I understand a lot of people do home 'backups' by using an external hard drive...but unless you are moving the external drive to a safe site outside of your home, you have not truly protected your data.
I'm not saying that having a good onsite backup is useless. It basically protects you from hardware failure or accidental deletion of your data. But it does nothing to protect your data from the risk of fire, flooding, theft, or other natural or manmade threats and disasters that can effect your entire home and its contents.
Yes, the odds of a given disaster striking over a short time frame are low. But over the course of a lifetime, it is far from unlikely that you may be affected by such an event.
How valuble is your data to you? Music, software, and the like can be replaced by spending money. But what about decades worth of photographs, home videos, diaries? What about manuscripts, source code or other data that could be the work of a lifetime?
Whatever method you choose for home backup, if your data matters to you it is essential to find a way to keep backups offsite...but this is acutally done all too rarely. It's unfortunate that more effort has not been made to create widely-availible, easy to use, and reasonably priced solutions for this problem.
It's not a problem; there is more than enough supported hardware available for Linux.
I suppose it depends on what you consider a "problem." Yes, there are "many" printers & scanners that work with linux. But most of these are old models that aren't commonly sold, and there are many, many more that only partly work with linux; or only partly work if you go through complex proceedures like a kernel recompile; or don't work at all.
And unfortunately, the printers and scanners that are most easily availible-- cheap ones you can get from Best Buy or the like, the newest models, and the most popular models--seem to be the least likely to support linux.
If you're not sure what I'm talking about, go to cnet.com, find the editors choices for best printers.
Canon Pixma iP5000
Canon Pixma MP760
HP Color LaserJet 2840
Lexmark T430dn
Canon Pixma iP8500
And on the same page, the most popular printers:
HP OfficeJet 4215 All-in-One
HP LaserJet 1320
HP Color LaserJet 2840
HP Deskjet 6840
HP OfficeJet 7410
Of all these models, I can't find even ONE that is considered fully supported by linux in the hardware compatiblity form you provided. What this means in practical terms is that rather than just being able to buy a cheap device, it takes a ton of work and research to buy a printer or scanner for a linux home machine. You may not consider this to be a problem, but I do.
The only area where there is any practically significant difficulty with Linux and hardware these days is on laptops and with 3D cards
What about printers? Do the cheap color printers you can buy at any electronics store for windows machines work with Linux yet? How about scanners?
I'm not saying you can't find a printer or scanner that works properly with Linux, but last time I looked it seemed like the vast majority of models just wouldn't cut it with Linux, especially on the low end.
I'm not saying it's the distros fault, but it is their problem.
The article is crap, pure and utter FUD. It was prepared by a New Zealand corporate law firm, Chapman Tripp. Anyone want to take a bet that they have business ties to Microsoft and whatever big proprietary software firms are currently feeding of the government trough in New Zealand?
The bottom line reality is that for virtually any government agency, using GPL'd software would be a far better choice than proprietary--the agency has FULL RIGHTS to USE the GPL'd software however they choose, to modify it to meet their needs, and to benefit from improvements others make, all at no cost to the taxpayer. Using proprietary, closed-source licences is the real risk, turning over essential government operations and data to the whims of a private company, suffering from inevitable vendor-lock-in and intentionally incompatibility, and paying for the privilage.
The so-called "infectiousness" (a clever linquistic escalation; I guess "viral" wasn't testing negatively enough in the focus groups) is a non-issue; how many government agencys are DISTRIBUTING software at all as opposed to USING it? To those few that might be distributing software, how many are distributing PROPRIETARY software? If any are, they shouldn't be.
The GPLs share-and-share-alike requirements which this article tries to depict as frightening and "infectious" only come into effect when you are DISTRIBUTING software, not USING it. The only people who need to worry about that are crooks who want to sell Free Software (written by other people) as their own, without sharing the the source as they agreed to.
The truth is, the real risk for governments, legally and economically, is the unwarranted use of proprietary, closed souce software, often entailing bizare or extreme restrictions in USE (forget about distribution, no sharing allowed), foisted on agencys by clever salespeople backed up by lobbiests with thick wallets. Open source is the safer type of licence for governments and should be the preferred choice.
> he did tell me...it was a simple matter of going to miami where jewish doctors (I'm repeating what I was told, so I'm not going to alter it to remove any racial / religious references
This is a particularly vicious slur, given the history of antisemitic blood libels against the Jews.
Saying that you are "just repeating" what you were told is weak. You are spreading bigoted rumors.
The fact that drivel like this can get modded up to +5 is astonishing, and quite sad.
I have tried several of the low-weight distros mentioned in the article, Damn Small Linux in particular has outstanding performance and reliability on old hardware.
The problem the light distros suffer from is the weakness of low-weight open source/free software office apps, e.g. a browser and office suite.
In the open source world, we have openoffice, abiword, koffice, firefox, konqueror, gnumeric etc. Many of these are outstanding but all have hefty hardware requirements to run reasonably. Even with something like a pentium with 32MB RAM they will run like dogs, if at all. Forget it if you have older hardware than that.
The low-weight distros try to fill the gap with apps like siag, dillo, ted, FLWriter, etc. Unfortunatly, these projects just have not gotten much attention or support from the free software community. They have remained small, isolated projects, and though I applaud the programers who have created and nurtured them, they desperatly need more help & resources to add needed features and integration. Couldn't the big, heavyweight projects like openoffice & mozilla either make lightweight versions, or modularlize their features better so they could be used by lightweight projects?
Windows98 had decent office apps (ms office 97 or thereabouts) and worked quite well on old hardware (lets say 32MB RAM or less). Of course, Windows98 itself was crap...Linux with X & a lightweight window manager is far superior as an OS to windows98 on the same hardware... I think its a shame that more resources aren't put on getting decent, basic, linux based desktop apps up to the level MS achieved in 1997... there are millions of old PCs that could be used for these basic purposes that instead end up in the junkyard.
Can somebody write a script for a website that will detect when a visitor is coming through Bell South's network, and alert the visitor that "the slow performance you may be experiencing is due to Bell South's Network... we recommend these alternatives."
The biggest problem I have had with the various light distros is the lack of a decent low-weight web browser.
Firefox is huge, it will not run reasonably without a fast machine with lots of RAM.
Dillo is small and fast, and has potential, but lacks what most people would consider minimal capability... I don't mean to put it down, but it doesn't render almost any site correctly. Forget about sites with AJAX, I don't think it even has CSS and it doesn't even support https out of the box.
I find it quite surprising that more effort has not been made to create a decent low-weight browser, given the vast number of older machines out there that could be made into useful web-browsing stations if such a product existed. I am sure it would be most welcome by the many people who only want a web browser and don't need much else.
Re:Straight Talk About Copyrights
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As Richard Stallman has pointed out, the term "Intellectual Property" is an intentional linguistic distortion. It attempts to conglomerate a series of complex laws, covering trademarks, copyrights, and patents, and confuse them in the public mind with the concept of private property. As the parent post points out, property rights were created to allocate finite resources, not create artifical scarcity and restrict the free exchange of information.
In my opinion, if it is necessary to have a term to refer to the trademark, copyright, and patent laws, Intellectual Restrictions (IR) would be more accurate.
If it is true that Sony distributed a binary that contains GPL'd code, then someone who received the binary (i.e. bought one of these CDs) should request the source code for the rootkit from Sony, which they are required to make availible.
I would be interested to know what Sony's reaction to such a request might be.
The recording industry has been repeatedly and consistently been involved in crime, including bribery, theft from artists, and murder.
The recording industry has a long history of involvement with organized crime. Example: Morris Levy, a longtime Genovese crime-family associate and recording industry "legend."
The recording industry has been repeatedly accused itself of corrupting the values of youth, and even inciting violence. But in those cases, it claims the protection of freedom of expression -- a freedom they have worked hard to deny to programers and consumers through outragous legislation and restrictive technologies.
With this record, without even getting into the lies they have spread, accusations from the recording industry have little credibilty as far as I am concerned.
If you do write to the Copyright Office (and you should), it might be a good idea to send a copy of your letter to your Representative in Congress as well, asking them to use their influence to get the Copyright Office to behave fairly towards non-IE users who want to be able to use the system.
Congresspeople tend to be more sensitive to the desires of their constituents than bureaucrats within the executive branch, and they know how to get results from the bureaucracy when needed.
>While its true, its misleading to count the
>manufacturers as "aiding" Iraq. In the same fashion
>I could claim Ford was aiding gansgters when they
>kill someone in drive-by-shooting.
Supose that Ford and Chrystler sell some gangsters 500 machine guns, knowing that they are gangsters, and are involved in a gang war.
Supose General Motors sells the same gangsters 3 six shooters and a couple of baseball bats.
Now, you may think that all these companys are wrong for selling the gangsters arms.
Or, you may think they are right, for perhaps the gangsters enemeys are worse, or more dangerous, and perhaps selling arms to the gangsters is a good strategy.
Or, maybe you don't see selling arms to the gangsters as "aiding" them, or don't care.
But what if General Motors is repeatedly villified, again and again without respite, for selling the gangsters arms...while Ford and Chrystler are not criticized at all?
Is it not fair to point out that Ford and Chrystler did far more to support the gangsters than GM?
This is analagous to the situation at hand. The left has repeatedly attacked the US for selling arms to Saddam, while totally ignoring the fact that it was the Soviet Union and Europe who sold him the vast majority of his arms, dwarfing the US sales to insignificance.
When someone simply tried to point out the
facts, they were attacked and modded down. I am troubled by this and have been trying to set the record straight.
Sadly, some people's views are so twisted by their hatred for America that they are unable to see anything America does as anything but wrong.
>They were all selling him crap but none other >then the US gave Saddam loan guarantees. That >is, they were all peddling him their wares on >credit (and got stung when he fell), but the US >was financing him. I hope you grok the difference.
The difference is, the US loaned Iraq money to buy agricultural products. France and the Soviet Union loaned Iraq money to buy weapons, and sold Saddam weapons.
You seem to perceive a difference between loaning money directly to Saddam (as France and the Soviet Union did) to buy arms, and guaranteeing loans that banks made to Saddam for the purpose of buying grain (as the US did). I think most people would agree that Saddam was being "financed" in both cases... but in the case of France and the Soviets, for a much greater amount, and for the direct purpose of buying arms (from the arms manufacturers of those countries, of course).
The article you cite is a collection of ill-framed half truths by a far left wing anti semite. In any case, once you get through the anti-U.S. invective, the article says nothing to contradict the fact that the Soviet Union and France, and not the US, supplied Saddam with the vast majority of his arms.
> So that is why US loans were guaranteed and >covered by taxpayers by definition and France's and >USSR's had to be nullified by the US invasion? Or >am I missing something?
Talk about double-talking connivery...what does the above even mean? France and the USSRs loans weren't guaranteed by their respective taxpayers?
Let me get this straight: the USSR and France supplied Saddam with vastly, vastly more arms than did the US. But to you, the US is still worse.
The USSR and France loaned Saddam more money than the US. But to you, the US is still worse.
After overthrowing Saddam, the US immediately moved to forgive Iraqs debts to America. France and Russia as well as Germany and several Middle East nations, however, dragged their feet until finally, under US pressure, agreeing to forgive about 80% of Iraqi debts.
And to you, this indicates the villany of the US?
You say you are "skeptical." It appears to me from your statements and your illogical reasoning that your antipathy towards the US is emotional, and I doubt that any amount of evidence will sway you.
The SIPRI report is highly credible, particularly since it comes from a left-leaning institute with no reason to favor the US.
How about it? It's a link to small, amatuer-appearing website produced by a group called the "Foundation for Democracy in Iran," whose "About Us" link is broken....
You want to compare that with SIPRI, a well respected and established institute? Please check out SIPRIs website yourself. I think it will be pretty clear who is the more credible source. SIPRI is, if anything, slightly left-leaning (see their funding sources) which in my mind adds credibility to their well-documented assertion that the USSR and France were the major arms suppliers to Saddam.
The "FDI" website you cited, as far as I can tell, has the goal of overthrowing the Iranian regime and replacing it with democracy. A worthy goal but one which may have lead them to desire to conflate the Iranian regime and the Soviet Union in the minds of Americans.
In any case, the "facts" you quoted from that site, even if true, don't contradict the SIPRI report. All it says is that North Korea and China sold arms to Iran, both of whom at the time had large arsenels of old Soviets weapons available for sale, and neither of whom was by any means under the thumb of the Soviets at the time.
>You gotta be kidding. I am not gonna >waste a day looking for primary sources
You won't because if you did, your preconceived notions wouldn't hold up. How inconvenient that would be.
Instead, you cite a article by a partisan, anti-American hack, the facts of which don't even contradict the SIPRI report.
You then appear to say that the US behaved in a morally inferior manner because they "funded" Saddam, while the USSR "only" sold arms to him. The notion that massive arms sales to a brutal regime are less morally problematic than agricultural loans is questionable; in any case, you then contradict yourself by admiting the Soviets "did sell him arms on credit." So they "funded" Saddam as well as arming him.
The truth is that: a) the USSR and France both sold Saddam massive amounts of arms, far, far more than the amount of arms and "high tech equipment" he got from the US; b) The USSR and France both loaned Saddam massive amounts of money (far more that the agricultural loans the US made to Iraq).
The facts don't matter to people like you. You will always see the US as wrong and make excuses for other countries like France and the USSR.
> Aha! I think I know where the chickanery is. The > SIPRI people, very disingenuosly, counted all > Soviet made weapons as Soviet aid.
No. Read the report.
>you will notice that none of the Arab countries, >which are beyond any doubt known to have assisted >Iraq against Iran with arms shipments, are on the >list.
That's because none of those countries were then, or are now, manufacturers of advanced weapons systems.
The fact is that the Soviet Union was a strong supporter of Saddam's regime, as was France, his other great arms supplier. The United States did not even have diplomatic relations with Saddam's regime until 1984, and had little trade, let alone arms deals with it.
>USSR was backing Iran and not Iraq in the war. >Saddam was loudly criticising USSR action in >Afghanistan. etc.
You "wonder" about SIPRIs figures, but you can't cite anything to rebut them.
The USSR certainly did not back Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. Iran was violently anti-communist, and was a major supporter of the the mujahadeen resistance to the USSR occupation of Afghanistan.
The USSR happily supplied Saddam all the arms could buy. SIPRI has no axe to grind, and you don't know what you are talking about.
>While USSR indeed supplied his junk, US paid for it
>with military aid. I will repeat so there is no
>confusion: USA gave Saddam money explicitely to buy
>arms.
Care to cite some FACTS to back up your "repeated" assertion? You can't, because the reality is that the Saddam's financing, like his arms supplies, came from many countries, and in both cases the U.S. was FAR down the list.
>Furthermore, the USA's 0.58% includes the
>precursors, equipment and plans to manufacture
>chemical weapons
In fact, it
was by far German & other EUROPEAN firms that happliy sold Saddam the majority of his
his chemical weapons precursors. But I guess its more convienient for you to avoid these facts, since they interfere with your ability to paint America as the source of all the world's evil.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand a lot of people do home 'backups' by using an external hard drive...but unless you are moving the external drive to a safe site outside of your home, you have not truly protected your data.
I'm not saying that having a good onsite backup is useless. It basically protects you from hardware failure or accidental deletion of your data. But it does nothing to protect your data from the risk of fire, flooding, theft, or other natural or manmade threats and disasters that can effect your entire home and its contents.
Yes, the odds of a given disaster striking over a short time frame are low. But over the course of a lifetime, it is far from unlikely that you may be affected by such an event.
How valuble is your data to you? Music, software, and the like can be replaced by spending money. But what about decades worth of photographs, home videos, diaries? What about manuscripts, source code or other data that could be the work of a lifetime?
Whatever method you choose for home backup, if your data matters to you it is essential to find a way to keep backups offsite...but this is acutally done all too rarely. It's unfortunate that more effort has not been made to create widely-availible, easy to use, and reasonably priced solutions for this problem.
It's not a problem; there is more than enough supported hardware available for Linux.
I suppose it depends on what you consider a "problem." Yes, there are "many" printers & scanners that work with linux. But most of these are old models that aren't commonly sold, and there are many, many more that only partly work with linux; or only partly work if you go through complex proceedures like a kernel recompile; or don't work at all.
And unfortunately, the printers and scanners that are most easily availible-- cheap ones you can get from Best Buy or the like, the newest models, and the most popular models--seem to be the least likely to support linux.
If you're not sure what I'm talking about, go to cnet.com, find the editors choices for best printers.
Canon Pixma iP5000
Canon Pixma MP760
HP Color LaserJet 2840
Lexmark T430dn
Canon Pixma iP8500
And on the same page, the most popular printers:
HP OfficeJet 4215 All-in-One
HP LaserJet 1320
HP Color LaserJet 2840
HP Deskjet 6840
HP OfficeJet 7410
Of all these models, I can't find even ONE that is considered fully supported by linux in the hardware compatiblity form you provided. What this means in practical terms is that rather than just being able to buy a cheap device, it takes a ton of work and research to buy a printer or scanner for a linux home machine. You may not consider this to be a problem, but I do.
The only area where there is any practically significant difficulty with Linux and hardware these days is on laptops and with 3D cards
What about printers? Do the cheap color printers you can buy at any electronics store for windows machines work with Linux yet? How about scanners?
I'm not saying you can't find a printer or scanner that works properly with Linux, but last time I looked it seemed like the vast majority of models just wouldn't cut it with Linux, especially on the low end.
I'm not saying it's the distros fault, but it is their problem.
Won't the Christians riot?
Thank you!
The article is crap, pure and utter FUD. It was prepared by a New Zealand corporate law firm, Chapman Tripp. Anyone want to take a bet that they have business ties to Microsoft and whatever big proprietary software firms are currently feeding of the government trough in New Zealand?
The bottom line reality is that for virtually any government agency, using GPL'd software would be a far better choice than proprietary--the agency has FULL RIGHTS to USE the GPL'd software however they choose, to modify it to meet their needs, and to benefit from improvements others make, all at no cost to the taxpayer. Using proprietary, closed-source licences is the real risk, turning over essential government operations and data to the whims of a private company, suffering from inevitable vendor-lock-in and intentionally incompatibility, and paying for the privilage.
The so-called "infectiousness" (a clever linquistic escalation; I guess "viral" wasn't testing negatively enough in the focus groups) is a non-issue; how many government agencys are DISTRIBUTING software at all as opposed to USING it? To those few that might be distributing software, how many are distributing PROPRIETARY software? If any are, they shouldn't be.
The GPLs share-and-share-alike requirements which this article tries to depict as frightening and "infectious" only come into effect when you are DISTRIBUTING software, not USING it. The only people who need to worry about that are crooks who want to sell Free Software (written by other people) as their own, without sharing the the source as they agreed to.
The truth is, the real risk for governments, legally and economically, is the unwarranted use of proprietary, closed souce software, often entailing bizare or extreme restrictions in USE (forget about distribution, no sharing allowed), foisted on agencys by clever salespeople backed up by lobbiests with thick wallets. Open source is the safer type of licence for governments and should be the preferred choice.
> he did tell me...it was a simple matter of going to miami where jewish doctors (I'm repeating what I was told, so I'm not going to alter it to remove any racial / religious references
This is a particularly vicious slur, given the history of antisemitic blood libels against the Jews.
Saying that you are "just repeating" what you were told is weak. You are spreading bigoted rumors.
The fact that drivel like this can get modded up to +5 is astonishing, and quite sad.
I have tried several of the low-weight distros mentioned in the article, Damn Small Linux in particular has outstanding performance and reliability on old hardware.
The problem the light distros suffer from is the weakness of low-weight open source/free software office apps, e.g. a browser and office suite.
In the open source world, we have openoffice, abiword, koffice, firefox, konqueror, gnumeric etc. Many of these are outstanding but all have hefty hardware requirements to run reasonably. Even with something like a pentium with 32MB RAM they will run like dogs, if at all. Forget it if you have older hardware than that.
The low-weight distros try to fill the gap with apps like siag, dillo, ted, FLWriter, etc. Unfortunatly, these projects just have not gotten much attention or support from the free software community. They have remained small, isolated projects, and though I applaud the programers who have created and nurtured them, they desperatly need more help & resources to add needed features and integration. Couldn't the big, heavyweight projects like openoffice & mozilla either make lightweight versions, or modularlize their features better so they could be used by lightweight projects?
Windows98 had decent office apps (ms office 97 or thereabouts) and worked quite well on old hardware (lets say 32MB RAM or less). Of course, Windows98 itself was crap...Linux with X & a lightweight window manager is far superior as an OS to windows98 on the same hardware... I think its a shame that more resources aren't put on getting decent, basic, linux based desktop apps up to the level MS achieved in 1997... there are millions of old PCs that could be used for these basic purposes that instead end up in the junkyard.
Can somebody write a script for a website that will detect when a visitor is coming through Bell South's network, and alert the visitor that "the slow performance you may be experiencing is due to Bell South's Network... we recommend these alternatives."
The biggest problem I have had with the various light distros is the lack of a decent low-weight web browser.
Firefox is huge, it will not run reasonably without a fast machine with lots of RAM.
Dillo is small and fast, and has potential, but lacks what most people would consider minimal capability... I don't mean to put it down, but it doesn't render almost any site correctly. Forget about sites with AJAX, I don't think it even has CSS and it doesn't even support https out of the box.
I find it quite surprising that more effort has not been made to create a decent low-weight browser, given the vast number of older machines out there that could be made into useful web-browsing stations if such a product existed. I am sure it would be most welcome by the many people who only want a web browser and don't need much else.
In my opinion, if it is necessary to have a term to refer to the trademark, copyright, and patent laws, Intellectual Restrictions (IR) would be more accurate.
If it is true that Sony distributed a binary that contains GPL'd code, then someone who received the binary (i.e. bought one of these CDs) should request the source code for the rootkit from Sony, which they are required to make availible.
I would be interested to know what Sony's reaction to such a request might be.
Reality check:
The recording industry has been repeatedly and consistently been involved in crime, including bribery, theft from artists, and murder.
The recording industry has a long history of involvement with organized crime. Example: Morris Levy, a longtime Genovese crime-family associate and recording industry "legend."
The recording industry has been repeatedly accused itself of corrupting the values of youth, and even inciting violence. But in those cases, it claims the protection of freedom of expression -- a freedom they have worked hard to deny to programers and consumers through outragous legislation and restrictive technologies.
With this record, without even getting into the lies they have spread, accusations from the recording industry have little credibilty as far as I am concerned.
What can we do? Support the EFF and the FSF.
If you do write to the Copyright Office (and you should), it might be a good idea to send a copy of your letter to your Representative in Congress as well, asking them to use their influence to get the Copyright Office to behave fairly towards non-IE users who want to be able to use the system.
Congresspeople tend to be more sensitive to the desires of their constituents than bureaucrats within the executive branch, and they know how to get results from the bureaucracy when needed.
You can find your Representative here:
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
>While its true, its misleading to count the
>manufacturers as "aiding" Iraq. In the same fashion
>I could claim Ford was aiding gansgters when they
>kill someone in drive-by-shooting.
Supose that Ford and Chrystler sell some gangsters 500 machine guns, knowing that they are gangsters, and are involved in a gang war.
Supose General Motors sells the same gangsters 3 six shooters and a couple of baseball bats.
Now, you may think that all these companys are wrong for selling the gangsters arms.
Or, you may think they are right, for perhaps the gangsters enemeys are worse, or more dangerous, and perhaps selling arms to the gangsters is a good strategy.
Or, maybe you don't see selling arms to the gangsters as "aiding" them, or don't care.
But what if General Motors is repeatedly villified, again and again without respite, for selling the gangsters arms...while Ford and Chrystler are not criticized at all?
Is it not fair to point out that Ford and Chrystler did far more to support the gangsters than GM?
This is analagous to the situation at hand. The left has repeatedly attacked the US for selling arms to Saddam, while totally ignoring the fact that it was the Soviet Union and Europe who sold him the vast majority of his arms, dwarfing the US sales to insignificance.
When someone simply tried to point out the facts, they were attacked and modded down. I am troubled by this and have been trying to set the record straight.
Sadly, some people's views are so twisted by their hatred for America that they are unable to see anything America does as anything but wrong.
>They were all selling him crap but none other
>then the US gave Saddam loan guarantees. That
>is, they were all peddling him their wares on
>credit (and got stung when he fell), but the US
>was financing him. I hope you grok the difference.
The difference is, the US loaned Iraq money to buy agricultural products. France and the Soviet Union loaned Iraq money to buy weapons, and sold Saddam weapons.
You seem to perceive a difference between loaning money directly to Saddam (as France and the Soviet Union did) to buy arms, and guaranteeing loans that banks made to Saddam for the purpose of buying grain (as the US did). I think most people would agree that Saddam was being "financed" in both cases... but in the case of France and the Soviets, for a much greater amount, and for the direct purpose of buying arms (from the arms manufacturers of those countries, of course).
The article you cite is a collection of ill-framed half truths by a far left wing anti semite. In any case, once you get through the anti-U.S. invective, the article says nothing to contradict the fact that the Soviet Union and France, and not the US, supplied Saddam with the vast majority of his arms.
> So that is why US loans were guaranteed and
>covered by taxpayers by definition and France's and
>USSR's had to be nullified by the US invasion? Or
>am I missing something?
Talk about double-talking connivery...what does the above even mean? France and the USSRs loans weren't guaranteed by their respective taxpayers?
Let me get this straight: the USSR and France supplied Saddam with vastly, vastly more arms than did the US. But to you, the US is still worse.
The USSR and France loaned Saddam more money than the US. But to you, the US is still worse.
After overthrowing Saddam, the US immediately moved to forgive Iraqs debts to America. France and Russia as well as Germany and several Middle East nations, however, dragged their feet until finally, under US pressure, agreeing to forgive about 80% of Iraqi debts.
And to you, this indicates the villany of the US?
You say you are "skeptical." It appears to me from your statements and your illogical reasoning that your antipathy towards the US is emotional, and I doubt that any amount of evidence will sway you.
The SIPRI report is highly credible, particularly since it comes from a left-leaning institute with no reason to favor the US.
>Well, how about this [iran.org]?
How about it? It's a link to small, amatuer-appearing website produced by a group called the "Foundation for Democracy in Iran," whose "About Us" link is broken....
You want to compare that with SIPRI, a well respected and established institute? Please check out SIPRIs website yourself. I think it will be pretty clear who is the more credible source. SIPRI is, if anything, slightly left-leaning (see their funding sources) which in my mind adds credibility to their well-documented assertion that the USSR and France were the major arms suppliers to Saddam.
The "FDI" website you cited, as far as I can tell, has the goal of overthrowing the Iranian regime and replacing it with democracy. A worthy goal but one which may have lead them to desire to conflate the Iranian regime and the Soviet Union in the minds of Americans.
In any case, the "facts" you quoted from that site, even if true, don't contradict the SIPRI report. All it says is that North Korea and China sold arms to Iran, both of whom at the time had large arsenels of old Soviets weapons available for sale, and neither of whom was by any means under the thumb of the Soviets at the time.
>You gotta be kidding. I am not gonna
>waste a day looking for primary sources
You won't because if you did, your preconceived notions wouldn't hold up. How inconvenient that would be.
Instead, you cite a article by a partisan, anti-American hack, the facts of which don't even contradict the SIPRI report.
You then appear to say that the US behaved in a morally inferior manner because they "funded" Saddam, while the USSR "only" sold arms to him. The notion that massive arms sales to a brutal regime are less morally problematic than agricultural loans is questionable; in any case, you then contradict yourself by admiting the Soviets "did sell him arms on credit." So they "funded" Saddam as well as arming him.
The truth is that: a) the USSR and France both sold Saddam massive amounts of arms, far, far more than the amount of arms and "high tech equipment" he got from the US; b) The USSR and France both loaned Saddam massive amounts of money (far more that the agricultural loans the US made to Iraq).
The facts don't matter to people like you. You will always see the US as wrong and make excuses for other countries like France and the USSR.
> Aha! I think I know where the chickanery is. The
> SIPRI people, very disingenuosly, counted all
> Soviet made weapons as Soviet aid.
No. Read the report.
>you will notice that none of the Arab countries, >which are beyond any doubt known to have assisted >Iraq against Iran with arms shipments, are on the >list.
That's because none of those countries were then, or are now, manufacturers of advanced weapons systems.
The fact is that the Soviet Union was a strong supporter of Saddam's regime, as was France, his other great arms supplier. The United States did not even have diplomatic relations with Saddam's regime until 1984, and had little trade, let alone arms deals with it.
>USSR was backing Iran and not Iraq in the war.
>Saddam was loudly criticising USSR action in
>Afghanistan. etc.
You "wonder" about SIPRIs figures, but you can't cite anything to rebut them.
The USSR certainly did not back Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. Iran was violently anti-communist, and was a major supporter of the the mujahadeen resistance to the USSR occupation of Afghanistan.
The USSR happily supplied Saddam all the arms could buy. SIPRI has no axe to grind, and you don't know what you are talking about.
>While USSR indeed supplied his junk, US paid for it
>with military aid. I will repeat so there is no
>confusion: USA gave Saddam money explicitely to buy
>arms.
Care to cite some FACTS to back up your "repeated" assertion? You can't, because the reality is that the Saddam's financing, like his arms supplies, came from many countries, and in both cases the U.S. was FAR down the list.
Iraq's war debts
Iraqs arms suppliers
>Furthermore, the USA's 0.58% includes the
>precursors, equipment and plans to manufacture
>chemical weapons
In fact, it was by far German & other EUROPEAN firms that happliy sold Saddam the majority of his his chemical weapons precursors. But I guess its more convienient for you to avoid these facts, since they interfere with your ability to paint America as the source of all the world's evil.
Normally on Slashdot, when an inaccurate statement or innuendo is posted, a response citing facts that rebut it will be quickly modded up.
The exception seems to be that if the statement or innuendo is Anti-American.
I guess the old chestnut that "America supplied Saddam with his arms" is just too good to give up, no matter what the facts are.
This means you could theoretically run Windows on a Linux machine at near native speeds
Theoretically, does it work or not?
http://www.paralinks.net/paralinksarchives/hawking exo.html