Eww! i845 SDRAM chipset (20-25% performence hit compared to the i850 RDRAM chipset that's clock-to-clock way slower than the Athlon to begin with), slow and small hard drive (why bother with anything less than 7200RPM?), video card that's two generations out of date. You could build an Athlon XP box with DDR SDRAM and KT266A chipset that would destroy the Dell econo-box for less money. FedEx delivers mine Monday.
Subscription model that could work (wunderground)
on
LWN in Trouble
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Weather Underground has a neat subscription model: pay $5/year and they shut off the ads. Ads are a minor annoyance on my cable modem feed, but I subscribed just because they're my favorite weather site. LWN might want to charge a bit more, and/or make shutting off the ads a user-selectable option (targeted ads can be informative), and definitely offer payment via PayPal as well as credit cards, but it's the most plausible revenue model I've seen.
Re:will the trickery work?
on
AthlonXP Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is AMD marketing trickery countering Intel engineering trickery. Intel doubled the pipeline length in the P4 versus the P3 and Athlon (20 stage versus 10 and 11, respectively) in order to crank the clock speed at the expense of performence (see The Megahertz Myth for an excellent overview on the subject). Thus why a 1.13GHz P3 will outrun a 1.4GHz P4 most of the time, and why the upgraded core of the 1.53GHz Athlon XP outruns the 2GHz P4 most of the time (for half the price).
In other words, in marketing, two wrongs make a right!
The previously released Athlon MP is the multiprocessor certified version of the Athlon XP. Faster versions of the Athlon MP are expected to be announced next week, with new dual processor motherboards (in addition to the Tyan Thunder and Tiger MP boards already on the market) expected next month.
The Athlon4 notebook CPUs are also equivalent to the Athlon XP desktop CPUs (with the addition of PowerNOW! power management, natch). As notebook and MP-certified CPUs are higher margin parts than uniprocessor desktop CPUs and AMD had no previous MP or notebook Athlon offerings, AMD directed their new Palamino-core fabrication lines to those markets first.
Yahoo! should buy PayPal and integrate it into their Yahoo! Store and Auctions infrastructure. Their existing PayDirect service was too late getting into the game, ditch it and convert its users to PayPal. The cut the credit card companies normally get for Store purchases could flow to Yahoo! when payments are made from a cash-positive PayPal account. The additional users from Yahoo!'s existing services plus advertising would be a big boost to PayPal. And no need for an incredibly poorly timed IPO. Win-win situation.
Credit my consulting fee to my PayPal account, please;-).
Dish Network used to give you the receivers if you ordered $50+/month in programming, which is what DirecTV still does. Buying the receiver then paying $9/month is the same kind of subsidy. Take your pick, but I like Dish Network better.
Hit Dish Network's web site, find your local dealer, haul ass over there, buy whatever receiver model amuses you (I'd pick between the HDTV and PVR versions), and get it hooked up and activated before 8pm. It's doable. (Sears sells them under the JVC name too, but an independent dealer is probably better.) Dish Network carries TWO UPN stations in their Superstations package (and THREE WBs!), so even if one of them is playing some lame sports game instead of Trek you're covered. I've been a Dish subscriber for almost 5 years. Highly recommended. You can probably get the Detroit network stations too, or better yet, the NY/LA East/West combo if you're not in a local broadcast area. You will need line-of-sight to the southwest (in Michigan), 30 degree angle IIRC.
1) Bush's point was that keeping federal taxes at record levels, higher than during World War 2, was risking recession. Which was (and still is) true. The Democrats amplified it in the news by relentlessly pounding Bush over it, which was hypocritical as hell because:
2) Remember the '92 Clinton/Gore campaign mantra about the "WORST ECONOMY IN 50 YEARS!"? Which besides being irresponsible was also a blatent lie, given the mess of the Carter Administration twelve years before.
Other than that, yup, psychology is a bitch, and I hope we don't get stuck in that negative feedback loop. It'd be nice if Bush used his current popularity to push thru both corporate welfare cuts and tax cuts, maybe even radical tax simplification (Flat Tax), but it's not likely to happen.
See my homepage, where I detail the parts I used for my 1.4GHz Athlon machine for work. It's the third Athlon system I've built, preceeded by numerous 386/486/Pentium/PPro/K6 systems.
Antec has a new 350W p/s that makes a good, inexpensive choice for a single-CPU system, and they sell a nice midtower case that comes with it. I say "inexpensive" relative to the PC Power & Cooling gear I usually get.
Toy stores: MWave.com for selection, Newegg.com for price. I've bought a lot of stuff from MWave, haven't tried Newegg yet but will next chance I get, they're supposed to be good. EMS Computing has great prices on Antec stuff, I bought from them once, but their site is s-l-o-w.
This email has been making the rounds, and happened to meander my way:
Dear Colleagues,
As we reflect upon the tragic events of this week and an appropriate
"response," I thought you might like to see this letter from my college
roommate, Tamim Ansary, who grew up in Afghanistan. I think he offers an
interesting perspective on Bin Laden, the Taliban, and Afghanistan.
Toivo Kallas
Department of Biology & Microbiology
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 10:14:27 -0700
Dear Friends,
Yesterday I heard a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the
Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio allowed that this would mean
killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity,
but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage," and he asked,
"What else can we do? What is your suggestion?" Minutes later I heard a
TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about these issues especially hard because I am from
Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost
track of what's been going on over there. So I want to share a few
thoughts with anyone who will listen.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no
doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in
New York. I fervently wish to see those monsters punished.
But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the
government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics
who captured Afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the country in
bondage ever since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a master
plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden,
think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the
Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people
had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the
perpetrators. They would love for someone to eliminate the Taliban and
clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
I guarantee it.
Some say, if that's the case, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow
the Taliban themselves? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted,
damaged, and incapacitated. A few years ago, the United Nations
estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a
country with no economy, no food. Millions of Afghans are widows of the
approximately two million men killed during the war with the
Soviets. And the Taliban has been executing these women for being women
and have buried some of their opponents alive in mass graves. The soil
of Afghanistan is littered with land mines and almost all the farms have
been destroyed . The Afghan people have tried to overthrow the Taliban.
They haven't been able to.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
Trouble with that scheme is, it's already been done. The Soviets took
care of it . Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level
their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble?
Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their
infrastructure? There is no infrastructure. Cut them off from medicine
and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only land in the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at
least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the
Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away
and hide. (They have already, I hear.) Maybe the bombs would get some of
those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have
wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be
a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it
would be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the
people they've been raping all this time
So what else can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and
trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground
troops. I think that when people speak of "having the belly to do what
needs to be done" many of them are thinking in terms of having the belly
to kill as many as needed. They are thinking about overcoming moral
qualms about killing innocent people. But it's the belly to die not kill
that's actually on the table. Americans will die in a land war to get
Bin Laden. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their
way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than
that, folks. To get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through
Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would
have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where
I'm going. The invasion approach is a flirtation with global war between
Islam and the West.
And that is Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants and why he
did this thing. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right
there. AT the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist. There
are Muslims and there are Muslim countries, but no such political entity
as Islam. Bin Laden believes that if he can get a war started, he can
constitute this entity and he'd be running it. He really believes Islam
would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can
polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion
soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in Muslim lands, that's a
billion people with nothing left to lose, even better from Bin Laden's
point of view. He's probably wrong about winning, in the end the west
would probably overcome--whatever that would mean in such a war; but the
war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but
ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden yes, but anyone else?
I don't have a solution. But I do believe that suffering and poverty are
the soil in which terrorism grows. Bin Laden and his cohorts want to bait
us into creating more such soil, so they and their kind can flourish. We
can't let him do that. That's my humble opinion.
If Rumsfeld or ANY member of the Bush cabinet ruled out the use of nukes, he should be fired. You NEVER EVER tell the enemy what you aren't going to do, no matter how unlikely you are to do it. Our enemies must always have in the back of their mind the thought that we CAN annihilate them if they push us too far. It's called deterrent effect.
Barry Goldwater got crucified in the press over this issue (wouldn't deny the possible use of nukes if we went into Vietnam). Which went a long way to getting LBJ elected, and we all know what a peace-lover he was (not).
And remember this: if these terrorists had nukes, they'd use them, without hesitation. I don't think I need to elaborate after the events of this week.
There have been allegations that Bush Sr. may have been involved in negotiations with the Iranians in Paris, on behalf of Reagan, to delay the release of the hostages until after the elections. Whether or not there is a shred of truth to such allegations...
As Leon Panetta put it at the time while he was a member of Congress: "While we have no proof of the allegation, the seriousness of the charge warrants investigation," or something to that effect. Oddly enough, his views on standards for evidence changed quite radically once he joined the Clinton cabinet.
C'mon, the Concorde flight to Paris charge is right up there with space aliens rigging the election in lack of credibility.
Rep. Rivers is a Democrat, and mentioned that privacy support in Congress has little to do with political party affiliation. She mentioned that
she and Barr are big allies on this issue, although they disagree on many others.
Yup, I should have specified Rivers party affiliation rather than implied it. She's not too bad as Democrats go, someone you can agree to disagree with.
Republicans tend to get blamed for anti-privacy stuff by people who don't follow politics, so I thought it important to point out that there are many Republican who are strong defenders of privacy and many Democrats who would shred privacy rights if they could.
Few Democrats support the Second Amendment, Rivers included, thus equating crypto rights with the Second Amendment is not a good idea when pleading the case for crypto rights to Democrats. You're about as likely to find a pro-gun Democrat congresscritter as a pro-life Democrat. They exist, but if you don't know where yours stands, play the odds.
Microsoft is riding high right now, but it is headed for the boneyard after all.
If Microsoft is headed to the boneyard, then the free market works, Microsoft's non-government-sanctioned "monopoly" (AT&Ts was government sanctioned, like every other real monopoly) isn't worth squat, and this crusade by a bunch of success-hating left-wingers (and certain alledged Republicans with Microsoft competitors in their districts) has been much ado about nothing.
The converse, Microsoft's continued success means the free market doesn't work, isn't necessarily true, before y'think about throwing that one at me.
One more time: FEED ENGINEERS, NOT LAWYERS! The money spent attacking Microsoft could have paid for a helluva lot of Linux desktop development. And had Mozilla at 1.0 by now.
Cryptography rights are the Second Amendment issue of the Internet. If you're going to write your congresscritter, that's a good point to make... tho perhaps not with Democrats. National Review has come down firmly on the side of being careful to maintain civil liberties, and folks like Bob Barr and Dick Armey (majority leader) in the House are well-known privacy nuts, so I'm not overly worried; the quote (yesterday?) by the House minority leader (Gephardt) was disconcerting, hopefully he'll listen to reps like Rivers (whose district is a stone's throw from mine).
The main source of our strength is our freedom and open society. The United States already has the most powerful military in the world. We don't need the symbolic jaw, jaw, jaw of more laws, but the will to use our existing war power.
Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation, aptly wrote: "The truth is that if we further emasculate our Constitution the terrorists will have achieved the greatest victory imaginable. Their triumph won't just be the thousands of people they killed, the triumph will be if they see our democratic institutions crumble. If President Bush can navigate a responsible course where we make an appropriate response to those who have perpetrated these unspeakable crimes while at the same time protecting our essential freedoms in the process he will end up being the greatest President of the modern age."
Another essay from yesterday, "Freedom First", is also a worthy read.
afghanistan does NOT produce oil (actually their NUMBER ONE export is HEROIN, much of which ends up in the streets of NYC)...
Actually, the Taliban ordered the destruction of the poppy (?) fields used to produce heroin several months ago. They're gone, eradicated. It's the only good thing they've done AFAIK.
It would be grossly irresponsible to tell our enemies what we will not do, no matter how unlikely the exercise of that option may be. Our enemies must, at the very least, always have the thought in the back of their mind that if they anger us sufficiently WE CAN ANNIHILATE THEM.
Port 80's still blocked where I live (Comcast land, after a territory swap with MediaOne). But they left https alone. The annoyance of certificate warning messages aside (unless you've bought one from the usual suspects), it's just nice to use crypto, and the https port (unlike port 81) is unlikely to be blocked by firewalls.
I haven't thought of anything crypto-worthy to say lately, tho. Maybe I should reread "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell".
I have two folding tables, one 6' and one 5', lining two adjacent walls in what is supposed to be my dining room (heh). Sturdy, cheap ($30 each), lots of room under the desks for the computers, just enough room on top for my 21" monitor, easy to spread stuff out... no shelves, though, but you could mount shelves on the wall above a desk if you wanted. I use a bookcase instead.
Care to name some of those "anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian" views, or maybe even back up your "goose-stepping" crack by explaining what you think Republicans have in common with the National Socialist Workers Party?
Oh, and if Canada is fool enough to take you, buh-bye...
Back on topic: curious how only the local news site mentioned the Hamas connection that is the target of the FBIs search. Rather important detail for the nationals to omit, isn't it?
Well, for starters, companies don't get personal and dependent deductions. If a family of four gets to tax deduct their first $35K of income, are they really going to care that they don't have a separate deduction for their health insurance and mortgage? Like I said, with the Flat Tax, there's no social engineering. And it ends the massive tax discrimination against renters.
Companies are just tax collectors, btw. Their customers pay their taxes. It's just easier for politicians to tax an abstract accounting construct than a flesh-and-blood individual. All the same, having the same 17% rate for individuals and corporations minimizes the risks of accounting trickery.
And people already use sole proprieterships for exactly what you describe. The current 40,000 page tax code is abused almost as much as it is abusive. With the Flat Tax, auditing is simpler, compliance is easy (not to mention possible), and with the lower tax rate there's far less incentive to cheat. And you get to skip the TurboTax tax. Companies won't need platoons of accountants and tax attorneys to figure out how to comply with the tax (some, but far less), and we'd remove the primary source of corruption in Washington: special interest buying (and Congressional selling) of tax loopholes.
Slashdot Mirror
Eww! i845 SDRAM chipset (20-25% performence hit compared to the i850 RDRAM chipset that's clock-to-clock way slower than the Athlon to begin with), slow and small hard drive (why bother with anything less than 7200RPM?), video card that's two generations out of date. You could build an Athlon XP box with DDR SDRAM and KT266A chipset that would destroy the Dell econo-box for less money. FedEx delivers mine Monday.
Weather Underground has a neat subscription model: pay $5/year and they shut off the ads. Ads are a minor annoyance on my cable modem feed, but I subscribed just because they're my favorite weather site. LWN might want to charge a bit more, and/or make shutting off the ads a user-selectable option (targeted ads can be informative), and definitely offer payment via PayPal as well as credit cards, but it's the most plausible revenue model I've seen.
This is AMD marketing trickery countering Intel engineering trickery. Intel doubled the pipeline length in the P4 versus the P3 and Athlon (20 stage versus 10 and 11, respectively) in order to crank the clock speed at the expense of performence (see The Megahertz Myth for an excellent overview on the subject). Thus why a 1.13GHz P3 will outrun a 1.4GHz P4 most of the time, and why the upgraded core of the 1.53GHz Athlon XP outruns the 2GHz P4 most of the time (for half the price).
In other words, in marketing, two wrongs make a right!
The previously released Athlon MP is the multiprocessor certified version of the Athlon XP. Faster versions of the Athlon MP are expected to be announced next week, with new dual processor motherboards (in addition to the Tyan Thunder and Tiger MP boards already on the market) expected next month.
The Athlon4 notebook CPUs are also equivalent to the Athlon XP desktop CPUs (with the addition of PowerNOW! power management, natch). As notebook and MP-certified CPUs are higher margin parts than uniprocessor desktop CPUs and AMD had no previous MP or notebook Athlon offerings, AMD directed their new Palamino-core fabrication lines to those markets first.
Yahoo! should buy PayPal and integrate it into their Yahoo! Store and Auctions infrastructure. Their existing PayDirect service was too late getting into the game, ditch it and convert its users to PayPal. The cut the credit card companies normally get for Store purchases could flow to Yahoo! when payments are made from a cash-positive PayPal account. The additional users from Yahoo!'s existing services plus advertising would be a big boost to PayPal. And no need for an incredibly poorly timed IPO. Win-win situation.
;-).
Credit my consulting fee to my PayPal account, please
Does DirecTV even have a UPN channel?
Dish Network used to give you the receivers if you ordered $50+/month in programming, which is what DirecTV still does. Buying the receiver then paying $9/month is the same kind of subsidy. Take your pick, but I like Dish Network better.
Hit Dish Network's web site, find your local dealer, haul ass over there, buy whatever receiver model amuses you (I'd pick between the HDTV and PVR versions), and get it hooked up and activated before 8pm. It's doable. (Sears sells them under the JVC name too, but an independent dealer is probably better.) Dish Network carries TWO UPN stations in their Superstations package (and THREE WBs!), so even if one of them is playing some lame sports game instead of Trek you're covered. I've been a Dish subscriber for almost 5 years. Highly recommended. You can probably get the Detroit network stations too, or better yet, the NY/LA East/West combo if you're not in a local broadcast area. You will need line-of-sight to the southwest (in Michigan), 30 degree angle IIRC.
Two points:
1) Bush's point was that keeping federal taxes at record levels, higher than during World War 2, was risking recession. Which was (and still is) true. The Democrats amplified it in the news by relentlessly pounding Bush over it, which was hypocritical as hell because:
2) Remember the '92 Clinton/Gore campaign mantra about the "WORST ECONOMY IN 50 YEARS!"? Which besides being irresponsible was also a blatent lie, given the mess of the Carter Administration twelve years before.
Other than that, yup, psychology is a bitch, and I hope we don't get stuck in that negative feedback loop. It'd be nice if Bush used his current popularity to push thru both corporate welfare cuts and tax cuts, maybe even radical tax simplification (Flat Tax), but it's not likely to happen.
See my homepage, where I detail the parts I used for my 1.4GHz Athlon machine for work. It's the third Athlon system I've built, preceeded by numerous 386/486/Pentium/PPro/K6 systems.
Antec has a new 350W p/s that makes a good, inexpensive choice for a single-CPU system, and they sell a nice midtower case that comes with it. I say "inexpensive" relative to the PC Power & Cooling gear I usually get.
Toy stores: MWave.com for selection, Newegg.com for price. I've bought a lot of stuff from MWave, haven't tried Newegg yet but will next chance I get, they're supposed to be good. EMS Computing has great prices on Antec stuff, I bought from them once, but their site is s-l-o-w.
The whole series of articles is excellent, especially this one about "Why they hate America". Thanks for the link.
If you haven't yet listened to or read President Bush's speech to Congress, I highly recommend doing so.
I'm getting the distinct impression that Bush is planning on liberating Afghanistan. There are even reports that this is the case. Combine that with the ongoing British diplomacy with Iran, Iran's calling for an international fight against terrorism, and unprecedented sympathy towards the terror attack victims. And note how we haven't dropped any bombs yet, 11 days after the WTC mass murder. It looks like we're going to do the job right this time.
Peace with Iran, the liberation and rebuilding of Afghanistan... it's going to be tough to pull off, but if it can be done, wow...
This email has been making the rounds, and happened to meander my way:
Dear Colleagues,
As we reflect upon the tragic events of this week and an appropriate
"response," I thought you might like to see this letter from my college
roommate, Tamim Ansary, who grew up in Afghanistan. I think he offers an
interesting perspective on Bin Laden, the Taliban, and Afghanistan.
Toivo Kallas
Department of Biology & Microbiology
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 10:14:27 -0700
Dear Friends,
Yesterday I heard a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the
Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio allowed that this would mean
killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity,
but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage," and he asked,
"What else can we do? What is your suggestion?" Minutes later I heard a
TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about these issues especially hard because I am from
Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost
track of what's been going on over there. So I want to share a few
thoughts with anyone who will listen.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no
doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in
New York. I fervently wish to see those monsters punished.
But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the
government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics
who captured Afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the country in
bondage ever since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a master
plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden,
think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the
Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people
had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the
perpetrators. They would love for someone to eliminate the Taliban and
clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
I guarantee it.
Some say, if that's the case, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow
the Taliban themselves? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted,
damaged, and incapacitated. A few years ago, the United Nations
estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a
country with no economy, no food. Millions of Afghans are widows of the
approximately two million men killed during the war with the
Soviets. And the Taliban has been executing these women for being women
and have buried some of their opponents alive in mass graves. The soil
of Afghanistan is littered with land mines and almost all the farms have
been destroyed . The Afghan people have tried to overthrow the Taliban.
They haven't been able to.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
Trouble with that scheme is, it's already been done. The Soviets took
care of it . Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level
their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble?
Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their
infrastructure? There is no infrastructure. Cut them off from medicine
and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only land in the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at
least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the
Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away
and hide. (They have already, I hear.) Maybe the bombs would get some of
those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have
wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be
a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it
would be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the
people they've been raping all this time
So what else can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and
trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground
troops. I think that when people speak of "having the belly to do what
needs to be done" many of them are thinking in terms of having the belly
to kill as many as needed. They are thinking about overcoming moral
qualms about killing innocent people. But it's the belly to die not kill
that's actually on the table. Americans will die in a land war to get
Bin Laden. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their
way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than
that, folks. To get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through
Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would
have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where
I'm going. The invasion approach is a flirtation with global war between
Islam and the West.
And that is Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants and why he
did this thing. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right
there. AT the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist. There
are Muslims and there are Muslim countries, but no such political entity
as Islam. Bin Laden believes that if he can get a war started, he can
constitute this entity and he'd be running it. He really believes Islam
would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can
polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion
soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in Muslim lands, that's a
billion people with nothing left to lose, even better from Bin Laden's
point of view. He's probably wrong about winning, in the end the west
would probably overcome--whatever that would mean in such a war; but the
war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but
ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden yes, but anyone else?
I don't have a solution. But I do believe that suffering and poverty are
the soil in which terrorism grows. Bin Laden and his cohorts want to bait
us into creating more such soil, so they and their kind can flourish. We
can't let him do that. That's my humble opinion.
Tamim Ansary
If Rumsfeld or ANY member of the Bush cabinet ruled out the use of nukes, he should be fired. You NEVER EVER tell the enemy what you aren't going to do, no matter how unlikely you are to do it. Our enemies must always have in the back of their mind the thought that we CAN annihilate them if they push us too far. It's called deterrent effect.
Barry Goldwater got crucified in the press over this issue (wouldn't deny the possible use of nukes if we went into Vietnam). Which went a long way to getting LBJ elected, and we all know what a peace-lover he was (not).
And remember this: if these terrorists had nukes, they'd use them, without hesitation. I don't think I need to elaborate after the events of this week.
There have been allegations that Bush Sr. may have been involved in negotiations with the Iranians in Paris, on behalf of Reagan, to delay the release of the hostages until after the elections. Whether or not there is a shred of truth to such allegations...
As Leon Panetta put it at the time while he was a member of Congress: "While we have no proof of the allegation, the seriousness of the charge warrants investigation," or something to that effect. Oddly enough, his views on standards for evidence changed quite radically once he joined the Clinton cabinet.
C'mon, the Concorde flight to Paris charge is right up there with space aliens rigging the election in lack of credibility.
Rep. Rivers is a Democrat, and mentioned that privacy support in Congress has little to do with political party affiliation. She mentioned that
she and Barr are big allies on this issue, although they disagree on many others.
Yup, I should have specified Rivers party affiliation rather than implied it. She's not too bad as Democrats go, someone you can agree to disagree with.
Republicans tend to get blamed for anti-privacy stuff by people who don't follow politics, so I thought it important to point out that there are many Republican who are strong defenders of privacy and many Democrats who would shred privacy rights if they could.
Few Democrats support the Second Amendment, Rivers included, thus equating crypto rights with the Second Amendment is not a good idea when pleading the case for crypto rights to Democrats. You're about as likely to find a pro-gun Democrat congresscritter as a pro-life Democrat. They exist, but if you don't know where yours stands, play the odds.
Microsoft is riding high right now, but it is headed for the boneyard after all.
If Microsoft is headed to the boneyard, then the free market works, Microsoft's non-government-sanctioned "monopoly" (AT&Ts was government sanctioned, like every other real monopoly) isn't worth squat, and this crusade by a bunch of success-hating left-wingers (and certain alledged Republicans with Microsoft competitors in their districts) has been much ado about nothing.
The converse, Microsoft's continued success means the free market doesn't work, isn't necessarily true, before y'think about throwing that one at me.
One more time: FEED ENGINEERS, NOT LAWYERS! The money spent attacking Microsoft could have paid for a helluva lot of Linux desktop development. And had Mozilla at 1.0 by now.
Cryptography rights are the Second Amendment issue of the Internet. If you're going to write your congresscritter, that's a good point to make... tho perhaps not with Democrats. National Review has come down firmly on the side of being careful to maintain civil liberties, and folks like Bob Barr and Dick Armey (majority leader) in the House are well-known privacy nuts, so I'm not overly worried; the quote (yesterday?) by the House minority leader (Gephardt) was disconcerting, hopefully he'll listen to reps like Rivers (whose district is a stone's throw from mine).
Appropriate commentary here, dated yesterday:
The main source of our strength is our freedom and open society. The United States already has the most powerful military in the world. We don't need the symbolic jaw, jaw, jaw of more laws, but the will to use our existing war power.
Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation, aptly wrote: "The truth is that if we further emasculate our Constitution the terrorists will have achieved the greatest victory imaginable. Their triumph won't just be the thousands of people they killed, the triumph will be if they see our democratic institutions crumble. If President Bush can navigate a responsible course where we make an appropriate response to those who have perpetrated these unspeakable crimes while at the same time protecting our essential freedoms in the process he will end up being the greatest President of the modern age."
Another essay from yesterday, "Freedom First", is also a worthy read.
afghanistan does NOT produce oil (actually their NUMBER ONE export is HEROIN, much of which ends up in the streets of NYC)...
Actually, the Taliban ordered the destruction of the poppy (?) fields used to produce heroin several months ago. They're gone, eradicated. It's the only good thing they've done AFAIK.
It would be grossly irresponsible to tell our enemies what we will not do, no matter how unlikely the exercise of that option may be. Our enemies must, at the very least, always have the thought in the back of their mind that if they anger us sufficiently WE CAN ANNIHILATE THEM.
To our men in uniform: Good hunting.
Port 80's still blocked where I live (Comcast land, after a territory swap with MediaOne). But they left https alone. The annoyance of certificate warning messages aside (unless you've bought one from the usual suspects), it's just nice to use crypto, and the https port (unlike port 81) is unlikely to be blocked by firewalls.
I haven't thought of anything crypto-worthy to say lately, tho. Maybe I should reread "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell".
FYI: Robocode doesn't like Sun's JDK 1.4 Beta 2. I'll presume it'll play nice with 1.3.1.
.jar with Netscape 4.77 (Windows) didn't work (mangled file), but wget (from my Linux server) did.
:-).
Also, downloading the
Maybe this will get little brother interested in programming, he likes to destroy stuff...
Damn, Slashdotted IBM. Obviously they need to devote one of those S/390's running Linux to Alphaworks
I have two folding tables, one 6' and one 5', lining two adjacent walls in what is supposed to be my dining room (heh). Sturdy, cheap ($30 each), lots of room under the desks for the computers, just enough room on top for my 21" monitor, easy to spread stuff out... no shelves, though, but you could mount shelves on the wall above a desk if you wanted. I use a bookcase instead.
Care to name some of those "anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian" views, or maybe even back up your "goose-stepping" crack by explaining what you think Republicans have in common with the National Socialist Workers Party?
Oh, and if Canada is fool enough to take you, buh-bye...
Back on topic: curious how only the local news site mentioned the Hamas connection that is the target of the FBIs search. Rather important detail for the nationals to omit, isn't it?
Well, for starters, companies don't get personal and dependent deductions. If a family of four gets to tax deduct their first $35K of income, are they really going to care that they don't have a separate deduction for their health insurance and mortgage? Like I said, with the Flat Tax, there's no social engineering. And it ends the massive tax discrimination against renters.
Companies are just tax collectors, btw. Their customers pay their taxes. It's just easier for politicians to tax an abstract accounting construct than a flesh-and-blood individual. All the same, having the same 17% rate for individuals and corporations minimizes the risks of accounting trickery.
And people already use sole proprieterships for exactly what you describe. The current 40,000 page tax code is abused almost as much as it is abusive. With the Flat Tax, auditing is simpler, compliance is easy (not to mention possible), and with the lower tax rate there's far less incentive to cheat. And you get to skip the TurboTax tax. Companies won't need platoons of accountants and tax attorneys to figure out how to comply with the tax (some, but far less), and we'd remove the primary source of corruption in Washington: special interest buying (and Congressional selling) of tax loopholes.