LINQ sounds like craziness in terms of being able to keep SQL maintained.
You have to look beyond SQL and see the real value of having an abstract in-language query facility which can be remapped, using any number of methods from XML configuration to dependency injection, to any data source which supports LINQ. This is no more complicated than the previous state of affairs in many high level languages with generic data table and grid objects or strings built up as queries. The genius of LINQ is that it compliments the better solutions while replacing the inferior ones and providing some additional goodies, lambda expressions for example. LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query and is NOT just LINQ to SQL (although Microsoft has promoted the hell out of that implementation). Sometimes it pays to look beyond the hype and see what a new technology really does (or does not) bring to the table and if LINQ is just another way to write SQL to you then perhaps you should take another look, because LINQ has much more to offer than just LINQ to SQL.
And let's not forget why Canadian drugs are cheaper: less litigation, for one. Another good reason is domestic drugs are sold at a higher price in order to subsidize sales in Canada at lower prices. Go look it up. It's true.
YES! I too have been saying that for years. The Canadians, French, and others with socialized medicine always point to their cheap drugs and say, "Well look, we regulate drug prices and we don't have a shortage, so the economics are wrong." without realizing that the reason that they do not experience the SHORTAGE that they otherwise would is because Americans make up the difference by paying even higher prices since America is one of the few countries on earth that DOESN'T regulate drug prices (it is basically the last bastion of free market drugs on the planet). If the United States imposes European style prices controls on drugs then two (2) things will happen in relatively short order. First, shortages of non-generic drugs would very quickly appear as drug companies punished the people for imposing price controls and second most future drug research activities (which are tremendously expensive) would cease. Some governments, probably India, would start producing knock-offs of existing drugs in violation of patent laws and start trade wars over the issue but in the long run price controlled drugs worldwide, with no outlet as there now exists in the US market to make up for the low prices, would be the end of privately funded drug research which means that government would have to raise taxes to pay for drug research to bring new drugs into the market at the price controlled rates. I think that overall the world would be worse off under this system.
Alas, there are fewer and fewer Americans left each year who understand the free market and freedom and now with Obama likely to complete the triple crown for the Democrats (house, senate, and white house) we are going to see America take a sharp turn to the left and down the road of socialism that we have walked down before, although not as far as the Europeans, and too our own mutual misery. It seems that a new generation of young American lefties, the college educated Obama supporters, are about to get their wish: a first-hand lesson in the failures of socialism and wealth redistribution.
By saying only accidents are covered, you're basically telling people to wait for the situation to be catastrophic.
and yet people still maintain their cars instead of waiting for the engine to seize or the transmission to fall out the bottom. If people are willing to pay to keep their cars running smoothly then why wouldn't they be willing to pay, assuming that they have a red cent to their name (very few people are truly destitute, many Americans just have their spending priorities out whack) to keep their bodies in good working order?
Wikipedia maintains a partial list of Austrian School economists, both past and present including some active as of 2008, and there are probably many more out there even though they are admittedly less common than economists from other contemporary schools, including neoclassical and post-Keynesian for example.
The economic school of thought most closely aligned with Libertarian thought is the Austrian School. There are modern Austrian School economists out there, although none presently as well known as Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich Hayek were when they were alive.
It is really quite tiresome to see the same misrepresentation of the Libertarian platform repeated again and again by the left. They hijacked the term "liberal", completely obliterating the classical meaning of the word in an attempt to capture for themselves the intellectual and historical capital attached to "classical liberalism", so we "classically liberal" people chose a new term for ourselves to clearly distinguish, Libertarian, and they now attempt to lump us in with the conservatives. Libertarian would only be conservative if the present system largely or mostly reflected Libertarian values which in my opinion , and one shared by many other Libertarians, it does not. There are too many departures from core platform values for the present political and economic system in the United States to be considered Libertarian. A conservative is one who wishes to preserve the existing order "to conserve" whereas implementing the Libertarian platform would involve dismantling much of this existing order in favor of individual liberty and truly free markets.
some kind of filthy commie healthcare system where government employees carry out open heart surgery with rusty cutlery.
Unfortunately, in some countries with socialized medicine that may not be too far off the mark. In the degenerating health care system of Russia for example, there are waiting lists to get into decrepit state run hospitals that have neither heat nor hot water and even the better hospitals rely on rusty hot plates and ancient pots to sterilize instruments in the operating rooms.
The current system in the UK, for example, offers both private and state healthcare, with the NHS free for all and private healthcare available if you want to pay a bit of money for a TV in your hospital room and a shorter wait for your elective surgery.
I am not very familiar with NHS procedures, being an American myself, but it was my understanding that it was an either or choice with regard to private or public health care in Britain. Meaning that if you chose the NHS care then it is illegal to supplement with private care in addition to your NHS care (this comes up, for example, in cancer cases where NHS won't pay for certain drugs and has threatened to send patients a bill for NHS provided chemo and other services if they are caught paying for unapproved cancer drugs under the table). The following article, Grandmother dies after NHS cancer treatment is withdrawn because she paid privately for life-extending drug, discusses a particular instance of this occurring with a British NHS cancer patient.
If the government starts paying for health care then eventually there will be pressure to tax or even ban unhealthy choices such as fast food, smoking, drinking, etc that many Americans don't want the government to be involved with (i.e. telling them what they can and cannot eat or drink). The problem with letting the government into our personal lives, whether that be health care or any other personal choices, is that it invariably leads to big brother nanny state policies which crush individual initiative and alternative views on matters of personal freedom, even over ones own mind and body (over which every person should be sovereign). People should be careful what they wish for when they ask the government to get involved, they may end up with a lot more than they bargained for.
Except that Bin Laden was NOT a citizen of Afghanistan and he is NOT a native Pashtun or any other tribal relation, he is an arab foreigner so why should they want to stick their necks out for him? Do you think that the United States would hesitate to hand over a foreign illegal alien under similar circumstances?
Look, the evidence was collected and investigated after the invasion of Afghanistan because it took months to track everything down and Al-Qaeda didn't publish some of the audio and video recordings until after the invasion had occurred (and some of the materials were captured during the invasion and were obviously not intended for public distribution). We were concerned that Bin Laden would escape if we delayed (which he did anyway), even to negotiate, and who knew what other attacks he had already prepped and ready to go around the world (as it turns out, none but we didn't know that at the time). If the Taliban wanted to cooperate then they should have said so immediately, if only to assuage American anger over the then fresh 9/11 attacks. What is one man, a foreigner no less, compared to their survival? In any case, the way I see it we have the following pieces of evidence:
(1) We have the confession made by Bin Laden himself and also a video captured in Jalalabad, Afghanistan around November 2001 in which Bin Laden discusses the 9/11 operations in a way that indicates foreknowledge and coordination of the attacks. The translation of the 2001 tape may have been a bit dodgy due to the poor quality of the tape and the generalized nature of the discussion contained therein, but it is still compelling in light of the other pieces of evidence.
(2) there is the full text of the original fatwah issued by Bin Laden in which he declares war against the United States.
(3) there are also other sources of evidence linked from the September 11, 2001 attacks section of the Bin Laden article.
If Bin Laden ever is captured (unlikely, I don't think that he will allow himself to be taken alive) then the evidence warrants a trial at the very least and I think that he would be convicted, even by the International Criminal Court, given the known evidence against him. Although, it is exceedingly unlikely that he will live to be tried in any case because the United States would rather kill him than capture him and I doubt that he would surrender in any case even if surrounded.
I thought I was clear in my position that overall violence will be lessened by permanently removing our military presence from Iraq
Then that is where we part ways. While it is true that removing our military presence from Iraq immediately would result in less violence against Americans (i.e. no troops and few contractors in country) it would almost certainly result in an increase of Iraqi on Iraqi violence for an overall higher amount of violence. It is important to understand that most of the violence going on right now in Iraq comes from suicide bombers and roadside bombs and not Americans shooting at insurgents (although that does tend to make the news more readily when it does happen). It is very likely that in the absence of any mitigating force (i.e. the American Military) the number of bombings would increase in an massive orgy of violence as those elements which are currently suppressed by our military and the Iraqi guards surge forth in a fresh push to control Iraq (think of it as the insurgent surge).
The peace keeping responsibility in Iraq needs to be transferred to the Iraqis themselves, and as soon as possible, because that will allow us to remove the single greatest source of strife and tension from that country--ourselves.
That is exactly what we are trying to do right now. I am just not very optimistic that we will ultimately succeed. History is against us in that region going back to the days of the British when Iraq was created. There has been progress and progress is good, but the real test will come when we start really drawing down our troops (i.e. not just a combat brigade or two) and letting the Iraqis take up the slack. Hopefully it will work, but we have to be prepared for the possibility that it will not in which case semi-permanent bases may be necessary. I don't really want bases and I think that most Americans don't, but we have to be prepared for that possibility because we are responsible for what happens in Iraq now because of our involvement.
I honestly can't see things ever becoming more peaceful until that happens.
I agree and in fact most people who have been following the situation, including both major party presidential candidates, agree with the present course of action which is, as we described above, to continue working towards a complete handover to the Iraqi forces. That is really the only path which makes sense in both the short and the long term, we have to try.
I also believe that mankind has evolved enough that we can (mostly) end war.
Then you have a much higher opinion about the relative advancement of humanity than I do. It is my own personal theory that this type of opinion, that humanity has reached a more evolved sensibility (this isn't Star Trek after all), tends to come most often from those who have lived sheltered lives in Europe and the United States. Take a good look in the mirror and you will see that we are not so far removed from our violent ancestors as you might suppose and that beneath this thin veneer of civilization lies the savage that survived to make it all possible.
Have you considered the possibility that some violence over these matters might be inevitable? In such a case the best we can do is to minimize the overall level of violence. I suppose it also depends upon how much you think an Iraqi life is worth vs an American life, but if you believe that they are of equal worth then you should choose the course of action which minimizes overall violence, even if that means staying there for a while longer than any of our leaders are presently willing to admit. There are some people on this topic who agree with me that some violence is inevitable and they still want us to leave soon, even if that means a certain bloodbath for the Iraqis (they are of the opinion that if it is going to happen anyway what difference does now or later mean, especially when American lives are also at risk by staying), and while I respect the honesty of that position I cannot support it because I would prefer not to see a bloodbath simply so that we can get out quickly.
Actually, I think it's pretty reasonable for a country to ask for evidence of the crime before handing someone over to another country. I certainly hope mine would ask for evidence.
You assume that all countries are willing to be reasonable.
You seem very confident and certain that you know the minds of the leaders of the Taliban.
I had and have ZERO confidence that the Taliban would honor any agreement made with, to use their words, "infidels" if doing so would in the least way inconvenience them or not work in their favor. They would only have assisted the United States if they thought that doing so was going to gain them more than they lost by having to swallow their disgust over even speaking with us. I also have every reason to believe that they would not hesitate to stab us in the back at the first opportunity. I don't trust them. I have no reason to trust them. Why trust them when we can crush them and nobody will come to their defense? Why take a chance? It is much better for us if the Taliban are all dead or disbanded.
Certainly the controlling factions of the US government had motivations for wanting a war with Afghanistan, so how can you trust their propounded view that negotiation was not possible?
I don't trust the US government entirely either, but I give them a lot more credit then I give the Taliban. Besides, what do you suppose that Bin Laden would have done while the "negotiations" were going on? Everyone knew that we wanted him, including him, and he immediately went into hiding with his army of loyal followers. There was ZERO chance that he would have surrendered to Taliban authorities without a fight, even if the Taliban wanted to detain and hand him over.
And certainly the Taliban had reasons not to want war with the USA. But we do know that in their situation, simply bowing down to the US demands would put them in an untenable situation which the US government surely realised.
When nations absolutely cannot not agree then they either drop the matter and sever all relations or they settle it with the swords and the winner is the one left standing. I don't care whether our demands put them in an untenable situation. Taliban controlled Afghanistan produced almost nothing of value in the world economy (except opium), they harbored our enemies, and they had no strength to back up their position. They made themselves an attractive target by being radical and inflexible pests.
The US claims it has evidence that Osama Bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks but we have not seen this evidence.
He himself (Bin Laden) admitted as much in audio and video recordings posted on his own websites. There is also the matter of his fatwah declaration of war on the United States. He had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to carry out the attacks and he has confessed to masterminding the attacks in his own video and voice recordings on numerous occasions. To suggest that there is no evidence or that we have not seen it is silly. The whole world has seen these pieces of evidence and almost nobody (and no intelligence agency anywhere on earth) doubts that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda planed, funded, and had agents carry out the 9/11 attacks.
What is your evidence that the US government's word is the more trustworthy in this situation?
Don't take our word for it, Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have spoken for themselves on these matters. They did it, they are proud of it, and they said that they would do it all again if they could.
Invading a country that is publically asking merely for evidence of a crime before handing someone over, evidence that it is claimed there is, does not incline one to believe the US side of things quite frankly.
They were only stalling for time by appearing to be willing to cooperate. I wasn't sorry to see the Taliban go and
The Full Disk Encryption product that I have the most personal experience using, TrueCrypt, mounts the encrypted disk as a virtual partition during the boot loader phase (i.e. before ANY semblance of Windows has loaded). This way, any tools such as CHKDSK remain completely unaware of any encryption that is going on (it is handled by the virtual disk driver at a lower level). From the standpoint of Windows a special driver is being used to access the HDD and that is all that it knows.
Mod the parent up please, he knows what he is talking about. TrueCrypt FDE actually stores the encryption key for the drive in the header on the drive itself which is itself encrypted separately using the password provided by the user via the TrueCrypt boot loader. If the recovery disk or a copy of the header is maintained from the initial conversion to full encryption AND the drive is not reformatted and re-encrypted in the meantime then restoring the previous "password" is as simple as overwriting the new header with the old header (the actual disk encryption key hasn't changed, just the key supplied by the user in the form of the password to decrypt the header).
It sounds like you had a bad experience with a "leaky" implementation of disk encryption and by "leaky" I mean that it was not virtual hard disk (i.e. lowest possible level encryption). Incidentally, this is also why I object to the Windows Vista "bit locker" encryption scheme, it does not implement the pre-boot virtual disk method. The best way to implement full disk encryption is to employ the pre-boot virtual disk method used by TrueCrypt (and also PGP, but I have no personal experience with that). That way, for all intents and purposes, the OS is completely naïve about the encryption (i.e. it is transparent to the OS) and therefore no special handling, other than the special disk driver for the virtual encrypted disk, is required on the part of the OS. It would be like using a special non-standard hardware for your data, the OS just asks you for the driver that works with that hardware (virtual disk in the case of TrueCrypt since the disk is actually the underlying HDD, possibly even hardware RAID if you have another layer below that). This is the "best" implementation IMHO, because it is completely transparent to all existing software, including the OS, and uses the existing facilities to seamlessly insert encryption into the hard disk read/write chain.
Well a spokesperson for them said they were willing to discuss it
That is diplomatic code speak for "We will politely listen to what you have to say and then proceed to ignore, stonewall, and generally obstruct you until you give up in frustration and disgust". Please tell me that you are not that naïve.
General Petraus is a professional soldier who gives the best possible recommendations that he can for achieving the goals that his commanders, the Joint Chiefs, the Sec Def and ultimately the President, set for him to achieve based upon his professional experience and training as a military commander. We are not "trusting" General Petraus in the sense that he is the final word on the war, that is the preserve of the President, Congress, and ultimately the people.
possibly agreeing to Afghanistan's terms for a fair trial of Osama Bin Laden so that they would be willing to hand him over to a neutral court
The Taliban would never have agreed to hand him over to any foreign court, no matter how neutral (not even ICC). They wanted to try him themselves in their own Islamic courts (where he would have been acquitted). No, the US response to the Taliban in Afghanistan was the correct one from a strategic standpoint, issue the ultimatum to hand over Bin Laden or else and then invade when they fail to deliver, but we managed to botch a couple of key tactical operations (relying on unreliable tribesmen to contain Bin Laden in Tora Bora for example) and Bin Laden escaped into Pakistan where, presuming that he is still alive, he probably remains until this day. Iraq was a different matter altogether and a strategic mistake, so it is important not to lump these two conflicts together even though people on both sides of the issues have been doing just that from the start for various different reasons.
simply shutting down this crazy war will give Obama more money than he could hope to raise through taxation.
You speak as if it were such a simple thing to do, but the other side (i.e. the Insurgents and their backers) might not be so inclined to bury the hatchet. That is the problem with war, you cannot just go somewhere, shoot a few people, and then say, "oops, my bad, but this isn't going so well now so I am just going to go back where I came from and everything is cool with you guys right"? Also, what lesson might nations like Iran and Syria take away from the present wars if the US suffers a humiliating defeat at the hands of guerillas funded and equiped by them? A US defeat in either Afghanistan or Iraq, perhaps preceded by a precipitous and ill-advised early withdrawal, would embolden all of the insurgents in those regions and have disastrous consequences and implications for Israel, Europe, and the United States for decades to come. I don't much care for the Iraq war either, I believed and still believe that the entire affair was a strategic mistake, but now that we are there we cannot substantially reduce troop numbers until a friendly Iraqi government, which can control and contain the insurgent groups, has been fully established and probably with semi-permanent US bases as existed in Germany for the 60 years following the end of WWII.
Does it allow fine grained per-script control? For example, it is common for java script files related to advertising domains to be linked separately into pages served from different top level domains. Noscript allows exclusions or inclusions for scripts loaded from a particular domain to be applied (doubleclick for example) no matter what site is attempting to load the scripts. No script also offers xss and cross site scripting sanitization. Personally, I like the addon concept employed by Firefox much more than the "one size fits all" approach of Internet Explorer and other browsers (yes, yes, I know about plugins, but Firefox has the greatest number of quality and interesting addons of any browser that I know of, there really is something for everyone). The addon concept allows core browser functionality to be concentrated on to the exclusion of extraneous features and enforces a more formal separation of concerns between core browser functions and functions provided by addons. IMHO, the addon approach is simply a superior design.
Folks can say what they want about JScript rendering and memory leaks
The Mozilla folks have really done a good job fixing the memory leaks and improving memory usage in Firefox as of version 3+. There might still be some small leaks here and there (it is very difficult to eliminate them entirely in large enough programs which weren't implemented in a garbage-collected programming language), but for the most part FF3 is pretty good and the excellent addons (flashblock, adblock plus, and noscript being the three most important) really push it over the top and into the number one spot IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
LINQ sounds like craziness in terms of being able to keep SQL maintained.
You have to look beyond SQL and see the real value of having an abstract in-language query facility which can be remapped, using any number of methods from XML configuration to dependency injection, to any data source which supports LINQ. This is no more complicated than the previous state of affairs in many high level languages with generic data table and grid objects or strings built up as queries. The genius of LINQ is that it compliments the better solutions while replacing the inferior ones and providing some additional goodies, lambda expressions for example. LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query and is NOT just LINQ to SQL (although Microsoft has promoted the hell out of that implementation). Sometimes it pays to look beyond the hype and see what a new technology really does (or does not) bring to the table and if LINQ is just another way to write SQL to you then perhaps you should take another look, because LINQ has much more to offer than just LINQ to SQL.
And let's not forget why Canadian drugs are cheaper: less litigation, for one. Another good reason is domestic drugs are sold at a higher price in order to subsidize sales in Canada at lower prices. Go look it up. It's true.
YES! I too have been saying that for years. The Canadians, French, and others with socialized medicine always point to their cheap drugs and say, "Well look, we regulate drug prices and we don't have a shortage, so the economics are wrong." without realizing that the reason that they do not experience the SHORTAGE that they otherwise would is because Americans make up the difference by paying even higher prices since America is one of the few countries on earth that DOESN'T regulate drug prices (it is basically the last bastion of free market drugs on the planet). If the United States imposes European style prices controls on drugs then two (2) things will happen in relatively short order. First, shortages of non-generic drugs would very quickly appear as drug companies punished the people for imposing price controls and second most future drug research activities (which are tremendously expensive) would cease. Some governments, probably India, would start producing knock-offs of existing drugs in violation of patent laws and start trade wars over the issue but in the long run price controlled drugs worldwide, with no outlet as there now exists in the US market to make up for the low prices, would be the end of privately funded drug research which means that government would have to raise taxes to pay for drug research to bring new drugs into the market at the price controlled rates. I think that overall the world would be worse off under this system.
Alas, there are fewer and fewer Americans left each year who understand the free market and freedom and now with Obama likely to complete the triple crown for the Democrats (house, senate, and white house) we are going to see America take a sharp turn to the left and down the road of socialism that we have walked down before, although not as far as the Europeans, and too our own mutual misery. It seems that a new generation of young American lefties, the college educated Obama supporters, are about to get their wish: a first-hand lesson in the failures of socialism and wealth redistribution.
By saying only accidents are covered, you're basically telling people to wait for the situation to be catastrophic.
and yet people still maintain their cars instead of waiting for the engine to seize or the transmission to fall out the bottom. If people are willing to pay to keep their cars running smoothly then why wouldn't they be willing to pay, assuming that they have a red cent to their name (very few people are truly destitute, many Americans just have their spending priorities out whack) to keep their bodies in good working order?
Wikipedia maintains a partial list of Austrian School economists, both past and present including some active as of 2008, and there are probably many more out there even though they are admittedly less common than economists from other contemporary schools, including neoclassical and post-Keynesian for example.
The economic school of thought most closely aligned with Libertarian thought is the Austrian School. There are modern Austrian School economists out there, although none presently as well known as Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich Hayek were when they were alive.
because you still vote
Morpheus: Everything begins with choice.
Merovingian: No, wrong. Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without."
I suggest you join my revolution. Because governments outlaw things.
I don't know...how can I be sure that you won't take away my heavy artillery when we are done?
conservatives and libertarians
It is really quite tiresome to see the same misrepresentation of the Libertarian platform repeated again and again by the left. They hijacked the term "liberal", completely obliterating the classical meaning of the word in an attempt to capture for themselves the intellectual and historical capital attached to "classical liberalism", so we "classically liberal" people chose a new term for ourselves to clearly distinguish, Libertarian, and they now attempt to lump us in with the conservatives. Libertarian would only be conservative if the present system largely or mostly reflected Libertarian values which in my opinion , and one shared by many other Libertarians, it does not. There are too many departures from core platform values for the present political and economic system in the United States to be considered Libertarian. A conservative is one who wishes to preserve the existing order "to conserve" whereas implementing the Libertarian platform would involve dismantling much of this existing order in favor of individual liberty and truly free markets.
some kind of filthy commie healthcare system where government employees carry out open heart surgery with rusty cutlery.
Unfortunately, in some countries with socialized medicine that may not be too far off the mark. In the degenerating health care system of Russia for example, there are waiting lists to get into decrepit state run hospitals that have neither heat nor hot water and even the better hospitals rely on rusty hot plates and ancient pots to sterilize instruments in the operating rooms.
The current system in the UK, for example, offers both private and state healthcare, with the NHS free for all and private healthcare available if you want to pay a bit of money for a TV in your hospital room and a shorter wait for your elective surgery.
I am not very familiar with NHS procedures, being an American myself, but it was my understanding that it was an either or choice with regard to private or public health care in Britain. Meaning that if you chose the NHS care then it is illegal to supplement with private care in addition to your NHS care (this comes up, for example, in cancer cases where NHS won't pay for certain drugs and has threatened to send patients a bill for NHS provided chemo and other services if they are caught paying for unapproved cancer drugs under the table). The following article, Grandmother dies after NHS cancer treatment is withdrawn because she paid privately for life-extending drug, discusses a particular instance of this occurring with a British NHS cancer patient.
If the government starts paying for health care then eventually there will be pressure to tax or even ban unhealthy choices such as fast food, smoking, drinking, etc that many Americans don't want the government to be involved with (i.e. telling them what they can and cannot eat or drink). The problem with letting the government into our personal lives, whether that be health care or any other personal choices, is that it invariably leads to big brother nanny state policies which crush individual initiative and alternative views on matters of personal freedom, even over ones own mind and body (over which every person should be sovereign). People should be careful what they wish for when they ask the government to get involved, they may end up with a lot more than they bargained for.
Except that Bin Laden was NOT a citizen of Afghanistan and he is NOT a native Pashtun or any other tribal relation, he is an arab foreigner so why should they want to stick their necks out for him? Do you think that the United States would hesitate to hand over a foreign illegal alien under similar circumstances?
Look, the evidence was collected and investigated after the invasion of Afghanistan because it took months to track everything down and Al-Qaeda didn't publish some of the audio and video recordings until after the invasion had occurred (and some of the materials were captured during the invasion and were obviously not intended for public distribution). We were concerned that Bin Laden would escape if we delayed (which he did anyway), even to negotiate, and who knew what other attacks he had already prepped and ready to go around the world (as it turns out, none but we didn't know that at the time). If the Taliban wanted to cooperate then they should have said so immediately, if only to assuage American anger over the then fresh 9/11 attacks. What is one man, a foreigner no less, compared to their survival? In any case, the way I see it we have the following pieces of evidence:
(1) We have the confession made by Bin Laden himself and also a video captured in Jalalabad, Afghanistan around November 2001 in which Bin Laden discusses the 9/11 operations in a way that indicates foreknowledge and coordination of the attacks. The translation of the 2001 tape may have been a bit dodgy due to the poor quality of the tape and the generalized nature of the discussion contained therein, but it is still compelling in light of the other pieces of evidence.
(2) there is the full text of the original fatwah issued by Bin Laden in which he declares war against the United States.
(3) there are also other sources of evidence linked from the September 11, 2001 attacks section of the Bin Laden article.
If Bin Laden ever is captured (unlikely, I don't think that he will allow himself to be taken alive) then the evidence warrants a trial at the very least and I think that he would be convicted, even by the International Criminal Court, given the known evidence against him. Although, it is exceedingly unlikely that he will live to be tried in any case because the United States would rather kill him than capture him and I doubt that he would surrender in any case even if surrounded.
I thought I was clear in my position that overall violence will be lessened by permanently removing our military presence from Iraq
Then that is where we part ways. While it is true that removing our military presence from Iraq immediately would result in less violence against Americans (i.e. no troops and few contractors in country) it would almost certainly result in an increase of Iraqi on Iraqi violence for an overall higher amount of violence. It is important to understand that most of the violence going on right now in Iraq comes from suicide bombers and roadside bombs and not Americans shooting at insurgents (although that does tend to make the news more readily when it does happen). It is very likely that in the absence of any mitigating force (i.e. the American Military) the number of bombings would increase in an massive orgy of violence as those elements which are currently suppressed by our military and the Iraqi guards surge forth in a fresh push to control Iraq (think of it as the insurgent surge).
The peace keeping responsibility in Iraq needs to be transferred to the Iraqis themselves, and as soon as possible, because that will allow us to remove the single greatest source of strife and tension from that country--ourselves.
That is exactly what we are trying to do right now. I am just not very optimistic that we will ultimately succeed. History is against us in that region going back to the days of the British when Iraq was created. There has been progress and progress is good, but the real test will come when we start really drawing down our troops (i.e. not just a combat brigade or two) and letting the Iraqis take up the slack. Hopefully it will work, but we have to be prepared for the possibility that it will not in which case semi-permanent bases may be necessary. I don't really want bases and I think that most Americans don't, but we have to be prepared for that possibility because we are responsible for what happens in Iraq now because of our involvement.
I honestly can't see things ever becoming more peaceful until that happens.
I agree and in fact most people who have been following the situation, including both major party presidential candidates, agree with the present course of action which is, as we described above, to continue working towards a complete handover to the Iraqi forces. That is really the only path which makes sense in both the short and the long term, we have to try.
I also believe that mankind has evolved enough that we can (mostly) end war.
Then you have a much higher opinion about the relative advancement of humanity than I do. It is my own personal theory that this type of opinion, that humanity has reached a more evolved sensibility (this isn't Star Trek after all), tends to come most often from those who have lived sheltered lives in Europe and the United States. Take a good look in the mirror and you will see that we are not so far removed from our violent ancestors as you might suppose and that beneath this thin veneer of civilization lies the savage that survived to make it all possible.
Have you considered the possibility that some violence over these matters might be inevitable? In such a case the best we can do is to minimize the overall level of violence. I suppose it also depends upon how much you think an Iraqi life is worth vs an American life, but if you believe that they are of equal worth then you should choose the course of action which minimizes overall violence, even if that means staying there for a while longer than any of our leaders are presently willing to admit. There are some people on this topic who agree with me that some violence is inevitable and they still want us to leave soon, even if that means a certain bloodbath for the Iraqis (they are of the opinion that if it is going to happen anyway what difference does now or later mean, especially when American lives are also at risk by staying), and while I respect the honesty of that position I cannot support it because I would prefer not to see a bloodbath simply so that we can get out quickly.
Actually, I think it's pretty reasonable for a country to ask for evidence of the crime before handing someone over to another country. I certainly hope mine would ask for evidence.
You assume that all countries are willing to be reasonable.
You seem very confident and certain that you know the minds of the leaders of the Taliban.
I had and have ZERO confidence that the Taliban would honor any agreement made with, to use their words, "infidels" if doing so would in the least way inconvenience them or not work in their favor. They would only have assisted the United States if they thought that doing so was going to gain them more than they lost by having to swallow their disgust over even speaking with us. I also have every reason to believe that they would not hesitate to stab us in the back at the first opportunity. I don't trust them. I have no reason to trust them. Why trust them when we can crush them and nobody will come to their defense? Why take a chance? It is much better for us if the Taliban are all dead or disbanded.
Certainly the controlling factions of the US government had motivations for wanting a war with Afghanistan, so how can you trust their propounded view that negotiation was not possible?
I don't trust the US government entirely either, but I give them a lot more credit then I give the Taliban. Besides, what do you suppose that Bin Laden would have done while the "negotiations" were going on? Everyone knew that we wanted him, including him, and he immediately went into hiding with his army of loyal followers. There was ZERO chance that he would have surrendered to Taliban authorities without a fight, even if the Taliban wanted to detain and hand him over.
And certainly the Taliban had reasons not to want war with the USA. But we do know that in their situation, simply bowing down to the US demands would put them in an untenable situation which the US government surely realised.
When nations absolutely cannot not agree then they either drop the matter and sever all relations or they settle it with the swords and the winner is the one left standing. I don't care whether our demands put them in an untenable situation. Taliban controlled Afghanistan produced almost nothing of value in the world economy (except opium), they harbored our enemies, and they had no strength to back up their position. They made themselves an attractive target by being radical and inflexible pests.
The US claims it has evidence that Osama Bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks but we have not seen this evidence.
He himself (Bin Laden) admitted as much in audio and video recordings posted on his own websites. There is also the matter of his fatwah declaration of war on the United States. He had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to carry out the attacks and he has confessed to masterminding the attacks in his own video and voice recordings on numerous occasions. To suggest that there is no evidence or that we have not seen it is silly. The whole world has seen these pieces of evidence and almost nobody (and no intelligence agency anywhere on earth) doubts that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda planed, funded, and had agents carry out the 9/11 attacks.
What is your evidence that the US government's word is the more trustworthy in this situation?
Don't take our word for it, Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have spoken for themselves on these matters. They did it, they are proud of it, and they said that they would do it all again if they could.
Invading a country that is publically asking merely for evidence of a crime before handing someone over, evidence that it is claimed there is, does not incline one to believe the US side of things quite frankly.
They were only stalling for time by appearing to be willing to cooperate. I wasn't sorry to see the Taliban go and
The Full Disk Encryption product that I have the most personal experience using, TrueCrypt, mounts the encrypted disk as a virtual partition during the boot loader phase (i.e. before ANY semblance of Windows has loaded). This way, any tools such as CHKDSK remain completely unaware of any encryption that is going on (it is handled by the virtual disk driver at a lower level). From the standpoint of Windows a special driver is being used to access the HDD and that is all that it knows.
Mod the parent up please, he knows what he is talking about. TrueCrypt FDE actually stores the encryption key for the drive in the header on the drive itself which is itself encrypted separately using the password provided by the user via the TrueCrypt boot loader. If the recovery disk or a copy of the header is maintained from the initial conversion to full encryption AND the drive is not reformatted and re-encrypted in the meantime then restoring the previous "password" is as simple as overwriting the new header with the old header (the actual disk encryption key hasn't changed, just the key supplied by the user in the form of the password to decrypt the header).
It sounds like you had a bad experience with a "leaky" implementation of disk encryption and by "leaky" I mean that it was not virtual hard disk (i.e. lowest possible level encryption). Incidentally, this is also why I object to the Windows Vista "bit locker" encryption scheme, it does not implement the pre-boot virtual disk method. The best way to implement full disk encryption is to employ the pre-boot virtual disk method used by TrueCrypt (and also PGP, but I have no personal experience with that). That way, for all intents and purposes, the OS is completely naïve about the encryption (i.e. it is transparent to the OS) and therefore no special handling, other than the special disk driver for the virtual encrypted disk, is required on the part of the OS. It would be like using a special non-standard hardware for your data, the OS just asks you for the driver that works with that hardware (virtual disk in the case of TrueCrypt since the disk is actually the underlying HDD, possibly even hardware RAID if you have another layer below that). This is the "best" implementation IMHO, because it is completely transparent to all existing software, including the OS, and uses the existing facilities to seamlessly insert encryption into the hard disk read/write chain.
Well a spokesperson for them said they were willing to discuss it
That is diplomatic code speak for "We will politely listen to what you have to say and then proceed to ignore, stonewall, and generally obstruct you until you give up in frustration and disgust". Please tell me that you are not that naïve.
General Petraus is a professional soldier who gives the best possible recommendations that he can for achieving the goals that his commanders, the Joint Chiefs, the Sec Def and ultimately the President, set for him to achieve based upon his professional experience and training as a military commander. We are not "trusting" General Petraus in the sense that he is the final word on the war, that is the preserve of the President, Congress, and ultimately the people.
possibly agreeing to Afghanistan's terms for a fair trial of Osama Bin Laden so that they would be willing to hand him over to a neutral court
The Taliban would never have agreed to hand him over to any foreign court, no matter how neutral (not even ICC). They wanted to try him themselves in their own Islamic courts (where he would have been acquitted). No, the US response to the Taliban in Afghanistan was the correct one from a strategic standpoint, issue the ultimatum to hand over Bin Laden or else and then invade when they fail to deliver, but we managed to botch a couple of key tactical operations (relying on unreliable tribesmen to contain Bin Laden in Tora Bora for example) and Bin Laden escaped into Pakistan where, presuming that he is still alive, he probably remains until this day. Iraq was a different matter altogether and a strategic mistake, so it is important not to lump these two conflicts together even though people on both sides of the issues have been doing just that from the start for various different reasons.
simply shutting down this crazy war will give Obama more money than he could hope to raise through taxation.
You speak as if it were such a simple thing to do, but the other side (i.e. the Insurgents and their backers) might not be so inclined to bury the hatchet. That is the problem with war, you cannot just go somewhere, shoot a few people, and then say, "oops, my bad, but this isn't going so well now so I am just going to go back where I came from and everything is cool with you guys right"? Also, what lesson might nations like Iran and Syria take away from the present wars if the US suffers a humiliating defeat at the hands of guerillas funded and equiped by them? A US defeat in either Afghanistan or Iraq, perhaps preceded by a precipitous and ill-advised early withdrawal, would embolden all of the insurgents in those regions and have disastrous consequences and implications for Israel, Europe, and the United States for decades to come. I don't much care for the Iraq war either, I believed and still believe that the entire affair was a strategic mistake, but now that we are there we cannot substantially reduce troop numbers until a friendly Iraqi government, which can control and contain the insurgent groups, has been fully established and probably with semi-permanent US bases as existed in Germany for the 60 years following the end of WWII.
Does it allow fine grained per-script control? For example, it is common for java script files related to advertising domains to be linked separately into pages served from different top level domains. Noscript allows exclusions or inclusions for scripts loaded from a particular domain to be applied (doubleclick for example) no matter what site is attempting to load the scripts. No script also offers xss and cross site scripting sanitization. Personally, I like the addon concept employed by Firefox much more than the "one size fits all" approach of Internet Explorer and other browsers (yes, yes, I know about plugins, but Firefox has the greatest number of quality and interesting addons of any browser that I know of, there really is something for everyone). The addon concept allows core browser functionality to be concentrated on to the exclusion of extraneous features and enforces a more formal separation of concerns between core browser functions and functions provided by addons. IMHO, the addon approach is simply a superior design.
Folks can say what they want about JScript rendering and memory leaks
The Mozilla folks have really done a good job fixing the memory leaks and improving memory usage in Firefox as of version 3+. There might still be some small leaks here and there (it is very difficult to eliminate them entirely in large enough programs which weren't implemented in a garbage-collected programming language), but for the most part FF3 is pretty good and the excellent addons (flashblock, adblock plus, and noscript being the three most important) really push it over the top and into the number one spot IMHO.