I think his point is that he wants other recruitment ideas besides "post a plea for help to Slashdot".
If he'd asked for help instead of asking for how to find the right people, he might have found half a dozen/. readers and nobody else. His story might never have made the front page that way, anyway. By asking a general question that will result in general answers, he might help himself and others more in the long run.
One of your issues is likely to be that your users are people wanting to run simulations and the people you need to help with programming are programmers who are interested in n-body simulation. Any time you have two narrow slices of the population as your user pool and contributor pool, it's harder to find users who are also able and willing to contribute.
Most big projects are more general-purpose. Everyone needs a text editor or email client. Many people need a database or web server. Programmers are big users of things like text editors, programming language tools, and project management systems. Communications tools like email, IM, IRC, web servers, CMSes, etc. are very popular as projects because of what they are and who uses them.
The best way to find people who have both interest and ability in the areas you need for your project is to find people familiar with the problem and hold their hand getting them up to speed on your code. It's much easier to teach someone with domain experience how the program represents their data and manipulates it rather than to teach a programmer with no domain experience what they need to know for the simulation. You may find some others who already have both sets of knowledge, but they're probably busy people (and might even already be writing competing software).
One thing you might consider is searching for similar projects that are also open source and more or less defunct, and see about merging projects or sharing code back and forth. If you could find another project or two working towards the same goals you might be able to propose a standard data format or compatible plug-in interfaces. That would save a bunch of time for all involved, and would make sharing code in the future even easier.
Actually, I'd prefer "murderer and terrorist" for both. They both killed people not because they wanted those people specifically dead, but to spread an aura of fear among those like the ones attacked.
The Unabomber was a Luddite or neo-Luddite, so he attacked people working on high-tech stuff. He wasn't trying to stop the work through words or even through destroying all the people involved and their work, but through fear.
Bin Laden is against apparently all Westerners, Christians, Jews, bankers, and people who engage in global business. He's also against any Muslims who live peaceably alongside any of those. So he attacks people representative of those groups. He figures he can cause people to cower and change their ways in much larger numbers through fear of attack than through other methods.
A murderer kills someone. A terrorist tries to coerce a group to do something based on fear, which may or may not include actually killing anyone. Terrorism is like extortion on a massive scale. The threat is more important than the actual act, but proving you're willing to commit the act on a sample of the people brings credibility to the threat. People who are terrorists may be murderers, and they usually are since the fear of death is one of the biggest fears people have. Murderers are not necessarily terrorists, though. Killing one person doesn't mean you're doing it to send a list of demands to others.
Now, the question of crime vs. act of war is still applicable. Many would say that even if terrorism and murder are separate, that terrorism could be treated as a crime. I agree with that, actually.
I also agree that when such a heinous crime as the WTC attack cannot be prosecuted properly because a nation like Afghanistan refuses to extradite the planners that it's acceptable to go in and try to take the suspects by force. If the government of that nation is giving active support and training to the group that did it, as it appears they were, then that is an act of war.
So I have no way, from my beliefs, to condemn the invasion of Afghanistan given the circumstances.
Iraq is a different situation, though, and I'm still to this day torn over it. I think the ceasefire terms from the UN counterattack against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait could have been used as a valid reason to invade. However, I think invading at the time chosen and using additional reasons that turned out to be false were both horrible mistakes. I further think the planning for what to do after deposing Hussein was abysmal. In all, invading Iraq was probably a bad idea. How it was done has certainly been terrible, and has lead to far more instability and suffering than should have been necessary. I think the intentions of those involved at the top were mostly honorable, but they screwed up badly.
I think the intentions of the vast majority of the soldiers and Marines on the ground were entirely honorable, and it's a shame that their civilian commanders and a few of their brothers at arms have put them in such a predicament.
The US trained Bin Laden as a freedom fighter against the Soviet military, not as a terrorist who blows up civilians on purpose. Compare it to the accusations of Iran training people to fight US troops in Iraq if you like, because that's much more like what the US did. It's silly to compare it to people blowing up office buildings and nightclubs.
The US military does not in general kill civilians on purpose. There are a few assholes in every large organization, but people get punished for killing civilians on purpose and not praised as heroes. Civilians who happen to be close to a battle or who are reasonably mistaken for enemy forces do unfortunately sometimes die. That's an unsavory effect of any urban act of military force.
Where exactly in that post did I claim the US was better than anywhere else? I certainly believe it's better than some of those listed, but I didn't say that and I certainly didn't say it's better than all of them. Nation states don't exist to be shining beacons to other nation states. They exist to serve the common good of their citizens. Being nice to people in other countries is the right thing to do as human beings, but it's not necessary to the mission of protecting your people and providing opportunities for them.
There's plenty of blame to go around pretty much every part of the globe, and the US has its share. I think it's silly to say it has a disproportionately large share of blame for suffering, though, when our government has also done so much to help other countries and is mostly (but not completely) fair to its own citizens.
Copyright might be a surmountable obstacle since it'd be a short-lived cache. Slashdot/SourceForge might get sued once in a while, but could probably win or settle cheap.
How the heck do you propose Slashdot calculates and distributes the ad revenues according to the agreements the referenced site has? There's no standard infrastructure for determining the ad rates, what constitutes a payable event (loading the ad, a chance of loading the ad, a click, a click that ends up in a closed sale) or what ads are to be shown when and communicating it all to a third party. Furthermore, it's really none of a third party's business what the sites make per ad. So you either pre-negotiate with every site you're caching for how to make sure they get their the ad revenue, or you're preventing them from getting those revenues.
You have some good points, but if you're wanting it to vacuum while you watch a movie you must have a really big house or a really quiet vacuum cleaner.
It's on the web site for your local/regional branch of their company. $2900 US for the DVD projector, or $400 for the little wireless webcam that runs around and changes the lens angle based on commands from a lightsaber remote. It's nice to know there's a cheaper option for the more strapped SW geek.
Actually, Adobe just released the specs for SWF and FLV files for others to be able to more fully utilize those formats. Adobe is much more friendly to open standards than Macromedia was, so look for more of this to happen.
Many other players and authoring tools supported SWF files before the spec was fully published. Now they'll be able to do an even better job, though. Adobe intends to compete based on the quality of their tools rather than customer lock-in, and that makes them one of the best closed-source software vendors out there.
Another popular theory among SW fans has been that it's a race between two objects that are moving in opposite directions. The faster you get back and forth, the less distance there is between them.
Then there's the "Han is trying to snow these dumb townies" idea.
Did the slap down go along the lines of, "Well, since you believed the license which permitted you to make these copies to be invalid, each copy you made was intended to be a violation of the copyrights for this code. We could therefore start the settlement process by negotiating how many thousands of euros you'll pay per copy."?
I think it really should go something like that. If you think a license in invalid, you're not allowed to use the code under that license. Therefore, you have no license under which to use the code. So if you use the code anyway, you're purposefully committing copyright violations, just the same as if the license is valid and you don't live up to its terms.
Either way, they violated copyright. It's a damn poor argument to make that you thought you'd just use some code because you didn't think there was a valid license that gave you a right to use it.
How about my perennial suggestion -- pack a lightweight, smallish motorcycle on your plane? Anyone willing to go through the training, risk, and expense of flying a small aircraft should have no problems getting qualified to ride a bike.
George W. Bush (had to get the political joke in) Well, you managed to fit his name in anyway. (I don't think/. posts will hold a Max Headroom or Tron type of download.)
BTW, the ID people never claimed that everything designed would itself be intelligent.
Why strive to be the single best and be in the spotlight for any failures when it's far more advantageous to be thought of as one of the many near the top?
"Suicide bomber" sounds like someone who wants to die and offs himself with explosives. "Homicide bomber" sounds like someone who wants to blow up other people. Very clearly, the "suicide bombers" to which we normally refer are intending to kill others, and killing themselves is part of the tactic.
Fighting against uniformed forces using asymmetrical tactics because you're a smaller force facing a larger force is one thing. Attacking civilians with no warning to get on CNN and have your demands heard is another. There is a proper use for the term "terrorist", but it's being used more broadly than it should be.
The AK-style action is less accurate but more reliable under abuse and poor maintenance conditions than the Striker-based rifles. It's also much cheaper, usually, to get a Kalishnikov, Dragonov or some knock off than to get a Colt, Bushmaster, or equivalent.
The Hi Point pistol cartridge carbines might make sense as they're meant to take some abuse at a low price point. They're not exactly military-style rifles, though, and are even less accurate than AKs because of the types of rounds they fire. They should be fine in close quarters, though, as offensive or defensive weapons or as target/varmint plinkers.
One of the biggest reasons I think that the AK is so popular with those opposed to the US or US policy, though, is that it symbolizes that opposition. The Soviets, Chinese, Germans, Israelis, and Americans are well known for small arms. The Germans produce very expensive weapons and I think they only sell to allies. The Israelis produce their own weapons for strategic reasons. The US only sells its weapons to nations which it's happy with. The Soviets were (and the Chinese are) able to make a good amount of money selling AKs to whoever can't or won't buy AR-15/M-16 rifles and M4 carbines.
If you're from a nation that is traditionally opposed to the US, as many (not all) terrorists tend to be, then the AK is likely what you've had around to be comfortable with using. It's also a symbol of sorts for the animosity these people have.
That the treatment at Abu Graib was newsworthy shows that you're babbling nonsense. If the US military was at all like al Qaeda or like Saddam Hussein, then it would have been expected.
All of you other countries lost the right to have the US stay out of world affairs. The US tried to avoid both world wars, and was brought in by plots of other nations. Now, the US is going to have its hands in whatever it can reach. We get attacked when we leave the rest of you alone, and we get attacked when we don't. We might as well sway some things in our favor, then.
Before you start mouthing off about human rights abuses and "terrorist acts" by the US, you should look up some other countries. I suggest you start with China, Myanmar, Iraq, Somalia, Serbia, Mexico , Brazil, Colombia, and Peru.
You forgot to mention that suicidal terrorists don't care if they buy a one-way ticket or a round-trip ticket. They're not going to be worried about wasting the return trip ticket if they're planning to be dead by then.
Wildcarding domains is a very old, in Net terms, practice. All you have to do to have it work at the registry level is to wildcard the top level. It's a trivial one line per top-level domain for which you want to do this in BIND. There's nothing novel or even particularly interesting about it.
That comparison's fair enough. IF you're really pissed about the war in Iraq, be aware that Bush Sr. had every opportunity to end Hussein's reign the first time, and that Clinton's administration could have kept the oil-for-food campaign from being abused for profit.
Clinton also could have taken care of bin Laden before the WTC was destroyed, since it had been attacked by a truck bomb by al Qaeda before. He could have kept lots of people from dying in Somalia by not pulling our troops out of the UN effort there because of one "failed"* mission.
* It's interesting to call a mission "failed" with the objectives met, but without the expected clean withdrawal.
Neither party is blameless in Iraq. Bush had little choice but to invade Afghanistan, but Clinton could have prevented that. Neither has helped much in the Israeli and Palestinian mess, although both say they tried. Clinton did help in Yugoslavia, but probably could have done more if it wasn't for his issues at home. Neither has dropped the silly and damaging embargo against Cuba. It was under Clinton's watch that US intelligence funding was cut and overseas field agents were pulled, leading to many of the intelligence problems the Bush administration has. Again, neither Clinton nor Bush is blameless in Iraq.
Neither is, AFAICT, Achmadinijad nor was Saddam Hussein. Hussein claimed to have WMD programs, he kicked out inspectors, and he had a history of using WMD. The oil for food program was full of kickbacks and illegal funneling of money, so there's every chance he could have been using that for WMD. Russian and French interests are also not blameless in that scandal. When very few WMD were found (and mostly in disrepair, in no shape to be used), many people were shocked, and not just in the US.
You must remember that the Hussein regime was so crooked and/or ill-connected to their country (or to reality) that their propaganda machine was proclaiming that US troops were being routed at the borders while US tanks were rolling into Baghdad. When dealing with people who make such outrageous claims as that who have a fairly recent history of using chemical weapons, what is one supposed to believe and not believe about their weapons programs?
The situation was that 2,000,000 Japanese and 1.2 million Americans were likely to die in an invasion. The cities that were bombed were industrial centers powering the Japanese war effort, and the primary targets were the factories. It's unfortunate that so many civilians died (civilians trained to fight with farm implements and pointed sticks in case of an invasion, but still it's unfortunate). Such things happen when weapons aren't discriminating and accurate enough.
The Tokyo incendiary runs -- fire bombing a city largely made of wood and paper night after night -- was probably much more terrifying than the atomic bombs. The A-bombs ended the war through a vulgar display of power, and it's unfortunate it had to happen that way. Yet the people at the time saw no alternative that would not cost many more lives on both sides.
The nation which was attacked with those bombs was the aggressor who brought the US into the war. Their soldiers raped, killed, and stole from civilians face to face at Nanking. They marched US, Chinese, and British soldiers they had captured to death. They were training their 19 and 20-year old pilots to fly over-fueled fighter planes with little or no weaponry into enemy ships on suicide missions.
One pilot's plane failed on the way to his suicide mission, and he parachuted to safety to go back and fly the next suicide mission. He was berated by his commanders for not going down with the plane honorably, even though the plane wasn't doing anything to the enemy where it went down.
Germany fired scud-like V2 rockets into London indiscriminately. They killed millions of Jews for simply being Jewish. They performed medical experiments on captives. They invaded dozens of countries. They were allied with the Japanese, so give credit to that alliance for those tactics.
Who do you think leads the world in the development of tightly targeted, electronically controlled "smart" weapons? Why do you think that might be? Might it be to limit overkill and damage to civilians and their property? It's certainly cheaper to carpet bomb a city than to drop two high-end TV-guided bombs into the window of a factory.
How many years ago did bin Laden's people attack the World Trade center? Was it 63 years? No, I didn't think so. Was there a declared and internationally recognized war between the two sides? No, I didn't think that either.
I'm not saying the US is perfect. It needs quite a lot of work. Don't compare a difficult decision about how to end a war with the technology available in 1945 with the unannounced targeting of a skyscraper with a civilian airliner, though.
Hitler's scientists were working on the atomic bomb, too. If the US hadn't been the first nation to successfully build and deploy them, do you really think things would have turned out better?
6 order of magnitude? 3,000,000,000? Three billion people? Wow. Just, wow. I think you're a bit over any count I've ever heard. Half the world's population killed by US soldiers? Just, wow. Please go away now.
Like the Iraqis were so successfully keeping a muzzle on Saddam Hussein or like Serbia and Milosevic? Let's face it, we Americans might be able to do better controlling our politicians, but we sure as hell could do worse.
Slashdot Mirror
I think his point is that he wants other recruitment ideas besides "post a plea for help to Slashdot".
/. readers and nobody else. His story might never have made the front page that way, anyway. By asking a general question that will result in general answers, he might help himself and others more in the long run.
If he'd asked for help instead of asking for how to find the right people, he might have found half a dozen
One of your issues is likely to be that your users are people wanting to run simulations and the people you need to help with programming are programmers who are interested in n-body simulation. Any time you have two narrow slices of the population as your user pool and contributor pool, it's harder to find users who are also able and willing to contribute.
Most big projects are more general-purpose. Everyone needs a text editor or email client. Many people need a database or web server. Programmers are big users of things like text editors, programming language tools, and project management systems. Communications tools like email, IM, IRC, web servers, CMSes, etc. are very popular as projects because of what they are and who uses them.
The best way to find people who have both interest and ability in the areas you need for your project is to find people familiar with the problem and hold their hand getting them up to speed on your code. It's much easier to teach someone with domain experience how the program represents their data and manipulates it rather than to teach a programmer with no domain experience what they need to know for the simulation. You may find some others who already have both sets of knowledge, but they're probably busy people (and might even already be writing competing software).
One thing you might consider is searching for similar projects that are also open source and more or less defunct, and see about merging projects or sharing code back and forth. If you could find another project or two working towards the same goals you might be able to propose a standard data format or compatible plug-in interfaces. That would save a bunch of time for all involved, and would make sharing code in the future even easier.
Actually, I'd prefer "murderer and terrorist" for both. They both killed people not because they wanted those people specifically dead, but to spread an aura of fear among those like the ones attacked.
The Unabomber was a Luddite or neo-Luddite, so he attacked people working on high-tech stuff. He wasn't trying to stop the work through words or even through destroying all the people involved and their work, but through fear.
Bin Laden is against apparently all Westerners, Christians, Jews, bankers, and people who engage in global business. He's also against any Muslims who live peaceably alongside any of those. So he attacks people representative of those groups. He figures he can cause people to cower and change their ways in much larger numbers through fear of attack than through other methods.
A murderer kills someone. A terrorist tries to coerce a group to do something based on fear, which may or may not include actually killing anyone. Terrorism is like extortion on a massive scale. The threat is more important than the actual act, but proving you're willing to commit the act on a sample of the people brings credibility to the threat. People who are terrorists may be murderers, and they usually are since the fear of death is one of the biggest fears people have. Murderers are not necessarily terrorists, though. Killing one person doesn't mean you're doing it to send a list of demands to others.
Now, the question of crime vs. act of war is still applicable. Many would say that even if terrorism and murder are separate, that terrorism could be treated as a crime. I agree with that, actually.
I also agree that when such a heinous crime as the WTC attack cannot be prosecuted properly because a nation like Afghanistan refuses to extradite the planners that it's acceptable to go in and try to take the suspects by force. If the government of that nation is giving active support and training to the group that did it, as it appears they were, then that is an act of war.
So I have no way, from my beliefs, to condemn the invasion of Afghanistan given the circumstances.
Iraq is a different situation, though, and I'm still to this day torn over it. I think the ceasefire terms from the UN counterattack against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait could have been used as a valid reason to invade. However, I think invading at the time chosen and using additional reasons that turned out to be false were both horrible mistakes. I further think the planning for what to do after deposing Hussein was abysmal. In all, invading Iraq was probably a bad idea. How it was done has certainly been terrible, and has lead to far more instability and suffering than should have been necessary. I think the intentions of those involved at the top were mostly honorable, but they screwed up badly.
I think the intentions of the vast majority of the soldiers and Marines on the ground were entirely honorable, and it's a shame that their civilian commanders and a few of their brothers at arms have put them in such a predicament.
The US trained Bin Laden as a freedom fighter against the Soviet military, not as a terrorist who blows up civilians on purpose. Compare it to the accusations of Iran training people to fight US troops in Iraq if you like, because that's much more like what the US did. It's silly to compare it to people blowing up office buildings and nightclubs.
The US military does not in general kill civilians on purpose. There are a few assholes in every large organization, but people get punished for killing civilians on purpose and not praised as heroes. Civilians who happen to be close to a battle or who are reasonably mistaken for enemy forces do unfortunately sometimes die. That's an unsavory effect of any urban act of military force.
Where exactly in that post did I claim the US was better than anywhere else? I certainly believe it's better than some of those listed, but I didn't say that and I certainly didn't say it's better than all of them. Nation states don't exist to be shining beacons to other nation states. They exist to serve the common good of their citizens. Being nice to people in other countries is the right thing to do as human beings, but it's not necessary to the mission of protecting your people and providing opportunities for them.
There's plenty of blame to go around pretty much every part of the globe, and the US has its share. I think it's silly to say it has a disproportionately large share of blame for suffering, though, when our government has also done so much to help other countries and is mostly (but not completely) fair to its own citizens.
Ad revenue and copyright come to mind.
Copyright might be a surmountable obstacle since it'd be a short-lived cache. Slashdot/SourceForge might get sued once in a while, but could probably win or settle cheap.
How the heck do you propose Slashdot calculates and distributes the ad revenues according to the agreements the referenced site has? There's no standard infrastructure for determining the ad rates, what constitutes a payable event (loading the ad, a chance of loading the ad, a click, a click that ends up in a closed sale) or what ads are to be shown when and communicating it all to a third party. Furthermore, it's really none of a third party's business what the sites make per ad. So you either pre-negotiate with every site you're caching for how to make sure they get their the ad revenue, or you're preventing them from getting those revenues.
You have some good points, but if you're wanting it to vacuum while you watch a movie you must have a really big house or a really quiet vacuum cleaner.
Only if he pays before he loses it all at blackjack.
It's on the web site for your local/regional branch of their company. $2900 US for the DVD projector, or $400 for the little wireless webcam that runs around and changes the lens angle based on commands from a lightsaber remote. It's nice to know there's a cheaper option for the more strapped SW geek.
Call the 6.6m diagonal a 6.6m diagonal, and also mention the aspect ratio?
Actually, Adobe just released the specs for SWF and FLV files for others to be able to more fully utilize those formats. Adobe is much more friendly to open standards than Macromedia was, so look for more of this to happen.
Many other players and authoring tools supported SWF files before the spec was fully published. Now they'll be able to do an even better job, though. Adobe intends to compete based on the quality of their tools rather than customer lock-in, and that makes them one of the best closed-source software vendors out there.
Another popular theory among SW fans has been that it's a race between two objects that are moving in opposite directions. The faster you get back and forth, the less distance there is between them.
Then there's the "Han is trying to snow these dumb townies" idea.
Did the slap down go along the lines of, "Well, since you believed the license which permitted you to make these copies to be invalid, each copy you made was intended to be a violation of the copyrights for this code. We could therefore start the settlement process by negotiating how many thousands of euros you'll pay per copy."?
I think it really should go something like that. If you think a license in invalid, you're not allowed to use the code under that license. Therefore, you have no license under which to use the code. So if you use the code anyway, you're purposefully committing copyright violations, just the same as if the license is valid and you don't live up to its terms.
Either way, they violated copyright. It's a damn poor argument to make that you thought you'd just use some code because you didn't think there was a valid license that gave you a right to use it.
How about my perennial suggestion -- pack a lightweight, smallish motorcycle on your plane? Anyone willing to go through the training, risk, and expense of flying a small aircraft should have no problems getting qualified to ride a bike.
BTW, the ID people never claimed that everything designed would itself be intelligent.
Why strive to be the single best and be in the spotlight for any failures when it's far more advantageous to be thought of as one of the many near the top?
"Suicide bomber" sounds like someone who wants to die and offs himself with explosives. "Homicide bomber" sounds like someone who wants to blow up other people. Very clearly, the "suicide bombers" to which we normally refer are intending to kill others, and killing themselves is part of the tactic.
Fighting against uniformed forces using asymmetrical tactics because you're a smaller force facing a larger force is one thing. Attacking civilians with no warning to get on CNN and have your demands heard is another. There is a proper use for the term "terrorist", but it's being used more broadly than it should be.
The AK-style action is less accurate but more reliable under abuse and poor maintenance conditions than the Striker-based rifles. It's also much cheaper, usually, to get a Kalishnikov, Dragonov or some knock off than to get a Colt, Bushmaster, or equivalent.
The Hi Point pistol cartridge carbines might make sense as they're meant to take some abuse at a low price point. They're not exactly military-style rifles, though, and are even less accurate than AKs because of the types of rounds they fire. They should be fine in close quarters, though, as offensive or defensive weapons or as target/varmint plinkers.
One of the biggest reasons I think that the AK is so popular with those opposed to the US or US policy, though, is that it symbolizes that opposition. The Soviets, Chinese, Germans, Israelis, and Americans are well known for small arms. The Germans produce very expensive weapons and I think they only sell to allies. The Israelis produce their own weapons for strategic reasons. The US only sells its weapons to nations which it's happy with. The Soviets were (and the Chinese are) able to make a good amount of money selling AKs to whoever can't or won't buy AR-15/M-16 rifles and M4 carbines.
If you're from a nation that is traditionally opposed to the US, as many (not all) terrorists tend to be, then the AK is likely what you've had around to be comfortable with using. It's also a symbol of sorts for the animosity these people have.
That the treatment at Abu Graib was newsworthy shows that you're babbling nonsense. If the US military was at all like al Qaeda or like Saddam Hussein, then it would have been expected.
All of you other countries lost the right to have the US stay out of world affairs. The US tried to avoid both world wars, and was brought in by plots of other nations. Now, the US is going to have its hands in whatever it can reach. We get attacked when we leave the rest of you alone, and we get attacked when we don't. We might as well sway some things in our favor, then.
Before you start mouthing off about human rights abuses and "terrorist acts" by the US, you should look up some other countries. I suggest you start with China, Myanmar, Iraq, Somalia, Serbia, Mexico , Brazil, Colombia, and Peru.
You forgot to mention that suicidal terrorists don't care if they buy a one-way ticket or a round-trip ticket. They're not going to be worried about wasting the return trip ticket if they're planning to be dead by then.
Wildcarding domains is a very old, in Net terms, practice. All you have to do to have it work at the registry level is to wildcard the top level. It's a trivial one line per top-level domain for which you want to do this in BIND. There's nothing novel or even particularly interesting about it.
That comparison's fair enough. IF you're really pissed about the war in Iraq, be aware that Bush Sr. had every opportunity to end Hussein's reign the first time, and that Clinton's administration could have kept the oil-for-food campaign from being abused for profit.
Clinton also could have taken care of bin Laden before the WTC was destroyed, since it had been attacked by a truck bomb by al Qaeda before. He could have kept lots of people from dying in Somalia by not pulling our troops out of the UN effort there because of one "failed"* mission.
* It's interesting to call a mission "failed" with the objectives met, but without the expected clean withdrawal.
Neither party is blameless in Iraq. Bush had little choice but to invade Afghanistan, but Clinton could have prevented that. Neither has helped much in the Israeli and Palestinian mess, although both say they tried. Clinton did help in Yugoslavia, but probably could have done more if it wasn't for his issues at home. Neither has dropped the silly and damaging embargo against Cuba. It was under Clinton's watch that US intelligence funding was cut and overseas field agents were pulled, leading to many of the intelligence problems the Bush administration has. Again, neither Clinton nor Bush is blameless in Iraq.
Neither is, AFAICT, Achmadinijad nor was Saddam Hussein. Hussein claimed to have WMD programs, he kicked out inspectors, and he had a history of using WMD. The oil for food program was full of kickbacks and illegal funneling of money, so there's every chance he could have been using that for WMD. Russian and French interests are also not blameless in that scandal. When very few WMD were found (and mostly in disrepair, in no shape to be used), many people were shocked, and not just in the US.
You must remember that the Hussein regime was so crooked and/or ill-connected to their country (or to reality) that their propaganda machine was proclaiming that US troops were being routed at the borders while US tanks were rolling into Baghdad. When dealing with people who make such outrageous claims as that who have a fairly recent history of using chemical weapons, what is one supposed to believe and not believe about their weapons programs?
The situation was that 2,000,000 Japanese and 1.2 million Americans were likely to die in an invasion. The cities that were bombed were industrial centers powering the Japanese war effort, and the primary targets were the factories. It's unfortunate that so many civilians died (civilians trained to fight with farm implements and pointed sticks in case of an invasion, but still it's unfortunate). Such things happen when weapons aren't discriminating and accurate enough.
The Tokyo incendiary runs -- fire bombing a city largely made of wood and paper night after night -- was probably much more terrifying than the atomic bombs. The A-bombs ended the war through a vulgar display of power, and it's unfortunate it had to happen that way. Yet the people at the time saw no alternative that would not cost many more lives on both sides.
The nation which was attacked with those bombs was the aggressor who brought the US into the war. Their soldiers raped, killed, and stole from civilians face to face at Nanking. They marched US, Chinese, and British soldiers they had captured to death. They were training their 19 and 20-year old pilots to fly over-fueled fighter planes with little or no weaponry into enemy ships on suicide missions.
One pilot's plane failed on the way to his suicide mission, and he parachuted to safety to go back and fly the next suicide mission. He was berated by his commanders for not going down with the plane honorably, even though the plane wasn't doing anything to the enemy where it went down.
Germany fired scud-like V2 rockets into London indiscriminately. They killed millions of Jews for simply being Jewish. They performed medical experiments on captives. They invaded dozens of countries. They were allied with the Japanese, so give credit to that alliance for those tactics.
Who do you think leads the world in the development of tightly targeted, electronically controlled "smart" weapons? Why do you think that might be? Might it be to limit overkill and damage to civilians and their property? It's certainly cheaper to carpet bomb a city than to drop two high-end TV-guided bombs into the window of a factory.
How many years ago did bin Laden's people attack the World Trade center? Was it 63 years? No, I didn't think so. Was there a declared and internationally recognized war between the two sides? No, I didn't think that either.
I'm not saying the US is perfect. It needs quite a lot of work. Don't compare a difficult decision about how to end a war with the technology available in 1945 with the unannounced targeting of a skyscraper with a civilian airliner, though.
Hitler's scientists were working on the atomic bomb, too. If the US hadn't been the first nation to successfully build and deploy them, do you really think things would have turned out better?
6 order of magnitude? 3,000,000,000? Three billion people? Wow. Just, wow. I think you're a bit over any count I've ever heard. Half the world's population killed by US soldiers? Just, wow. Please go away now.
Like the Iraqis were so successfully keeping a muzzle on Saddam Hussein or like Serbia and Milosevic? Let's face it, we Americans might be able to do better controlling our politicians, but we sure as hell could do worse.