lots of finiky equipment, and a great deal of skill.
why make this big deal out of the fact that it turned out to be a lie that he was trying to acquire more?
Maybe because the lie was used to trick the American people into starting a war that has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, wrecked our economy, undermined our position in the world and put us in a far less secure position, killed hundreds of thousands of people, destabilized the middle east, and lined the pockets of the friends and supporters of the people who told the lie with money stolen from the US treasury on the basis of that lie?
The problem was it was a lie, crafted and used to achieve a specific dishonorable result. The fact that other claims that could have been made about superficially similar subjects were true (and were known to be true at the time) has absolutely no bearing on the situation.
Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons...
Why do people always feel the need to stress that yellowcake could be made into weapons, no matter how far from being a weapon it presently is? It's like saying:
Rust also can be smelted for use in cast iron lawn ornaments and, at higher levels, steel tools...
...though making a high quality steel tool from rust is significantly easier than making a weapon from yellowcake. The ubiquitous anti-nuke meme (it's radioactive, be afraid!)? Or just boilerplate like measuring energy use in average households equivalents or heavy things in adult male elephants?
What wrath? It's not like you can do anything to them once they're in office.
The permanent campaign mentality has changed all that. Most politicians today are either running for re-election or trying to jump up to the next level the whole time they are in office. Those that aren't are busy trying to help those that are. Senator Obama isn't president yet. And we have the opportunity to use his aspirations for higher office to pressure him into doing his present job.
The ironic thing is, this is the same technique used against us by the lobbyists. Remember that story a few days back about the representatives who changed to vote against the public interest and for the telecoms getting more $$$? That was money for their next campaign, already in progress.
Can you see world's population assembling under that cliff, chanting "Jump! Jump!"?
Hell, I could see quite a few people giving them a nudge in the 'right' direction...
Here's your chance to nudge. In the primaries, Barack Obama said he'd fight giving the telecoms retroactive immunity for their illegal wiretaps over the last eight years. Now that he's got the nomination sewn up he's losing some of his spine.
But the fasted growing group on his social networking site was specifically set up to nudge him in the right direction. All you have to do to add to the momentum is sign up and join the group.
Putting a little fear of the voter's wrath in a politician's heart is a patriotic duty.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
Why is it always pizza? I've been seeing you guys for twenty years, and it's always been pizza. If you were really into non sequiturs you could factor out the trade winds and integrate with respect and courage till the cows came and went. If you get my estoppal.
Not at all. I'm saying that if you really had evidence of a crime, you would not find it so difficult to get a hearing.
The problem is, you don't have evidence, but you still seem to want a hearing to take place.
You are totally confused. First, most such hearings are investigative in nature; the point of asking people to testify, subpoenaing records, etc. is to collect the evidence (it doesn't have to involve a crime; they could be investigating the weather or a treaty or whatever).
Second, such hearings have already occurred, and in fact they have led to a number of criminal trials in which people have been found guilty of various crimes.
But, and here we come home to the big point, any time the trail of evidence leads towards the White House, there is complete, illegal, and guilty-as-hell looking refusal to cooperate. They don't show up to testify, they lie under oath, they claim to have lost records that they are later able to produce when it suits them, but subsequently claim to have lost again when the tide turns...
So asking if I have evidence of criminal activity is silly. We all have the evidence, it's part of the public record. What we don't have is evidence that would show that Bush, Cheney. et al were involved in the crimes, or would clear their names, and the reason we don't have it is that they steadfastly refuse to turn it over. And that they routinely provide immunity or get out of jail free cards to anyone who might provide a chink in their armor. And that they fire investigators who push too hard for it. And that many of them have been caught with their hands dirty in similar shenanigans in the past.
Huh? Who lets users enter arbitrary integers to index into arrays?
You do, every time you make an "Add Item" button on the web page.
How so? What array? Where does the user specify the integer? Where in the code is this indexing done (I assmue you're talking about Rails, unless you're just blowing smoke)? On the face of it, your claim here makes no sense.
These vulnerabilities are likely to crop up in just about any average ruby web application. And by 'crop up' I mean 'crop up exploitable from trivial user-specified parameters.'
Huh? Who lets users enter arbitrary integers to index into arrays? Or let's users submit arbitrary loops for execution? Apart from the statement quoted above, what indication is there that any of these would "crop up" in any but the most contrived circumstances?
Obama will try to get the immunity provision removed, but failing that will vote for the overhauled wiretapping bill anyway.
This is just another case where multiple issues are stacked into one bill, forcing legislators to either support something they don't want or vote against something they do want.
Bull. We're deep in a game of "I know that you know that I think you think that I know..." but not so deep that we can't follow the clues and, ignoring what people say and watching what they do, see pretty clearly what's going on.
The House Democratic leadership has control of this process, and, through Steny Hoyer pushed this through. They could have played it many ways, and this is the way they chose. They put together this "compromise" and were under no obligation to bring it to the floor unless and until they liked it. Turning around and saying they were foxed into it doesn't wash.
Why would they do this, you ask? The most likely answer is that they wanted to get it out of play before November, and thus were doing it on behalf of Obama.
Or, if you're paranoid, you might note that we already know that some of the illegal wiretaps were done on journalists and politicians. Just as the "anti-racketeering" RICO act was quickly expanded to cover things that weren't previously considered racketeering, even the legally sanctioned the anti-terrorism powers are being used in all sorts of inappropriate ways. Perhaps blocking the immunity provisions would not be healthy for our brave representatives's careers. So in that sense you might argue that they were forced into it.
But, no matter what, our representatives weren't sold a pig in a poke unless they weren't paying any attention at all, and in that case it was their own leadership that did it to them.
At some point wouldn't that involve creating a giant space laser that could destroy the planet?
Only if we let Dr. Evil write the specs. A more reasonable design would beam the power at frequencies and densities that were harmless to living things; specifically, you wouldn't want anything that would interact with water if you expect it to get through the atmosphere.
If we're talking about what we could have built using the funds from Iraq it would be very easy to completely replace fossil fuel with biodiesel, wind and terrestrial solar.
Sounds good, but if you do the math it's not so pretty. Biodiesel only works if you're willing to accept wide spread starvation as a result of all the farm land you displace. Large scale molten salt solar in extensive deserts might get you there, but the ecological impact is still considerable. Really, nuclear and space based solar are the only options I've seen that could get the job done.
Second, you realize I hope that NASA's budget is minuscule in the big scheme of things; we spend much more on things like professional sports and junk food that are even less useful. Our entire space program from 1958 to today cost less than our current misadventures in the middle east.
That one I really don't like. Just because we've pissed away a huge amount of money in one place in no way justifies being loose with our spending elsewhere. That kind of reasoning could justify funding anything.
I suppose, but it could also be used to justify defunding anything. Besides, you used exactly the same sort of reasoning when you said:
DARPA-style engineering challenges seem to get more bang-for-the-buck.
In general, cost benefit reasoning is a pretty sound basis on which to make such decisions.
short of possibly retrieving tritium from the moon, we've got a lot of progress to make before extra-terrestrial mining becomes profitable
Mining for return to Earth, sure. But rearranging things in space to produce useful results, not so much.
For example (to merge the two thoughts), the cost of the Iraq war has exceeded the cost to set up a system of space-based solar power that could eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. The idea would be to use a heat engine design with big concentrators and take advantage of the fact that the massive parts of such a power station are low tech (and could be made from available materials) while the parts that would need to be made on Earth and shipped up are comparatively small. While the tool mass is considerable, you can mitigate this by making lots of identical power stations and amortizing the tool costs.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm trolling, but I just can't understand our push into space. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but if we can't exploit it (or learn something exploitable from it), why pursue it? It's not that it's not interesting (even fascinating), but not particularly useful as far as I can see.
You're right, it does sound like you are trolling. But I'll bite.
First off, you are aware that one of the best ways to improve your national engineering cadre (and thus, your economy, standard of living, etc.) is to attempt things that are at the border of your capabilities, or even just a tad beyond, aren't you? Even if the only thing out there was a big brass ring that was way far away, it would pay to push your limits by constantly trying to grab it faster, or cheaper, or whatever.
Second, you realize I hope that NASA's budget is minuscule in the big scheme of things; we spend much more on things like professional sports and junk food that are even less useful. Our entire space program from 1958 to today cost less than our current misadventures in the middle east.
Third, did you ever stop to think about where the vast majority of the available resources are? From energy to precious metals to useful chemical to just plain space the overwhelming majority of the resources we know about are out in space.
Given all that, it hardly seems sensible to deride the space program as useless.
Slashdot Mirror
We, the American people. The public. People whole follow the news, who watch C-SPAN or even The Daily Show, who look things up rather than just letting them slide by. By "we are discovering" I mean that, by paying attention, we are finding out things we didn't know before. To wit, that the things the Bush administration claimed they were being told by various sources were actually things that they told those sources to tell them.
Ah, but then if you try to paint the report as an independent source of factual information to which you are simply responding (rather than a contrived source of spin that you engineered to justify your actions) you are....wait for it...lying!.
I agree that they could pay (with their own money of course) for "reports" that said anything they wanted. But they could not then honestly claim (as the Bush administration repeatedly has) that they "learned" these things from these "reports."
--MarkusQ
If that were as far as it went I might agree with you. But, increasingly, we are discovering that the plums they "cherry picked" hadn't been in the pudding until they had them put there. They (esp. Cheney) went to great lengths to make sure that the spin they wanted was included in reports, news stories, etc. so that they could subsequently quote it.
That, IMHO, pushes it over the threshold into lying even by the abysmally low relativist's standard.
--MarkusQ
First, a few points:
So being forced to stick to the facts is akin to drowning?
But seriously, there are two key points here, and you are (intentionally or unintentionally) conflating them. The first, I am not expecting you to prove that Bush told the truth, since most of the claims in question are now known to have been untrue, and even the Bush administration admits this. But the second, that they knew (or should have known) that the claims were untrue at the time they made them is where the thrust of our argument are actually directed.
To that end, the damning evidence against the Bush administration is that in each case they presented their false statements as if they came from some independent source (the NIE, our alies, the press, etc.) when in each case we now know (via leaks, sworn testimony, contemporaneous documents, etc.) that they had themselves fed the information to the sources they were supposedly quoting. Most of the cases follow the pattern:
This is lying, with a thin skin of grade school level frosting, no better than telling a judge that it wasn't perjury 'cause you had your fingers crossed.
--MarkusQ
It depends on how varied your projects are; if all you ever do (as a company) is produce slight variations on a single theme, it should go fine. If you need to develop everything from hard real time embedded apps to web 2.7 social networking goo, you're screwed.
--MarkusQ
If you're going to dispute them, go ahead and do it. But do it by citing some sort of externally verifiable source (say, like a news report or a public document) cut out the creepy Democrats-are-everywhere paranoia, OK? I'm not a Democrat, I'm not talking about, for, or on behalf of the Democrats. They have nothing to do with this and the only reason they keep cropping up here is that you seem to be obsessed with them.
The Bush administration made a whole bunch of public statements in the lead up to the Iraq war. We have learned since that many of those statements were not true, and that they knew (or damned well should have known) that they were not true when they made them. I call that lying.
If you want to dispute any step of this reasoning feel free. If you just want to blather about your fear of Democrats controlling everyone who disagrees with you, go soak your head.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Do you honestly believe that the Democrats could ever get together and agree on a coherent set of talking points and get people to spread them? Seriously?
I suggest you take some of your own advice.
Like heck. For years they claimed that Saddam's Iraq and Al Queada In Irag were the same people who attacked us on 9/11.
Made the claim on several occasions as was reported in the news at the time.
No, I don't think that, and if you would learn how to read you would have realized that. The Bush administration passed the information on, as, again, has been widely reported.
Thank you, I do.
I would love to hate him for something semi-reasonable (I'd actually prefer even more not to hate him at all) but I am constrained by the fact that the only thing I have to judge him on is his conduct in office; if the un-American, inept, and dishonest things he says and does are not even semi-reasonable the fault is his, not mine.
--MarkusQ
Baloney (unless by "giant lie" you mean "a set of undisputed facts that I don't like").
This is what I mean about you coming off like you are just spewing talking points without regard for how well they fit in the context. When have I said anything about exculpating the Democratic party? You're the one who keeps bringing them up. The only time I mentioned them was to say that they were stupid and that Bush's duplicity didn't have anything to do with that fact, the two being logically unrelated. So (unless by "exculpate" you mean "denigrate in a public forum") again I say baloney!
Unless by "simple truth" you mean "racist rant buried in a glib generalization and topped off with a bad analogy" this too is baloney.
The entire country demonstrably didn't want to go to war with Iraq, or anyone else. They wanted Osama Bin Laden captured and tried for his crimes. That was the whole reason for the big sell-job on going to war with Iraq (and the fact that the Bush administration themselves saw it as a sell-job is aptly demonstrated by the fact that they referred to the process as "selling the war" and to the war itself as a "product").
If you want to play dueling irrelevancies I can do that too. Chipmunks blah blah Democrats blah blah tungsten blah blah refrigerate blah blah Democrats blah blah ...baloney.
But of course the Democrats, great though there faults may be, did not cause the Bush administration to lie to the American people, and (unless you are claiming that they somehow control Bush and are just using him to distract the American people from their stipulated stupidity) I suspect you realize that repeatedly dragging them into this discussion is just more baloney.
--MarkusQ
Whoa. Dude.
First off, learn to read. I didn't say anything about Obama, or carbon caps, or global warming, or any of that stuff, and your assumptions about what I would have said are faulty.
Second, to the extent that your points are on topic they are generally illogical, and sound more like memorized talking points that rational responses to what I said. For instance, you try to justify Bush lying when the point in question is whether or not he did lie, not whether or not it was justified. And what congress did with the information they were given is irrelevant to the question of Bush's honesty in saying that the information they saw was "the same" as what he saw. The information was not the same, he knew it, he lied when he said it was the same, and the stupidity of the Democrats in not seeing this isn't germane.
Finally, when you do make an on topic factual claim, it's wrong. For example:
Not according to the recent pentagon report:
...which continues to agree with what the CIA was saying as far back as 1993, less than a month after the event. The fact that Clinton acted on the story says more about Clinton's judgment than the truth of the story. In any case, Clinton didn't "break up" the plan, or claim to; he just retaliated. And unless you are trying to argue something along the lines of "Clinton acted on this rumor, so it must be true" I think you'd better just give up.
--MarkusQ
P.S. If you are trying to argue that Clinton's actions are an unassailable proof that something is true, please let me know. I could have some fun with that one. Seriously.
I agree with you for the most part, but you should note that you can't lie about speculation. If their estimates were wrong, then they were wrong, but by their nature you can't lie about something that hasn't happened yet that you don't have any real foreknowledge of.
The Intelligence estimate for Iran, released some time ago, shows the sort of lying that goes on. The intelligence community is saying one thing, the politicians are saying another.
At first I thought you were joking.
Bush, Cheney, et al told so many lies in the lead up to the Iraq war that it's difficult to keep track of them all. Just off the top of my head (and sticking to things we know):
To claim that they didn't lie about anything regarding Iraq is either a sign of coolaid overdose, sock puppetry, or terminal cluelessness.
--MarkusQ
The yellowcake in question has been sitting there for close to twenty years, maybe longer. Sadam might have had dreams of making a weapon with it back in the 1980's, when he had (or thought he had) support from the US, but the program was shut down dead by the early nineties and never got going again. Nor would it have even without the US led invasion and occupation. To say that it "was being accumulated," etc. grossly misstates the actual situation.
--MarkusQ
Nuts. Unless you've got some super secret enrichment technique that you haven't shared with the rest of us, you are quite simply dead wrong. Yellowcake is just a mix of uranium salts, and making it is no more complicated than any typical mining operation; drill some holes, crush some rock, and leach the minerals out with a suitable leaching agent. Dry the result and repeat. You don't need specialized equipment, or even a great deal of skill. It is a low tech, low precision step.
Enrichment, on the other hand, is a bear, requiring precision engineering, lots of finiky equipment, and a great deal of skill.
--MarkusQ
Maybe because the lie was used to trick the American people into starting a war that has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, wrecked our economy, undermined our position in the world and put us in a far less secure position, killed hundreds of thousands of people, destabilized the middle east, and lined the pockets of the friends and supporters of the people who told the lie with money stolen from the US treasury on the basis of that lie?
The problem was it was a lie, crafted and used to achieve a specific dishonorable result. The fact that other claims that could have been made about superficially similar subjects were true (and were known to be true at the time) has absolutely no bearing on the situation.
--MarkusQ
Why do people always feel the need to stress that yellowcake could be made into weapons, no matter how far from being a weapon it presently is? It's like saying:
...though making a high quality steel tool from rust is significantly easier than making a weapon from yellowcake. The ubiquitous anti-nuke meme (it's radioactive, be afraid!)? Or just boilerplate like measuring energy use in average households equivalents or heavy things in adult male elephants?
-- MarkusQ
The permanent campaign mentality has changed all that. Most politicians today are either running for re-election or trying to jump up to the next level the whole time they are in office. Those that aren't are busy trying to help those that are. Senator Obama isn't president yet. And we have the opportunity to use his aspirations for higher office to pressure him into doing his present job.
The ironic thing is, this is the same technique used against us by the lobbyists. Remember that story a few days back about the representatives who changed to vote against the public interest and for the telecoms getting more $$$? That was money for their next campaign, already in progress.
--MarkusQ
Here's your chance to nudge. In the primaries, Barack Obama said he'd fight giving the telecoms retroactive immunity for their illegal wiretaps over the last eight years. Now that he's got the nomination sewn up he's losing some of his spine.
But the fasted growing group on his social networking site was specifically set up to nudge him in the right direction. All you have to do to add to the momentum is sign up and join the group.
Putting a little fear of the voter's wrath in a politician's heart is a patriotic duty.
--MarkusQ
Why is it always pizza? I've been seeing you guys for twenty years, and it's always been pizza. If you were really into non sequiturs you could factor out the trade winds and integrate with respect and courage till the cows came and went. If you get my estoppal.
--MarkusQ
You are totally confused. First, most such hearings are investigative in nature; the point of asking people to testify, subpoenaing records, etc. is to collect the evidence (it doesn't have to involve a crime; they could be investigating the weather or a treaty or whatever).
Second, such hearings have already occurred, and in fact they have led to a number of criminal trials in which people have been found guilty of various crimes.
But, and here we come home to the big point, any time the trail of evidence leads towards the White House, there is complete, illegal, and guilty-as-hell looking refusal to cooperate. They don't show up to testify, they lie under oath, they claim to have lost records that they are later able to produce when it suits them, but subsequently claim to have lost again when the tide turns...
So asking if I have evidence of criminal activity is silly. We all have the evidence, it's part of the public record. What we don't have is evidence that would show that Bush, Cheney. et al were involved in the crimes, or would clear their names, and the reason we don't have it is that they steadfastly refuse to turn it over. And that they routinely provide immunity or get out of jail free cards to anyone who might provide a chink in their armor. And that they fire investigators who push too hard for it. And that many of them have been caught with their hands dirty in similar shenanigans in the past.
--MarkusQ
How so? What array? Where does the user specify the integer? Where in the code is this indexing done (I assmue you're talking about Rails, unless you're just blowing smoke)? On the face of it, your claim here makes no sense.
--MarkusQ
Huh? Who lets users enter arbitrary integers to index into arrays? Or let's users submit arbitrary loops for execution? Apart from the statement quoted above, what indication is there that any of these would "crop up" in any but the most contrived circumstances?
--MarkusQ
Bull. We're deep in a game of "I know that you know that I think you think that I know..." but not so deep that we can't follow the clues and, ignoring what people say and watching what they do, see pretty clearly what's going on.
The House Democratic leadership has control of this process, and, through Steny Hoyer pushed this through. They could have played it many ways, and this is the way they chose. They put together this "compromise" and were under no obligation to bring it to the floor unless and until they liked it. Turning around and saying they were foxed into it doesn't wash.
Why would they do this, you ask? The most likely answer is that they wanted to get it out of play before November, and thus were doing it on behalf of Obama.
Or, if you're paranoid, you might note that we already know that some of the illegal wiretaps were done on journalists and politicians. Just as the "anti-racketeering" RICO act was quickly expanded to cover things that weren't previously considered racketeering, even the legally sanctioned the anti-terrorism powers are being used in all sorts of inappropriate ways. Perhaps blocking the immunity provisions would not be healthy for our brave representatives's careers. So in that sense you might argue that they were forced into it.
But, no matter what, our representatives weren't sold a pig in a poke unless they weren't paying any attention at all, and in that case it was their own leadership that did it to them.
--MarkusQ
--MarkusQ
Only if we let Dr. Evil write the specs. A more reasonable design would beam the power at frequencies and densities that were harmless to living things; specifically, you wouldn't want anything that would interact with water if you expect it to get through the atmosphere.
Sounds good, but if you do the math it's not so pretty. Biodiesel only works if you're willing to accept wide spread starvation as a result of all the farm land you displace. Large scale molten salt solar in extensive deserts might get you there, but the ecological impact is still considerable. Really, nuclear and space based solar are the only options I've seen that could get the job done.
--MarkusQ
I suppose, but it could also be used to justify defunding anything. Besides, you used exactly the same sort of reasoning when you said:
In general, cost benefit reasoning is a pretty sound basis on which to make such decisions.
Mining for return to Earth, sure. But rearranging things in space to produce useful results, not so much.
For example (to merge the two thoughts), the cost of the Iraq war has exceeded the cost to set up a system of space-based solar power that could eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. The idea would be to use a heat engine design with big concentrators and take advantage of the fact that the massive parts of such a power station are low tech (and could be made from available materials) while the parts that would need to be made on Earth and shipped up are comparatively small. While the tool mass is considerable, you can mitigate this by making lots of identical power stations and amortizing the tool costs.
--MarkusQ
You're right, it does sound like you are trolling. But I'll bite.
First off, you are aware that one of the best ways to improve your national engineering cadre (and thus, your economy, standard of living, etc.) is to attempt things that are at the border of your capabilities, or even just a tad beyond, aren't you? Even if the only thing out there was a big brass ring that was way far away, it would pay to push your limits by constantly trying to grab it faster, or cheaper, or whatever.
Second, you realize I hope that NASA's budget is minuscule in the big scheme of things; we spend much more on things like professional sports and junk food that are even less useful. Our entire space program from 1958 to today cost less than our current misadventures in the middle east.
Third, did you ever stop to think about where the vast majority of the available resources are? From energy to precious metals to useful chemical to just plain space the overwhelming majority of the resources we know about are out in space.
Given all that, it hardly seems sensible to deride the space program as useless.
--MarkusQ