So I guess we should cover up all of those mass graves, put all those children back in prison, get Chemical Ali back into the lab, get those torture racks greased, throw all of those 'Big Brother Saddam' pictures back up in Baghdad, and leave a fruit basket with a letter of apology.
Internal affairs inside Iraq is non of your bussiness. You may not like this and it somewhat sucks to thing of it in such a synical way. But that is the way it is. Start reading if you read about every fucking tractat and agreement from 1900 you will get the picture. As long as a country dont't attack you or allies or the UN decides to move him is it not the job of USA to remove him.
Now you are pissed that the CIA and our president moved based on information that wasn't 100% complete.
Please, the information was pure BS, and everyone knew it including the President, if you still belive in the lie about the Niger stuff you nedd a reality check.
You and your ilk have offered nothing but criticism. No solutions. Just pissing and moaning. You have built your platform on the hopes that the United States will fail in its endeavours. That is disgusting.
Does the phrase "continued weapons inspection" mean anything to you?
If the wepon inspections had continued for 4-6 months one could have been pretty shure about:
a. No WMD, leave Iraq alone.
b. WMD, UN invation.
c. No cooperation/failure to show information-> UN invation.
I mean really, why should we give a damn. It's still blatant speculation, just like the speculation that this would be "another Vietname" and "a quagmire". People that think just like you have been wrong over and over again, so many times, but you still get up and scream this same bullshit at the top of your lungs. That's what people should be giving a damn about.
Okay maybe the Vietnam analogy is a bit overreaction, its along way to 36000 deaths.
But the problem is still real though. If the attacks on US troops in Iraq continues at the same rate (average 0.75 soldier killed pr. day), 1365 soldiers will die in the possible 5 year period.
The fact is, the United States had moral, legal, and political justification for removing Saddam Hussein.
Moral: IMHO, no.
legal: No way, you did NOT have the right or any legal basis behind the invation.
political: What do you mean, the fact that the US government authorized the attack? So what. That still don't give you the right to invade Iraq.
The world is a safer place for both Americans and Iraqis today than it was a few months ago, and it cost fewer lives than anyone estimated.
You are right about the latter. The war was a succsess. But Saddam had not been a treat against Americans since 1994:
-They did not possess WMD capable of getting to USA, and did not had the intensions to attack USA.
-There has been no evidence on connections between SAddam/Iraq and al-Qaeda.
A people who have experienced oppression you will NEVER comprehend are now free. I'll never forget the images of those Iraqis beating that Saddam statue with the shoes off of their feet.
True. But you _still_ had no right to invade their country anymore than Mexico has the right to invade USA.
So please; provide me with some clues about why you have the right to invade a country...
And don't give me that "he is evil"/"we don't like him" crap. Many countries in this world hate eachother, but theu still don't invade eachother on the basis of that.
If you trully bellive that the USA have the right to invade any country at any time you should seriously think about leaving the UN.
Ever stop to think that the index probably measures things that are biased toward socialist welfare?
Well, of course some of the indicators are slighly biased towards socialist welfare states.
The index measures:
-Life expectancy.
-Adult litteracy rate.
-Combined tertiary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment ratio.(not shure about what this really consist of..)
-GPD per capita.
-Eduaction.
How bad is it really for acountry to have a high life exppectancy or a high eduaction level?
Well of course this index don't measure important issues such as liberty from government and imposed tax level. So one can argue that the index is somewhat biased towards values or areas that social welfare states have choosen to care about. However I'm not shure about whether that is a bad thing.
But the index also showes that the economy in the top social welfare states (based on GPD) is only slighly behind the US. So rejecting a social welfare state modell based on fears about the economy is a flawed argument.
Abourt the misundarstanding(s); you are prob. right, I need to sleep.
They way you mentions "a socialist welfare state" and puts it up against " imperialist invasion of countries" i get the feeling that you are not very happy about it...
But did you know that when UN classifies countries based and ranks them in their Human Development Index what you propably consider socialist welfare states(as a bad thing) these socialist welfare states top the list?
1.Norway, socialist welfare state
2.Iceland, socialist welfare state
3.Sweden, socialist welfare state
4.Australia,
5.the Netherlands, somewhat socialist welfare 6.state
7.Belgium, socialist welfare state
8.the United States,
9.Canada, somewhat socialist welfare state
10.Japan,
11.Switzerland, socialist welfare state
12.Denmark, socialist welfare state
13.Ireland,
14.the United Kingdom,
15.Finland, socialist welfare state
16.Luxembourg,
17.Austria,
18.France,
19.Germany,
20.Spain and
20.New Zealand
Those I have marked socialist welfare states is those states I consider to be closer to a typical socilist welfare state modell than the United States way of "welfare state". There are of course difrences between them and different "degrees of socialist welfare states".
So please: Don't compare "socialist welfare states " to a foregin policy of "imperialist invasion of countries"
Why do people continue to vote for republicans and democrats anyway?
Because your country addappted a political system that in reality only promotes a two party system.
"Could this be a sign that a serious contender for President (tied for first for the nomination in the latest polls) has his head screwed on right about copyright law?"
From the comment-section on LL's blog:
Good heavens. Dare I interpret Governor Dean's guest blogging on Prof. Lessig's site as a sign that he supports copyright reform? ...
But, good lord, if he's actually in substantial agreement with Dr. Lessig on the issue, it's like a dream come true....posted by Evan
LL responds:
Good point, and I should have made this clear: Dean's guest blogging says nothing about Dean's views about the issues I've been pushing here. I've never discussed these issues with any member of the Dean campaign. And as we don't (yet) determine elections, I'm not even sure that Dean has worked these issues out himself.
So please don't read anything into this more than the obvious: This is yet another way in which the Dean campaign has understood something about the net.... posted by Lessig
It's a win-win deal. LL gets someone to blog while on vactation, Dean reach out to a couple of thousand potentional voters. But interesting anyway. Looking forward to reading this blog.
Do what you will but believing that buy purchasing the machine, you're hurting the company - you are incorrect.
I don't belive that my purchase of the unit they are selling below necessarily cause economichal damage on them.
My comment about the economic aspect in the situation was about the whole console market. It's alomst impossible to earn money unless you've got ecomics of scale and sell shitloads of games.
A upstart company like this just won't succede.
But if the hardware in the box is good and I can run Linux on it i'll probably buy it.
Voting with the wallet is a good thing, but I prefer to vote with my brain. If they are going to sell this below production cost*(like XBox) at a price I find reasonable, I'll but it.
It these people really are so stupid that they tink that the current way of selling consoles is a good business model, well, good luck..
If somene breaks the crypto and DRM in a way that makes it possible to run Linux, well guess what; I'll say fuck their crypto and DRM scheme: I'm running Linux on *my* box.
*Maybe not, sice they are a uppstart company with less cash to burn off.
A "potential terrorist target"? Hell, why not label every single building in London? Somehow I don't think you had sharp well-defined criteria of what makes something a potential target.
Suicide bombers in Israel like to blow up shops, cafes and bus stops. Chechen separatists in Moscow blew up the entrance line to an open-air rock concert. Etc., etc.
To give a trivial example, why did you include military barracks as potential targets? They don't look all that appealing to terrorists -- high security to start with, plus blowing up civilians is better for terror purposes. (note: I am speaking about military barracks in home countries. Abroad, they are a frequent target -- see bombing of US compounds in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia).
AFAI Understand he was makink a list of possible Al-Qaeda targets.
The strategy of A-Q is to attack (almost) only high profile targets. This means that military barracks or a public school in the suburbs of London is not big enough.
Some high profile targets in London:
-Parliament/Big Ben.
-DS 10.
-City/LSE.
-Buckingham Palace/Windsor/Tower.
-Bridges.
-Airports and planes.
-MI5 and MI6; that new and shiny building.
-US Embassy.
-Large companies; BA, Vodaphone, etc..
-The tube.
-Large football stadiums.
From a microsoft standpoint, that is the last thing they want.
Locking down hardware especially motherboards by adding "Microsoft solutions" ment to provide features that makes it harder for people to switch to Open Source would have been an excellent solutions to save their bussiness.
Anh know I have an idea of what Microsoft can use their $46 billion on.
1.Buy a large chipset maker (VIA) or motherboard maker (Gigabyte or Asus). Or the complete/. acquisition nightmare; AMD.
2. Develop and add extra Microsoft Only (TM) features. Like:
-Extra monitoring for admins.
-Security layer like NGSCB aka Palladium.
-Virus scanning.
-Anti-spam chip.
-Isolation or reboot of broken components.
3. Lock out GNU/Linux and BSD
4.?
5. Insane profit margins.
(Hey, Bill; If you ever use this idea I will claim my 10%)
Yeah, how uncomfortable(1) that the police managed to catch the scumbag guilty(2) of murdering the young girl to which you refer..
So you woudl actually prefer that the scumbag was still on the lose, right?(3)
Nice argumentation technique you've got there.
1. Implying that the grandposter is meaning that he would have felt better if the policed had failed.
2. Yeah since the police arrested a guy he must be guilty, right?...
3. Uh that must have hurt. Again; implying that the the poster would have been better off if the police had failed.
You sir, are a moron. Or maybe you are just trolling.
There's no reason DNA profiling couldn't be used to track down criminals and give them hugs and cookies if that's the way you want to go.
I guess you are right, strictly teorethical speakink.
But a society (USA) willling to trade in privacy for some sence of security is less likely to approach the problem gently.
If someone at the first place manage to implement a system for DNA profiling; then its highly unlikely that the same socitety that granted them this "oppurtunity" to catch criminals is willing to treat criminals in a way that actually reduces crime.
When the system is in place it is much easier to justify actually using it for purposes beyond those originaly intended.
As grandposter says it:
The big question will be (and it is almost too late to answer this) whether society is willing to pay the price for this security. I suspect the answer is "YES" for most people except theoretical libertarians. I think most people are wrong on this.
I think that the US track record for criminal/justice-politics has shown that people in US wont exactly start riots in the streets becaus of a central DNA profiling system with a nice and shiny database of profiles.
Yeah, I know this was meant as a joke but you made me think.
The other day HP introduced their new DeskJet printers. Their prices start on something that would have been almost unbelievable a few years ago; *$39*. Isolated that's just freaking cheap for a printer capable of printing medium quality photos.
However the only reason they go so low in pricing is because they have managed to trick the public into almost exclusively buying HP-ink. Ink is a substance that's *pretty* generic. And still people still buy HP cartridges even if they could get ink elsewhere at 1/3 of the HP price-tag. That's beyond me.
AFAIK these printers don't contain chips that makes it impossible to use generic ink or third party cartridges.
I guess that the price on HP-ink feels right to many consumers as long as they are still willing to pay the price.
And BTW about the Champagne; the price on this former exclusive goods has been falling steadily after the Y2K buzz about the world running out of it. Basically the price curve on some brands like Dom Perignon looks like a stock chart for a dot-com.
"Itâ(TM)s no secret. To win at business, you must perform better than your competition. Better. Stronger. Faster. You get the picture. In Managing IT as an Investment: Partnering for Success, Ken Moskowitz and Harris Kern explore how changing the way you think about IT can help you develop solutions that exceed your strategic goals. To achieve the highest levels of profitability, the authors say, IT organizations must be well-tuned and in alignment with the goals of the enterprise to which they belong."
Slashdot: Mission critical best of breed News for nerds, Total Quality Managemented synergizing stuff that matters.
I don't know how much of your future bandwith requirements..., and I doubt someone else do that than you...
How much will be web-content? Files? Ftp? Small or large files? What about your customers? Are the "tech savy"? US-only? Old? Young?
Maybe there are other distribution-modells that are better for you than the tradidional client-server approach?
Some suggestions:
1.I heard about a game company that saved *thousands* of dollars each month when they actively started to supply game magazines with demos and paches so they could include them on their CD's. (+extra addvertising)
2.How about getting a deal with a similar company that about sharing bandwith? You create a ftp-mirror for them and vica-versa.
3.Maybe if you are distributing large files (25MB+)to many users BitTorrent could help you.
Just because you are a member of a group does not mean you always have to agree with the majority.
>>I know. I'm an American.
Well, since the people that voted for the current president probably don't consist of more than 30% of the population(above 18) you are probably part of the majority.
But that is only because the US political system is fucked up when it comes to representing the voters opinion; not because your political views neccesary are representant for the majority.
What is to keep them from going out and writing viruses, unleashing them upon the Internet and generally causing lots of trouble after learning how to "protect" systems.
The same thing that keeps 18-20 years old men fresh out of the military from creating havoc with a weapon: Ethics.
Most modern civilised societies today train *thousands* of young men to kill, wound, stab and inflict damage on others. Despite this, rarely does it happen that these people use their skills after-hours in an inappropriate way. Of course there are exceptions, for example people with mental illness etc.
Personally, I have a fully automatic rifle with XXX numbers of shoots stored in my home provided to me by the government. I could easily create a mess with this weapon, or with a shotgun or a pistol I own privately. Despite this I don't.
As long as the individuals/persons that are taught these skills are enough mature and they are taught ethics and the difference between right and wrong I don't se the problem.
After all: Deep inside, most people are good.
It's better that they acquire these skills in a way that gives someone the possibility to correct bad behaviour right then. And besides that it gives them something they can put on their CV and use to get a white-hat job.
This is a clear example of a case where the positive effects out-weights the negative.
Obviously, standards only emerge when a practice has been agreed upon.
Well, not necessarily. Sometimes, one player in a market can be powerfull enough to create their own "standard" and then makes it everyones elses standard. Example IBM PC or MS IExplorer for rendering webpages.
Further innovation leads to a development of a new standard.
Again, not neccesarily. Broad and simple standards like can last quite a while. For example in technology (after all this is slashdot); TCP/IP.
I'm not ruling out that it one day might change or somwhat evolve into something better or larger standard (TCPv2/IPv6) but because of it's importance the standard becomes de facto "the only way of possible soultion".
For example; the metric system an established and choosen standard im most of the civilised world has become almost impossible to change. And because of market acceptance no one *wants* to change from the standard into something new unless someone manage to create something far better then the existing standard.
The Economist had an article about the 25 years of succses of Ethernet in their latest so called newspaper.
They list 3 reasons why Ethernet succeeded:
-Simplicity.
-Open standard, as opposed to other competing standars.
-Decentralisation.
The later is probanly specific to Ethernet as a network standard, but the two other are probably pretty generic success factors for standars.
Slashdot Mirror
If the wepon inspections had continued for 4-6 months one could have been pretty shure about: a. No WMD, leave Iraq alone.
b. WMD, UN invation.
c. No cooperation/failure to show information-> UN invation.
Okay maybe the Vietnam analogy is a bit overreaction, its along way to 36000 deaths.
But the problem is still real though. If the attacks on US troops in Iraq continues at the same rate (average 0.75 soldier killed pr. day), 1365 soldiers will die in the possible 5 year period. Moral: IMHO, no.
legal: No way, you did NOT have the right or any legal basis behind the invation.
political: What do you mean, the fact that the US government authorized the attack? So what. That still don't give you the right to invade Iraq. You are right about the latter. The war was a succsess. But Saddam had not been a treat against Americans since 1994:
-They did not possess WMD capable of getting to USA, and did not had the intensions to attack USA.
-There has been no evidence on connections between SAddam/Iraq and al-Qaeda. True. But you _still_ had no right to invade their country anymore than Mexico has the right to invade USA.
So please; provide me with some clues about why you have the right to invade a country...
And don't give me that "he is evil"/"we don't like him" crap. Many countries in this world hate eachother, but theu still don't invade eachother on the basis of that.
If you trully bellive that the USA have the right to invade any country at any time you should seriously think about leaving the UN.
The index measures:
-Life expectancy.
-Adult litteracy rate.
-Combined tertiary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment ratio.(not shure about what this really consist of..)
-GPD per capita.
-Eduaction.
How bad is it really for acountry to have a high life exppectancy or a high eduaction level?
Well of course this index don't measure important issues such as liberty from government and imposed tax level. So one can argue that the index is somewhat biased towards values or areas that social welfare states have choosen to care about. However I'm not shure about whether that is a bad thing.
But the index also showes that the economy in the top social welfare states (based on GPD) is only slighly behind the US. So rejecting a social welfare state modell based on fears about the economy is a flawed argument.
Abourt the misundarstanding(s); you are prob. right, I need to sleep.
They way you mentions "a socialist welfare state" and puts it up against " imperialist invasion of countries" i get the feeling that you are not very happy about it...
But did you know that when UN classifies countries based and ranks them in their Human Development Index what you propably consider socialist welfare states(as a bad thing) these socialist welfare states top the list?
1.Norway, socialist welfare state
2.Iceland, socialist welfare state
3.Sweden, socialist welfare state
4.Australia,
5.the Netherlands, somewhat socialist welfare 6.state
7.Belgium, socialist welfare state
8.the United States,
9.Canada, somewhat socialist welfare state
10.Japan,
11.Switzerland, socialist welfare state
12.Denmark, socialist welfare state
13.Ireland,
14.the United Kingdom,
15.Finland, socialist welfare state
16.Luxembourg,
17.Austria,
18.France,
19.Germany,
20.Spain and
20.New Zealand
Those I have marked socialist welfare states is those states I consider to be closer to a typical socilist welfare state modell than the United States way of "welfare state". There are of course difrences between them and different "degrees of socialist welfare states".
So please: Don't compare "socialist welfare states " to a foregin policy of "imperialist invasion of countries"
Because your country addappted a political system that in reality only promotes a two party system.From the comment-section on LL's blog:
LL responds:
It's a win-win deal. LL gets someone to blog while on vactation, Dean reach out to a couple of thousand potentional voters. But interesting anyway. Looking forward to reading this blog.
My comment about the economic aspect in the situation was about the whole console market. It's alomst impossible to earn money unless you've got ecomics of scale and sell shitloads of games.
A upstart company like this just won't succede.
But if the hardware in the box is good and I can run Linux on it i'll probably buy it.
I'm not going to buy it merly to inflict economical damages on them because of their business modell etc.
My point was that; If I want this box, and the price is right(for me and my wallet) I will buy it and run Linux whether they like it or not.
It these people really are so stupid that they tink that the current way of selling consoles is a good business model, well, good luck..
If somene breaks the crypto and DRM in a way that makes it possible to run Linux, well guess what; I'll say fuck their crypto and DRM scheme:
I'm running Linux on *my* box.
*Maybe not, sice they are a uppstart company with less cash to burn off.
AFAI Understand he was makink a list of possible Al-Qaeda targets.
The strategy of A-Q is to attack (almost) only high profile targets. This means that military barracks or a public school in the suburbs of London is not big enough.
Some high profile targets in London: -Parliament/Big Ben.
-DS 10.
-City/LSE.
-Buckingham Palace/Windsor/Tower.
-Bridges.
-Airports and planes.
-MI5 and MI6; that new and shiny building.
-US Embassy.
-Large companies; BA, Vodaphone, etc..
-The tube.
-Large football stadiums.
Diclaimer: I'm not OBL etc.
Short one, but not short enough to take the 1st prize.
The Build Your Own Bar Stool Racer story had a shorter topic.
The fact that I remember this is clearly a sign of way too many hours on this site.
Locking down hardware especially motherboards by adding "Microsoft solutions" ment to provide features that makes it harder for people to switch to Open Source would have been an excellent solutions to save their bussiness.
Anh know I have an idea of what Microsoft can use their $46 billion on. /. acquisition nightmare; AMD.
1.Buy a large chipset maker (VIA) or motherboard maker (Gigabyte or Asus). Or the complete
2. Develop and add extra Microsoft Only (TM) features. Like:
-Extra monitoring for admins.
-Security layer like NGSCB aka Palladium.
-Virus scanning.
-Anti-spam chip.
-Isolation or reboot of broken components.
3. Lock out GNU/Linux and BSD
4.?
5. Insane profit margins.
(Hey, Bill; If you ever use this idea I will claim my 10%)
1. Implying that the grandposter is meaning that he would have felt better if the policed had failed.
2. Yeah since the police arrested a guy he must be guilty, right?...
3. Uh that must have hurt. Again; implying that the the poster would have been better off if the police had failed.
You sir, are a moron. Or maybe you are just trolling.
But a society (USA) willling to trade in privacy for some sence of security is less likely to approach the problem gently.
If someone at the first place manage to implement a system for DNA profiling; then its highly unlikely that the same socitety that granted them this "oppurtunity" to catch criminals is willing to treat criminals in a way that actually reduces crime.
When the system is in place it is much easier to justify actually using it for purposes beyond those originaly intended.
As grandposter says it:
I think that the US track record for criminal/justice-politics has shown that people in US wont exactly start riots in the streets becaus of a central DNA profiling system with a nice and shiny database of profiles.Kudos to heironymouscoward for a nice post.
I they wanted they could *easily* have got one.
How? (you might ask)
If someone from NASA had sent an email to marketing@amd.com; basically asking*:
Howdy!
I work at NASA and do some testing of some new hardware, among it the new G5 Powermac.
Could i borrow a Opteron for some testing?
AMD would have sent it on the day.
*Or a phonecall to any of these numbers.
Disclaimer: I don't work for AMD or any other related companies
This insight into the life off OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN came from intelligent comments on Slashdot!!!
Well based on the Pfizer stock it looks like, to some, Viagra is worth much much more than 35 times it weight in gold...
The other day HP introduced their new DeskJet printers. Their prices start on something that would have been almost unbelievable a few years ago; *$39*. Isolated that's just freaking cheap for a printer capable of printing medium quality photos.
However the only reason they go so low in pricing is because they have managed to trick the public into almost exclusively buying HP-ink. Ink is a substance that's *pretty* generic. And still people still buy HP cartridges even if they could get ink elsewhere at 1/3 of the HP price-tag. That's beyond me.
AFAIK these printers don't contain chips that makes it impossible to use generic ink or third party cartridges.
I guess that the price on HP-ink feels right to many consumers as long as they are still willing to pay the price.
And BTW about the Champagne; the price on this former exclusive goods has been falling steadily after the Y2K buzz about the world running out of it. Basically the price curve on some brands like Dom Perignon looks like a stock chart for a dot-com.
Slashdot: Mission critical best of breed News for nerds, Total Quality Managemented synergizing stuff that matters.
How much will be web-content? Files? Ftp? Small or large files? What about your customers? Are the "tech savy"? US-only? Old? Young?
Maybe there are other distribution-modells that are better for you than the tradidional client-server approach?
Some suggestions:
1.I heard about a game company that saved *thousands* of dollars each month when they actively started to supply game magazines with demos and paches so they could include them on their CD's. (+extra addvertising)
2.How about getting a deal with a similar company that about sharing bandwith? You create a ftp-mirror for them and vica-versa.
3.Maybe if you are distributing large files (25MB+)to many users BitTorrent could help you.
But that is only because the US political system is fucked up when it comes to representing the voters opinion; not because your political views neccesary are representant for the majority.
Most modern civilised societies today train *thousands* of young men to kill, wound, stab and inflict damage on others. Despite this, rarely does it happen that these people use their skills after-hours in an inappropriate way. Of course there are exceptions, for example people with mental illness etc.
Personally, I have a fully automatic rifle with XXX numbers of shoots stored in my home provided to me by the government. I could easily create a mess with this weapon, or with a shotgun or a pistol I own privately. Despite this I don't.
As long as the individuals/persons that are taught these skills are enough mature and they are taught ethics and the difference between right and wrong I don't se the problem.
After all: Deep inside, most people are good.
It's better that they acquire these skills in a way that gives someone the possibility to correct bad behaviour right then. And besides that it gives them something they can put on their CV and use to get a white-hat job.
This is a clear example of a case where the positive effects out-weights the negative.
Strange they haven't pulled it off the web.
Disclaimer:
This post is of course provided as "AS IS". And I do NOT encourage any copyright enfringement.
You deserve a flogbort of cheese for that invention.
May the new flogbort-standard of weight rule the world!
I'm not ruling out that it one day might change or somwhat evolve into something better or larger standard (TCPv2/IPv6) but because of it's importance the standard becomes de facto "the only way of possible soultion".
For example; the metric system an established and choosen standard im most of the civilised world has become almost impossible to change. And because of market acceptance no one *wants* to change from the standard into something new unless someone manage to create something far better then the existing standard.
The Economist had an article about the 25 years of succses of Ethernet in their latest so called newspaper.
They list 3 reasons why Ethernet succeeded:
-Simplicity.
-Open standard, as opposed to other competing standars.
-Decentralisation.
The later is probanly specific to Ethernet as a network standard, but the two other are probably pretty generic success factors for standars.