That link may not be very trustworthy. Timbro (the think-tank you linked to) is a strongly ideological organization.
It's mission is basically to turn Sweden into a smaller copy of their utopia, the USA.
Therefore they have a vested interest in making the USA look good, and the EU look bad in any comparison.
You may still be right, but if I were you I would find statistics from a less politically motivated and more respected source.
As things are now, you linked to something akin to soviet-era Pravda...
It boils down to this: The tactics of the insurgents in Iraq are not designed to give any military victories, only propaganda ones.
I dont think you understand their objectives...
The insurgents objective is to get the invaders to leave.
The US Armys objective is to occupy and pacify the country.
The insurgents doesn't need a military victory.
It's standard tried-and-true assymetrical warfare.
All they need is keeping constant pressure on the invaders, eventually they will decide the price is to high and just go home. It has worked many times before in history, and they're betting it will work again...
To stop the insurgents, the occupiers can:
Win popular support so the insurgency movement flicker out in a unsympatethic environment. Or...
Use their vastly superior force to crush the insurgency (military victory).
The first alternative means more occupier casulties, because winning popular support means minimizing "collatteral damage", means more fighting on the insurgents terms.
Increase the the US casulty rate can effect US domestic politics... definitly not desirable for the people in charge.
The second option means ruthless use of force on guilty and innocent alike.
The problem here is that the US has based the entire operation on claiming the higher moral ground (We will free the iraqi people from Sadam, and bring them Democracy!), so choosing option 2 is a serious loss of face for the people in charge... not so desirable either.
As I said, it has worked before (American Revolution), some people in Iraq are betting it will work once again. Some of them are probably the same mujahideen that fought the afghani-soviet war you mentioned...
That's because you hang out with the frothing-at-the-mouth anti-landmine lobby instead of watching what the military actually does.
You make a lot of assumptions...
I was an army engineer during my military service. Just not in the American army.
Our mines had no timers and the warzawa-pact mines generally had no timers.
I don't remember much about US mines (it was 8 years ago) but I think a lot of them were timerless too, at least the ones deployed manually.
The British military probably has more extensive experience in occupying countries than just about any other army on earth. This goes back a long way.
Well, if we are looking back in history, how about the French army? Napoleon Bonaparte pretty much occupied everything in Europe except the UK.
Or the Italian army? Rome more or less occupied the known world for a loooong time.
Most older nations have had gone down that road at some point...
Bioware's KotOR was awesome b/c it did it's job but offered a lot of content and cool gameplay to do that job, and in a way dealt with social issues (Czerka corporation is an evil company willing to withhold a cure to a disease for the highest bidder and enslave an entire species.)
I thought that part was kind of ham-fisted though. At least compared to the rest of the game. I was really impressed by the relationships between different NPCs.
For example Bastilla and her mother, or between Mission, her brother and his ex girlfriend.
Also Carth's struggle with his past, and, later with accepting that *spoiler* was very well done. As was Juhani's constant fight against temptations of revenge and her own temperament.
Playing as a dark side character sowing corruption and strife actually gave me a bad councience even if it was just a game. What happens on the tempel summit, and the fallout from that event made me feel bad. (And not the good kind of bad either...)
Iraq continuously ignored the UN and toyed with UNSCOM inspectors
Yes, and they were only militarily crushed by a multinational force in an UN sanctioned war in the early 90's, and then heavily sanctioned for 15 years (economy, medical care etc. destroyed). Seems pretty severe to me.
As for toying with the inspectors... Seems like the inspectors actually found all there was to find, that is, not much anymore.
The UN is far from perfect, but still, it's better than nothing.
The alternative is "might makes right" and although this may seem as an attractive proposition for someone in the US right now, this will destabilize the entire world in the long run...
Maybe something more modest, like a permanent moon base? Or more modest than that, wait a few years so we can fund this project with cash instead of Easy Credit Terms?
Seriously.
If the current US administration wasn't hell-bent on dropping bombs on muslims for dubious reasons they could easily have freed up several NASA budgets...
You're right. It's all a matter of priorities, and serious space exploration just don't rank all that high at the moment.
That aside, it would be interesting to know how much revenue Microsoft can attribute to the Italian market in a year. If it's less than a hundred million euros they might consider just suspending business in Italy for a while.
Why Italy? Because Mr Mario is italian?
This is a EU decision, that this particular plumber, i mean minister is italian doesn't mean squat.
Anyway, "suspending business" in a market just to spite someone would be an incredibly stupid move for a software company, one that will never happen outside your fantasies.
The consequence would be an entire continent simultanously deciding to migrate all business critical apps away from MS, because they could no longer be considered a reliable supplier.
Does that sound like something MS would risk over what is, for them, pocket change? No, they'll try to pay it in monopoly money (software to schools etc.) and if that don't work they'll just bite the bullet, pay in real money and move on.
The problem with free trade, at least as it exists now is that it doesn't really help the regular American populace at all
Wake up! Look at all the things you own.
How many of them says "Made In China"?
Now realize that you got all those things a lot cheaper because someone somwhere was paid a pittance to manufacture them...
Free trade has been fscking the 3:d world for decades. Free trade for stuff we make (or have them make cheaply for us) and tarrifs and subsidies against stuff they can produce, like food.
You (well actually we, as in the West) have been reaping the fruits of free trade for decades.
Now, we have reached the point where WE are at the sharp end of globalization and people suddenly start screaming bloody murder...
And I think we have only seen the beginning yet...
The rich will get even richer, maybe some of the poor will be a little less poor, but the western middle class will diminish over the next few decades...
...but the truth is, this will be a task for the antique space junk fanatics of the centuries to come, they can take pictures of them next to it and post them on the Net with their cars with fins. We need to move on.
Wouldn't Hubble, if left to it's own devices, deorbit in just a few years? Hubble is also too big to burn up completely on reentry and could put some serious hurt on someone if it crashed on a populated area.
No, when Hubbles' time is up, they'll have to make sure it hits the ocean somehow.
First, let me say that I agree completely with the parent post (not grandparent). I love my CLI, it is a flexible, powerful, tool.
To be completely fair however, unlike books, failing to use your comandline correctly can have pretty catastrophic consequenses ("rm -rf/*" anyone?).
Imagine if you misread a sentence in your book and the book immediately burst into flames, yelled rude things about your mother, kicked you in the nuts and then disintegrated... Thats the CLI for you. A powerful ally, but it can hurt you bad. More like having summoned a demon* to use as a servant, than reading a book really.
* The fire and brimstone type, not the zeroes and ones type...
I kind of wish that someone like ESR or Perensomeone respected by the folks involved, could step in and lend a cooling touch, maybe mediate a bit.
What, pray tell, makes you see ESR as someone who would quiet things down?
The man is always where the fighting is thickest... a regular stormtrooper of FOSS, and the last person you'll want involved if you wish a quiet peaceful solution. If you want some general PR-mayhem on the other hand...
We do not have the ability to accurately predict weather for a week, much less 50 years. All simulations doing this are nothing but fiction.
If you toss one coint, I can't tell in advance if you'll get heads or tails. But if you toss a million times I can predict you'll get ~50% of each.
There is a difference between short-term fluctuations and long term-trends.
Also, there are available climate data much older than a century (Trees for example).
The evidence indicates a (historically speaking) sharp turn upwards for global temp. That this coincides with industrialization suggests it might be manmade.
Also, this is the general concensus among the sci community. There are dissenters of cource, but they are a minority.
I won't bother with the rest of your post, because you have obviously made up your mind and I'd be wasting both our time.
Just make sure you didn't overlook data just to arrive safely at a convenient conclusion.
Remember: The old adage "fight fire with fire" does not apply to non-metaphorical fires.
Hate to be nitpicking, but... ...actually it does apply to non-metaphorical fire.
Say, you have a huge raging fire you can't possibly stop.
Now move downwind and start a smaller controllable fire that burns all available fuel in a path wide enough that the big fire can't cross. Now everything downwind from the small fire is safe. (Assuming you actually managed to keep the "small" fire under control, that is.)
Sorry, I am in a pedantic mode today, and just felt like destroying a beautiful sig;-)
Why couldn't I replace you with a computer program? Even a good calculator and textbook would be better than hiring you!
What is stopping anyone from learning things by rote/memory and competing with your job? Its all in textbooks for years!
Well, if you have studied some math it is pretty obvious that not everyone is cut out to do it.
Doing serious math is not something anyone can learn.
I had the fortune to share a house with a guy that competed in the youth "math olympics"... I was pretty decent at math, but I had to struggle hard to learn stuff that came so easily to him.
People are gifted in different ways, there is no way I could get as good as that guy, and you certainly couldn't replace him with a calculator.
I agree about the part where you say math is not a good career choice, though. Matematicians are woefully underapprechiated.
If (somehow) MS is the best and easiest choice for them to get back on their feet then so be it. The sooner the better for those people.
How about shutting up for a moment (unless you live in Iraq, that is) and letting them decide that for themselves?
If the future Iraqi government is capble of rational decisions (without being bribed or threatened) I think F/OSS stands a good chance of being widely used.
His idea in that article was that the economics and vulnerability of distributed development were inferior, not that the kernel was technically flawed.
Isn't the OSS development model exactly what he now claims MS wants to study? It's not the actual code they are interested in, according to the article. it's why the OSS model produces more consistent and flexible code.
Maybe because it is open source ? The consistency surely comes from having the entire codebase to refer to, and the flexibility from people being free to suggest any patches they like to the kernel.
Not to mention that in OSS every interested party in the entire world can see where you have been lazy and/or stupid... If that is not a strong motivation for churning out quality code I don't know what is!
Too bad for a certain closed source vendor that this is hard (if not impossible) to replicate within their current business model. But, who knows? Maybe they can learn something else from the OSS process. It's completely open and successfull, so it must be the ideal research subject!
He did the same thing with his airforce in Gulf 1. Except he made the idiotic choice of sending the plans to Iran. They still have them I think.
Thats crazy! What makes you believe that?
Are you aware that the iranians absolutely hate Saddam, he started a incredibly bloody (~1M dead) war of aggression against Iran, and you'll be hard pressed to find an iranian who hasn't lost some family member to that war...
Iran ever helping Saddam after that is as likely as the US helping out Osama Bin Laden (post 9/11-01 that is).
Slashdot Mirror
That link may not be very trustworthy.
Timbro (the think-tank you linked to) is a strongly ideological organization.
It's mission is basically to turn Sweden into a smaller copy of their utopia, the USA.
Therefore they have a vested interest in making the USA look good, and the EU look bad in any comparison.
You may still be right, but if I were you I would find statistics from a less politically motivated and more respected source.
As things are now, you linked to something akin to soviet-era Pravda...
I dont think you understand their objectives...
- The insurgents objective is to get the invaders to leave.
-
The US Armys objective is to occupy and pacify the country.
The insurgents doesn't need a military victory.It's standard tried-and-true assymetrical warfare.
All they need is keeping constant pressure on the invaders, eventually they will decide the price is to high and just go home. It has worked many times before in history, and they're betting it will work again...
To stop the insurgents, the occupiers can:
- Win popular support so the insurgency movement flicker out in a unsympatethic environment. Or...
- Use their vastly superior force to crush the insurgency (military victory).
The first alternative means more occupier casulties, because winning popular support means minimizing "collatteral damage", means more fighting on the insurgents terms.Increase the the US casulty rate can effect US domestic politics... definitly not desirable for the people in charge.
The second option means ruthless use of force on guilty and innocent alike.
The problem here is that the US has based the entire operation on claiming the higher moral ground (We will free the iraqi people from Sadam, and bring them Democracy!), so choosing option 2 is a serious loss of face for the people in charge... not so desirable either.
As I said, it has worked before (American Revolution), some people in Iraq are betting it will work once again.
Some of them are probably the same mujahideen that fought the afghani-soviet war you mentioned...
That's because you hang out with the frothing-at-the-mouth anti-landmine lobby instead of watching what the military actually does.
You make a lot of assumptions...
I was an army engineer during my military service. Just not in the American army.
Our mines had no timers and the warzawa-pact mines generally had no timers.
I don't remember much about US mines (it was 8 years ago) but I think a lot of them were timerless too, at least the ones deployed manually.
most modern day landmines have a built in timer that will render the detonation charge ineffective after a set time.
Not any of those I've seen.
Or even heard about for that matter.
The British military probably has more extensive experience in occupying countries than just about any other army on earth. This goes back a long way.
Well, if we are looking back in history, how about the French army? Napoleon Bonaparte pretty much occupied everything in Europe except the UK.
Or the Italian army? Rome more or less occupied the known world for a loooong time.
Most older nations have had gone down that road at some point...
At least compared to the rest of the game. I was really impressed by the relationships between different NPCs.
For example Bastilla and her mother, or between Mission, her brother and his ex girlfriend.
Also Carth's struggle with his past, and, later with accepting that *spoiler* was very well done. As was Juhani's constant fight against temptations of revenge and her own temperament.
Playing as a dark side character sowing corruption and strife actually gave me a bad councience even if it was just a game. What happens on the tempel summit, and the fallout from that event made me feel bad. (And not the good kind of bad either...)
Actually, it's "Anticipatory Defense" now.
Sounds more and more like plain old attack, doesn't it?
There are hardware keyloggers out there you know.
Also, get some new friends, man...
The free world should unite and do this to the US.
No, they shouldn't.
What would that accomplish?
Iraq continuously ignored the UN and toyed with UNSCOM inspectors
Yes, and they were only militarily crushed by a multinational force in an UN sanctioned war in the early 90's, and then heavily sanctioned for 15 years (economy, medical care etc. destroyed).
Seems pretty severe to me.
As for toying with the inspectors...
Seems like the inspectors actually found all there was to find, that is, not much anymore.
The UN is far from perfect, but still, it's better than nothing.
The alternative is "might makes right" and although this may seem as an attractive proposition for someone in the US right now, this will destabilize the entire world in the long run...
Maybe something more modest, like a permanent moon base? Or more modest than that, wait a few years so we can fund this project with cash instead of Easy Credit Terms?
Seriously.
If the current US administration wasn't hell-bent on dropping bombs on muslims for dubious reasons they could easily have freed up several NASA budgets...
You're right. It's all a matter of priorities, and serious space exploration just don't rank all that high at the moment.
Mars is not a self-sustainable ecosystem, and won't be for quite a while, even with our best efforts. That kind of thing takes time! Millienia!
Sounds like a good reason to get an start early to me.
That aside, it would be interesting to know how much revenue Microsoft can attribute to the Italian market in a year. If it's less than a hundred million euros they might consider just suspending business in Italy for a while.
Why Italy? Because Mr Mario is italian?
This is a EU decision, that this particular plumber, i mean minister is italian doesn't mean squat.
Anyway, "suspending business" in a market just to spite someone would be an incredibly stupid move for a software company, one that will never happen outside your fantasies.
The consequence would be an entire continent simultanously deciding to migrate all business critical apps away from MS, because they could no longer be considered a reliable supplier.
Does that sound like something MS would risk over what is, for them, pocket change?
No, they'll try to pay it in monopoly money (software to schools etc.) and if that don't work they'll just bite the bullet, pay in real money and move on.
The problem with free trade, at least as it exists now is that it doesn't really help the regular American populace at all
Wake up!
Look at all the things you own.
How many of them says "Made In China"?
Now realize that you got all those things a lot cheaper because someone somwhere was paid a pittance to manufacture them...
Free trade has been fscking the 3:d world for decades. Free trade for stuff we make (or have them make cheaply for us) and tarrifs and subsidies against stuff they can produce, like food.
You (well actually we, as in the West) have been reaping the fruits of free trade for decades.
Now, we have reached the point where WE are at the sharp end of globalization and people suddenly start screaming bloody murder...
And I think we have only seen the beginning yet...
The rich will get even richer, maybe some of the poor will be a little less poor, but the western middle class will diminish over the next few decades...
...but the truth is, this will be a task for the antique space junk fanatics of the centuries to come, they can take pictures of them next to it and post them on the Net with their cars with fins. We need to move on.
Wouldn't Hubble, if left to it's own devices, deorbit in just a few years?
Hubble is also too big to burn up completely on reentry and could put some serious hurt on someone if it crashed on a populated area.
No, when Hubbles' time is up, they'll have to make sure it hits the ocean somehow.
First, let me say that I agree completely with the parent post (not grandparent). I love my CLI, it is a flexible, powerful, tool. To be completely fair however, unlike books, failing to use your comandline correctly can have pretty catastrophic consequenses ("rm -rf /*" anyone?).
Imagine if you misread a sentence in your book and the book immediately burst into flames, yelled rude things about your mother, kicked you in the nuts and then disintegrated...
Thats the CLI for you. A powerful ally, but it can hurt you bad.
More like having summoned a demon* to use as a servant, than reading a book really.
* The fire and brimstone type, not the zeroes and ones type...
I kind of wish that someone like ESR or Perensomeone respected by the folks involved, could step in and lend a cooling touch, maybe mediate a bit.
What, pray tell, makes you see ESR as someone who would quiet things down?
The man is always where the fighting is thickest... a regular stormtrooper of FOSS, and the last person you'll want involved if you wish a quiet peaceful solution.
If you want some general PR-mayhem on the other hand...
The case for species preservation should be made on hard ground, not on computer-generated squish. Conservative News And Views [rightwingnews.com]
So, let me get this straight...
you go to a site with the word views right there in the name to get an unbiased scientific analysis.
We do not have the ability to accurately predict weather for a week, much less 50 years. All simulations doing this are nothing but fiction.
If you toss one coint, I can't tell in advance if you'll get heads or tails.
But if you toss a million times I can predict you'll get ~50% of each.
There is a difference between short-term fluctuations and long term-trends.
Also, there are available climate data much older than a century (Trees for example).
The evidence indicates a (historically speaking) sharp turn upwards for global temp.
That this coincides with industrialization suggests it might be manmade.
Also, this is the general concensus among the sci community. There are dissenters of cource, but they are a minority.
I won't bother with the rest of your post, because you have obviously made up your mind and I'd be wasting both our time.
Just make sure you didn't overlook data just to arrive safely at a convenient conclusion.
Remember: The old adage "fight fire with fire" does not apply to non-metaphorical fires.
...actually it does apply to non-metaphorical fire.
;-)
Hate to be nitpicking, but...
Say, you have a huge raging fire you can't possibly stop.
Now move downwind and start a smaller controllable fire that burns all available fuel in a path wide enough that the big fire can't cross. Now everything downwind from the small fire is safe. (Assuming you actually managed to keep the "small" fire under control, that is.)
Sorry, I am in a pedantic mode today, and just felt like destroying a beautiful sig
Why couldn't I replace you with a computer program? Even a good calculator and textbook would be better than hiring you!
What is stopping anyone from learning things by rote/memory and competing with your job? Its all in textbooks for years!
Well, if you have studied some math it is pretty obvious that not everyone is cut out to do it.
Doing serious math is not something anyone can learn.
I had the fortune to share a house with a guy that competed in the youth "math olympics"...
I was pretty decent at math, but I had to struggle hard to learn stuff that came so easily to him.
People are gifted in different ways, there is no way I could get as good as that guy, and you certainly couldn't replace him with a calculator.
I agree about the part where you say math is not a good career choice, though.
Matematicians are woefully underapprechiated.
If (somehow) MS is the best and easiest choice for them to get back on their feet then so be it. The sooner the better for those people.
How about shutting up for a moment (unless you live in Iraq, that is) and letting them decide that for themselves?
If the future Iraqi government is capble of rational decisions (without being bribed or threatened) I think F/OSS stands a good chance of being widely used.
His idea in that article was that the economics and vulnerability of distributed development were inferior, not that the kernel was technically flawed.
Isn't the OSS development model exactly what he now claims MS wants to study? It's not the actual code they are interested in, according to the article. it's why the OSS model produces more consistent and flexible code.
So, yes, this is a complete U-turn on his part
If that is not a strong motivation for churning out quality code I don't know what is!
Too bad for a certain closed source vendor that this is hard (if not impossible) to replicate within their current business model.
But, who knows? Maybe they can learn something else from the OSS process. It's completely open and successfull, so it must be the ideal research subject!
He did the same thing with his airforce in Gulf 1. Except he made the idiotic choice of sending the plans to Iran. They still have them I think.
Thats crazy! What makes you believe that?
Are you aware that the iranians absolutely hate Saddam, he started a incredibly bloody (~1M dead) war of aggression against Iran, and you'll be hard pressed to find an iranian who hasn't lost some family member to that war...
Iran ever helping Saddam after that is as likely as the US helping out Osama Bin Laden (post 9/11-01 that is).