When you say "it makes a lot of sense in some areas", do you mean the kind of sense, like, "people should have to pay me for their right to live"?
If so, I'd have to agree, because you are always going to have people who seek power, simply so that they can have luxury, babes, and whatnot at the expense of others.
I consider patents to be no different.
On the other hand, if you are saying that the phrase "intellectual property" can make rational sense, ever, I'd have to say no.
Property is that which can be defended. Intellectual property exists only as long as you don't tell others what you know. The moment you let it go, you have your property, and they have their property, and you cannot reasonably control what they do with their thoughts.
Of course, dictators always have thought otherwise, and always will. Indeed, to a limit, they are right, and thrive. Of course, that limit comes about the time that one of their military officers thinks that he's had enough, and should himself be dictator.
Oh, patents make a lot of sense all right. I'm sure Bill Gates, Putin, Castro, and Hussein would all agree.
It's everywhere. Same thing, different place, different language. In this case, the place is Lithuania, the language is Lithuanian , but it's still the same. ("Reklama"="advertisement")
There's another huge advantage here, as well.
This software will let the average person figure out designs that are inherently cheap. Then, when they want mass production (not an emachineshop specialty), they will already be fairly well optimized to get low cost parts.
That's pretty impressive.
Quite simply, your reply is good for the next two years or so, or maybe even ten years. However, it doesn't address the scalability issue, which is a concern in and of itself.
To address the scalability issue, perhaps there should be a distributed response network, to handle the distributed overload.
One idea? The RSS news feeder should always story the IP address of computers that it sends its most recent feed to, and append a random IP of one of the other computers that downloaded its feed.
Now, the news reader then turns around and the next time it goes to download its feed, it first asks one of the other sources. Three failures, and a source gets thrown out. Nonetheless, there will build up a distributed network of computers that first look for their feeds from another source.
Now, that the brings along with it the questionability of verification of the RSS feed line. I mean, how do you know that the RSS news feed doesn't direct you to the latest Windows Spam Takeover Site? However, that can be handled with another kind of RSS or similar technology, namely PGP.
Now, this all involves new technology. But the technology isn't all that difficult -- it's been done before, in bits and pieces. So it could be done again, I suppose. The real question, to me, is whether it's all worth it.
Okay, a man goes big game hunting in Africa with a fine pointer dog and a guide -- but he doesn't get a single lion. Indeed, he never even sees a lion. Why not?
Well, as anyone learns in Geometry class, it takes to points to determine a lion.
-----
Bonus jokes, not related to big game hunting: Prove that the integral of d[cabin]/(cabin) is [houseboat].
Also, what do you get when you cross a pointer with a mountain climber? [You can't do it. A pointer is clearly a vector, but a mountain climber is a scalar. Cross product requires 2 vectors]
Quite simply, those things we term sports today, were in ancient times contests of military fitness. For that reason, shooting weapons fit right in with javelins (Shaka), running (achilles), swimming and sailing (piracy), wrestling, boxing, fencing, and so on.
In a way, the Olympics of ancient Greece may have been a way to test military prowess without the waste of needless war. Of course, with the sports in those times, there was no problem with cheating and doping, much less the joke of professional/amature status. Not because they didn't do it -- they did -- but all's fair in war, as they say, and all was fair in the ancient Olympics as well. And being military, yes, sometimes people did get killed.
The bit about fair sportsmanship, amature status, and so on, was a way that the British lords who began the more modern olympics, could compete and do well without being the actual best. The best fighters, runners, and boxers, of course, did it for money. They still do.
So is math a sport? As soon as doing quick math can be shown to be an advantage in battle, I'll agree that it is. Mortar marksmanship (complete with tracers), for example, might be a valid use.
Until then, I'd say no. Math is just a fun competition.
When I was setting up my Debian box, before, I was offered the option of a firewall based upon a text interface.
In the end, I couldn't understand it well enough to activate it. What I'd really like, then, is a nice interface similar to Zone Alarm, but with lots of documentation (help files) written, as well.
That way, I can get the firewall up and running with a minimum of experience, and then can tweak it to my hearts content.
Bonus brownie points, if the documentation leads me into being able to understand the command-line text program's interface, as well, or [better yet] help me be able to read the logs and the/etc files directly.
Sorry about this -- I hope I don't sound too stupid to use Linux (I'm not: I've set up everything from an appletalk server to a recording and mixing setup, and even programmed a little) -- but this was just too hard for me to use correctly, and be sure I was using it correctly.
Good point. I meant no job in my field. I'm a surveyer's assistant, holding a survey rod, at a concrete manufacturer at the moment. Between then and now, I had a small business producing study guides.
Probably this guy's right. I've taken the other end of that -- National Merit Scholar, but needed money for school, so I delivered ice for $5000/yr, instead of working as an intern in the Space Station Integration Center (which would give me contacts, but no real work).
Not that I didn't try for a real NASA job, but they were all nominally closed to everyone, and my 4.0 GPA + Nat. Merit Scholarship wasn't enough.
But when I graduated, no job. To this day, 12 years later, no job. Oh, well.
As others have mentioned, the new IE patch for this weakness is here and here. If you don't have time for that, you can try a temporary but standard Microsoft workaround over here.
When he says that the meat comes from the former Soviet Union, the cheapest food I know of [having lived in Lithuania], seems to come from Belarus or Ukraine, especially from the region around Chernobyl.
Now, if you buy (for example) those add-water-and-heat noodles from the Ukraine, you're going to get a good bit of Cesium(Cs-137?) in it, because -- and this is according to Lithuanian natives, who probably got it in their news -- the Ukrainian government has limits on the amount of Cs that can be in it, but accepts companies taking contaminated grain and mixing it down with uncontaminated grain, to meet the required levels.
Point being, I probably wouldn't suggest that this meat is good to eat, any more than I'd eat lamb from the Scottish moors (sorry, same problem: Chernobyl's Cs-137. It seems that the plants have been recycling the Cs back to the top.)
As I remember, Sony has been involved in a number of shady "target the customer" problems, all mentioned here on slashdot. [For example, weren't they one of the groups that made the break-his-Ibook CDs with the damaged track, so that the CD couldn't be used in a computer?]
So right there, I'd require a 50% discount to do business with Sony.
But then, they also have the lock-in architecture of the Sony memory stick. So you can't go back to another competitor later. Therefore, I'd require another 50% discount.
I need these discounts, because there is a very real cost to doing business with a slimebag, even with a big name slimebag company.
In other words, the Sony product needs to be about 25% of the price of a no-name competitor before I'll seriously consider their product.
Sony Vaio the best? No, I don't think so. I'll wait.
Nope. The Romans did well not because of their technological prowess, but because they were more just than the neighboring countries. That caused a relative economic boom, which in turn fed both the technology, and the expansion (which occurred more by treaty than by conquest, interestingly enough). However, Rome was not infinitely just, and their injustices proved their downfall.
For anything less than a tenth of a wave long, it can drop to less than an ohm. At that point, ANY antenna resistance, even the normal resistance of copper or silver, becomes very relevant. If someone were to use a superconductor, it might make a very big difference.
I don't think that you'll see superconductor antennas, anyhow, because as I remember, the superconductor would have its superconductivity destroyed the moment you started releasing radio waves. So if you designed a superconductor antenna, it would simply be so that it could keep total radio silence until the moment you wanted to broadcast. Not too bad an idea, at that, except that the cost would be $100k for the superconductor (with high vacuum system attached), and then more to run it.
Well, my father is a university professor at James Madison University, in Virginia. One of the former department heads authored one of the best-selling Physics texts (Serway). And yet none of the professors there has had an article published in, say, Scientific American.
Well... none except for their (now retired) technician, Jim Lehman, who invented a mechanical seismometer far better than any at his time.
That said, I wouldn't classify him as a genius, not knowing what makes up a genius. I would just classify him as a guy who knew a lot about how to do things.
But neither would I classify him as just a technician at the physics department. He knew the physics that was being taught, as well as any of the professors. His lack of a degree simply indicated that he hadn't jumped through the standard hoops to prove his ability.
Jim Lehman was definitely a scientist. He could plan projects, design and set up experiments, analyze data, and do anything that the physics professors could do... including publish.
More than that, he understood what science could and could not do, which made his skills that much more useful. He didn't look to science for answers to the meaning of life -- he looked to Christ for that.
Jim Lehman was/is a scientist and an excellent technician, not just a technician. I expect the HAM was the same.
Re:So you're angling for the DARPA challenge too?
on
Old Toy Modding?
·
· Score: 1
It could work. Your style was MacCready's approach to the human-powered-aircraft contest. He built cheap so he could afford to test and retest lots of times. Then he had a working model.
Do the same -- demonstrate it to a local auto repair shop/junk yard, and then work with them to upgrade one to match the other, and in the end you could even win.
... if this job is "scan it straight to PDF", then the result will be huge, really eat bandwidth, and not be very useful to the students. It'll take forever to load.
On the other hand, if you want something fast, accurate, easy to use, and useful, then you have a job similar to what I and two others did -- at $15-$25 per page.
Of course, when we first started jobs like this, the publisher specified MS Word 5.1a for Mac; and it took us 1/2 an hour per page ($11-$15/pg). Then they wanted it in HTML, so they specified MS Word 98. That jumped our time per page to 1.5 hours, and at $15 per page, we lost around $7000.
Then we changed it to Quark + Acrobat, with pieces available in Word (but no final prepublishing in Word), and that took us an hour per page at $25 per page. At that rate, we still went broke, but barely finished our contract, saved the publisher ~$100k by reducing the page count, and made an excellent study guide.
However, as of right now, we said that our next bid would have to be significantly higher ($70k-$100k), and the publisher decided they want to try someone else.
But you are right about the college professors not realizing what they were asking. That hour per page not only included layout, graphics, equations, and formatting. It included approximately 2-3 complete rewrites on the text, chapter after chapter, and sometimes I had to suggest the final wording, myself.
... this reminds me of a number of NYT articles by a pulitzer prize winning former journalist.
This sounds great, just the perfect amount of detail, some "sorry, can't give you some details because I don't know", and what not.
Can anyone check this article out? Or do we all, unanimously, believe it true, because it has to be true, because it meets our deepest suspicions, because the author uses all the right phrases?
Okay, I tend to agree with the bit of poetry. It matches what we know, best.
However, I can think of another possibility -- and perhaps, both were correct. If we remember the era, there were two strong characteristics of lordly British social life: one was the devotion of court life to everything artistic and sensual, and the other was the ongoing persecution of Catholics.
So if one of Anson's people was a Catholic, then perhaps this does have a secondary, obfusciated meaning. That, especially since the AV VM reminds me of "Ave, Virgin Mary".
Yet I strongly doubt we will ever find conclusive evidence of this. Therefore, I have to go with the first: it's a bit of symbolic poetry, meant perhaps to entertain Lord Anson's guests.
Quite simply, if you've had it with corporate America, I can bet that either it is because the promises are false, or they are true and worthless.
Quite simply, rather than just picking up and going to another country -- which might be decent, or might be a very bad move [let's not pick up and go to Iraq, unless we want to be kidnapped and murdered] -- it might be good to ask God what he wants, in prayer, and then start trying to follow his lead as completely as possible.
To do that, though, you're going to have to read your Bible, and pray, and especially take God's word seriously.
The length of the button press can either have an immediate action, or can present a menu, as shown in the example of Mac OS 8.0, Figure 42. So clearly , Microsoft's patent is much more specific than your watch./sarcasm
Yes, people should follow their conscience, and we shouldn't be surprised when others ignore them.
However, almost by definition, the person who is following their conscience at cost to themselves, is going to be totally caught up in that other issue. So I don't know that you can say that it is petulent and childish for him to imply that iti is their fault for not sharing his views.
It is their fault, if he is right, and they are not. However, it is not necessarily going to be their fault not to follow in the same path he has. Even at best, we are each called to our own path of righteousness; and though some paths are definitely right and some are definitely wrong, there are many right paths to choose from, and we can't take them all.
In the end, I'd say I view this guy with some respect and a lot of understanding.
So it looks like you pointed out that even before Desert Storm II, we were causing needless deaths with our embargo.
I'd say that's partly correct.
Point is, we don't have to cause needless deaths at all. True, if we don't, then Saddam or someone else will. But if that's the case, why do you want to be the one to do it? I certainly don't.
That quote reads more like he butted heads with other administrators/board members and decided to make his outrage as public as possible, without providing details.
Not necessarily. Sometimes, a person simply feels called to testify with their lives against something they feel is wrong. When that happens, they may do something like this.
Ten years ago, I found the evils of the social security system (for starters, preventing aliens from working via red/blue/green card; taking money from laborers when they need it, to give to rich folks when they don't) to be bad enough that I had to give up using my SSN. Talk about disrupting your life. Yet I did it.
I absolutely agree that we should not be in Iraq, and that if in Iraq, we shouldn't be fighting. But this man agrees so strongly that he's willing to make an issue out of his job.
Bravo.
I think more people should follow their consciences more often; and fewer people should denigrate people with motivating consciences (as a poster above your post did, for example).
Will it make a difference to the LUG? Slightly. Will it make a difference to the military? Maybe to some members, but probably not. Will it make a difference to GWB? I'd be shocked if it did. Will it make a difference to GPL? Nope.
Will it make a difference to the ex-pres of the LUG? Absolutely. If my own experience is any guide, it may be the best thing he could have done. There's a ton of value to stopping the train and getting off.
Slashdot Mirror
Does your wife really build locomotives? If so, what kind / scale ? I know that's kindof OT for this thread, but I find it quite interesting.
When you say "it makes a lot of sense in some areas", do you mean the kind of sense, like, "people should have to pay me for their right to live"?
If so, I'd have to agree, because you are always going to have people who seek power, simply so that they can have luxury, babes, and whatnot at the expense of others.
I consider patents to be no different.
On the other hand, if you are saying that the phrase "intellectual property" can make rational sense, ever, I'd have to say no.
Property is that which can be defended. Intellectual property exists only as long as you don't tell others what you know. The moment you let it go, you have your property, and they have their property, and you cannot reasonably control what they do with their thoughts.
Of course, dictators always have thought otherwise, and always will. Indeed, to a limit, they are right, and thrive. Of course, that limit comes about the time that one of their military officers thinks that he's had enough, and should himself be dictator.
Oh, patents make a lot of sense all right. I'm sure Bill Gates, Putin, Castro, and Hussein would all agree.
http://www.reklama.lt/index2.php?program=catalog&b ranchid=168
It's everywhere. Same thing, different place, different language. In this case, the place is Lithuania, the language is Lithuanian , but it's still the same. ("Reklama"="advertisement")
There's another huge advantage here, as well. This software will let the average person figure out designs that are inherently cheap. Then, when they want mass production (not an emachineshop specialty), they will already be fairly well optimized to get low cost parts. That's pretty impressive.
Quite simply, your reply is good for the next two years or so, or maybe even ten years. However, it doesn't address the scalability issue, which is a concern in and of itself.
To address the scalability issue, perhaps there should be a distributed response network, to handle the distributed overload.
One idea? The RSS news feeder should always story the IP address of computers that it sends its most recent feed to, and append a random IP of one of the other computers that downloaded its feed.
Now, the news reader then turns around and the next time it goes to download its feed, it first asks one of the other sources. Three failures, and a source gets thrown out. Nonetheless, there will build up a distributed network of computers that first look for their feeds from another source.
Now, that the brings along with it the questionability of verification of the RSS feed line. I mean, how do you know that the RSS news feed doesn't direct you to the latest Windows Spam Takeover Site? However, that can be handled with another kind of RSS or similar technology, namely PGP.
Now, this all involves new technology. But the technology isn't all that difficult -- it's been done before, in bits and pieces. So it could be done again, I suppose. The real question, to me, is whether it's all worth it.
Okay, a man goes big game hunting in Africa with a fine pointer dog and a guide -- but he doesn't get a single lion. Indeed, he never even sees a lion. Why not?
Well, as anyone learns in Geometry class, it takes to points to determine a lion.
-----
Bonus jokes, not related to big game hunting:
Prove that the integral of d[cabin]/(cabin) is [houseboat].
Also, what do you get when you cross a pointer with a mountain climber? [You can't do it. A pointer is clearly a vector, but a mountain climber is a scalar. Cross product requires 2 vectors]
Quite simply, those things we term sports today, were in ancient times contests of military fitness. For that reason, shooting weapons fit right in with javelins (Shaka), running (achilles), swimming and sailing (piracy), wrestling, boxing, fencing, and so on.
In a way, the Olympics of ancient Greece may have been a way to test military prowess without the waste of needless war. Of course, with the sports in those times, there was no problem with cheating and doping, much less the joke of professional/amature status. Not because they didn't do it -- they did -- but all's fair in war, as they say, and all was fair in the ancient Olympics as well. And being military, yes, sometimes people did get killed.
The bit about fair sportsmanship, amature status, and so on, was a way that the British lords who began the more modern olympics, could compete and do well without being the actual best. The best fighters, runners, and boxers, of course, did it for money. They still do.
So is math a sport? As soon as doing quick math can be shown to be an advantage in battle, I'll agree that it is. Mortar marksmanship (complete with tracers), for example, might be a valid use.
Until then, I'd say no. Math is just a fun competition.
When I was setting up my Debian box, before, I was offered the option of a firewall based upon a text interface.
/etc files directly.
In the end, I couldn't understand it well enough to activate it. What I'd really like, then, is a nice interface similar to Zone Alarm, but with lots of documentation (help files) written, as well.
That way, I can get the firewall up and running with a minimum of experience, and then can tweak it to my hearts content.
Bonus brownie points, if the documentation leads me into being able to understand the command-line text program's interface, as well, or [better yet] help me be able to read the logs and the
Sorry about this -- I hope I don't sound too stupid to use Linux (I'm not: I've set up everything from an appletalk server to a recording and mixing setup, and even programmed a little) -- but this was just too hard for me to use correctly, and be sure I was using it correctly.
Good point. I meant no job in my field. I'm a surveyer's assistant, holding a survey rod, at a concrete manufacturer at the moment. Between then and now, I had a small business producing study guides.
Probably this guy's right. I've taken the other end of that -- National Merit Scholar, but needed money for school, so I delivered ice for $5000/yr, instead of working as an intern in the Space Station Integration Center (which would give me contacts, but no real work).
Not that I didn't try for a real NASA job, but they were all nominally closed to everyone, and my 4.0 GPA + Nat. Merit Scholarship wasn't enough.
But when I graduated, no job. To this day, 12 years later, no job. Oh, well.
As others have mentioned, the new IE patch for this weakness is here and here. If you don't have time for that, you can try a temporary but standard Microsoft workaround over here.
When he says that the meat comes from the former Soviet Union, the cheapest food I know of [having lived in Lithuania], seems to come from Belarus or Ukraine, especially from the region around Chernobyl.
Now, if you buy (for example) those add-water-and-heat noodles from the Ukraine, you're going to get a good bit of Cesium(Cs-137?) in it, because -- and this is according to Lithuanian natives, who probably got it in their news -- the Ukrainian government has limits on the amount of Cs that can be in it, but accepts companies taking contaminated grain and mixing it down with uncontaminated grain, to meet the required levels.
Point being, I probably wouldn't suggest that this meat is good to eat, any more than I'd eat lamb from the Scottish moors (sorry, same problem: Chernobyl's Cs-137. It seems that the plants have been recycling the Cs back to the top.)
As I remember, Sony has been involved in a number of shady "target the customer" problems, all mentioned here on slashdot. [For example, weren't they one of the groups that made the break-his-Ibook CDs with the damaged track, so that the CD couldn't be used in a computer?]
So right there, I'd require a 50% discount to do business with Sony.
But then, they also have the lock-in architecture of the Sony memory stick. So you can't go back to another competitor later. Therefore, I'd require another 50% discount.
I need these discounts, because there is a very real cost to doing business with a slimebag, even with a big name slimebag company.
In other words, the Sony product needs to be about 25% of the price of a no-name competitor before I'll seriously consider their product.
Sony Vaio the best? No, I don't think so. I'll wait.
Nope. The Romans did well not because of their technological prowess, but because they were more just than the neighboring countries. That caused a relative economic boom, which in turn fed both the technology, and the expansion (which occurred more by treaty than by conquest, interestingly enough). However, Rome was not infinitely just, and their injustices proved their downfall.
I don't think that you'll see superconductor antennas, anyhow, because as I remember, the superconductor would have its superconductivity destroyed the moment you started releasing radio waves. So if you designed a superconductor antenna, it would simply be so that it could keep total radio silence until the moment you wanted to broadcast. Not too bad an idea, at that, except that the cost would be $100k for the superconductor (with high vacuum system attached), and then more to run it.
Well, my father is a university professor at James Madison University, in Virginia. One of the former department heads authored one of the best-selling Physics texts (Serway). And yet none of the professors there has had an article published in, say, Scientific American.
... including publish.
Well... none except for their (now retired) technician, Jim Lehman, who invented a mechanical seismometer far better than any at his time.
That said, I wouldn't classify him as a genius, not knowing what makes up a genius. I would just classify him as a guy who knew a lot about how to do things.
But neither would I classify him as just a technician at the physics department. He knew the physics that was being taught, as well as any of the professors. His lack of a degree simply indicated that he hadn't jumped through the standard hoops to prove his ability.
Jim Lehman was definitely a scientist. He could plan projects, design and set up experiments, analyze data, and do anything that the physics professors could do
More than that, he understood what science could and could not do, which made his skills that much more useful. He didn't look to science for answers to the meaning of life -- he looked to Christ for that.
Jim Lehman was/is a scientist and an excellent technician, not just a technician. I expect the HAM was the same.
It could work. Your style was MacCready's approach to the human-powered-aircraft contest. He built cheap so he could afford to test and retest lots of times. Then he had a working model.
Do the same -- demonstrate it to a local auto repair shop/junk yard, and then work with them to upgrade one to match the other, and in the end you could even win.
... if this job is "scan it straight to PDF", then the result will be huge, really eat bandwidth, and not be very useful to the students. It'll take forever to load.
_ pr oducts_bc.pl?fid=M20b&product_isbn_issn=0534408427 &discipline_number=13
On the other hand, if you want something fast, accurate, easy to use, and useful, then you have a job similar to what I and two others did -- at $15-$25 per page.
http://www.brookscole.com/cgi-brookscole/course
Of course, when we first started jobs like this, the publisher specified MS Word 5.1a for Mac; and it took us 1/2 an hour per page ($11-$15/pg). Then they wanted it in HTML, so they specified MS Word 98. That jumped our time per page to 1.5 hours, and at $15 per page, we lost around $7000.
Then we changed it to Quark + Acrobat, with pieces available in Word (but no final prepublishing in Word), and that took us an hour per page at $25 per page. At that rate, we still went broke, but barely finished our contract, saved the publisher ~$100k by reducing the page count, and made an excellent study guide.
However, as of right now, we said that our next bid would have to be significantly higher ($70k-$100k), and the publisher decided they want to try someone else.
But you are right about the college professors not realizing what they were asking. That hour per page not only included layout, graphics, equations, and formatting. It included approximately 2-3 complete rewrites on the text, chapter after chapter, and sometimes I had to suggest the final wording, myself.
... this reminds me of a number of NYT articles by a pulitzer prize winning former journalist.
This sounds great, just the perfect amount of detail, some "sorry, can't give you some details because I don't know", and what not.
Can anyone check this article out? Or do we all, unanimously, believe it true, because it has to be true, because it meets our deepest suspicions, because the author uses all the right phrases?
Okay, I tend to agree with the bit of poetry. It matches what we know, best.
However, I can think of another possibility -- and perhaps, both were correct. If we remember the era, there were two strong characteristics of lordly British social life: one was the devotion of court life to everything artistic and sensual, and the other was the ongoing persecution of Catholics.
So if one of Anson's people was a Catholic, then perhaps this does have a secondary, obfusciated meaning. That, especially since the AV VM reminds me of "Ave, Virgin Mary".
Yet I strongly doubt we will ever find conclusive evidence of this. Therefore, I have to go with the first: it's a bit of symbolic poetry, meant perhaps to entertain Lord Anson's guests.
Quite simply, if you've had it with corporate America, I can bet that either it is because the promises are false, or they are true and worthless.
Quite simply, rather than just picking up and going to another country -- which might be decent, or might be a very bad move [let's not pick up and go to Iraq, unless we want to be kidnapped and murdered] -- it might be good to ask God what he wants, in prayer, and then start trying to follow his lead as completely as possible.
To do that, though, you're going to have to read your Bible, and pray, and especially take God's word seriously.
Seriously.
As stated in the patent,
/sarcasm
The length of the button press can either have an immediate action, or can present a menu, as shown in the example of Mac OS 8.0, Figure 42. So clearly , Microsoft's patent is much more specific than your watch.
However, almost by definition, the person who is following their conscience at cost to themselves, is going to be totally caught up in that other issue. So I don't know that you can say that it is petulent and childish for him to imply that iti is their fault for not sharing his views.
It is their fault, if he is right, and they are not. However, it is not necessarily going to be their fault not to follow in the same path he has. Even at best, we are each called to our own path of righteousness; and though some paths are definitely right and some are definitely wrong, there are many right paths to choose from, and we can't take them all.
In the end, I'd say I view this guy with some respect and a lot of understanding.
So it looks like you pointed out that even before Desert Storm II, we were causing needless deaths with our embargo.
I'd say that's partly correct.
Point is, we don't have to cause needless deaths at all. True, if we don't, then Saddam or someone else will. But if that's the case, why do you want to be the one to do it? I certainly don't.
Not necessarily. Sometimes, a person simply feels called to testify with their lives against something they feel is wrong. When that happens, they may do something like this.
Ten years ago, I found the evils of the social security system (for starters, preventing aliens from working via red/blue/green card; taking money from laborers when they need it, to give to rich folks when they don't) to be bad enough that I had to give up using my SSN. Talk about disrupting your life. Yet I did it.
I absolutely agree that we should not be in Iraq, and that if in Iraq, we shouldn't be fighting. But this man agrees so strongly that he's willing to make an issue out of his job.
Bravo.
I think more people should follow their consciences more often; and fewer people should denigrate people with motivating consciences (as a poster above your post did, for example).
Will it make a difference to the LUG? Slightly. Will it make a difference to the military? Maybe to some members, but probably not. Will it make a difference to GWB? I'd be shocked if it did. Will it make a difference to GPL? Nope.
Will it make a difference to the ex-pres of the LUG? Absolutely. If my own experience is any guide, it may be the best thing he could have done. There's a ton of value to stopping the train and getting off.