countertroll, I was just watching the movie Carlos (the new one) plus watching this whole Lybian thing unfold and arrived at the same conclusion. The world is full of crap so I think I'll get a boat and start doing some fishing for a change. Life is too precious to waste it in politics with people who don't even understand they are being played at.
But you are aware that the resolution was not approved on those grounds? I mean, it does not give the authority to remove Gaddafi from power. So if your ultimate goal is to remove him from power then using a line like "protecting civilians" as the main goal in the UN resolution is what I call hypocrisy.
What part of Civil War you do not understand? Let me put it easy for you: I T I S N O T O U R P R O B L E M. People were killing each other in the US in 1861 and no one had the right to intervene in favor of the government (North) or the rebels (South). Going there for humanitarian reasons is a bunch of BS, call it what it is, removing somebody that was hated by us from power to impose a friendly government. I actually have no problem with that but of course that doesn't sell well, it's the hypocrisy of the situation that gets to my bones.
And that 50 million people live in the brink of war everyday. In fact they haven't signed peace just an armistice. Well done there. Look up what the Contadora group did in Central America and then maybe we can talk about something far more productive than sending Marines somewhere.
I have to agree with the last poster. This war is actually "legal" if you will, even if I don't buy it's based on humanitarian reasons. Iraq is a whole different story. The US is a well respected international player so it really needs to abide to this type of procedures, as opposed to what Bush did. Now if you want everybody to think you are a rogue/cowboy country, then by all means go ahead and invade at will.
The situation is bad but it is not our conflict. If there is an issue between a couple in your neighborhood you don't become involved, even if you know that they are causing a lot of grief to each other. Civil war is one of the worst forms of warfare, but when the US was fighting itself, no one had the right to intervene in favor of the north or the south, and you can say that the government was killing rebels in that case.
Using humanitarian reasons is ambiguous in this case since it is a selective use of justice. Just like many posters have said, that will give grounds to start invasions in Yemen and Bahrain right away based on recent events. I personally would not like to see a UN with the authority to be the world police. The French and Chileans were able to topple equally corrupt and dictatorial governments, with France having to deal with all the other monarchic countries going against her, so don't tell me that self-determination of the population does not work, no matter the odds. Mess with enough people enough, and even something as mighty as the Soviet Union will fall under its own weight.
Yes, that strategy worked wonders for North/South Korea, Central American wars, North/South Vietnam, Nationalist(Taiwan)/Communist China among others. You have any idea how much blood was spilled? Plus there are still unresolved conflicts in those areas with the exception of Vietnam.
The way the Central American wars was finally over was with a group of neutral countries getting everybody to sit around in a table to negotiate a truce, the same way it was done in Ireland, they way the government pacified the guerrillas in the 1960s here in my country (Venezuela) as opposed to what happened in Colombia, and my point is that violence rarely stops violence when it comes to state affairs. Dialogue on the other hand is rather uncool, boring and slow, but in the end it actually gets the job done.
There are two outcomes that I see happening in Lybia, either the country will be split in two or the coalition will somehow try to fetch Gadaffi to try him in court the same way they did with Milosevic.
The article is not reflecting why these measures came to pass. They are trying to block minors from spending all day long playing World of Warcraft, Counterstrike and similar addictive games, not the web itself. You can be in favor or against games like that, but one thing is certain, they are truly addictive and in my country, Venezuela, they don't allow minors with school uniforms into Internet cafes either. See the problem is that in countries like this, the "cafe" part is meaningless. People use computers in these places since they might not have a net connection at home, the games would have incredible lag and a myriad of other issues mostly related to money and available infrastructure. It is the same way in most developing countries.
And money it is that they shall have. Check this out from "http://www.mbendi.com/indy/oilg/af/lb/p0005.htm":
"Libya has very low production costs and the oilfields are close to the refineries and markets of Europe. In addition, despite almost half a century of exploration, Libya remains largely unexplored with vast oil and gas potential. The under-exploration of Libya reflects the impact of sanctions formerly imposed on the country."
It is very wise to invest in Eni, BP and Total since they will be going up very soon.
But you don't see that this is only going to lead to the creation of a new country divided in two. Just like North/South Korea, West/East Germany, North/South Vietnam, Nationalist(Taiwan)/Communist China, even "Palestine"/Israel. Look at how much blood and time it took to unify the ones that could solve their issues, and look at how the ones that haven't solved their issues live in constant fear of war. This is exactly what's going to happen to Lybia, split between Gadaffi's Western Lybia and National Council's Eastern Lybia. The resolution doesn't include any means to remove Gadaffi from power so he'll become the new Kim Jong-il of the world.
Actually there are a lot of regimes in Africa that kill their own people by the dozens. Make no mistake, Gadaffi is a bastard but what happened here is just pure politics with little to do with humanitarian purposes. But in any case that's the way the world works everywhere, mess with the powerful guys and you are going to get it, one way or the other.
Oh they are evil! Run for your lives!
After Kosovo, Russia is very reluctant to agree on using force based on humanitarian grounds. It is embedded in their rationale now. As for the Chinese, they have a history of not supporting intervention on what they consider other countries internal affairs, unless they are asked to. On the other hand, the Chinese employ 36000 people in the construction sector in Lybia with contracts worth $2.67 billion. It is the same reason why the "West" would not do anything in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE (slave labor and other human rights issues). Every country has their own interests to look after and it is perfectly rational even if it doesn't fill any high moral standards.
Calling something good or evil is just being stupid, things are not black or white in the real world.
I would like to thank you for sharing this piece of code. I'm always fascinated by computer code optimizations, even if D3D has it incorporated and OpenGL doesn't have it, it's good to know the internals.
Why do I have to be an America hater just for stating my opinion on the matter. Intelligent debate requires different point of views so I'm not sure what you are getting at.
And you are aware that the same Saddam destroyed his stockpile afterwards? Before insulting people just for having a different opinion than yours, I suggest you let your rage go down a little bit and read the Guardian article "Iraq war inquiry: Blair government 'massaged' Saddam Hussein WMD threat" http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/12/iraq-war-inquiry-saddam-carne-ross
Same thing happens in Latin America where we are region 4 but there are stores that sells legal titles in region 1/US. But in general people buy pirated movies in any case. A regular salary in Venezuela is about Bs. 1600, if you want to buy a legal DVD that will cost you around Bs. 150, a pirated one is Bs. 20. And everything electronics related is more expensive than in the US, you kind of see the problem.
I believe one thing this report is missing and that is true from Argentina to Mexico is that there isn't affordable housing, so people have to either:
-Rely on living with their families.
-Renting a room and share bathrooms and fridge space with some other people but everything coordinated by an old landlady that most of the time lives in the same house.
-Or renting something like a basement, which is pushing it a bit.
-Get married and pretty much use one person's salary for rent and the other for expenses. That is IF you can find something cheap enough while you get a government-backed credit to buy your own house in one of the remote suburbs.
If you can afford a 1 bedroom apartment for your own, everybody understand that either your family bought the apartment for you, or that your family in general has money and pays it for you. Unless you start working for the very best companies in the market, it is very hard to actually do it yourself. Following the case of Venezuela, in the capital Caracas, you can pay 1500 for a room, or something like 7000 or 8000 for an apartment monthly. A programmer or engineer can earn around Bs 3000 or maybe 4000 while there are still a lot of people getting Bs. 1600, so it's not hard to see why there are many shacks around cities.
I don't know about you, but using a Mac is much better than using Gnome. Go ahead and rent a Mac for a week to see what I'm talking about. And it's not that GUI intensive as people may think, I got used to Command-Q, Command-H for hiding the window (so yes, I don't minimize stuff), as well as some other stuff. The only thing lacking in the OS X version I'm using (10.4) is decent Alt-Tab functionality and I read that they either fixed it in the latest version or are going to do it in Mac OS X Lion. But seriously, even Windows feels clumsy when compared to the Mac.
But GUIs aside, I still use both a Windows PC and a Mac, since gaming for Mac means Boot Camp these days and I do most of my programming in Visual C++,.NET and LAMP. Xcode is pretty good but I still like Notepad++ better for PHP. So design, surf the web, edit pictures on a Mac, and work on a PC. It has been like that for decades and I think it still stands for a lot of people, unless you are doing iPhone programming:)
There will be a painful transition in the space industry from being public to going private. They have to endure the same thing the US and the Soviet Union had to face during the early stages of the Space Race. A lot of people and animals died from both sides during the Space Race because politics mandated that a lot of things needed to be done before the other team got there. These companies face a similar pressure in terms of money and competition among enterprises. In the long run it might be a good thing but I believe if the US wants to develop the private sector, sharing some of the old rocket designs with startups could make things easier for everybody and still conform with the objectives.
I don't know if that is entirely correct. I have been using the Mercury web browser in my iPhone for some time. I think it's based in Webkit but nonetheless it is a much better web browser than Safari is, with support for tabs, private navigation, full screen controls and stuff like that. Besides in my iPhone, which is the 3G, Safari stays on the background and that causes some problems when the application becomes unresponsive, since I pretty much have to restart the device to get it up and running. This "behavior" was added and backported after the new iPhones came out with their multitasking operating system, since it used to work just fine before.
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countertroll, I was just watching the movie Carlos (the new one) plus watching this whole Lybian thing unfold and arrived at the same conclusion. The world is full of crap so I think I'll get a boat and start doing some fishing for a change. Life is too precious to waste it in politics with people who don't even understand they are being played at.
But you are aware that the resolution was not approved on those grounds? I mean, it does not give the authority to remove Gaddafi from power. So if your ultimate goal is to remove him from power then using a line like "protecting civilians" as the main goal in the UN resolution is what I call hypocrisy.
What part of Civil War you do not understand? Let me put it easy for you: I T I S N O T O U R P R O B L E M. People were killing each other in the US in 1861 and no one had the right to intervene in favor of the government (North) or the rebels (South). Going there for humanitarian reasons is a bunch of BS, call it what it is, removing somebody that was hated by us from power to impose a friendly government. I actually have no problem with that but of course that doesn't sell well, it's the hypocrisy of the situation that gets to my bones.
And that 50 million people live in the brink of war everyday. In fact they haven't signed peace just an armistice. Well done there. Look up what the Contadora group did in Central America and then maybe we can talk about something far more productive than sending Marines somewhere.
I have to agree with the last poster. This war is actually "legal" if you will, even if I don't buy it's based on humanitarian reasons. Iraq is a whole different story. The US is a well respected international player so it really needs to abide to this type of procedures, as opposed to what Bush did. Now if you want everybody to think you are a rogue/cowboy country, then by all means go ahead and invade at will.
The situation is bad but it is not our conflict. If there is an issue between a couple in your neighborhood you don't become involved, even if you know that they are causing a lot of grief to each other. Civil war is one of the worst forms of warfare, but when the US was fighting itself, no one had the right to intervene in favor of the north or the south, and you can say that the government was killing rebels in that case. Using humanitarian reasons is ambiguous in this case since it is a selective use of justice. Just like many posters have said, that will give grounds to start invasions in Yemen and Bahrain right away based on recent events. I personally would not like to see a UN with the authority to be the world police. The French and Chileans were able to topple equally corrupt and dictatorial governments, with France having to deal with all the other monarchic countries going against her, so don't tell me that self-determination of the population does not work, no matter the odds. Mess with enough people enough, and even something as mighty as the Soviet Union will fall under its own weight.
Yes, that strategy worked wonders for North/South Korea, Central American wars, North/South Vietnam, Nationalist(Taiwan)/Communist China among others. You have any idea how much blood was spilled? Plus there are still unresolved conflicts in those areas with the exception of Vietnam. The way the Central American wars was finally over was with a group of neutral countries getting everybody to sit around in a table to negotiate a truce, the same way it was done in Ireland, they way the government pacified the guerrillas in the 1960s here in my country (Venezuela) as opposed to what happened in Colombia, and my point is that violence rarely stops violence when it comes to state affairs. Dialogue on the other hand is rather uncool, boring and slow, but in the end it actually gets the job done. There are two outcomes that I see happening in Lybia, either the country will be split in two or the coalition will somehow try to fetch Gadaffi to try him in court the same way they did with Milosevic.
The article is not reflecting why these measures came to pass. They are trying to block minors from spending all day long playing World of Warcraft, Counterstrike and similar addictive games, not the web itself. You can be in favor or against games like that, but one thing is certain, they are truly addictive and in my country, Venezuela, they don't allow minors with school uniforms into Internet cafes either. See the problem is that in countries like this, the "cafe" part is meaningless. People use computers in these places since they might not have a net connection at home, the games would have incredible lag and a myriad of other issues mostly related to money and available infrastructure. It is the same way in most developing countries.
And money it is that they shall have. Check this out from "http://www.mbendi.com/indy/oilg/af/lb/p0005.htm": "Libya has very low production costs and the oilfields are close to the refineries and markets of Europe. In addition, despite almost half a century of exploration, Libya remains largely unexplored with vast oil and gas potential. The under-exploration of Libya reflects the impact of sanctions formerly imposed on the country." It is very wise to invest in Eni, BP and Total since they will be going up very soon.
But you don't see that this is only going to lead to the creation of a new country divided in two. Just like North/South Korea, West/East Germany, North/South Vietnam, Nationalist(Taiwan)/Communist China, even "Palestine"/Israel. Look at how much blood and time it took to unify the ones that could solve their issues, and look at how the ones that haven't solved their issues live in constant fear of war. This is exactly what's going to happen to Lybia, split between Gadaffi's Western Lybia and National Council's Eastern Lybia. The resolution doesn't include any means to remove Gadaffi from power so he'll become the new Kim Jong-il of the world.
huh?
And who told you the terrorists were in Iraq in the first place? Remember it was the weapons of mass destruction, oops.
Actually there are a lot of regimes in Africa that kill their own people by the dozens. Make no mistake, Gadaffi is a bastard but what happened here is just pure politics with little to do with humanitarian purposes. But in any case that's the way the world works everywhere, mess with the powerful guys and you are going to get it, one way or the other.
...because that vile bastard is about to get his ass hammered.
And how exactly is that going to happen? Most likely, Lybia will be split in two with Gadaffi in charge of the western portion.
Mod the parent post up. I laughed so hard. One of the reasons I love to read Slashdot comments.
Oh they are evil! Run for your lives! After Kosovo, Russia is very reluctant to agree on using force based on humanitarian grounds. It is embedded in their rationale now. As for the Chinese, they have a history of not supporting intervention on what they consider other countries internal affairs, unless they are asked to. On the other hand, the Chinese employ 36000 people in the construction sector in Lybia with contracts worth $2.67 billion. It is the same reason why the "West" would not do anything in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE (slave labor and other human rights issues). Every country has their own interests to look after and it is perfectly rational even if it doesn't fill any high moral standards. Calling something good or evil is just being stupid, things are not black or white in the real world.
I would like to thank you for sharing this piece of code. I'm always fascinated by computer code optimizations, even if D3D has it incorporated and OpenGL doesn't have it, it's good to know the internals.
Are you seriously comparing the Beatles and Nirvana with Justin Bieber?
As good as Justin Bieber? Good god, the kid is a product of the music industry which is pushing it in very obnoxious ways.
Why do I have to be an America hater just for stating my opinion on the matter. Intelligent debate requires different point of views so I'm not sure what you are getting at.
And you are aware that the same Saddam destroyed his stockpile afterwards? Before insulting people just for having a different opinion than yours, I suggest you let your rage go down a little bit and read the Guardian article "Iraq war inquiry: Blair government 'massaged' Saddam Hussein WMD threat" http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/12/iraq-war-inquiry-saddam-carne-ross
Same thing happens in Latin America where we are region 4 but there are stores that sells legal titles in region 1/US. But in general people buy pirated movies in any case. A regular salary in Venezuela is about Bs. 1600, if you want to buy a legal DVD that will cost you around Bs. 150, a pirated one is Bs. 20. And everything electronics related is more expensive than in the US, you kind of see the problem. I believe one thing this report is missing and that is true from Argentina to Mexico is that there isn't affordable housing, so people have to either: -Rely on living with their families. -Renting a room and share bathrooms and fridge space with some other people but everything coordinated by an old landlady that most of the time lives in the same house. -Or renting something like a basement, which is pushing it a bit. -Get married and pretty much use one person's salary for rent and the other for expenses. That is IF you can find something cheap enough while you get a government-backed credit to buy your own house in one of the remote suburbs. If you can afford a 1 bedroom apartment for your own, everybody understand that either your family bought the apartment for you, or that your family in general has money and pays it for you. Unless you start working for the very best companies in the market, it is very hard to actually do it yourself. Following the case of Venezuela, in the capital Caracas, you can pay 1500 for a room, or something like 7000 or 8000 for an apartment monthly. A programmer or engineer can earn around Bs 3000 or maybe 4000 while there are still a lot of people getting Bs. 1600, so it's not hard to see why there are many shacks around cities.
I don't know about you, but using a Mac is much better than using Gnome. Go ahead and rent a Mac for a week to see what I'm talking about. And it's not that GUI intensive as people may think, I got used to Command-Q, Command-H for hiding the window (so yes, I don't minimize stuff), as well as some other stuff. The only thing lacking in the OS X version I'm using (10.4) is decent Alt-Tab functionality and I read that they either fixed it in the latest version or are going to do it in Mac OS X Lion. But seriously, even Windows feels clumsy when compared to the Mac. But GUIs aside, I still use both a Windows PC and a Mac, since gaming for Mac means Boot Camp these days and I do most of my programming in Visual C++, .NET and LAMP. Xcode is pretty good but I still like Notepad++ better for PHP. So design, surf the web, edit pictures on a Mac, and work on a PC. It has been like that for decades and I think it still stands for a lot of people, unless you are doing iPhone programming :)
There will be a painful transition in the space industry from being public to going private. They have to endure the same thing the US and the Soviet Union had to face during the early stages of the Space Race. A lot of people and animals died from both sides during the Space Race because politics mandated that a lot of things needed to be done before the other team got there. These companies face a similar pressure in terms of money and competition among enterprises. In the long run it might be a good thing but I believe if the US wants to develop the private sector, sharing some of the old rocket designs with startups could make things easier for everybody and still conform with the objectives.
I don't know if that is entirely correct. I have been using the Mercury web browser in my iPhone for some time. I think it's based in Webkit but nonetheless it is a much better web browser than Safari is, with support for tabs, private navigation, full screen controls and stuff like that. Besides in my iPhone, which is the 3G, Safari stays on the background and that causes some problems when the application becomes unresponsive, since I pretty much have to restart the device to get it up and running. This "behavior" was added and backported after the new iPhones came out with their multitasking operating system, since it used to work just fine before.