It is immoral to attack other people out of fear. There is a reason some version of "turn the other cheek" is part of most major religions. The whole notion of preemptive attack or being forced to create death squads because of the actions of the "other side". It is a convenient excuse - nothing more.
Of course, but then again it is dangerous to speak in absolutes and especially when speaking out of context. In general I would agree with you that preemptive attacks are to be avoided. However, there are limited circumstances where a first strike (not nuclear ), which may not be preemptive strictly speaking (when proceeded by a long period of failed diplomacy as the Iraq situation was) may be appropriate (although in the case of Iraq I believe that it was not). For example, suppose that an enemy is massing troops on your border and it is obvious that they are preparing for an attack or if the United States had spotted the Japanese carriers steaming towards Pearl Harbor? You mistake my position as supporting death squads and anything else that has happened in the past or could happen in the future simply because my position is not *exactly* the same as your position.
There is a difference between a "threat" and a "threat to our long term survival". It is disingenuous to confuse the two.
The Soviets that Reagan faced had thousands of nuclear warheads targeting the entire continental United States and all of our allies and they could have wiped us out with the push of a button. I don't know about you but I would have categorized that as a serious threat had been I been old enough to worry about such things back then...thankfully I was not. The terrorists are not threatening in quite the same way, at least not yet, but they could easily become the next Soviet style nuclear opponent if we give them one hundred years or so. Should we take that chance with the future of our grandchildren? Will they ask us what we were thinking to have allowed a massive nuclear armed Islamic empire to emerge as the great threat of their times? You are right of course that this is just speculation at this point, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't lift a finger in the here in now.
You do realize there are options beyond military adventurism and isolationism? Diplomacy for instance?
Of course, and all methods prior to war should be employed since violence should be reserved for the court of very last appeal or unless your opponent attacks first. However, it is important to remember that the success of diplomacy is based upon the credible threat that there *could* ultimately be violence if it became absolutely necessary. One must be willing to back up diplomacy with force should the other side call our bluff or elect to ignore us repeatedly on important issues over a long period of time, especially while negotiating in bad faith and reneging on past promises made at the bargaining table. It does not have to result in force every time of course, but if the threat is never made good on then it begins to loose credibility and our position at the bargaining table is substantially compromised since our opponents would come to believe that we can be safely ignored or cheated.
As a starting point would be to apply the same rules to ourselves that are applied to the rest of the world - start with fully supporting the U.N., the World Court, ratified treaties, and international law.
I am leery of the idea of world government. There is something to be said for the sovereignty of nations. The world court is useful for the prosecution of war criminals, but the day to day matters of justice should be administered by nations according to their national governments and traditions, not world opinion. The U.N. is a useful place for nations to come out and have their say in an open forum and that is about it.
Find areas of agreement with people and find ways to work with them? Stop bombing other countries? I can think of no better way to create enemies
It is amazing to me the lengths people will go to justify their support for the immoral actions of the United States.
The United States, for those of us fortunate enough to be citizens, is our country and though our leaders sometimes make mistakes it remains home to our families, friends, and fellow citizens. If the cause of freedom, the freedom to live as you wish and worship what god you wish (including none at all) and peruse what goals and aspirations that you wish is important to you, but is not supported by us the citizens of the United States then who else will support these goals? The ayatollahs? The terrorists? Is it immoral to defend one's family and home against those who seek our destruction? Should we not take these people at their word when they say, "death to America" and "Israel must be erased from the map"? How far would you go or not go to stop them?
The worst lie that is told is that "terrorism", "communism" or any other "ism" is a threat to our long term survival.
The threat may be overestimated at times, but I would not go so far as to say that they were outright lies. Is it reasonable to suggest that the terrorists or the Soviets during the Cold War were or are no threat at all? Certainly not. You may disagree concerning the magnitude of the threat but it is disingenuous to suggest that they were and are no threat at all.
I don't buy your initial premise nor do a adhere to the mentality of supporting the lesser evil.
How would you respond then? Should the United States become directly involved in every part of the world where we have even the slightest interest? Should we retreat back into the isolationist shell that we were shocked out of by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler during WWII? If you do not engage with the lesser evil you may be caught unaware and unprepared when the greater evil shows up on your doorstep.
One obvious problem is that "evil" and its quantity is often determined by what is expedient to someone's interest. At one time it is Honduras, Afghanistan (supporting people like the Taliban) and the next admistration it becomes Iraq and fighting the Taliban.
It is a slippery slope I will grant you, but we charge our leaders with the duty to protect us and that means making difficult decisions often based upon incomplete or time sensitive information where the consequences of getting it wrong are American lives lost, but who among us is prescient enough to see all possible outcomes? How can you be sure that past interventions have not saved America from a terrible fate?
Anyone who actually pays attention to history knows that fighting proxy wars and using mercenary armies is more of a threat to a republic than any outside threat.
The Army of the United States is not a mercenary army and the civilian military contractors are staffed by citizens of a nation, namely the United States, which is a direct party to the conflict and thus they are not mercenaries under the official United Nations definition of mercenary.
The history of the Roman empire illustrates this problem quite nicely. So, I'm sorry - I'm not giving these people the free pass on this one. The consequences of fighting proxy wars and why the were fought (not to fight communism by the way) is wrong.
It is interesting that you mention the Roman Empire, which fell due to internal squabbling and weakness when they should have been presenting a strong and united front against the barbarian invaders. I agree that the proxy wars had consequences, but what would the consequences have been had we not become involved? It is totally bunk to suggest that the communists were not involved in Honduras or Costa Rica or Nicaragua during the Cold War. They almost certainly were meddling and so they United States was forced to meddle to counteract their (the East German and Soviet) meddling. The United States didn't really want to be there...the communists forced the issue a
The war on terror began with Ronald Reagan. Want to know the best part? It was Ronald Reagan that normalized relations with Iraq, took them off the list of state sponsored terror, and sold them the "weapons of mass destruction" and other munitions. The irony? People in the current administration did it.
Let's look at an abbreviated list shall we?
Alright, lets...
Even the wisest men among us cannot see all ends. It is unfair to criticize Reagan, Rumsfeld, Gates, and Negroponte for decisions that were made during the 1980s when we have the benefit of hindsight. If you want to judge them anyway then do it based upon what they and everyone else knew then, not what we know now. Recall that at the time the Soviet Union was a tremendous threat to the long term survival of the United States and indeed the westernized world. It was the policy of the United States at that time to thwart the Soviet Union by any and all means necessary, short of first strike, in order to guarantee the long term survival of our nation. This tough stance against communism enjoyed wide support among most Americans and everyone, on both the right and the left, with the possible exception of the communists and the crackpots, were fully supportive of that effort. If you want to defeat evil then you must sometimes, regrettably, associate yourself with THEIR enemies, unsavory though they might be, in order to achieve victory and advance the greater good.
1. Donald Rumsfield: Previous Defense Secretary. During Reagan's time he was Special Envoy to the Middle East who helped normalize relations with Iraq - personally meeting with Saddam around when they were using chemical weapons on Iran.
The United States is now a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention but during the 1980s such matters were still governed by the Geneva Protocols which also outlawed their use. However, when faced with a superior force in a war that they admittedly started Iraq, and their dictator, Saddam Hussein, decided to use them anyway and not just against Iranian soldiers, but against their own people as well which was a much greater atrocity than using them against uniformed Iranian soldiers. It was certainly known to the CIA and other intelligence agencies that chemical weapons were being used and we supplied them with intelligence on the locations of Iranian troops and their movements which almost certainly assisted the Iraqi army in their chemical attacks. However, the United States DID NOT supply the chemical precursors, technical know how, equipment, or indeed any other direct official support of the Iraqi chemical weapons program. The only US Corporation involved, Alcolac International, sold precursors to both the Iranians and the Iraqis in violation of US export laws and they were punished when the connection was exposed, but Rumsfeld had NOTHING to do with that. The Iraqis bought their chemical weapons materials and expertise from other Arab countries (especially the United Arab Emirates), Germany, India, and Singapore. The Iran Iraqi War was a dirty backwater of the Cold War proxy battles and even though the Iraqis were unsavory we supported them against the equally unsavory Iranians to bloody the nose of the Ayatollah Khomeini as payback for the Iranian hostage crisis. So Rumsfeld and Reagan were disinclined to say or do anything which might have benefited the Iranians, despite the fact that the Iraqis were no better, because they had taken the hostile route with the United States. The United States did not goad the Iraqis to attack Iran, they did it of their own accord (or the will of the dictator Saddam anyway) and it went without saying that the United States would assist
Say what you want about Bush, but Ronald Reagan was a patriot and a great American. In fact, a substantial portion of the American public considers Reagan to be among the best five presidents thus far and perhaps the greatest to serve within their living memory. You tarnish the legacy of a great and noble man when you use him as a pawn in your petty arguments.
Agreed. This is the same kind of crap that I see all of the time from inexperienced developers (especially offshore developers in India). They make all of the classic mistakes, client side javascript for input validation, use of query string parameters with the the SQL command builder on their pages (SQL injections galore), administrative query access to the SQL server directly from the web server, "secret" admin pages, cross-site scripting, you name it and they do it. The problem with a significant portion of the Indian developers is that they are are too busy waving their IIT degree, ISO certs, and other documentation of their extensive education, which taught them everything they needed to know, so they don't need to listen to American devs who have a few lessons left to teach them from school of hard knocks. They suffer from the "not invented here" syndrome, sometimes to an extreme, and thus earn themselves nasty surprises when the attack finally comes and catches them completely flat-footed. The really sad part about all of this is that same types of attacks are used again and again and the same developers keep building vulnerable sites again and again...even long after the attacks are known and proper designs have been presented on many developer forums to avoid these problems (i.e. use stored procedures, limit database permissions to those stored procedures only, don't use the query string for sensitive data, use regular expressions to validate user input data on the server side, etc...)
A problem has been detected with the lunar return sequence and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your spacecraft.
The problem seems to be caused by the following file: lssas@DOOM32.dll.exe
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:
Check to make sure that the rocket engines are fueled and ready. If this a new installation ask your hardware or software vendor for any Windows updates that you might need.
If problems conintue, disable or remove any newley intalled lunar module hardware. Disable BIOS memory options such as failsafe and life support backup. If you need to use Safe Mode to remove or disable components, restart your computer, Press f8 to select Advanced Startup Options, and then select Safe Mode.
What I do care about is how well it integrates with Exchange Server, and whether its notifications for meetings and such are compatible with the business standard Exchange+Outlook combination.
That may not be possible given the proclivities of Microsoft when it comes to protecting the "better" integration features of their products from interoperable competitors. In this particular case the fact that only Microsoft Outlook can fully integrate with all of the advanced services offered by Exchange serves to protect Microsoft Outlook from other competitors in what is otherwise a completely commoditized market for e-mail clients. I would be surprised if Microsoft were to open up Exchange to be fully interoperable with the advanced features so it is not really the fault of Thunderbird that these features are not available for it to use (without reverse engineering the protocol and that is a whole other issue).
I know that business users "don't care" about the technical reasons why something in software "doesn't work", good though they may be, but really this is probably not the fault of Thunderbird. If you really need synchronized calendering with Exchange then you should probably go ahead and use Outlook, especially if the company doesn't mind paying for it, because these are must need features for you. The fact is that no software is going to please everyone completely, but the Thunderbird team deserves some credit for what they have accomplished in spite of the difficulties thrown in their path by Microsoft and others.
Yes, that is correct. The problem lies in certain XML tags generated by Microsoft Office with names such as SpaceLikeOffice95 which mean something to the proprietary file format stream readers / writers embeded in Microsoft Office, but are inscrutable to anyone else trying to implement a compatible WYSIWYG editor. It is impossible to be certain how the document should be displayed or printed becuase Microsoft has never defined precisely what certain tags, SpaceLikeOffice95 for example, mean in a context insensitive way. These tags refer to formatting rules which were and still are proprietary. The net effect of these tags is to cause display errors where the user says, "That is not how the chart embeded in our important business doc is supposed to look! That's it, we are ditching this 'open document' crap and going back to Microsoft office...oh and fire the analyst who recommended that we switch in the first place." Business users do not understand or care about the technical reasons why the document doesn't look like they remember it...they only care that it looks wrong and they will point the finger at OSS and say, "It looks fine in Microsoft Office so it must be a problem with your OSS". Microsoft knows this well and and they are attempting to exploit the situation to limit competition while claming that their doucment format is an 'Open Standard' in the classic embrace, extend, and extinguish gambit.
What about C# and.NET? You may not like Microsoft, but the development of C# and.NET by Anders Hejlsberg, among others, cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. There is also the matter of Microsoft Research, which generates some pretty interesting work that is not necessarily related directly to ongoing production work at Microsoft. It is not accurate therefore, to say that *nobody* or indeed *nobody that matters*, cares about what Microsoft is doing.
So make it a real service. Do some research. Use other people's research. Come up with genre playlists and let people subscribe to them. Find worthwhile podcasts and hire/pay people to make them daily/weekly and let people subscribe to them. Promote hot DJs at hot clubs by letting them come up with weekly playlists and let people subscribe to them. Build playlists from Billboard, Radio & Records, etc. and let people subscribe to them. And, of course, let "regular people" build lists of music and let people subscribe to them. Heck, build playlists based upon my ripped CDs and let me subscribe to them.
This is so right that I just want to scream at the morons in the music business for not getting a system like this set up. The really revolutionary part is that each user can manage sets of subscriptions on their own personal device and they are not limited by a fixed number of "channels" or any other holdovers from the radio days and since each user is paying the same subscriber fee there is more of an incentive to cater to all of the various niches out there since the real cost is in setting up and running the service, but once it is all set up and going there is almost no cost to add additional niche programs, eclectic playlists, and off-beat selections ala the Amazon.com com and Craigslist list based systems. The system would not even need to have only human DJs, it could use AI and have intelligent agent programs making playlists and selections based upon live user feedback, random, shuffle, etc...it is really wide open possibilities. The only explanation that I can think of is that the music execs are either too greedy, too stupid, or both to get this type of system up and running.
The "Here's our whole catalog--you figure it out" model isn't bringing them in droves because it's too much work. I'm not going to pay $15 per month for access to a mind-numbingly large collection of music. But I might pay that much if the subscription service actually provides a service where I automatically get new music that I might actually want to listen to!
Yes, Yes, Yes! If there are any music industry people reading this then PAY ATTENTION...THIS IS WHAT WE WANT. Sigh, they just don't get it.
Maybe satellite radio has a shot--they have live things that you can't preload onto an iPod--but the music rental business will go nowhere.
I don't know if I would go that far, imagine an XM radio attachment for your iPod that would allow you access to any of the XM streams from your iPod just about anywhere in the United States (or even the world if their satellite coverage is good enough) combined with the expertise of competent DJs selecting tracks with intelligent commentary, there are still a few stations like this, mostly the non-clearchannel listener supported public radio stations (they haven't been driven completely off the dial yet), but the same thing would work with subscriptions, no more top 40 BS or payola because the users are actually paying their OWN money to listen to the stream and they don't want that so the services like XM shouldn't need to and won't do it. It all comes down to price, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the value of such a service is not zero (i.e. free or I wont listen) to a large number of potential iPod owners. In fact, I myself might be willing to pay as much as $10 per month for such a service (not including the hardware of course) and I suspect that many other people would be willing to pay that much or perhaps even more.
Well, that's the bad thing about capitalism today - it's been replaced by blind greed and short-term thinking
What is bad about that? On the contrary, the system is working exactly as it was intended, people are free to chose how they earn, invest, and spend their money and they all enjoy the benefits or suffer the consequences of their own choices. It is true that there are many managers out there that lack the sophistication to properly evaluate the opportunity costs of their decisions, but there are also many skilled and efficient investors, owners, and managers who generally make pretty good business decisions. If you are an investor or a shareholder and you are dissatisfied with the direction that management is taking then you should make your displeasure known by voting your proxies at the shareholder meetings, voting against the term renewals for the board members that you disagree with, or if all else fails then you can sell your interest or shares and move on.
Instead, "investing" money is considered "spending" it.
Only to those who are unable to discern the difference. The general techniques of valuation are well known, but the skill comes in accurate estimation of intangible value such as human capital, potential value of intellectual property, and understanding of the marketplace in which the business operates. The better managers are the ones with a keen understanding of these things and the willingness to work hard and apply their expertise.
I was going to mention it, but you beat me to it so I will have to go ahead and agree with you that the episodes of the Ghost in the Shell series, especially the more recent iterations: the Stand Alone Complex and S.A.C. 2nd GIG television series and the new film S.A.C. Solid State Society, are generally very accurate and forward looking in terms of the progression of technology and its integration into our everyday lives. In fact, the Ghost in the Shell series is perhaps the finest recent example of the post cyberpunk genre of science fiction which is characterized by its portrayal of the near future, as in traditional cyberpunk, but from the standpoint of characters who attempt to improve social conditions or at least protect the status quo from further decay. If anyone has not seen the animes or read the mangas from this series then I would highly recommend them, especially scientists and engineer types, you will not be disappointed.
I fail to see how this has anything to do with MS not including drivers.
They do provide certified third party drivers with the OS out of the box, especially for common hardware from name brand manufacturers, and they provide updated drivers via their Windows Update service. I am not trolling, but maybe I just do not see why the Linux driver model is substantially better.
It has been suggested that IF the FCC were to allow this then airlines would install a cell phone signal relay so that the phones would be connecting to the "tower" onboard the plane with the signals being relayed via satellite to their destination networks in much the same way that the current seat back phones work, but with lower prices because companies like Verizon would almost certainly negotiate deals with the airlines for their subscribers to get regular access (uses minutes but no roaming) while everyone with a carrier that does NOT have a deal with the airline gets insane roaming charges (ala the seat back phone rates). The point is that there would be relay repeater(s) on board the plane if this were allowed.
and you don't have to run around to different vendors' websites trying to find drivers for your hardware because it's all already included in the kernel and distro.
Perhaps not, but then again Windows users don't have to recompile the kernel when they want to add, update, or swap drivers. I understand that this is mitigated in Linux with Loadable Kernel Modules, but how is that really different conceptually from the approach that Microsoft takes with not putting vendor drivers in the kernel to begin with?
I agree...users do not make those types of distinctions (i.e. between the kernel and the shell), or a least most Windows users don't, and it shows when they describe how they *think* a particular piece of software is actually working. For example they may say something like, "when I press this button the entries in the excel sheet are sorted", but they do not distinguish between the button signaling an event that is handled by the background process and the button actually doing something when it is clicked. The mechanism of action is indirect, but most users treat it conceptually as if it was direct. The parent is absolutely right and it would be easy to test this out. Just get some average people off the street and show them an ad for vista (running Aero of course) and then show them a laptop with the "Windows Vista Capable" sticker and ask them what they think the experience will look like when they actually upgrade (assuming that they can even understand that much, which is probably pushing it with the general public).
The analogy is not quite the same for the following reasons...I can go and see the car on the dealer lot and test drive the actual vehicle that I *might* end up buying. Therefore, the car purchase is a completely (or at least mostly) WYSIWYG experience. Furthermore, I can look under the hood and see the 4.0 liter engine, see the CD player (or lack thereof) on the dashboard, and the stock beefy (or not) tires and be sure that IF I buy this car then all of these features will be on the car and functional when I drive it off the lot.
The "Windows Vista Capable" promotion would be more comparable to buying a car with a promised engine upgrade at some point the in future, but when the time for the engine upgrade comes I find out that they have changed the fuel type, or the engine size, or some other characteristic that renders the upgrade moot without substantial modifications to the original vehicle that were not mentioned back when the upgrade was initially promised. At the very least Microsoft should have put a '*' next to the "Windows Vista Capable" sticker with the caveat, "May not run ALL Windows Vista Features".
The monitor that you are attempting to use is not compatible with Windows Vista DRM. The BSA will be at your door shortly to confirm that you are a genuine licensed user of Windows Vista. Cancel or allow?
It isn't the job of the consumer to research whether an advertisement means what it says. That's why there are consumer protection laws in the first place. Not everyone is capable of figuring out how to do such research.
Combine this with the fact that there is frequently imperfect information between buyers and sellers in the marketplace and especially so when the purchase is a franchise or proprietary product. Practically speaking there was no way that the average consumer, with access to public information only, could research accurately the real requirements for Vista as shown in the advertisements. The official sticker implies a bond of trust between Microsoft and the consumer that the machine they are currently using will be able to run Vista and since every single advertisement for Vista featured the Aero interface being used one might expect the same thing to run on one's "Windows Vista Capable" computer.
You do need a fairly densely populated rail corridor to really make it really worthwhile, but the east coast of the US would/should qualify.
In principle yes, but here in American you would have every NIMBY from Florida to New York screaming about the noise of the train, the eminent domain seizures of land to build the tracks, the timing of the routes, etc. It was a miracle that we got the superhighways built and then only because we did it mostly before the explosion of modern suburbia and urban sprawl beginning in the 1960s, enabled by the very highways that they now constrict on all sides thereby limiting space for high speed rail without more eminent domain or reducing the number of highway lanes (i.e taking away existing lanes), both of which are political non-starters. For example, they have been trying to widen the highway where I live for the past 20 years, but nothing has happened, despite the passage of an increased sales tax to fund the project, because there are powerful NIMBYs and other political groups that are vehemently opposed. In fact, some of these same factors have combined to make the only American "high speed" rail link, Acela Express, much less useful than it might have been because of compromises on just about everything to satisfy all of the NIMBYs and other opposition groups.
The passenger rail service here is terrible -- the tracks are owned by the freight rail company so you end up with the already far too slow passenger trains having to pull off for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to let freight trains past. You should be able to do Toronto to Montreal in about 2 hours with high speed trains, and even less time for Toronto to Ottawa. Instead the scheduled times take over 4 hours, and the trains are consistently anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour late.
This is exactly the situation here in most of the United States, except that where I live the scheduled times are probably 25% longer still with 2+ hour waits not unusual (btw they are NEVER exactly on time...always late by at least 5-10 minutes and usually more than that). There are some "light rail" regional commuter rail systems which do somewhat better than this, but here in the United States taking trains between major cities, especially across state lines, is hopeless. You would be much better off flying, driving, or even taking the bus.
I wish we had anything even vaguely comparable in North America.
One word...geography. The islands of Japan lend themselves very well to high speed train service (i.e. long, narrow, and densely populated) whereas the United States and Canada do not (i.e long AND wide with population centers spread out and lots of empty space in between...relative to Japan like densities anyway). The political factors do not help of course, but even if we had the will and the desire to have an extensive high speed rail system it would still be difficult economically to justify the costs on many potential routes which means less economy of scale on the trains, parts, and maintenance and thus even higher costs for a smaller system.
it also covers that land with one single crop that needs all sorts of nasty things such as pesticides and fertilizers.
It depends upon the type of crop used for the fuel stock or even the mix of crops in the sense of biowaste ethanol. The switchgrass that has been suggested as a source here in the United States once covered the great plains, along with other grassses, before we plowed the land to farm other crops and it was all growing wild without pesiticides and fertilizers.
The best bet for biofuels is something that has less of an impact on the soil and the planet, such as algae based biofuels.
One option that is not much discussed is the process of coal gassification, from which it is even possible to generate synthetic versions of the gasoline and diesel that we are currently using. In fact, the South Africans have become quite adept at the process via their investment in Sasol. This would combine nicely with nuclear energy to provide the electricity for heating the coal and creating the syngases.
That is just not possible and proves that our way of life is NOT sustainable in the long run without drastic reductions in energy use or population.
Then there will be a population drop, especially in areas like Africa, China, and India where the number of people per square mile would put extremely high demands on local food production to sustain the population. If indeed there is less energy available to transport food in the future, then more will have to be grown locally and in the cases where that is not possible the people will probably starve to death. The human race will survive, but not in its present form or numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
It is immoral to attack other people out of fear. There is a reason some version of "turn the other cheek" is part of most major religions. The whole notion of preemptive attack or being forced to create death squads because of the actions of the "other side". It is a convenient excuse - nothing more.
Of course, but then again it is dangerous to speak in absolutes and especially when speaking out of context. In general I would agree with you that preemptive attacks are to be avoided. However, there are limited circumstances where a first strike (not nuclear ), which may not be preemptive strictly speaking (when proceeded by a long period of failed diplomacy as the Iraq situation was) may be appropriate (although in the case of Iraq I believe that it was not). For example, suppose that an enemy is massing troops on your border and it is obvious that they are preparing for an attack or if the United States had spotted the Japanese carriers steaming towards Pearl Harbor? You mistake my position as supporting death squads and anything else that has happened in the past or could happen in the future simply because my position is not *exactly* the same as your position.
There is a difference between a "threat" and a "threat to our long term survival". It is disingenuous to confuse the two.
The Soviets that Reagan faced had thousands of nuclear warheads targeting the entire continental United States and all of our allies and they could have wiped us out with the push of a button. I don't know about you but I would have categorized that as a serious threat had been I been old enough to worry about such things back then...thankfully I was not. The terrorists are not threatening in quite the same way, at least not yet, but they could easily become the next Soviet style nuclear opponent if we give them one hundred years or so. Should we take that chance with the future of our grandchildren? Will they ask us what we were thinking to have allowed a massive nuclear armed Islamic empire to emerge as the great threat of their times? You are right of course that this is just speculation at this point, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't lift a finger in the here in now.
You do realize there are options beyond military adventurism and isolationism? Diplomacy for instance?
Of course, and all methods prior to war should be employed since violence should be reserved for the court of very last appeal or unless your opponent attacks first. However, it is important to remember that the success of diplomacy is based upon the credible threat that there *could* ultimately be violence if it became absolutely necessary. One must be willing to back up diplomacy with force should the other side call our bluff or elect to ignore us repeatedly on important issues over a long period of time, especially while negotiating in bad faith and reneging on past promises made at the bargaining table. It does not have to result in force every time of course, but if the threat is never made good on then it begins to loose credibility and our position at the bargaining table is substantially compromised since our opponents would come to believe that we can be safely ignored or cheated.
As a starting point would be to apply the same rules to ourselves that are applied to the rest of the world - start with fully supporting the U.N., the World Court, ratified treaties, and international law.
I am leery of the idea of world government. There is something to be said for the sovereignty of nations. The world court is useful for the prosecution of war criminals, but the day to day matters of justice should be administered by nations according to their national governments and traditions, not world opinion. The U.N. is a useful place for nations to come out and have their say in an open forum and that is about it.
Find areas of agreement with people and find ways to work with them? Stop bombing other countries? I can think of no better way to create enemies
HAHA...an excellent jest. Where are my mod points when I need them?
It is amazing to me the lengths people will go to justify their support for the immoral actions of the United States.
The United States, for those of us fortunate enough to be citizens, is our country and though our leaders sometimes make mistakes it remains home to our families, friends, and fellow citizens. If the cause of freedom, the freedom to live as you wish and worship what god you wish (including none at all) and peruse what goals and aspirations that you wish is important to you, but is not supported by us the citizens of the United States then who else will support these goals? The ayatollahs? The terrorists? Is it immoral to defend one's family and home against those who seek our destruction? Should we not take these people at their word when they say, "death to America" and "Israel must be erased from the map"? How far would you go or not go to stop them?
The worst lie that is told is that "terrorism", "communism" or any other "ism" is a threat to our long term survival.
The threat may be overestimated at times, but I would not go so far as to say that they were outright lies. Is it reasonable to suggest that the terrorists or the Soviets during the Cold War were or are no threat at all? Certainly not. You may disagree concerning the magnitude of the threat but it is disingenuous to suggest that they were and are no threat at all.
I don't buy your initial premise nor do a adhere to the mentality of supporting the lesser evil.
How would you respond then? Should the United States become directly involved in every part of the world where we have even the slightest interest? Should we retreat back into the isolationist shell that we were shocked out of by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler during WWII? If you do not engage with the lesser evil you may be caught unaware and unprepared when the greater evil shows up on your doorstep.
One obvious problem is that "evil" and its quantity is often determined by what is expedient to someone's interest. At one time it is Honduras, Afghanistan (supporting people like the Taliban) and the next admistration it becomes Iraq and fighting the Taliban.
It is a slippery slope I will grant you, but we charge our leaders with the duty to protect us and that means making difficult decisions often based upon incomplete or time sensitive information where the consequences of getting it wrong are American lives lost, but who among us is prescient enough to see all possible outcomes? How can you be sure that past interventions have not saved America from a terrible fate?
Anyone who actually pays attention to history knows that fighting proxy wars and using mercenary armies is more of a threat to a republic than any outside threat.
The Army of the United States is not a mercenary army and the civilian military contractors are staffed by citizens of a nation, namely the United States, which is a direct party to the conflict and thus they are not mercenaries under the official United Nations definition of mercenary.
The history of the Roman empire illustrates this problem quite nicely. So, I'm sorry - I'm not giving these people the free pass on this one. The consequences of fighting proxy wars and why the were fought (not to fight communism by the way) is wrong.
It is interesting that you mention the Roman Empire, which fell due to internal squabbling and weakness when they should have been presenting a strong and united front against the barbarian invaders. I agree that the proxy wars had consequences, but what would the consequences have been had we not become involved? It is totally bunk to suggest that the communists were not involved in Honduras or Costa Rica or Nicaragua during the Cold War. They almost certainly were meddling and so they United States was forced to meddle to counteract their (the East German and Soviet) meddling. The United States didn't really want to be there...the communists forced the issue a
The war on terror began with Ronald Reagan. Want to know the best part? It was Ronald Reagan that normalized relations with Iraq, took them off the list of state sponsored terror, and sold them the "weapons of mass destruction" and other munitions. The irony? People in the current administration did it.
Let's look at an abbreviated list shall we?
Alright, lets...
Even the wisest men among us cannot see all ends. It is unfair to criticize Reagan, Rumsfeld, Gates, and Negroponte for decisions that were made during the 1980s when we have the benefit of hindsight. If you want to judge them anyway then do it based upon what they and everyone else knew then, not what we know now. Recall that at the time the Soviet Union was a tremendous threat to the long term survival of the United States and indeed the westernized world. It was the policy of the United States at that time to thwart the Soviet Union by any and all means necessary, short of first strike, in order to guarantee the long term survival of our nation. This tough stance against communism enjoyed wide support among most Americans and everyone, on both the right and the left, with the possible exception of the communists and the crackpots, were fully supportive of that effort. If you want to defeat evil then you must sometimes, regrettably, associate yourself with THEIR enemies, unsavory though they might be, in order to achieve victory and advance the greater good.
1. Donald Rumsfield: Previous Defense Secretary. During Reagan's time he was Special Envoy to the Middle East who helped normalize relations with Iraq - personally meeting with Saddam around when they were using chemical weapons on Iran.
The United States is now a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention but during the 1980s such matters were still governed by the Geneva Protocols which also outlawed their use. However, when faced with a superior force in a war that they admittedly started Iraq, and their dictator, Saddam Hussein, decided to use them anyway and not just against Iranian soldiers, but against their own people as well which was a much greater atrocity than using them against uniformed Iranian soldiers. It was certainly known to the CIA and other intelligence agencies that chemical weapons were being used and we supplied them with intelligence on the locations of Iranian troops and their movements which almost certainly assisted the Iraqi army in their chemical attacks. However, the United States DID NOT supply the chemical precursors, technical know how, equipment, or indeed any other direct official support of the Iraqi chemical weapons program. The only US Corporation involved, Alcolac International, sold precursors to both the Iranians and the Iraqis in violation of US export laws and they were punished when the connection was exposed, but Rumsfeld had NOTHING to do with that. The Iraqis bought their chemical weapons materials and expertise from other Arab countries (especially the United Arab Emirates), Germany, India, and Singapore. The Iran Iraqi War was a dirty backwater of the Cold War proxy battles and even though the Iraqis were unsavory we supported them against the equally unsavory Iranians to bloody the nose of the Ayatollah Khomeini as payback for the Iranian hostage crisis. So Rumsfeld and Reagan were disinclined to say or do anything which might have benefited the Iranians, despite the fact that the Iraqis were no better, because they had taken the hostile route with the United States. The United States did not goad the Iraqis to attack Iran, they did it of their own accord (or the will of the dictator Saddam anyway) and it went without saying that the United States would assist
Say what you want about Bush, but Ronald Reagan was a patriot and a great American. In fact, a substantial portion of the American public considers Reagan to be among the best five presidents thus far and perhaps the greatest to serve within their living memory. You tarnish the legacy of a great and noble man when you use him as a pawn in your petty arguments.
Agreed. This is the same kind of crap that I see all of the time from inexperienced developers (especially offshore developers in India). They make all of the classic mistakes, client side javascript for input validation, use of query string parameters with the the SQL command builder on their pages (SQL injections galore), administrative query access to the SQL server directly from the web server, "secret" admin pages, cross-site scripting, you name it and they do it. The problem with a significant portion of the Indian developers is that they are are too busy waving their IIT degree, ISO certs, and other documentation of their extensive education, which taught them everything they needed to know, so they don't need to listen to American devs who have a few lessons left to teach them from school of hard knocks. They suffer from the "not invented here" syndrome, sometimes to an extreme, and thus earn themselves nasty surprises when the attack finally comes and catches them completely flat-footed. The really sad part about all of this is that same types of attacks are used again and again and the same developers keep building vulnerable sites again and again...even long after the attacks are known and proper designs have been presented on many developer forums to avoid these problems (i.e. use stored procedures, limit database permissions to those stored procedures only, don't use the query string for sensitive data, use regular expressions to validate user input data on the server side, etc...)
A problem has been detected with the lunar return sequence and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your spacecraft.
The problem seems to be caused by the following file: lssas@DOOM32.dll.exe
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:
Check to make sure that the rocket engines are fueled and ready. If this a new installation ask your hardware or software vendor for any Windows updates that you might need.
If problems conintue, disable or remove any newley intalled lunar module hardware. Disable BIOS memory options such as failsafe and life support backup. If you need to use Safe Mode to remove or disable components, restart your computer, Press f8 to select Advanced Startup Options, and then select Safe Mode.
Technical information:
*** STOP: 0x00000050 (0XFD459C20, 0XBEFE7167, 0X00000000)
*** lssas@DOOM32.dll.exe - Rocket Motors Failed - Engines Non Functional.
Is this copy of Windows Genuine? Please call Microsoft for reactivation to be sure...
What I do care about is how well it integrates with Exchange Server, and whether its notifications for meetings and such are compatible with the business standard Exchange+Outlook combination.
That may not be possible given the proclivities of Microsoft when it comes to protecting the "better" integration features of their products from interoperable competitors. In this particular case the fact that only Microsoft Outlook can fully integrate with all of the advanced services offered by Exchange serves to protect Microsoft Outlook from other competitors in what is otherwise a completely commoditized market for e-mail clients. I would be surprised if Microsoft were to open up Exchange to be fully interoperable with the advanced features so it is not really the fault of Thunderbird that these features are not available for it to use (without reverse engineering the protocol and that is a whole other issue).
I know that business users "don't care" about the technical reasons why something in software "doesn't work", good though they may be, but really this is probably not the fault of Thunderbird. If you really need synchronized calendering with Exchange then you should probably go ahead and use Outlook, especially if the company doesn't mind paying for it, because these are must need features for you. The fact is that no software is going to please everyone completely, but the Thunderbird team deserves some credit for what they have accomplished in spite of the difficulties thrown in their path by Microsoft and others.
Yes, that is correct. The problem lies in certain XML tags generated by Microsoft Office with names such as SpaceLikeOffice95 which mean something to the proprietary file format stream readers / writers embeded in Microsoft Office, but are inscrutable to anyone else trying to implement a compatible WYSIWYG editor. It is impossible to be certain how the document should be displayed or printed becuase Microsoft has never defined precisely what certain tags, SpaceLikeOffice95 for example, mean in a context insensitive way. These tags refer to formatting rules which were and still are proprietary. The net effect of these tags is to cause display errors where the user says, "That is not how the chart embeded in our important business doc is supposed to look! That's it, we are ditching this 'open document' crap and going back to Microsoft office...oh and fire the analyst who recommended that we switch in the first place." Business users do not understand or care about the technical reasons why the document doesn't look like they remember it...they only care that it looks wrong and they will point the finger at OSS and say, "It looks fine in Microsoft Office so it must be a problem with your OSS". Microsoft knows this well and and they are attempting to exploit the situation to limit competition while claming that their doucment format is an 'Open Standard' in the classic embrace, extend, and extinguish gambit.
No one really cares what Microsoft is doing
.NET? You may not like Microsoft, but the development of C# and .NET by Anders Hejlsberg, among others, cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. There is also the matter of Microsoft Research, which generates some pretty interesting work that is not necessarily related directly to ongoing production work at Microsoft. It is not accurate therefore, to say that *nobody* or indeed *nobody that matters*, cares about what Microsoft is doing.
What about C# and
So make it a real service. Do some research. Use other people's research. Come up with genre playlists and let people subscribe to them. Find worthwhile podcasts and hire/pay people to make them daily/weekly and let people subscribe to them. Promote hot DJs at hot clubs by letting them come up with weekly playlists and let people subscribe to them. Build playlists from Billboard, Radio & Records, etc. and let people subscribe to them. And, of course, let "regular people" build lists of music and let people subscribe to them. Heck, build playlists based upon my ripped CDs and let me subscribe to them.
This is so right that I just want to scream at the morons in the music business for not getting a system like this set up. The really revolutionary part is that each user can manage sets of subscriptions on their own personal device and they are not limited by a fixed number of "channels" or any other holdovers from the radio days and since each user is paying the same subscriber fee there is more of an incentive to cater to all of the various niches out there since the real cost is in setting up and running the service, but once it is all set up and going there is almost no cost to add additional niche programs, eclectic playlists, and off-beat selections ala the Amazon.com com and Craigslist list based systems. The system would not even need to have only human DJs, it could use AI and have intelligent agent programs making playlists and selections based upon live user feedback, random, shuffle, etc...it is really wide open possibilities. The only explanation that I can think of is that the music execs are either too greedy, too stupid, or both to get this type of system up and running.
In the meantime you might want to check out Digitally Imported and A State of Trance w/Armin Van Buurenfor some of the features that I have described above.
The "Here's our whole catalog--you figure it out" model isn't bringing them in droves because it's too much work. I'm not going to pay $15 per month for access to a mind-numbingly large collection of music. But I might pay that much if the subscription service actually provides a service where I automatically get new music that I might actually want to listen to!
Yes, Yes, Yes! If there are any music industry people reading this then PAY ATTENTION...THIS IS WHAT WE WANT. Sigh, they just don't get it.
Maybe satellite radio has a shot--they have live things that you can't preload onto an iPod--but the music rental business will go nowhere.
I don't know if I would go that far, imagine an XM radio attachment for your iPod that would allow you access to any of the XM streams from your iPod just about anywhere in the United States (or even the world if their satellite coverage is good enough) combined with the expertise of competent DJs selecting tracks with intelligent commentary, there are still a few stations like this, mostly the non-clearchannel listener supported public radio stations (they haven't been driven completely off the dial yet), but the same thing would work with subscriptions, no more top 40 BS or payola because the users are actually paying their OWN money to listen to the stream and they don't want that so the services like XM shouldn't need to and won't do it. It all comes down to price, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the value of such a service is not zero (i.e. free or I wont listen) to a large number of potential iPod owners. In fact, I myself might be willing to pay as much as $10 per month for such a service (not including the hardware of course) and I suspect that many other people would be willing to pay that much or perhaps even more.
"Economic freedom is a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for political freedom."
from Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
Well, that's the bad thing about capitalism today - it's been replaced by blind greed and short-term thinking
What is bad about that? On the contrary, the system is working exactly as it was intended, people are free to chose how they earn, invest, and spend their money and they all enjoy the benefits or suffer the consequences of their own choices. It is true that there are many managers out there that lack the sophistication to properly evaluate the opportunity costs of their decisions, but there are also many skilled and efficient investors, owners, and managers who generally make pretty good business decisions. If you are an investor or a shareholder and you are dissatisfied with the direction that management is taking then you should make your displeasure known by voting your proxies at the shareholder meetings, voting against the term renewals for the board members that you disagree with, or if all else fails then you can sell your interest or shares and move on.
Instead, "investing" money is considered "spending" it.
Only to those who are unable to discern the difference. The general techniques of valuation are well known, but the skill comes in accurate estimation of intangible value such as human capital, potential value of intellectual property, and understanding of the marketplace in which the business operates. The better managers are the ones with a keen understanding of these things and the willingness to work hard and apply their expertise.
I was going to mention it, but you beat me to it so I will have to go ahead and agree with you that the episodes of the Ghost in the Shell series, especially the more recent iterations: the Stand Alone Complex and S.A.C. 2nd GIG television series and the new film S.A.C. Solid State Society , are generally very accurate and forward looking in terms of the progression of technology and its integration into our everyday lives. In fact, the Ghost in the Shell series is perhaps the finest recent example of the post cyberpunk genre of science fiction which is characterized by its portrayal of the near future, as in traditional cyberpunk, but from the standpoint of characters who attempt to improve social conditions or at least protect the status quo from further decay. If anyone has not seen the animes or read the mangas from this series then I would highly recommend them, especially scientists and engineer types, you will not be disappointed.
I fail to see how this has anything to do with MS not including drivers.
They do provide certified third party drivers with the OS out of the box, especially for common hardware from name brand manufacturers, and they provide updated drivers via their Windows Update service. I am not trolling, but maybe I just do not see why the Linux driver model is substantially better.
It has been suggested that IF the FCC were to allow this then airlines would install a cell phone signal relay so that the phones would be connecting to the "tower" onboard the plane with the signals being relayed via satellite to their destination networks in much the same way that the current seat back phones work, but with lower prices because companies like Verizon would almost certainly negotiate deals with the airlines for their subscribers to get regular access (uses minutes but no roaming) while everyone with a carrier that does NOT have a deal with the airline gets insane roaming charges (ala the seat back phone rates). The point is that there would be relay repeater(s) on board the plane if this were allowed.
and you don't have to run around to different vendors' websites trying to find drivers for your hardware because it's all already included in the kernel and distro.
Perhaps not, but then again Windows users don't have to recompile the kernel when they want to add, update, or swap drivers. I understand that this is mitigated in Linux with Loadable Kernel Modules, but how is that really different conceptually from the approach that Microsoft takes with not putting vendor drivers in the kernel to begin with?
I agree...users do not make those types of distinctions (i.e. between the kernel and the shell), or a least most Windows users don't, and it shows when they describe how they *think* a particular piece of software is actually working. For example they may say something like, "when I press this button the entries in the excel sheet are sorted", but they do not distinguish between the button signaling an event that is handled by the background process and the button actually doing something when it is clicked. The mechanism of action is indirect, but most users treat it conceptually as if it was direct. The parent is absolutely right and it would be easy to test this out. Just get some average people off the street and show them an ad for vista (running Aero of course) and then show them a laptop with the "Windows Vista Capable" sticker and ask them what they think the experience will look like when they actually upgrade (assuming that they can even understand that much, which is probably pushing it with the general public).
The analogy is not quite the same for the following reasons...I can go and see the car on the dealer lot and test drive the actual vehicle that I *might* end up buying. Therefore, the car purchase is a completely (or at least mostly) WYSIWYG experience. Furthermore, I can look under the hood and see the 4.0 liter engine, see the CD player (or lack thereof) on the dashboard, and the stock beefy (or not) tires and be sure that IF I buy this car then all of these features will be on the car and functional when I drive it off the lot.
The "Windows Vista Capable" promotion would be more comparable to buying a car with a promised engine upgrade at some point the in future, but when the time for the engine upgrade comes I find out that they have changed the fuel type, or the engine size, or some other characteristic that renders the upgrade moot without substantial modifications to the original vehicle that were not mentioned back when the upgrade was initially promised. At the very least Microsoft should have put a '*' next to the "Windows Vista Capable" sticker with the caveat, "May not run ALL Windows Vista Features".
The monitor that you are attempting to use is not compatible with Windows Vista DRM. The BSA will be at your door shortly to confirm that you are a genuine licensed user of Windows Vista. Cancel or allow?
It isn't the job of the consumer to research whether an advertisement means what it says. That's why there are consumer protection laws in the first place. Not everyone is capable of figuring out how to do such research.
Combine this with the fact that there is frequently imperfect information between buyers and sellers in the marketplace and especially so when the purchase is a franchise or proprietary product. Practically speaking there was no way that the average consumer, with access to public information only, could research accurately the real requirements for Vista as shown in the advertisements. The official sticker implies a bond of trust between Microsoft and the consumer that the machine they are currently using will be able to run Vista and since every single advertisement for Vista featured the Aero interface being used one might expect the same thing to run on one's "Windows Vista Capable" computer.
You do need a fairly densely populated rail corridor to really make it really worthwhile, but the east coast of the US would/should qualify.
In principle yes, but here in American you would have every NIMBY from Florida to New York screaming about the noise of the train, the eminent domain seizures of land to build the tracks, the timing of the routes, etc. It was a miracle that we got the superhighways built and then only because we did it mostly before the explosion of modern suburbia and urban sprawl beginning in the 1960s, enabled by the very highways that they now constrict on all sides thereby limiting space for high speed rail without more eminent domain or reducing the number of highway lanes (i.e taking away existing lanes), both of which are political non-starters. For example, they have been trying to widen the highway where I live for the past 20 years, but nothing has happened, despite the passage of an increased sales tax to fund the project, because there are powerful NIMBYs and other political groups that are vehemently opposed. In fact, some of these same factors have combined to make the only American "high speed" rail link, Acela Express, much less useful than it might have been because of compromises on just about everything to satisfy all of the NIMBYs and other opposition groups.
The passenger rail service here is terrible -- the tracks are owned by the freight rail company so you end up with the already far too slow passenger trains having to pull off for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to let freight trains past. You should be able to do Toronto to Montreal in about 2 hours with high speed trains, and even less time for Toronto to Ottawa. Instead the scheduled times take over 4 hours, and the trains are consistently anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour late.
This is exactly the situation here in most of the United States, except that where I live the scheduled times are probably 25% longer still with 2+ hour waits not unusual (btw they are NEVER exactly on time...always late by at least 5-10 minutes and usually more than that). There are some "light rail" regional commuter rail systems which do somewhat better than this, but here in the United States taking trains between major cities, especially across state lines, is hopeless. You would be much better off flying, driving, or even taking the bus.
I wish we had anything even vaguely comparable in North America.
One word...geography. The islands of Japan lend themselves very well to high speed train service (i.e. long, narrow, and densely populated) whereas the United States and Canada do not (i.e long AND wide with population centers spread out and lots of empty space in between...relative to Japan like densities anyway). The political factors do not help of course, but even if we had the will and the desire to have an extensive high speed rail system it would still be difficult economically to justify the costs on many potential routes which means less economy of scale on the trains, parts, and maintenance and thus even higher costs for a smaller system.
it also covers that land with one single crop that needs all sorts of nasty things such as pesticides and fertilizers.
It depends upon the type of crop used for the fuel stock or even the mix of crops in the sense of biowaste ethanol. The switchgrass that has been suggested as a source here in the United States once covered the great plains, along with other grassses, before we plowed the land to farm other crops and it was all growing wild without pesiticides and fertilizers.
The best bet for biofuels is something that has less of an impact on the soil and the planet, such as algae based biofuels.
One option that is not much discussed is the process of coal gassification, from which it is even possible to generate synthetic versions of the gasoline and diesel that we are currently using. In fact, the South Africans have become quite adept at the process via their investment in Sasol. This would combine nicely with nuclear energy to provide the electricity for heating the coal and creating the syngases.
That is just not possible and proves that our way of life is NOT sustainable in the long run without drastic reductions in energy use or population.
Then there will be a population drop, especially in areas like Africa, China, and India where the number of people per square mile would put extremely high demands on local food production to sustain the population. If indeed there is less energy available to transport food in the future, then more will have to be grown locally and in the cases where that is not possible the people will probably starve to death. The human race will survive, but not in its present form or numbers.