Your plan has several large gaping holes in. First, the liberals would have to be in power. They are not, although it might happen. Second, the liberals would have to be smart enough to spend that money effectively. I don't see that EVER happening. Where I live the liberals bracketed their historic district/tourist trap with public housing back in the 60's. Want to guess what happened a year or two later? I knew you didn't really need to. I live in the high rent area of the historic district. Right in the middle of the most beautiful part of the city in a house built in 1870. I also sleep with an AK47 and a 12 gauge within easy reach. They haven't been needed yet (the dogs got the one would-be home invader that was dumb enough to break in) but I would be a fool not to be armed judging by the crime statistics around here. Fed up downtown residents just invited the Guardian Angels in since the police won't enforce the law for fear of appearing to be racist. The government won't help us, so we're helping ourselves. Yeah, there could and probably will be side effects (it was a realy interesting meeting when the Angels came in, old southern white money and two Hispanic ex-gang member Angel reps... and some cops trying to make everyone uncomfortable) So, to me, you're saying that you want to give more money to the people in those concrete jungle housing projects surrounding my home. Why? Do they need more fucking gas money to drive the five blocks to try to rob me? Again? Guess I need ANOTHER trained doberman if your tax plans ever see the light of day. Comparing liberals in Sweden to liberals in America is foolish. The liberals here would give the money to the minorities to get that guaranteed "black vote" on election day. They don't care if the quality of life goes up for those people, or anything else about them. If a tax plan like yours ever goes through I'm afraid I'd be forced to move offshore or buy a fanny pack if I wanted to go out after dark.
Oh yeah, Taco Bell coffee creamer works REALLY well for this trick... maybe those little packets absorb less water. However, they will kick you for trying in the restaurant, and they don't seem to care if you've finished your food or not:) So take a few packets home, kids.
That's it... beer bottles will crack from the heat on occasion, which causing nasty lye/hot water solution spills. Putting the wine bottle in a bucket of ice water helps a lot... the steam/air in the ballon actually helps with the H/O mix if you do it right. You just have to keep the temperature constant. And no, I wouldn't really reccomend this either, although it wouldn't kill you unless you drank the shit. If you're dumb enough to drink the base ingredient in Drano, well... Anyway, the only real problem I had was spilling a tiny little bit of lye on the counter one night. My roommate, not thinking, wiped her finger over it and tasted it to see if it was salt or sugar... being a chemist you would think she would know better. She wasn't real happy with me a few seconds after, needless to say:)
And how do you propose that a country like Somalia or Zimbabwe go about becoming "affluent"? The Somalis ripped up their power grid to get money for guns to shoot each other with, and khat to chew while shooting. Zimbabwe, and much of Africa, has to tribal of a culture to get away from the "big man" style of government easily. The western world is attempting to solve their problems for them, which is in opinion a waste of time. And money. And lives. And the UN sucks at this (they are a rat's nest of red tape, not problem solvers). I think it was Sierra Leone where the UN negotiated a peace deal with the "rebels" (African term for rival tribe not currently in power). Sandline, a British mercenary unit, had been keeping them in check with a few hundred guys and 2 helicopter gunships. The couldn't put a stop to it, but they could keep the larger cities normal and functional. They supposedly only operate if the British government approves the operational objectives, so it could of course be argued that Sandline is just a tool to do the western power's dirty work. Anyway, the rebels main demand in negotiations was that the UN force Sandline to leave the country... the UN, being fucking idiots, agreed to this and Sandline left. Per their contract, they submitted a post-operation report which among other things estimated that the country would be back to full-scale war 120 days after their exit. The UN sent in THOUSANDS of "peacekeepers" with their stupid blue hats at a cost of billions of dollars (I think Sandline charged a couple million a year, maybe with some casualty expenses added on). If I remember correctly, the country was back a war in 119 days and the UN has NEVER been able to get it back under control. The moral of the story is that developed countries, and especially large groups of them, do not understand the third world. They also suck at actually fucking accomplishing anything, since doing so would require force on a level that the competing tribes would understand and respect. Time alone will not make the third world rich, it won't solve the tribal issues, and it won't fix the corruption bleeding those countries dry. Even Russia is hurting badly from thier rampant corruption. Money doesn't fix everything, the "Big Man" at the moment will just steal it. It's will take brute force if it happens at all. The world would be better off with more outfits like Sandline and less UN and "government" involvement. Be up front,state your objectives like "keep so and so in power" and let them handle the details. For more somewhat amusing info on how the third world fights its wars, you might want to search on cryptome.org for the radio intercepts of the Cubans sent to fight in Angola. Quite interesting. So no, based on past experience and current events, I think that the third world is going to go downhill in the next century, not up. To think otherwise seems like a politically correct pipe dream.
You are of course correct. The population is increasing fastest in the places where it will do the most damage. Hence my previous comment on war (and disease) keeping the population in check. Even civilized countries start wars (US lately a case in point, even if was a "preemtive strike". Uncivilized countries (and yes, they exist. Having a UN representative does NOT make you civilized by western, developed world standards) have this nasty habit of engaging in slow-burn tribal warfare. Yes, tribal. They will be too busy hacking each other up with machetes to contribute much for a while, whether to their own cultures or "hydrogen leakage".
No, war is what will keep the population at a manageable level as those 11 billion people compete for resources. China will either implode or explode. India might have a shot, unless they start chucking nukes at Pakistan and vice versa. Although such a conflict might give the US programming houses a shot in the arm. On a slightly related note, why do all the Indian telemarketer women trying to give me free subscriptions to advertisements masquerading as engineering magazines try to tell me that their names are "Mary" and "Chantel" of all things? It's not like you can't hear them chattering away in Hindi among themselves if they don't hit the button fast enough. Look, ladies, I KNOW your name is not Chantel. (Ask them to spell it sometime... hey,they called you at work, you may as well get a laugh out of it). Lying in your 5 words or so is a GREAT way to get me to agree to spammed via the postal service. Who the fuck trains these people?
Aha... another slashdotter knows the lye/aluminum/water trick:) This really annoys your neighbors if you do what I do though... You scotch tape a piece of cannon fuse to the balloon, light the fuse, and let it go. Do it after dark with black balloons and your neighbors will have a really hard time figuring out what those booming flashes. So will the police, who will probably take an interest:) Now for trivia: why do perform this reaction in a wine bottle and not a beer bottle?
Thanks for the info... he seemed to be pushing Linux as a "commercial system usually installed from purchased media". In my experience that isn't the case. Yes, I buy box sets, but I do that to show support. I still download off a mirror for the latest (Anyone know where NASA's went, BTW). Bertrand Meyer is just as guilty as ESR of trying to twist the culture to fit his mold. More guilty, in my opinion, as this mold is apparently targeted at CIOs. My CIO doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. Does yours? Ever wonder why those IBM salespeople that swarm on you in groups of 12 or more use so many buzzwords that don't really mean anything in terms of a company-specific, complex project? The do it because it works on your CIO. He read that buzzword somewhere in a trade rag. That's the audience Meyer is targeting. (Get your CIO talking about SysV with an IBM sales droid sometime... especially if you are talking engineering workstations... trust me, it's fun. See, the IBM guy won't tell the CIO he's a moron, and they will BOTH have a lot of harmless fun throwing buzzwords around).
Forget the 80 lines of code... I'm just wondering who threatened the drive by shooting mentioned in the article? Is someone keeping a geek or two in a basement somewhere and depriving them of caffeine for this purpose? Not that I would have a problem with that... Never mind, I guess I really don't want to know.
I agree with you that nothing is a certainty, primarily because free software can't really compete on its merits. There is too much money from corporations tied up in politics. In a perfect world, to phrase it a bit better, we've been at "GhandiCon Three" for a couple of years now. Yes, I know, this is simplifying things a bit too far. But to use my favorite Hemingway quote: "but wouldn't it be nice to think so?"
Are you arguing with his take on the stability of Windows? I wouldn't. I agree completely. And mom and pop users? You know, I'm all for linux on the desktop, but some people just should not have computers. The "Mom and Pop" users running Windows 98 on cable connections are the vector for the internet's worst diseases... the dumbasses wind up with zombie machines doing DOS attacks over cable modems, firing off viruses at random, and then calling YOU when they can't download the pictures of the grandkids fast enough. Fuck it. Fork the whole internet, at least for non-business use, and let people that buy computers based on that Dell commercial that they saw fend for themselves. And yes, I'm annoyed right now. Trying to fix a box that HAD up to date antivirus on it. The idiot girl *UNINSTALLED IT* to see what the attachment did... but of course she doesn't want to lose anything. AND it's Windows ME, which networking never worked right before she fucked it up. So yeah, the "sugar coated pig on Qualuudes" sounds about right to me.
From the article: One of the most visible results has been the Linux operating system, developed under the leadership of Linus Torvald and nominally available at no cost (although usually installed from a CD obtained, for a price, from a commercial company). Who does this guy work for? Just wondering, as most people I know just download the ISOs. He has an opinion, he has a viewpoint. He's welcome to both, and both are colored just like ESRs. Corporations might be adopting Linux, but Linux hardly fits the corporate model. Apologetic claptrap articles like the one referenced are not only unneccessary, they are embarassing. To use linux in a corporate/government environment (the important markets that need to be won) is just a little revolutionary. Win first, THEN apoligize. Meantime, ESR gets everyone plenty of publicity. Works for me:)
Ok, I've got to ask and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been wondering. What the fuck is warblogging? I consider myself fairly jargon-file literate, and I have never heard that one. What's the deal? Send your enemies links to a blog in the hopes of boring them to death? Insert malicious shtml code in your blog that forces IE to open and close the CD tray repeatedly to try to drive them insane? What?
No, if the gun industry was like the computer industry guns would randomly explode, killing the user, or include backdoors (intended or not) that allowed strangers use the gun to kill passerby without the owners permission. This analogy is fairly true when talking about Microsoft software, which is why they don't have a large following among people experienced enought to know better (astroturfers don't count, btw).
This will get modded off topic, but for the record I agree with you. Extremist muslim societies ARE sick and twisted, same as any other extreme theocracies (Jim Jones, anyone?) and I commend you for saying so. Still, you have to realize that the parent poster is probably NOT a muslim at all... he's probably a pissed off european with a bone to pick, in which case we're both wasting our time.
If moducum means minumum. The RIAA, of course, would prefer that you have NO fair use, so this is better than nothing. I don't download music, by the way... I like to keep my bandwidth free for other things, and I haven't heard much RIAA-sponsered music that I like lately. No, they piss me off because they want to use purchased congresscritters and corporations to turn back the clock. Fuck them. That's fair, considering that they want to take away my computers to use as I see fit when I'm not costing them anything. Stupid, greedy, fucking luddite organisations should roll over and die already.
You know, if Microsoft were not evil, didn't produce things like ME, etc... I might actually like their software. I actually like their development tools. Unfortunatly, I think that they are evil (in a business sense) and stupid (in terms of some of the operating systems they have shipped). Would I reccomend Windows for the secretary's computer? Yeah, reluctantly... Office just has too much market share. Would I reccomend it for the server room? Hell no. Would I run it on my own servers? Are you kidding? Would you, assuming that you know better?
So, you are the only person I've ever met who BELIEVES that MS is doing this to do something good for society? MS does not do anything that is not good for MS. Things that are good for MS tend to wind up screwing everyone else. That is just the way things are... you can't behave the way Redmond has for the past couple decades and expect anyone to trust you. Which is why most people don't trust them at all.
I think that the US is already considering pulling out of Europe, and I don't think it's because they are worried about collateral damage if Al-Quada strike. I think it is because they feel that it is no longer worth putting up with the bullshit. That, and pumping money into governments who are fair-weather friends. That's not my opinion, that's what I get from watching the news here. I think the US is telling the EU "want to play in this league? Ok, make your own bed and lie in it". Which is entirely fair... not like the lack of US support hurts the EU in any way. Why Russia would start shit or refuse to play ball is beyond me though... unless it was decided that they were so corrupt that economic aid would magnify the unfixable problems.
Where exactly is the EU working as peacekeepers? You might trust them, but GETTING them there sure seems difficult... at least until the US has gone in and done the heavy lifting. Maybe the EU should just pick a country, like Somalia, Sudan, somewhere like that. Just go in, say we're going to clean this mess up, repair the infrastructure, because it's the right thing to do. I don't know what the payback would be, maybe tourism, or you could get the French hooked on Khat (instant export!). It would be good practice for an aspiring superpower, and would be great for PR brownie points at the UN as long as nobody got hurt.
Slashdot Mirror
Your plan has several large gaping holes in. First, the liberals would have to be in power. They are not, although it might happen. Second, the liberals would have to be smart enough to spend that money effectively. I don't see that EVER happening. Where I live the liberals bracketed their historic district/tourist trap with public housing back in the 60's. Want to guess what happened a year or two later? I knew you didn't really need to. I live in the high rent area of the historic district. Right in the middle of the most beautiful part of the city in a house built in 1870. I also sleep with an AK47 and a 12 gauge within easy reach. They haven't been needed yet (the dogs got the one would-be home invader that was dumb enough to break in) but I would be a fool not to be armed judging by the crime statistics around here. Fed up downtown residents just invited the Guardian Angels in since the police won't enforce the law for fear of appearing to be racist. The government won't help us, so we're helping ourselves. Yeah, there could and probably will be side effects (it was a realy interesting meeting when the Angels came in, old southern white money and two Hispanic ex-gang member Angel reps... and some cops trying to make everyone uncomfortable) So, to me, you're saying that you want to give more money to the people in those concrete jungle housing projects surrounding my home. Why? Do they need more fucking gas money to drive the five blocks to try to rob me? Again? Guess I need ANOTHER trained doberman if your tax plans ever see the light of day. Comparing liberals in Sweden to liberals in America is foolish. The liberals here would give the money to the minorities to get that guaranteed "black vote" on election day. They don't care if the quality of life goes up for those people, or anything else about them. If a tax plan like yours ever goes through I'm afraid I'd be forced to move offshore or buy a fanny pack if I wanted to go out after dark.
Yep... glad I'm not the only techie with a chem/pyro background here :)
Oh yeah, Taco Bell coffee creamer works REALLY well for this trick... maybe those little packets absorb less water. However, they will kick you for trying in the restaurant, and they don't seem to care if you've finished your food or not :) So take a few packets home, kids.
That's it... beer bottles will crack from the heat on occasion, which causing nasty lye/hot water solution spills. Putting the wine bottle in a bucket of ice water helps a lot... the steam/air in the ballon actually helps with the H/O mix if you do it right. You just have to keep the temperature constant. And no, I wouldn't really reccomend this either, although it wouldn't kill you unless you drank the shit. If you're dumb enough to drink the base ingredient in Drano, well... Anyway, the only real problem I had was spilling a tiny little bit of lye on the counter one night. My roommate, not thinking, wiped her finger over it and tasted it to see if it was salt or sugar... being a chemist you would think she would know better. She wasn't real happy with me a few seconds after, needless to say :)
And how do you propose that a country like Somalia or Zimbabwe go about becoming "affluent"? The Somalis ripped up their power grid to get money for guns to shoot each other with, and khat to chew while shooting. Zimbabwe, and much of Africa, has to tribal of a culture to get away from the "big man" style of government easily. The western world is attempting to solve their problems for them, which is in opinion a waste of time. And money. And lives. And the UN sucks at this (they are a rat's nest of red tape, not problem solvers). I think it was Sierra Leone where the UN negotiated a peace deal with the "rebels" (African term for rival tribe not currently in power). Sandline, a British mercenary unit, had been keeping them in check with a few hundred guys and 2 helicopter gunships. The couldn't put a stop to it, but they could keep the larger cities normal and functional. They supposedly only operate if the British government approves the operational objectives, so it could of course be argued that Sandline is just a tool to do the western power's dirty work. Anyway, the rebels main demand in negotiations was that the UN force Sandline to leave the country... the UN, being fucking idiots, agreed to this and Sandline left. Per their contract, they submitted a post-operation report which among other things estimated that the country would be back to full-scale war 120 days after their exit. The UN sent in THOUSANDS of "peacekeepers" with their stupid blue hats at a cost of billions of dollars (I think Sandline charged a couple million a year, maybe with some casualty expenses added on). If I remember correctly, the country was back a war in 119 days and the UN has NEVER been able to get it back under control. The moral of the story is that developed countries, and especially large groups of them, do not understand the third world. They also suck at actually fucking accomplishing anything, since doing so would require force on a level that the competing tribes would understand and respect. Time alone will not make the third world rich, it won't solve the tribal issues, and it won't fix the corruption bleeding those countries dry. Even Russia is hurting badly from thier rampant corruption. Money doesn't fix everything, the "Big Man" at the moment will just steal it. It's will take brute force if it happens at all. The world would be better off with more outfits like Sandline and less UN and "government" involvement. Be up front,state your objectives like "keep so and so in power" and let them handle the details. For more somewhat amusing info on how the third world fights its wars, you might want to search on cryptome.org for the radio intercepts of the Cubans sent to fight in Angola. Quite interesting. So no, based on past experience and current events, I think that the third world is going to go downhill in the next century, not up. To think otherwise seems like a politically correct pipe dream.
You are of course correct. The population is increasing fastest in the places where it will do the most damage. Hence my previous comment on war (and disease) keeping the population in check. Even civilized countries start wars (US lately a case in point, even if was a "preemtive strike". Uncivilized countries (and yes, they exist. Having a UN representative does NOT make you civilized by western, developed world standards) have this nasty habit of engaging in slow-burn tribal warfare. Yes, tribal. They will be too busy hacking each other up with machetes to contribute much for a while, whether to their own cultures or "hydrogen leakage".
No, war is what will keep the population at a manageable level as those 11 billion people compete for resources. China will either implode or explode. India might have a shot, unless they start chucking nukes at Pakistan and vice versa. Although such a conflict might give the US programming houses a shot in the arm. On a slightly related note, why do all the Indian telemarketer women trying to give me free subscriptions to advertisements masquerading as engineering magazines try to tell me that their names are "Mary" and "Chantel" of all things? It's not like you can't hear them chattering away in Hindi among themselves if they don't hit the button fast enough. Look, ladies, I KNOW your name is not Chantel. (Ask them to spell it sometime... hey,they called you at work, you may as well get a laugh out of it). Lying in your 5 words or so is a GREAT way to get me to agree to spammed via the postal service. Who the fuck trains these people?
Aha... another slashdotter knows the lye/aluminum/water trick :) This really annoys your neighbors if you do what I do though... You scotch tape a piece of cannon fuse to the balloon, light the fuse, and let it go. Do it after dark with black balloons and your neighbors will have a really hard time figuring out what those booming flashes. So will the police, who will probably take an interest :) Now for trivia: why do perform this reaction in a wine bottle and not a beer bottle?
Thanks for the info... he seemed to be pushing Linux as a "commercial system usually installed from purchased media". In my experience that isn't the case. Yes, I buy box sets, but I do that to show support. I still download off a mirror for the latest (Anyone know where NASA's went, BTW). Bertrand Meyer is just as guilty as ESR of trying to twist the culture to fit his mold. More guilty, in my opinion, as this mold is apparently targeted at CIOs. My CIO doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. Does yours? Ever wonder why those IBM salespeople that swarm on you in groups of 12 or more use so many buzzwords that don't really mean anything in terms of a company-specific, complex project? The do it because it works on your CIO. He read that buzzword somewhere in a trade rag. That's the audience Meyer is targeting. (Get your CIO talking about SysV with an IBM sales droid sometime... especially if you are talking engineering workstations... trust me, it's fun. See, the IBM guy won't tell the CIO he's a moron, and they will BOTH have a lot of harmless fun throwing buzzwords around).
Forget the 80 lines of code... I'm just wondering who threatened the drive by shooting mentioned in the article? Is someone keeping a geek or two in a basement somewhere and depriving them of caffeine for this purpose? Not that I would have a problem with that... Never mind, I guess I really don't want to know.
I agree with you that nothing is a certainty, primarily because free software can't really compete on its merits. There is too much money from corporations tied up in politics. In a perfect world, to phrase it a bit better, we've been at "GhandiCon Three" for a couple of years now. Yes, I know, this is simplifying things a bit too far. But to use my favorite Hemingway quote: "but wouldn't it be nice to think so?"
Are you arguing with his take on the stability of Windows? I wouldn't. I agree completely. And mom and pop users? You know, I'm all for linux on the desktop, but some people just should not have computers. The "Mom and Pop" users running Windows 98 on cable connections are the vector for the internet's worst diseases... the dumbasses wind up with zombie machines doing DOS attacks over cable modems, firing off viruses at random, and then calling YOU when they can't download the pictures of the grandkids fast enough. Fuck it. Fork the whole internet, at least for non-business use, and let people that buy computers based on that Dell commercial that they saw fend for themselves. And yes, I'm annoyed right now. Trying to fix a box that HAD up to date antivirus on it. The idiot girl *UNINSTALLED IT* to see what the attachment did... but of course she doesn't want to lose anything. AND it's Windows ME, which networking never worked right before she fucked it up. So yeah, the "sugar coated pig on Qualuudes" sounds about right to me.
From the article: One of the most visible results has been the Linux operating system, developed under the leadership of Linus Torvald and nominally available at no cost (although usually installed from a CD obtained, for a price, from a commercial company). Who does this guy work for? Just wondering, as most people I know just download the ISOs. He has an opinion, he has a viewpoint. He's welcome to both, and both are colored just like ESRs. Corporations might be adopting Linux, but Linux hardly fits the corporate model. Apologetic claptrap articles like the one referenced are not only unneccessary, they are embarassing. To use linux in a corporate/government environment (the important markets that need to be won) is just a little revolutionary. Win first, THEN apoligize. Meantime, ESR gets everyone plenty of publicity. Works for me :)
Ok, I've got to ask and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been wondering. What the fuck is warblogging? I consider myself fairly jargon-file literate, and I have never heard that one. What's the deal? Send your enemies links to a blog in the hopes of boring them to death? Insert malicious shtml code in your blog that forces IE to open and close the CD tray repeatedly to try to drive them insane? What?
So, I guess we're at GhandiCon Three, then. May four come quickly... I want my workstation at work to be running Linux already!
Oddly, the defaced site shows some whacked-out text when you select all... looks like a crypto key.
The site has been defaced. It is now "powered by beef" or something. I grabbed a few screenshots.
Why on earth would I want the Microsoft Bob source code?
No, if the gun industry was like the computer industry guns would randomly explode, killing the user, or include backdoors (intended or not) that allowed strangers use the gun to kill passerby without the owners permission. This analogy is fairly true when talking about Microsoft software, which is why they don't have a large following among people experienced enought to know better (astroturfers don't count, btw).
This will get modded off topic, but for the record I agree with you. Extremist muslim societies ARE sick and twisted, same as any other extreme theocracies (Jim Jones, anyone?) and I commend you for saying so. Still, you have to realize that the parent poster is probably NOT a muslim at all... he's probably a pissed off european with a bone to pick, in which case we're both wasting our time.
If moducum means minumum. The RIAA, of course, would prefer that you have NO fair use, so this is better than nothing. I don't download music, by the way... I like to keep my bandwidth free for other things, and I haven't heard much RIAA-sponsered music that I like lately. No, they piss me off because they want to use purchased congresscritters and corporations to turn back the clock. Fuck them. That's fair, considering that they want to take away my computers to use as I see fit when I'm not costing them anything. Stupid, greedy, fucking luddite organisations should roll over and die already.
You know, if Microsoft were not evil, didn't produce things like ME, etc... I might actually like their software. I actually like their development tools. Unfortunatly, I think that they are evil (in a business sense) and stupid (in terms of some of the operating systems they have shipped). Would I reccomend Windows for the secretary's computer? Yeah, reluctantly... Office just has too much market share. Would I reccomend it for the server room? Hell no. Would I run it on my own servers? Are you kidding? Would you, assuming that you know better?
So, you are the only person I've ever met who BELIEVES that MS is doing this to do something good for society? MS does not do anything that is not good for MS. Things that are good for MS tend to wind up screwing everyone else. That is just the way things are... you can't behave the way Redmond has for the past couple decades and expect anyone to trust you. Which is why most people don't trust them at all.
I think that the US is already considering pulling out of Europe, and I don't think it's because they are worried about collateral damage if Al-Quada strike. I think it is because they feel that it is no longer worth putting up with the bullshit. That, and pumping money into governments who are fair-weather friends. That's not my opinion, that's what I get from watching the news here. I think the US is telling the EU "want to play in this league? Ok, make your own bed and lie in it". Which is entirely fair... not like the lack of US support hurts the EU in any way. Why Russia would start shit or refuse to play ball is beyond me though... unless it was decided that they were so corrupt that economic aid would magnify the unfixable problems.
Where exactly is the EU working as peacekeepers? You might trust them, but GETTING them there sure seems difficult... at least until the US has gone in and done the heavy lifting. Maybe the EU should just pick a country, like Somalia, Sudan, somewhere like that. Just go in, say we're going to clean this mess up, repair the infrastructure, because it's the right thing to do. I don't know what the payback would be, maybe tourism, or you could get the French hooked on Khat (instant export!). It would be good practice for an aspiring superpower, and would be great for PR brownie points at the UN as long as nobody got hurt.