In the first place, not enough troops were sent to occupy Iraq. Then the Pentagon disbanded the Iraqi Army and ripped apart the Ba'athist infrastructure leaving a lot of *trained guys running around with grudges against the US military. Privatisation of occupation duties plus lack of control (for the sake of "efficiency") has led to rampant corruption - http://lrb.co.uk/v28/n21/harr04_.html This has led to an almost complete failure by US corporations to restore Iraqi infrastructure.
Let's face it, the US Main Stream Media has been controlled and castrated for years now - see the NY Times and it's suppression of the wire-tapping. The US military embedded journalists so as to control them. I see you're polling for control of the internet as well. How much does it take for you to say that the US fucked up? You sound almost like these guys: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/0 1/neocons200701
As for the justness of this war, the sheer number of so-called honest people telling us lies in order to get us to go to war have been astounding. Weapons of mass destruction? Non-existent. Uranium? ditto. Saddam and Al Qaeda? Wrong. In the US, the neo-cons have even gone to the extreme of committing crimes (re: Valerie Plame) in order to justify this war. In the UK, the pressures of this power has forced an honest man to commit suicide. If the need to go to war was that just, why all this pressure?
And I have to say that the current US intransigence towards their supposedly closest ally smacks of, at the least, ingratitude. Brits are currently dieing in Iraq and Afghanistan, paying in blood for a "speicial relationship" which is being revealed as worthless when push comes shove. In contrast, I bet the US would hand the code over to the Israelis in a similar situation.
"American military spending on Iraq is now approaching $8 billion a month. Accounting for inflation, this is half as much again as the average monthly cost of the Vietnam War; the total spent so far has long surpassed the cost of the entire Apollo space programme. Three and a half months of occupation costs the equivalent of Iraq's estimated oil revenues for the current financial year. We now know, thanks to the leaked report of James Baker's Iraq Study Group, that if US troops withdrew, they would in all probability be redeployed to neighbouring countries, increasing the already massive expenditure and inevitably threatening new arenas of conflict. Here's an unimaginable alternative. If the US army left the region, and if the money was instead handed out to every Iraqi man, woman and child, they would each receive more than $300 a month."
"They need it: Iraq has run out of reconstruction money. The funds in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq - some $20 billion of Iraqi money - were spent by Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority in the first year of the occupation. The US Embassy in Baghdad has spent virtually all of the $18.4 billion that Congress appropriated for 'rebuilding' the country; $5.6 billion of it was used to run the embassy, promote American 'values' and set up the new armed forces and police. Most of the American money never even gets to Iraq. The bulk of it has gone to American consultants, or into American contractors' international bank accounts."
Me, I'd give the money to each Iraqi, $300 a month.
Over the past 50 years, Sci-Fi - the literature rather than the film - has gotten computers wrong. Remember all those sentient computers? AI is a dead subject. Yet, rarely sci-fi predict the actual blazing speed, smallness, or distributed nature of computers today. There are few true visionaries = the exception being possibly Arthur C Clark. Yet even Clark bought into the idea that a monolithic sentient computer was to be the future. Now we can see that this is so wrong. So if much of the source material for sci-fi films gets it wrong, why blame Hollywood?
The only writer to be consistently right about the future was Phillip K Dick. Dick wrote consistently about vision rather than technology. Even so, look at the balls-up that (*spit) spielberg (/*spit) made of Minority report: the conclusion a moral cop-out in a film supposedly about morals.
The neo-cons - the architects of the ideology if not the actual war - are cutting loose like no one's business. They seem to think the war is going badly, and they're blaming the chimp.
And even if you don't believe the figure of 100,000 people fleeing Iraq every month, that it mught be 50,000, or even less, it's still people going gone get. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6158847.stm
It'll only work well with crap-free hulls. That's OK just after dry-dock but cargo ship hull deterioriate fast.
Also Water+oxygen+metal = rust
So, to use the air-layer efficiently, you need even more specialised paints, more sacrificial anodes, and shorter times between dry-docks to maintain hull-efficiency? You could well end up not saving money at all.
Note that most of the russian vessels are either plastic or pleasure boats. Typically, these sorts of boats don't get the usage of container ships and dry-docking is cheaper.
YMMV, though. I help run the distribution build process (from source code to CD) for a software company and I get this all the time. We're lumped together with the cleaners, the plumbers etc. Yet, if my build servers break, nothing is tested, no product is shipped etc. Period. We're the factory-line for software: we can last for a while if the toilets break or the cleaners go on strike, but we stop if we can't ship product. Most assembly lines these days depend on computers. So, yeah, IT is more than often a step above the cleaners.
All those billions down the tube - one wonders if Rummy's going will make any difference to the rate of spend or how it's spent? I like this bit:
"The propaganda keeps quiet about the torture of prisoners in secret jail cells, and about the infiltration of the security forces by sectarian militias. These activities are overseen by the Interior Ministry, which reportedly employs at least a thousand ghost employees, whose wages amount to more than $1 million a month. The US Embassy has lost track of the weapons, radios and other hardware it has supplied over the past two years, and the auditors talk of 'uncertain property ownership' and 'political difficulties'. The ministry's audit director, who is responsible for police activities throughout Iraq, has six staff and one computer. Much of the equipment intended for government use is probably with sectarian militias, or has been sold."
I like to see Unca Sam's tax dollars at work - but selling weapons to kill it's own soldiers? It's a blooddy farce I tells ya. And Rummy should be in jail.
That's the best thing about Wikipedia: the debates are transparent, down to the boring nitty-gritty. No transparency at all with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia do with a firmer identity process, even if to just weed out the multitude of sock-puppets.
That's right, Ridley Scott started out in adverts. So, no chance of a repeat there then, as advertising and music videos kept "british cinema" alive for many years.
Read the Right Stuff. The scientists running the first missions wanted "Spam in a Can" - monkeys would have done them, and probably would have performed better than the astronauts. However, lowering the entry qualifications *so* low meant obvious problems in recruitment, with too many people flying. So the "obvious" pick was amongst fighter pilots and aerospace test pilots. the latter soon realised they were overly qualified (as both pilots and geeks) to run a mercury or an apollo rig but that got out-balanced by the inherent dangers of the missions. The tests they took to become astronauts could easily have been done by, oh, weight-lifters, long-distance runners etc. However, there's not much glory attached to sending runners into space...
The Soviets went through a similar process.
The shuttle changes things again, but I would dispute that you need to be a fighter-jock to control it. A bomber or transport or even an airline pilot would be equally, if not better adapted, to deal with the shuttle controls. If they had kept the X15 program going, then that truly was a fighter-jocks dream aircraft and we'd've had returnable aircraft flying today rather than the flying brick of a shuttle.
The last time I bought a diamond ring for my (ex-)wife, I had to return it because I divorced her. Now, even though I had the receipt the salesperson went through a process of some sort of "gun" with a light that shone into each diamond on the ring, and it went "beep" when a diamond was "genuine" - I think that's when it found some sort of unique mark. I think that debeers are now marking their diamonds to distinguish from the manufactured ones.
IIRC, diamonds used to be prized *because* of their flawlessness. DeBeers now put out that it's the flaws which are the mark of a "better" diamond.
So, debeers are crapping themselves and I can't feel that sorry about the situation.
Maybe you should trying sending in some ideas as that's where most of Scott's storylines come from these days. OTOH, better still, try *your* hand at a 10year comic strip, see if you can run the distance. Good luck with that.
I've never *seen* so many on-topic posts. This page just smells of nerdiness... like patchouli but worse and, btw, you ain't seennothing yet. Buncha addicts
1. You don't trust the local translators. If not, what are you doing there...
2. You don't trust US soldiers with Arabic. Expensive? Afraid your soldiers will "go native"? Language is culture so learning a language may endear that culture to you - hard to be "objective" then, and kill people. Better to keep the to-be-killed objectified.
3. You don't trust people. That's the American Way!!!
"Thus, on 2 November 1983, as Soviet intelligence services were attempting to detect the signs of a nuclear strike, NATO began to simulate one. The exercise, codenamed Able Archer, spanned Europe and simulated European command and communications procedures during a nuclear war."
Or hows about Cuba? As American moved nukes into Turkey, the Soviets moved missles into Cuba. Seems the only people who wanted to turn the cold war hot was the Americans.
I've met a lot of people who want historical or evironmental views of their region.
In the UK, local authorities can grant planning permissions - motorways, supermarkets etc. Using Google Maps would be ideal for this, rather than the PDF files with their itty-bitty descriptions they have now. You could actually *see* which bit of countryside they were going to concrete over.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, the old "stab-in-the-back" excuses already.
0 1/neocons200701
In the first place, not enough troops were sent to occupy Iraq. Then the Pentagon disbanded the Iraqi Army and ripped apart the Ba'athist infrastructure leaving a lot of *trained guys running around with grudges against the US military. Privatisation of occupation duties plus lack of control (for the sake of "efficiency") has led to rampant corruption - http://lrb.co.uk/v28/n21/harr04_.html This has led to an almost complete failure by US corporations to restore Iraqi infrastructure.
Let's face it, the US Main Stream Media has been controlled and castrated for years now - see the NY Times and it's suppression of the wire-tapping. The US military embedded journalists so as to control them. I see you're polling for control of the internet as well. How much does it take for you to say that the US fucked up? You sound almost like these guys: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/
As for the justness of this war, the sheer number of so-called honest people telling us lies in order to get us to go to war have been astounding. Weapons of mass destruction? Non-existent. Uranium? ditto. Saddam and Al Qaeda? Wrong. In the US, the neo-cons have even gone to the extreme of committing crimes (re: Valerie Plame) in order to justify this war. In the UK, the pressures of this power has forced an honest man to commit suicide. If the need to go to war was that just, why all this pressure?
And I have to say that the current US intransigence towards their supposedly closest ally smacks of, at the least, ingratitude. Brits are currently dieing in Iraq and Afghanistan, paying in blood for a "speicial relationship" which is being revealed as worthless when push comes shove. In contrast, I bet the US would hand the code over to the Israelis in a similar situation.
"Rumbles in the news" == the MSM aren't paying attention. See this:
the least accountable regime in the middle east
and I quote:
"American military spending on Iraq is now approaching $8 billion a month. Accounting for inflation, this is half as much again as the average monthly cost of the Vietnam War; the total spent so far has long surpassed the cost of the entire Apollo space programme. Three and a half months of occupation costs the equivalent of Iraq's estimated oil revenues for the current financial year. We now know, thanks to the leaked report of James Baker's Iraq Study Group, that if US troops withdrew, they would in all probability be redeployed to neighbouring countries, increasing the already massive expenditure and inevitably threatening new arenas of conflict. Here's an unimaginable alternative. If the US army left the region, and if the money was instead handed out to every Iraqi man, woman and child, they would each receive more than $300 a month."
"They need it: Iraq has run out of reconstruction money. The funds in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq - some $20 billion of Iraqi money - were spent by Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority in the first year of the occupation. The US Embassy in Baghdad has spent virtually all of the $18.4 billion that Congress appropriated for 'rebuilding' the country; $5.6 billion of it was used to run the embassy, promote American 'values' and set up the new armed forces and police. Most of the American money never even gets to Iraq. The bulk of it has gone to American consultants, or into American contractors' international bank accounts."
Me, I'd give the money to each Iraqi, $300 a month.
Over the past 50 years, Sci-Fi - the literature rather than the film - has gotten computers wrong. Remember all those sentient computers? AI is a dead subject. Yet, rarely sci-fi predict the actual blazing speed, smallness, or distributed nature of computers today. There are few true visionaries = the exception being possibly Arthur C Clark. Yet even Clark bought into the idea that a monolithic sentient computer was to be the future. Now we can see that this is so wrong. So if much of the source material for sci-fi films gets it wrong, why blame Hollywood?
The only writer to be consistently right about the future was Phillip K Dick. Dick wrote consistently about vision rather than technology. Even so, look at the balls-up that (*spit) spielberg (/*spit) made of Minority report: the conclusion a moral cop-out in a film supposedly about morals.
People like Richard Perle seem to think that Iraq is an unfolding disaster:
1 2/neocons200612
m
m
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/
The neo-cons - the architects of the ideology if not the actual war - are cutting loose like no one's business. They seem to think the war is going badly, and they're blaming the chimp.
And even if you don't believe the figure of 100,000 people fleeing Iraq every month, that it mught be 50,000, or even less, it's still people going gone get. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6158847.st
Dead bodies found:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6160117.st
more killed. every day, yet more.
If this is victory
It'll only work well with crap-free hulls. That's OK just after dry-dock but cargo ship hull deterioriate fast.
Also
Water+oxygen+metal = rust
So, to use the air-layer efficiently, you need even more specialised paints, more sacrificial anodes, and shorter times between dry-docks to maintain hull-efficiency? You could well end up not saving money at all.
Note that most of the russian vessels are either plastic or pleasure boats. Typically, these sorts of boats don't get the usage of container ships and dry-docking is cheaper.
that gives you a one-page format of the article. Counter-intuitive? yeah, that's right.
Not as bad as the macromedia paged website the other week. Sheesh!!!!!
unless Microsoft figure a way of rigging it.
YMMV, though. I help run the distribution build process (from source code to CD) for a software company and I get this all the time. We're lumped together with the cleaners, the plumbers etc. Yet, if my build servers break, nothing is tested, no product is shipped etc. Period. We're the factory-line for software: we can last for a while if the toilets break or the cleaners go on strike, but we stop if we can't ship product. Most assembly lines these days depend on computers. So, yeah, IT is more than often a step above the cleaners.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/search/index.php
All those billions down the tube - one wonders if Rummy's going will make any difference to the rate of spend or how it's spent? I like this bit:
"The propaganda keeps quiet about the torture of prisoners in secret jail cells, and about the infiltration of the security forces by sectarian militias. These activities are overseen by the Interior Ministry, which reportedly employs at least a thousand ghost employees, whose wages amount to more than $1 million a month. The US Embassy has lost track of the weapons, radios and other hardware it has supplied over the past two years, and the auditors talk of 'uncertain property ownership' and 'political difficulties'. The ministry's audit director, who is responsible for police activities throughout Iraq, has six staff and one computer. Much of the equipment intended for government use is probably with sectarian militias, or has been sold."
I like to see Unca Sam's tax dollars at work - but selling weapons to kill it's own soldiers? It's a blooddy farce I tells ya. And Rummy should be in jail.
wxWidgets comes with a binding for quite a few languages, and support for a lot of platforms, including PDAs. wxPython is pretty cool.
That's the best thing about Wikipedia: the debates are transparent, down to the boring nitty-gritty. No transparency at all with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia do with a firmer identity process, even if to just weed out the multitude of sock-puppets.
That's right, Ridley Scott started out in adverts. So, no chance of a repeat there then, as advertising and music videos kept "british cinema" alive for many years.
http://www.sysadminoftheyear.com/
is down, slashdotted. Sack the sysadmin, I say!!!
"Having been through the MtG additiction twice, I've decided staying away from this CCQ is a good idea."
If the editors can't it right, who can? It's *addiction*/SpellingNazi
Read the Right Stuff. The scientists running the first missions wanted "Spam in a Can" - monkeys would have done them, and probably would have performed better than the astronauts. However, lowering the entry qualifications *so* low meant obvious problems in recruitment, with too many people flying. So the "obvious" pick was amongst fighter pilots and aerospace test pilots. the latter soon realised they were overly qualified (as both pilots and geeks) to run a mercury or an apollo rig but that got out-balanced by the inherent dangers of the missions. The tests they took to become astronauts could easily have been done by, oh, weight-lifters, long-distance runners etc. However, there's not much glory attached to sending runners into space ...
The Soviets went through a similar process.
The shuttle changes things again, but I would dispute that you need to be a fighter-jock to control it. A bomber or transport or even an airline pilot would be equally, if not better adapted, to deal with the shuttle controls. If they had kept the X15 program going, then that truly was a fighter-jocks dream aircraft and we'd've had returnable aircraft flying today rather than the flying brick of a shuttle.
The last time I bought a diamond ring for my (ex-)wife, I had to return it because I divorced her. Now, even though I had the receipt the salesperson went through a process of some sort of "gun" with a light that shone into each diamond on the ring, and it went "beep" when a diamond was "genuine" - I think that's when it found some sort of unique mark. I think that debeers are now marking their diamonds to distinguish from the manufactured ones.
IIRC, diamonds used to be prized *because* of their flawlessness. DeBeers now put out that it's the flaws which are the mark of a "better" diamond.
So, debeers are crapping themselves and I can't feel that sorry about the situation.
Maybe you should trying sending in some ideas as that's where most of Scott's storylines come from these days. OTOH, better still, try *your* hand at a 10year comic strip, see if you can run the distance. Good luck with that.
thankyou, thankyou, I'll be here all week
I've never *seen* so many on-topic posts. This page just smells of nerdiness ... like patchouli but worse and, btw, you ain't seen nothing yet. Buncha addicts
So the biggest Software Development organisation in the world couldn't fix this big for over a year? For shame ...
It can't be hard to figure that these things are going to get jumped on. Why not fix it and save the bad press?
They have *luxury of the monopoly ... little competition and your time-frames expand ...
1. You don't trust the local translators. If not, what are you doing there ...
2. You don't trust US soldiers with Arabic. Expensive? Afraid your soldiers will "go native"? Language is culture so learning a language may endear that culture to you - hard to be "objective" then, and kill people. Better to keep the to-be-killed objectified.
3. You don't trust people. That's the American Way!!!
It was Bose-Eisenstein, all the way down the steps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
"Thus, on 2 November 1983, as Soviet intelligence services were attempting to detect the signs of a nuclear strike, NATO began to simulate one. The exercise, codenamed Able Archer, spanned Europe and simulated European command and communications procedures during a nuclear war."
Or hows about Cuba? As American moved nukes into Turkey, the Soviets moved missles into Cuba. Seems the only people who wanted to turn the cold war hot was the Americans.
That's this would be good for.
I've met a lot of people who want historical or evironmental views of their region.
In the UK, local authorities can grant planning permissions - motorways, supermarkets etc. Using Google Maps would be ideal for this, rather than the PDF files with their itty-bitty descriptions they have now. You could actually *see* which bit of countryside they were going to concrete over.