"Was that so hard? Definately better, though, to teach grandma how to get her syntax exactly right at the command prompt. That's much better."
Or maybe just show her how to use synaptic (a nice graphical front end for apt). Then her applications will be updated as well - and she will be able to search for and install new applications if she pleases.
"The problem is US patent laws that allows anybody who wants a patent to get it. I think there are current US patents on both the wheel and on fire. In the US patent office is a registration only office. In Europe, you need to convince them you have a real invention."
Really, you obviously haven't seen some of the trivial software patents that already exist in the EU (even though they are in principle not allowed). You can take a look here for some examples:
http://ole.tange.dk/swpat/
So the EU patent office both allows software patents (against the law) and does allow trivial patents. I don't think we have anything to teach the Americans.
At least in the Danish implementation of the EU copyright directive it is illegal to produce, import, spread, sell, lease out, advertise for or in a commercial setting own products or components that are subject to advertised as usable for circumventing technological protection measures, only have limited use besides circumvention of technological protection measures or is primarily produced to make it possible to circumvent technological protection measures.
The German implementation is probably similar. My question is: How can the German Library break the copy protection when it is illegal to produce tools to do it?
I think it is absolutely amazing that ordinary people will be able to experience space and zero gravity. But I also think that we need to look into the environmental aspects of this development.
If we will come to see daily flights of maybe hundreds of planes it might have a significant impact on the ozone layer and thus our health. It is therefore important to get an estimate of the impact on the ozone layer so that cleaner fuels and other measures can be taken to prevent this.
Here is a bit of background info on the ozone layer and the impact of the space shuttle and high flying aircraft and rockets on it:
"it's increasingly evident the OS wars are down to three - Microsoft Windows, Sun's Solaris, and Red Hat's Linux."
Well, I would say down to two. It is left as an exercise to reader to figure out which one should be left out. In addition one of the remaining OS's should have the vendor prefix removed.
"But I've been thinking lately -- is this going to change the Internet dramatically? How many web sites rely on advertising revenue, and won't get it anymore when everybody is filtering banners?"
Well, the remote control didn't kill advertising based TV (by allowing viewers to skip commercials) - but it has probably decreased the income from TV advertising somewhat. My guess is that we will see a similar pattern on the internet: The general growth of the internet and cheaper and better internet tools/connections/etc. will outweigh the negative economic consequences of a decline in advertising income.
My own impression is also that more and more sites are trying to implement benefits to paying members. I guess they are trying to find alternatives to ad-based revenue.
"I'm a computer geek, not physical sciences. I just assumed about water because I lost a couple ice cube trays due to expanding water (and my idiocy in placing things on top of them)."
Well, I'm a physical oceanographer - so water puts butter on my bread:-)
Maybe you mean that water expands when it freezes - that is absolutely true. But the density of (sea) water also changes with temperature and salinity (salt content). This is what the plot I linked to showed (although the author forgot to mention that the colour denotes density of the water in kg/m3 with red is heavier, blue is lighter water).
Actually that is not true - it depends on the salinity and temperature of the water in question. For low temperatures and salinities you are right but in most of the world ocean this is not the case. You can look at the first figure on this page to verify that:
http://richardson.dl.stevens-tech.edu/FIPSE/Comp Hy dro/density.html
"For the human rights ussue, yes we don't provide rights for people who like to divide our country (I don't know if any other country provides this or not), but there are no problems other than that."
Well, I guess all other European countries allow people to work for independence by peaceful means.
You say that there are no other problems. That is not entirely correct. Please have a look at the Human Rights Watch web page:
http://hrw.org/doc/?t=europe&c=turkey
These are the main problems:
"In an assessment of Turkey's progress in meeting human rights benchmarks, Human Rights Watch said today that press freedom, freedom of religion and respect for minorities in the country remain far from perfect, but show continued improvement. The Turkish government needs to take steps to eradicate torture in police stations and facilitate the return of hundreds of thousands of Kurds displaced in the 1990s."
I think Turkey has made great progress in the last couple of decades but it still lacks in some areas. My main concern about Turkey becoming a member of the EU is more about the motivation for all these reforms. Is Turkey doing these reforms to satisfy the EU or is there a popular movement in Turkey for expanding civil liberties. Unfortunately my impression is the former of the two - but I might be wrong?
...and what about the Falkland War where british shipborne missiles did'nt hit their targets because they had forgotten that they were in the southern hemisphere where the Coriolis force deflects moving objects to the left instead of right.
Maybe it would be an idea to mark articles in the Wikipedia with an "Expert reviewed" flag. The wikipedia team could encourage trusted people with academic or other credentials to review articles - these articles could then be "locked" for further editing except if approved by an editor.
I know that this idea need some work but it might be a starting point for discussion (if the wikipedia team has not considered it already).
"If the employees are treated poorly they should quit. That's how capitalism works, if all the good employees quit, or start demanding more and more money to make up for the poor working environment then EA will see that it's policies are not best for the bottom line and they will change."
Maybe you don't understand that EA is trying to "cheat" the market forces by lying about what they expect from their employees (you can see my previous post for details). If you define capitalism by the absence of regulation, then maybe this is capitalism. If that is your definition of capitalism, then I would argue that this is not a system which ensures optimal economic growth.
We all know that capitalism has a number of flaws that need to be corrected by legislation (for example anti-trust laws). I consider it a flaw in the system when employees are not well informed about the expectations in their work - this can be corrected through legislation (just like it is not legal to lie about products that we buy).
An effective market economy relies on well informed citizens and corporations, whether this is information about products or jobs.
And I would add that the main point in the article is not the long hours but the fact that EA deceives their employees into believing that it is a temporary measure. If they had stated their expectations during the job interview then everything would have been fine.
In my view they are taking advantage of an information asymmetry (which they create themselves) to pressure wages (compared to the amount of work). That is not optimal in a market economy - and leaves a lot of people with a suboptimal choice (they would have taken another job if they knew about it).
I guess the market forces can be restored in several ways. 1) More articles like this, or 2) Legislation requiring employers to specify the working conditions in a contract prior to employment (that is the solution we have in Denmark - and it works fine).
"Does this mean that I've been missing a huge amount of important information until now?"
Maybe the steep increase is due to all the new file formats they are indexing now. That might be useful for some people (although I sometimes find it kind of annoying that a search returns MS-Word documents).
The GDP per capita was $5,000 in China (2003). This does not mean that all of China is poor but it does mean that in general China is not as rich as western countries. I would therefore contend the image that the author of the article paints of a throughout modern chinese society. In fact large parts of China are poor and underdeveloped.
Of course this statement might not be true in 10 years time or so due to the quick rate of economic growth in China - and of course this does not mean that the chinese are not doing stuff that we can learn from. But it does mean that the impression conveyed by the author of the article is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.
"I have a big Atlas of the world put out by National Geographic which shows the known topography of the world's oceans. There is an under sea structure labelled the "Amazon Cone" which shows the continuation of the river bed outward far beyond the continental shelf."
Sorry I did'nt make myself clear - I do believe that there Amazon Cone exists:-)
The reference I requested was that a warmer climate caused the lowering of the sea level. In fact I think that the lowering of the sea level in the Amazon Cone was due to lower temperatures. During the last glacial maximum the sea level dropped 120-130 meters (globally).
"The river bed of the Amazon continues on the present continental shelf of South America out for almost 200 miles. All of that is under water now, but at one time, the river flowed there. This is because the so much of the water was in the warm atmosphere and above it."
Would you care to back that up by a reference to a popular or scientific article. To be frank I don't believe it.
"Water vapor is lighter than air; that is why clouds float upwards."
Just to nitpick. This is not true. Clouds are formed by vertical advection of air (you can see what can cause this advection in the link below). When the air rises the temperature drops due to the lower pressure at higher altitudes (just like a spray can gets cold when release the compressed gas inside it out to 1 atmosphere of pressure). The temperature drop then causes the dew point (the amount of water a given air parcel can contain) to drop - and therefore the air at one point might get (super-)saturated.
"As the air gets warmer the upper atmosphere also gets warmer and so condensation level is much higher up where there is little or no dust to condense raindrops on."
Yes, except that dust would also be present there then due to the advective processes I just referenced.
"This means the upper atmosphere could be a layer of almost pure supersaturated water vapor. There is very little water in the upper atmosphere today,..."
Even if this were true you should realise that the temperature of the upper troposphere would be _very_ low even in a drastically warmer climate. If you take a look at the figure I referenced in an earlier post you will note that this means that the water vapour holding capacity of the upper troposphere or lower stratosphere will be negligble.
"All geologic processes take a long time and extrapolating from our miniscule observation time perspective is an uncertain business."
OK, we are talking about different things. I am talking about human induced warming - which is estimated to be around 2.8 degC over the next century. You are talking about a temperature increase 5-10 times that.
You can see that a temperature increase in the atmosphere of 10 degC results in roughly a doubling of the water holding capacity of the atmosphere. The upper limit of the IPCC estimates of the global mean atmospheric temperature change is 5.8 degC.
Furthermore most of the atmosphere is undersaturated (that is the relative humidity is less than 100%). In a future warmer climate the relative humidity is expected to drop further.
This means that we will probably see less than a doubling of the water vapour content if the temperature rose 10 degC. An upper estimate would thus be 2.8 cm sea level drop due to more moist in the atmosphere. This is neglible in comparison with the expected total sea level change
And yes, I am a climate scientist (although a physical oceanographer - but I had a substantial portion of meteorology during my education).
"But you who took a junior high school physics course forgot that warm air can hold HUGE quantities of water. All and more of the water from the ice would be suspended in a warm atmosphere."
Oh, gee - it seems like you have found an important factor for predicting the sea level rise due to rising temperatures. I wonder why the International Panel Climate Change has not included that effect as one of the major effects on sea level change - maybe all them scientists are dum?
The truth is that the atmosphere on average holds 2.9 cm of water. In a warmer climate that might be somewhat larger - but it is not of the same magnitude as for example the thermal expansion of the oceans due to heating (which is already observed with very high accuracy - google for Levitus and Science).
Do you have any evidence to back up your argument?
"Less power to the government = more power to the people = free people."
That is a gross oversimplification. From your statement it seems like it is only the government which limits the freedom of the people.
In fact one of the most important uses (in my opinion) of government power is to prevent a limitation in the freedom of people by restricting actions from other people and organisations that try to limit this freedom.
An example could be pollution. The government (through regulatory bodies) limits the freedom of people and industry to pollute my neighbourhood. That is a limitation in their freedom but it is done to protect our right to avoid pollution (breathing unpolluted air and so on).
My point is that your freedom to swing your arms in the air ends where my nose begins - and that it is the duty of our government to enforce the rules securing that (the rules are of course passed by the legislative body).
Re:This is not a government only thing
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
I stand corrected. I assumed that the grandparent poster's statement that there are some forms of press censorship in the UK was true (and would therefore affect the index).
A bit of googling revealed that this does not seem to be the case. There is a socalled "self-regulatory body" called the Press Complaints Commission which sets some standards for journalistic work (but it has no formal legal powers - we have a similar institution here in Denmark).
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Press+ Co mplaints+Commission
Sorry if I offended any Brits - maybe the Americans can learn something from UK anyways:-)
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"And the rest of the "civilized world"[1] _DOES NOT_ always have our freedoms. In the UK, the press can be censored."
And if you look at the press freedom index you will note that UK is 28th on the list while USA is 22nd. Maybe you should set your ambitions higher than that? For inspiration you can have a look at the countries higher up the list - like Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia or Switzerland.
If you are satisfied with the current freedom of press and hence lower quality of the coverage please feel free to be so.
As a Danish citizen I noticed a lowered quality of (parts of) the US press after September 11th and particularly during the run-up to the Iraq war (there seemed to be no room for doubt). From my point of view it was clear that the evidence for weapons of mass destruction were poor. My impression was that a discussion of the quality of the evidence was hardly allowed space in US media outlets. Is that also your impression in 20-20 hindsight?
In spite of this I supported the invasion of Iraq but based on other arguments than WMD, but that is a different story.
Slashdot Mirror
"Was that so hard? Definately better, though, to teach grandma how to get her syntax exactly right at the command prompt. That's much better."
Or maybe just show her how to use synaptic (a nice graphical front end for apt). Then her applications will be updated as well - and she will be able to search for and install new applications if she pleases.
"The problem is US patent laws that allows anybody who wants a patent to get it. I think there are current US patents on both the wheel and on fire. In the US patent office is a registration only office. In Europe, you need to convince them you have a real invention."
Really, you obviously haven't seen some of the trivial software patents that already exist in the EU (even though they are in principle not allowed). You can take a look here for some examples:
http://ole.tange.dk/swpat/
So the EU patent office both allows software patents (against the law) and does allow trivial patents. I don't think we have anything to teach the Americans.
At least in the Danish implementation of the EU copyright directive it is illegal to produce, import, spread, sell, lease out, advertise for or in a commercial setting own products or components that are subject to advertised as usable for circumventing technological protection measures, only have limited use besides circumvention of technological protection measures or is primarily produced to make it possible to circumvent technological protection measures.
The German implementation is probably similar. My question is: How can the German Library break the copy protection when it is illegal to produce tools to do it?
I think it is absolutely amazing that ordinary people will be able to experience space and zero gravity. But I also think that we need to look into the environmental aspects of this development.
e r2 000/01.html
If we will come to see daily flights of maybe hundreds of planes it might have a significant impact on the ozone layer and thus our health. It is therefore important to get an estimate of the impact on the ozone layer so that cleaner fuels and other measures can be taken to prevent this.
Here is a bit of background info on the ozone layer and the impact of the space shuttle and high flying aircraft and rockets on it:
http://www.aero.org/publications/crosslink/summ
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ozone-depletion/intro/
"it's increasingly evident the OS wars are down to three - Microsoft Windows, Sun's Solaris, and Red Hat's Linux."
Well, I would say down to two. It is left as an exercise to reader to figure out which one should be left out. In addition one of the remaining OS's should have the vendor prefix removed.
"But I've been thinking lately -- is this going to change the Internet dramatically? How many web sites rely on advertising revenue, and won't get it anymore when everybody is filtering banners?"
Well, the remote control didn't kill advertising based TV (by allowing viewers to skip commercials) - but it has probably decreased the income from TV advertising somewhat. My guess is that we will see a similar pattern on the internet: The general growth of the internet and cheaper and better internet tools/connections/etc. will outweigh the negative economic consequences of a decline in advertising income.
My own impression is also that more and more sites are trying to implement benefits to paying members. I guess they are trying to find alternatives to ad-based revenue.
Try this one:
http://gauret.free.fr/adshare/adshare.php
"I'm a computer geek, not physical sciences. I just assumed about water because I lost a couple ice cube trays due to expanding water (and my idiocy in placing things on top of them)."
Well, I'm a physical oceanographer - so water puts butter on my bread:-)
Maybe you mean that water expands when it freezes - that is absolutely true. But the density of (sea) water also changes with temperature and salinity (salt content). This is what the plot I linked to showed (although the author forgot to mention that the colour denotes density of the water in kg/m3 with red is heavier, blue is lighter water).
"Actually, water expands as it gets colder."
p Hy dro/density.html
Actually that is not true - it depends on the salinity and temperature of the water in question. For low temperatures and salinities you are right but in most of the world ocean this is not the case. You can look at the first figure on this page to verify that:
http://richardson.dl.stevens-tech.edu/FIPSE/Com
"For the human rights ussue, yes we don't provide rights for people who like to divide our country (I don't know if any other country provides this or not), but there are no problems other than that."
Well, I guess all other European countries allow people to work for independence by peaceful means.
You say that there are no other problems. That is not entirely correct. Please have a look at the Human Rights Watch web page:
http://hrw.org/doc/?t=europe&c=turkey
These are the main problems:
"In an assessment of Turkey's progress in meeting human rights benchmarks, Human Rights Watch said today that press freedom, freedom of religion and respect for minorities in the country remain far from perfect, but show continued improvement. The Turkish government needs to take steps to eradicate torture in police stations and facilitate the return of hundreds of thousands of Kurds displaced in the 1990s."
I think Turkey has made great progress in the last couple of decades but it still lacks in some areas. My main concern about Turkey becoming a member of the EU is more about the motivation for all these reforms. Is Turkey doing these reforms to satisfy the EU or is there a popular movement in Turkey for expanding civil liberties. Unfortunately my impression is the former of the two - but I might be wrong?
...and what about the Falkland War where british shipborne missiles did'nt hit their targets because they had forgotten that they were in the southern hemisphere where the Coriolis force deflects moving objects to the left instead of right.
So, are you living in Europe? We also have software patents. Here is an example of 20 software patents a web shop could potentially infringe:
http://www.mimesis.net/swpat/video.htm
Maybe it would be an idea to mark articles in the Wikipedia with an "Expert reviewed" flag. The wikipedia team could encourage trusted people with academic or other credentials to review articles - these articles could then be "locked" for further editing except if approved by an editor.
I know that this idea need some work but it might be a starting point for discussion (if the wikipedia team has not considered it already).
"If the employees are treated poorly they should quit. That's how capitalism works, if all the good employees quit, or start demanding more and more money to make up for the poor working environment then EA will see that it's policies are not best for the bottom line and they will change."
Maybe you don't understand that EA is trying to "cheat" the market forces by lying about what they expect from their employees (you can see my previous post for details). If you define capitalism by the absence of regulation, then maybe this is capitalism. If that is your definition of capitalism, then I would argue that this is not a system which ensures optimal economic growth.
We all know that capitalism has a number of flaws that need to be corrected by legislation (for example anti-trust laws). I consider it a flaw in the system when employees are not well informed about the expectations in their work - this can be corrected through legislation (just like it is not legal to lie about products that we buy).
An effective market economy relies on well informed citizens and corporations, whether this is information about products or jobs.
And I would add that the main point in the article is not the long hours but the fact that EA deceives their employees into believing that it is a temporary measure. If they had stated their expectations during the job interview then everything would have been fine.
In my view they are taking advantage of an information asymmetry (which they create themselves) to pressure wages (compared to the amount of work). That is not optimal in a market economy - and leaves a lot of people with a suboptimal choice (they would have taken another job if they knew about it).
I guess the market forces can be restored in several ways. 1) More articles like this, or 2) Legislation requiring employers to specify the working conditions in a contract prior to employment (that is the solution we have in Denmark - and it works fine).
"Does this mean that I've been missing a huge amount of important information until now?"
Maybe the steep increase is due to all the new file formats they are indexing now. That might be useful for some people (although I sometimes find it kind of annoying that a search returns MS-Word documents).
The GDP per capita was $5,000 in China (2003). This does not mean that all of China is poor but it does mean that in general China is not as rich as western countries. I would therefore contend the image that the author of the article paints of a throughout modern chinese society. In fact large parts of China are poor and underdeveloped.
Of course this statement might not be true in 10 years time or so due to the quick rate of economic growth in China - and of course this does not mean that the chinese are not doing stuff that we can learn from. But it does mean that the impression conveyed by the author of the article is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.
"I have a big Atlas of the world put out by National Geographic which shows the known topography of the world's oceans. There is an under sea structure labelled the "Amazon Cone" which shows the continuation of the river bed outward far beyond the continental shelf."
Sorry I did'nt make myself clear - I do believe that there Amazon Cone exists:-)
The reference I requested was that a warmer climate caused the lowering of the sea level. In fact I think that the lowering of the sea level in the Amazon Cone was due to lower temperatures. During the last glacial maximum the sea level dropped 120-130 meters (globally).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(prehistoric)
"The river bed of the Amazon continues on the present continental shelf of South America out for almost 200 miles. All of that is under water now, but at one time, the river flowed there. This is because the so much of the water was in the warm atmosphere and above it."
s .h tml
Would you care to back that up by a reference to a popular or scientific article. To be frank I don't believe it.
"Water vapor is lighter than air; that is why clouds float upwards."
Just to nitpick. This is not true. Clouds are formed by vertical advection of air (you can see what can cause this advection in the link below). When the air rises the temperature drops due to the lower pressure at higher altitudes (just like a spray can gets cold when release the compressed gas inside it out to 1 atmosphere of pressure). The temperature drop then causes the dew point (the amount of water a given air parcel can contain) to drop - and therefore the air at one point might get (super-)saturated.
http://www.rcn27.dial.pipex.com/cloudsrus/cloud
"As the air gets warmer the upper atmosphere also gets warmer and so condensation level is much higher up where there is little or no dust to condense raindrops on."
Yes, except that dust would also be present there then due to the advective processes I just referenced.
"This means the upper atmosphere could be a layer of almost pure supersaturated water vapor. There is very little water in the upper atmosphere today,..."
Even if this were true you should realise that the temperature of the upper troposphere would be _very_ low even in a drastically warmer climate. If you take a look at the figure I referenced in an earlier post you will note that this means that the water vapour holding capacity of the upper troposphere or lower stratosphere will be negligble.
"All geologic processes take a long time and extrapolating from our miniscule observation time perspective is an uncertain business."
OK, we are talking about different things. I am talking about human induced warming - which is estimated to be around 2.8 degC over the next century. You are talking about a temperature increase 5-10 times that.
"Don't run a certain Redmond OS, Perhaps it might be a good idea to use a *nix one."
Redmond OS in 2020, you must be kidding. We all know that Linux has achieved World Domination (tm) by 2015.
Yes, and if you plug in the numbers you will see that any heating of the atmosphere will result in neglible water uptake by the atmosphere on average.
g es /Image1.gif
9 0_ satellite_finds_warming.html
I just took a quick look at this figure:
http://www.tesag.jcu.edu.au/subjects/ge1400/Ima
You can see that a temperature increase in the atmosphere of 10 degC results in roughly a doubling of the water holding capacity of the atmosphere. The upper limit of the IPCC estimates of the global mean atmospheric temperature change is 5.8 degC.
Furthermore most of the atmosphere is undersaturated (that is the relative humidity is less than 100%). In a future warmer climate the relative humidity is expected to drop further.
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/mar/HQ_040
This means that we will probably see less than a doubling of the water vapour content if the temperature rose 10 degC. An upper estimate would thus be 2.8 cm sea level drop due to more moist in the atmosphere. This is neglible in comparison with the expected total sea level change
And yes, I am a climate scientist (although a physical oceanographer - but I had a substantial portion of meteorology during my education).
"But you who took a junior high school physics course forgot that warm air can hold HUGE quantities of water. All and more of the water from the ice would be suspended in a warm atmosphere."
Oh, gee - it seems like you have found an important factor for predicting the sea level rise due to rising temperatures. I wonder why the International Panel Climate Change has not included that effect as one of the major effects on sea level change - maybe all them scientists are dum?
The truth is that the atmosphere on average holds 2.9 cm of water. In a warmer climate that might be somewhat larger - but it is not of the same magnitude as for example the thermal expansion of the oceans due to heating (which is already observed with very high accuracy - google for Levitus and Science).
Do you have any evidence to back up your argument?
"Less power to the government = more power to the people = free people."
That is a gross oversimplification. From your statement it seems like it is only the government which limits the freedom of the people.
In fact one of the most important uses (in my opinion) of government power is to prevent a limitation in the freedom of people by restricting actions from other people and organisations that try to limit this freedom.
An example could be pollution. The government (through regulatory bodies) limits the freedom of people and industry to pollute my neighbourhood. That is a limitation in their freedom but it is done to protect our right to avoid pollution (breathing unpolluted air and so on).
My point is that your freedom to swing your arms in the air ends where my nose begins - and that it is the duty of our government to enforce the rules securing that (the rules are of course passed by the legislative body).
I stand corrected. I assumed that the grandparent poster's statement that there are some forms of press censorship in the UK was true (and would therefore affect the index).
+ Co mplaints+Commission
A bit of googling revealed that this does not seem to be the case. There is a socalled "self-regulatory body" called the Press Complaints Commission which sets some standards for journalistic work (but it has no formal legal powers - we have a similar institution here in Denmark).
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Press
Sorry if I offended any Brits - maybe the Americans can learn something from UK anyways:-)
"And the rest of the "civilized world"[1] _DOES NOT_ always have our freedoms. In the UK, the press can be censored."
And if you look at the press freedom index you will note that UK is 28th on the list while USA is 22nd. Maybe you should set your ambitions higher than that? For inspiration you can have a look at the countries higher up the list - like Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia or Switzerland.
If you are satisfied with the current freedom of press and hence lower quality of the coverage please feel free to be so.
As a Danish citizen I noticed a lowered quality of (parts of) the US press after September 11th and particularly during the run-up to the Iraq war (there seemed to be no room for doubt). From my point of view it was clear that the evidence for weapons of mass destruction were poor. My impression was that a discussion of the quality of the evidence was hardly allowed space in US media outlets. Is that also your impression in 20-20 hindsight?
In spite of this I supported the invasion of Iraq but based on other arguments than WMD, but that is a different story.