Go back and read about a half dozen UN resolution that expressly prohibited Iraq from possessing ANY Bio-Chem weapons OR the means to deliver such weapons.
Does this consitute a stockpile? No. Does it mean Saddam's regime was in violation of UN terms of cease-fire set in 1991? Yes.
While justifications and the events in Iraq can be debated.
Legally speaking, the war of 2003 was technically the resuming of hostilities from 1991, not a new conflict.
No am I not an lawyer in international law....yet...I'm just merely a Law School student.
Similar thing happened to me about the time I turned 22 or so, milk and i just didn't get along. Now so long as I stick to small amounts, if I have cream with my coffee and milk on cereal in the morning, no cheese at lunch or dinner.
Of all dairy products, cheese is the worst followed by ice cream. Just a little cheese and my stomach goes nuts.
Of course I've had to get used to carrying a couple lactiad pills with me, but its something else to remember to take them before I start eating dairy. Fortunately the lactase pills do help a lot, especially at late night work sessions when pizza is ordered.
I had an English Professor once remark that there is no longer any orginial work in writing today. It is all been done before. He is really correct. Every story can be broken down in to one of about seven types. Sure, there may be plot twists, well written dialog and good story telling, but someone else as written the same basic story with the same basic plot twists before. Just because the story's been told before doesn't mean there still aren't good new books out there.
Video Games I think have reached the same state. I like 2 types of games: Air/Space combat sims and FPS tactical sims (like Ghost Recon 1, the first 2 Rainbow Six games on PC).
I've played Halo and Halo 2, and with friends on a friday night with some booze, it can be a lot of fun. But is that the game or the people playing it?
I haven't seen any Space shooters from major developers since FreeSpace 2, great game that didn't sell all that well. However with the semi-opensourced FS2 code, there have been some really cool mods.
Ghost Recon 2/Rainbow6 - 3 I hated on the consoles. They seemed much more arcadish shoot'em up and less tactical stategy.
A few weeks ago I thought about creating a MMOG FPS set in World War I. I looked at several game engines, and found Military Forces at sourceforge.net.
I finally did buy a new PC game (first one in 3 years) the other day: Falcon 4.0 Allied Force. I purchased Falcon 4 six months after it was released for $15. WHy? All the features never worked. Well some in the mod community were able to get Atari to actually release a new version of the game that all features that were supposed to work actually did work.
This doesn't make sense to me. I've used solaris, AIX, Windows 9x/NT4/2000/XPpro, various Linux distros, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and OS 10.1/.2/.3/.4. Linux pissed me off at first. (actually Linux still pisses me off for many reasons) If I had only used Linux for a day, I would be bitching at having a lost day. In fact I lost many days trying to get hardware and systems to work together(granted this was in the days of Slackware 2) (For the record I prefer BSD for many reasons. Including the ultimate license in Free-Beer and Free-Speech)
My first mac was an iBook. I was leaving the country for an extended period and I needed a laptop that would just work for Office apps, email, and web browsing. I had to get used to a one button mouse when using the touch pad on the road, but if I was at home, I just plugged in my MS optical mouse and two buttons work fine. After about two weeks I got used to the one-button mouse.
I have a friend that is a sales rep for Coke and I am a fan of Pepsi products. He once said, "Doesn't matter. Drink coke for a week and you'll prefer coke. Drink Pepsi for a week and you'll prefer Pepsi". I think the same thing applies with any computer system. Give it a couple weeks and then see.
Why I like OSX is because all my Unix goodies I was used to under BSD, Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl, were all extremely easy to install, especially since I was able to find package installers that did all that work for me. I had to edit the Apache conf file to enable php, but no matter what system I've installed apache on I've had to edit the conf file at least once. All of my custom BSD apps took minor, if any, changes in code to compile on OSX as well.
I found the Dock extremely easy to use and the best part of OSX: Applications everyone else uses. I was able to buy MS Office (which was a charm to use on the Mac because it actually works), dreamweaver, Quickbooks pro, Quicken, Photoshop, illustrator, fireworks, Quark Xpress, Lightwave 3D, and a few Apple only applications like Final Cut Pro.
I also have to admit I hated Word for mac (v.x) for the first 3 months I used it. Powerpoint on the other hand is a different story. PowerPoint just seems to work better on the Mac.
Not only that but I have found OSX to be incredably stable. The system crashed to the point of restart 4 times in 3 years. Two of those times were while running OS 9 applications in the emulator (Quark). Most of the time, I just shut the lid and would open it and the system would spring back to life for weeks on end. I once had an uptime of over 100 days until my battery died on a long trans-atlantic flight.
It is for those above reasons that people have really fallen for the OS X platform. A number of engineering depts I know have purchased PowerMacs with OSX, especially after the intro of the g5 processors, to replace DEC, SUN, and SGI workstations. Those workstations often cost USD 20,000+ when they were orginally purchased. Suddely $8,000 for a maxed out machine with 8GB of Ram is a bargin for those people.
Saying I don't like _________ because I used it for one day and it was different isn't a good arguement. Its an argument, just not a good one.
Saying I don't like Linux because no two distros are exactly the same and compiling binary programs for every platform is time-consuming and expensive is a real pain in the ass, not to mention Linux geeks tend to customize installs further adding to hassles with emails like "this won't work on my custom hacked 2.6 Kernal with a mixture of Fedora/Slackware/and Debain I cobbled together and for those reasons is why I prefer developing for *BSD or OSX because I know where the dependancies will be on a standard installation is a much better argument.
Until there are games and the final hardware version is released, I think I am just going to stick with my PS2 for at least another couple years until the HD-DVD/Bluray and platform wars are decided.
In my business all of our office computers and servers are Apple. Yes quite a bit of upfront costs, but we don't have to spend the time dealing with virus of the week. Plus we're in the graphics and video industry (ie we use Final Cut Pro). Also, we can take advantage of Xgrid when needed for rendering tasks.
Then comes the other part of the puzzle for office/business use: software. We use quickbooks. We are a small business and this is the program our CPA recommends and offers a rather substantial discount for using Quickbooks. In fact its enough that Quickbooks ends up only costs about $50 a year if you factor in that savings. Also, our bank supports Quickbooks. Bottom line: Use it because its the easiest way to work with the worlkd. No OSS app can match that at the moment.
The other nice thing about quickbooks is that many potenial employees we hire have used the application in the past on Windows and there is little to no difference. We don't have to spend much time/money to train them. And accounting is frankly the most important aspect of business operations. If the books aren't kept right, real shit can happen that costs lots of money to hire lawyers for...
We have Microsoft Office for Mac for the business computers. The machines mainly used for video editing, Photoshop, or Lightwave have OpenOffice installed on them.
The SAN are made up of Xserve Raids. Yeah damned expensive, but having a 100% Mac shop saves us a lot of time and effort even though programs like Lightwave now support a Linux Screamernet rendering option. Our database server is MySQL on OSX.
Now our website is hosted on Linux from 1and1 internet and we run MySQL with Mambo Openserver CMS.
We have two Windows XP Pro systems in the office for the rare times we need Windows Only Applications such as Adobe Premiere or 3D Studio Max or if we get back loged and need to burn more DVD's, however they are rarely even turned on.
Um....I think that already exists: called Macintosh OS X. Nothing against BSD, runs on most of our white box servers, but to me what is the point? OSX has gained a lot of support from OSS land as well as commerical software packages.
And in the past, I haven't had any problems setting up FreeBSD 5.x with x11 and KDE for GUI desktop features. Hell I even got my old Aureal Vortex 2 card to actually work in BSD.
Can we label DesktopBSD -1 for Redundant: see OSX?
Most of the causualities of WWII were civilians. How many civilians were killed in China and other asian countries occupied by the Japanese? How many civilians died in the bombing of London? How many civilians died in the fire bombing of Dresden or the siege of Berlin? How many in St. Petersburg? Were those put to death in the concetration camps military personnel or civilians? Was seiging castles throwing rotting carcuses to cause disease (aka a biological weapon) against military or civilians?
The idea of "civilian" targets really didn't take on the meaning it has today in the western world until after WW2. Civilians have been fair targets in all wars. Might not like that, but if someone can point to a war where civilians weren't harmed, please tell me.
I suppose you, the author, haven't spoken to many WW2 vets, especially those that fought in the Pacific. You also seek to make a moral judgement on an event after the fact.
Did we know that Japan wanted to surrender: yes. But they sent a cousin to the royal family to seek Soviet intervention. Huge diplomatic mistake considering how the Soviets viewed Empires. If Japan had sent a minister to Russia, maybe things would have been different.
Secondly, The US was going to have to deal with the USSR after the war. The Atomic bomb, and the willingness to play hardball had a huge effect with dealing with Stalin in the period right after the war. Again on that note, Truman wanted to end the war before the Russians got involved.
Moreover on that note, the Japanese wanted a conditional surender. Typically such accords only last for short periods of time and the war is not resolved and continues (usually flaring up again) at a later point. For example see Korea today. The US wanted Japan defeated in spirit as well as practically.
Lastly, there was the chance that even though the Emperor wanted peace, the US knew it, that the Japanese Military wouldn't honor such a request take power and continue fighting. In fact, if you read your history, several in the Japanese military high command tried to stop the Emperor's message of surrender from being aired and continue the war even after the two Atomic Bombs were used.
We can play the "what-if" games now that we have most of the facts on the tables, but those facts are always there when decision times comes for an event.
Two bombs, 200,000 dead vs. the potenial of millions on both sides dieing in an invasion or such a surrender not being complete only to have hostilities resume at a later date...give me the two bombs please.
Just not in the way's the author was talking about. I've seen some papers and studies that show that video games can be as addicting as narcotics and when I was in college a few years ago I saw more than a few people fail out because of video games.
That's not to say they would have suceeded any way. I saw a number of other kids fail out due to drinking and drugs or just sheer laziness.
I've known more than once I'd be playing a game and look up and it was 6 hours later and I had stuff to do.
From causing violance perspective, probably not. The possible need for Gamers Anonymous support groups somedays...maybe.
There is the measure that some OSS applications that are worth a darn rise to the top. Those that don't are buried on some obsecure inactive SF project.
This goes to replacing Mozilla on my dad's machine, but so far I haven't seen too many modded comments about some of the brillant concept of NS 8. Mainly all I've seen are the typical "Firefox is the best" Slashdot rants.
So far this is what I like: switching between IE and Firefox's rendering engine. Much faster than NS 7 and Mozilla. However there are a few sites that don't render correctly, like our bank's, in Firefox/Mozilla and this fixes that problem.
As far as security concerns: no browser is ever going to be perfect, but NS 8 has all the features, tabbed browsing, access to my Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts, RSS feed links, and blends the best of both worlds.
I've always been a fan of the best tool for the job, and for the windows platform, this is my new defacto standard.
I think we are starting to see this in cars, but I know its also a problem in some farm equipement now as well. Farmers used to be able to fix most mechanical beasts often with the use of bailing wire. One of our farmers had a problem last year during harvest: the engine would start. Why? One of the sensors went bad and wouldn't allow the engine to start. The engine itself was mechanically fine. Took four hours for a field tech to come by and replace the sensor. Four hours doesn't sound like a lot, but during planting or harvesting, getting that extra 50 arces planted or harvested is the difference between breaking even and making a profit.
Growing up we did most of our own car repairs, changed the oil, etc. But with our newer car we cannot do a lot if something goes wrong, especially with electronics which is what fails 90% of the time.
The day my push mower won't start because of a faulty sensor is probably the day I really get mad. Why? Because with all this technology, I think many, especially engineers, might have forgotten that true genisus is making something complex simple. Too often I think we are making simple things way too complex.
Actually did I ever mention that I like clean coal in my post, so on what rational basis are you proposing that I support clean coal? I was merely pointing out that the production of solar cells takes some pretty cuastic stuff to create.
Based on my indpendant "Sub-way" test, which is completely unscientific and involves me riding the subway or in airports/airplanes, easily 6 - 7 out of 10 people with portable music players have an Apple (or I guess HP now) iPod(TM).
Sometimes I'll see a dell or creative MP3 player, but hands down I notice more people listening to ipods. On planes most of those people are using a windows based laptop too.
I thought that was the point of Opensource. If you needed something or felt you could make adjustments or improvements based on other's codes that was the point.
Last time I checked, the requirement was for Apple to release back the code, not release back well documented code.
Back when I was involved with some opensource projects I took upon the task to essentially take code from about 4 different forks and intergrate various features into an uber version combining the best of all worlds and adding a couple cool new features.
Some of the code was in PERL, some was in PHP, most wasn't documented, but I didn't bitch about it.
If people would complain "We want this feature", I'd simple say, "Its opensource,you want it...code it!".
I think some people in OSS land begin to get pissed the moment someone takes something that is OSS and finds away to make money directly or indirectly from it.
In the world of the insurance risk assessor, you are correct statistically. However, there is a complete other side that has now mathamatical value.
First off, airliners are a known target of terrorists. It is very likely that if terrorists wanted to target an aircraft for destruction, these would be their likely choice because you can cause the most amount of death and destruction. Now its still damn hard to take down an airliner these days, but if I were to hedge my bets, the A380 has "Al-queda target" written all over it. It fits with their M.O.
Second is the PR angle. Right now the deadliest air crash of all time happened when 2 747's collided on a runway in Tenerife killing 574 people. That was due to pilot error. If anything, at somepoint the A380 is going to crash. If its a passanger version with 600 people aboard, one crash is going to cause more deaths than 2 747's. The Media will go nuts over the story. Second off is how many times will insurance companies pay out until they decide, $600M+ per crash is a little steep for payout? That's if it was settled for $2M a person. Likely much higher with lawsuit happy trial lawyers.
In more than one Econ class I can remember us beating the business models of airlines to death. End of the decade, about half of the US carriers need to (or will) be gone leaving 2 or 3 major players and that's about it.
However, I can remember reading consistantly that the hub-spoke method was seriously outdated and many are predicting the shift away for a majority of domestic (US) flights because the cost and ablity to fly point-to-point has dropped dramatically.
For international flights, its a different story. Hub-Spoke will continue to be dominate mainly because of port of entry considerations.
Biggest problem with Linux is they are largely stuck on emmulate and immiate not innovate.
Linux is a clone of Unix. Most of the GUI interfaces have options like "Look like XP or Look like OSX".
Linux was a useful stepping stone for me make in 1999 to learn the basic concepts of a *iux world. However, in 2002 I bought a Mac, haven't loaded Linux since.
Folks in Linux will come back a year later and say, "See, we made Linux now do what OSX can, or XP can". By that time Apple's realeased another 200 new features, granted some better than others.
I'll have to back this story up about 5 years because that's how long we've had an HDTV and HD service from Dishnetwork. In 2000 our TV's were between 25 - 30 years old and in various stages of kicking the bucket so for christmas we bought one large 65" HDTV. Also I say we, but I was in college and even now only get to enjoy it on holidays or when I am at home, so really its my father that gets to enjoy it.
My mother died 6 years ago and he lives alone and opted for the 500 channel package with all the movie networks. For most of the first couple years all we got were HBO and Showtime in HD. I can remember seeing the Matrix in HD vs SD vs DVD and the HD quality kicked the snot out of even the DVD.
We did have a brief period where Dish changed their HD broadcasting format, without really telling us....poof whatching a movie in HD and the channel dissapeared...and then wanted us to buy a $100 add on module for the model 6000 reciever because "That model is old". We also paid $800 for the damn thing because it was the first HD receiver on the market. Took dad 5 minutes on the phone bitching that, "Look we didn't do anything, your the ones that changed it. We paid the premium for getting it first, and last time I checked if you change things mid-course, you have to make it right!" Two days later we had the module free of charge.
The other major factor is we cannot get HD over our cable lines. It is in fact, impossible. Why? We were one of the first areas around to get cable circa 1982. All the lines in this area are not digital capable. They should have all the lines upgraded by the end of this year, but we can't get digital if we wanted. That little fact, that 5 years ago we didn't know if or when they would upgrade the cable lines, was the major factor for switching.
I think Dad pays about $200 a month now and that includes his phone, cell phone, DSL, and Sat package with 500 channels +HD package. Dish has a deal worked out with SBC, local phone provider anyway.
We'll loose signals during large storms, but usually only for a few minutes at most. Other than that "We decided to change HD broadcast formats and you now need another $100 part for your $800 revicer to make it work again" incident, we've been pretty pleased with our HD service. Just wish there was more content.
When our TV's were all dying about 5 years ago (all between 20 - 25 years old at the time) my father decided to purchase one good new one. I was off to college and my mother had passed away so it was just him.
We knew the digital switchover was going to occur and many things would switch to HDTV. So we bought a 65" HDTV and made the switch to sat, the cable in this area was laid 25 years ago and is all analog, although by this time next year they claim it will be replaced.
For a while we got all 500 channels including HBO and Showtime in HD and then suddenly one day the HD channels went dead, even the preview HD channel on Dish.
Well turns out they changed their broadcasts in HD that required all 6000 model owners (the first HD sat reiever) to purchase a $100 upgrade to get back HD. We didn't mind because there wasn't any channels broadcasting in HD other than HBO and Showtime which we don't subscribe to.
We bitched and got the new module for our reciever free. After all we spent like $600 for it new, however if we want HD content, we have to pay an extra $10 a month and right now local channel programming in HD are not available on sat. So we are all set-up ready to for HD, but other than Discovery HD, there isn't really all that much to watch that we can get.
Having the regular mouse with retractable cord actually is nice for those of us on the road. Not fair to bash every niche market because there are those of us that can find it useful.
As far as this router goes, I guess I'm not a huge gamer since my el-cheapo Netgear 11b wireless router seems to work just fine for playing games and hooking in a couple X-boxes for Halo every couple months with friends.
Then again I don't do a lot of gaming since all but one of my computers is a Mac now anyway.
since sliced bread in schools? When I was growing up I was one of the first in the class with a computer at home, an IBM XT clone. We did start learning how to use APPLE IIe's in school I think in Kindergarten if not at least starting in the first grade, but mainly math and reading games eventually progressing to LOGO writer.
This was all good an such, however there have been two things that have universally suffered: penmenship and spelling. I started typing reports and such at an early age and used it on everything but one report in the fifth grade which was mandated had to be hand written. Now my handwriting's been crap since day one, but I used to be able to spell worth a crap. Now I spell better in my second language (german) than I do in english primarily because I've been using spell check since MS Works 1.0 and anymore so long as I get close, office will automatically change the word.
I am sure that looking up information online has come in handy, but I can remember a couple years ago professors not allowing more than 1 internet resource per paper. And it was a good thing. Some went a step further and would allow no more than 2 electronic resources, which I found annoying because I often used Lexis-Nexis and EBSCOhost to find articles and frankly is there a difference if the New York Times article I found was on paper or electronic format if it says the same thing? Most of the students would grumble about having to actually go to the library and look up magazine articles or perodicals.
Frankly I think computers, and the Internet, has only fed the "I want it now" culture. If people now can't find the answer within the first page of Google, many are too lazy to dig deeper.
When it comes to computers in the classrooms, maybe we should hold off. Instead of having a shiny toy on every desk, anyone think we might should ensure that kids can actually read a book, spell, and do math without needing a machine to do it for them?
It doesn't excuse OpenBSD, however it the stated goal of OpenBSD to create as secure default install as possible. No system is ever going to be 100% secure ever, but OpenBSD is farther ahead of the game than most in the security department.
Just look at the number of exploits published for OpenBSD vs. Linux, Apple, other BSD's, and Windows. OpenBSD isn't batting 1.000, but higher than the others...
Slashdot Mirror
...you can always buy one of the 200 or so car models that GM doesn't make.
Does this consitute a stockpile? No. Does it mean Saddam's regime was in violation of UN terms of cease-fire set in 1991? Yes.
While justifications and the events in Iraq can be debated.
Legally speaking, the war of 2003 was technically the resuming of hostilities from 1991, not a new conflict.
No am I not an lawyer in international law....yet...I'm just merely a Law School student.
Of all dairy products, cheese is the worst followed by ice cream. Just a little cheese and my stomach goes nuts.
Of course I've had to get used to carrying a couple lactiad pills with me, but its something else to remember to take them before I start eating dairy. Fortunately the lactase pills do help a lot, especially at late night work sessions when pizza is ordered.
Video Games I think have reached the same state. I like 2 types of games: Air/Space combat sims and FPS tactical sims (like Ghost Recon 1, the first 2 Rainbow Six games on PC).
I've played Halo and Halo 2, and with friends on a friday night with some booze, it can be a lot of fun. But is that the game or the people playing it?
I haven't seen any Space shooters from major developers since FreeSpace 2, great game that didn't sell all that well. However with the semi-opensourced FS2 code, there have been some really cool mods.
Ghost Recon 2/Rainbow6 - 3 I hated on the consoles. They seemed much more arcadish shoot'em up and less tactical stategy.
A few weeks ago I thought about creating a MMOG FPS set in World War I. I looked at several game engines, and found Military Forces at sourceforge.net.
I finally did buy a new PC game (first one in 3 years) the other day: Falcon 4.0 Allied Force. I purchased Falcon 4 six months after it was released for $15. WHy? All the features never worked. Well some in the mod community were able to get Atari to actually release a new version of the game that all features that were supposed to work actually did work.
This doesn't make sense to me. I've used solaris, AIX, Windows 9x/NT4/2000/XPpro, various Linux distros, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and OS 10.1/.2/.3/.4. Linux pissed me off at first. (actually Linux still pisses me off for many reasons) If I had only used Linux for a day, I would be bitching at having a lost day. In fact I lost many days trying to get hardware and systems to work together(granted this was in the days of Slackware 2) (For the record I prefer BSD for many reasons. Including the ultimate license in Free-Beer and Free-Speech) My first mac was an iBook. I was leaving the country for an extended period and I needed a laptop that would just work for Office apps, email, and web browsing. I had to get used to a one button mouse when using the touch pad on the road, but if I was at home, I just plugged in my MS optical mouse and two buttons work fine. After about two weeks I got used to the one-button mouse. I have a friend that is a sales rep for Coke and I am a fan of Pepsi products. He once said, "Doesn't matter. Drink coke for a week and you'll prefer coke. Drink Pepsi for a week and you'll prefer Pepsi". I think the same thing applies with any computer system. Give it a couple weeks and then see. Why I like OSX is because all my Unix goodies I was used to under BSD, Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl, were all extremely easy to install, especially since I was able to find package installers that did all that work for me. I had to edit the Apache conf file to enable php, but no matter what system I've installed apache on I've had to edit the conf file at least once. All of my custom BSD apps took minor, if any, changes in code to compile on OSX as well. I found the Dock extremely easy to use and the best part of OSX: Applications everyone else uses. I was able to buy MS Office (which was a charm to use on the Mac because it actually works), dreamweaver, Quickbooks pro, Quicken, Photoshop, illustrator, fireworks, Quark Xpress, Lightwave 3D, and a few Apple only applications like Final Cut Pro. I also have to admit I hated Word for mac (v.x) for the first 3 months I used it. Powerpoint on the other hand is a different story. PowerPoint just seems to work better on the Mac. Not only that but I have found OSX to be incredably stable. The system crashed to the point of restart 4 times in 3 years. Two of those times were while running OS 9 applications in the emulator (Quark). Most of the time, I just shut the lid and would open it and the system would spring back to life for weeks on end. I once had an uptime of over 100 days until my battery died on a long trans-atlantic flight. It is for those above reasons that people have really fallen for the OS X platform. A number of engineering depts I know have purchased PowerMacs with OSX, especially after the intro of the g5 processors, to replace DEC, SUN, and SGI workstations. Those workstations often cost USD 20,000+ when they were orginally purchased. Suddely $8,000 for a maxed out machine with 8GB of Ram is a bargin for those people. Saying I don't like _________ because I used it for one day and it was different isn't a good arguement. Its an argument, just not a good one. Saying I don't like Linux because no two distros are exactly the same and compiling binary programs for every platform is time-consuming and expensive is a real pain in the ass, not to mention Linux geeks tend to customize installs further adding to hassles with emails like "this won't work on my custom hacked 2.6 Kernal with a mixture of Fedora/Slackware/and Debain I cobbled together and for those reasons is why I prefer developing for *BSD or OSX because I know where the dependancies will be on a standard installation is a much better argument.
Until there are games and the final hardware version is released, I think I am just going to stick with my PS2 for at least another couple years until the HD-DVD/Bluray and platform wars are decided.
The other nice thing about quickbooks is that many potenial employees we hire have used the application in the past on Windows and there is little to no difference. We don't have to spend much time/money to train them. And accounting is frankly the most important aspect of business operations. If the books aren't kept right, real shit can happen that costs lots of money to hire lawyers for...
We have Microsoft Office for Mac for the business computers. The machines mainly used for video editing, Photoshop, or Lightwave have OpenOffice installed on them.
The SAN are made up of Xserve Raids. Yeah damned expensive, but having a 100% Mac shop saves us a lot of time and effort even though programs like Lightwave now support a Linux Screamernet rendering option. Our database server is MySQL on OSX.
Now our website is hosted on Linux from 1and1 internet and we run MySQL with Mambo Openserver CMS.
We have two Windows XP Pro systems in the office for the rare times we need Windows Only Applications such as Adobe Premiere or 3D Studio Max or if we get back loged and need to burn more DVD's, however they are rarely even turned on.
And in the past, I haven't had any problems setting up FreeBSD 5.x with x11 and KDE for GUI desktop features. Hell I even got my old Aureal Vortex 2 card to actually work in BSD.
Can we label DesktopBSD -1 for Redundant: see OSX?
The idea of "civilian" targets really didn't take on the meaning it has today in the western world until after WW2. Civilians have been fair targets in all wars. Might not like that, but if someone can point to a war where civilians weren't harmed, please tell me.
I suppose you, the author, haven't spoken to many WW2 vets, especially those that fought in the Pacific. You also seek to make a moral judgement on an event after the fact.
Did we know that Japan wanted to surrender: yes. But they sent a cousin to the royal family to seek Soviet intervention. Huge diplomatic mistake considering how the Soviets viewed Empires. If Japan had sent a minister to Russia, maybe things would have been different.
Secondly, The US was going to have to deal with the USSR after the war. The Atomic bomb, and the willingness to play hardball had a huge effect with dealing with Stalin in the period right after the war. Again on that note, Truman wanted to end the war before the Russians got involved.
Moreover on that note, the Japanese wanted a conditional surender. Typically such accords only last for short periods of time and the war is not resolved and continues (usually flaring up again) at a later point. For example see Korea today. The US wanted Japan defeated in spirit as well as practically.
Lastly, there was the chance that even though the Emperor wanted peace, the US knew it, that the Japanese Military wouldn't honor such a request take power and continue fighting. In fact, if you read your history, several in the Japanese military high command tried to stop the Emperor's message of surrender from being aired and continue the war even after the two Atomic Bombs were used.
We can play the "what-if" games now that we have most of the facts on the tables, but those facts are always there when decision times comes for an event.
Two bombs, 200,000 dead vs. the potenial of millions on both sides dieing in an invasion or such a surrender not being complete only to have hostilities resume at a later date...give me the two bombs please.
That's not to say they would have suceeded any way. I saw a number of other kids fail out due to drinking and drugs or just sheer laziness.
I've known more than once I'd be playing a game and look up and it was 6 hours later and I had stuff to do.
From causing violance perspective, probably not. The possible need for Gamers Anonymous support groups somedays...maybe.
There is the measure that some OSS applications that are worth a darn rise to the top. Those that don't are buried on some obsecure inactive SF project.
So far this is what I like: switching between IE and Firefox's rendering engine. Much faster than NS 7 and Mozilla. However there are a few sites that don't render correctly, like our bank's, in Firefox/Mozilla and this fixes that problem.
As far as security concerns: no browser is ever going to be perfect, but NS 8 has all the features, tabbed browsing, access to my Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts, RSS feed links, and blends the best of both worlds.
I've always been a fan of the best tool for the job, and for the windows platform, this is my new defacto standard.
Growing up we did most of our own car repairs, changed the oil, etc. But with our newer car we cannot do a lot if something goes wrong, especially with electronics which is what fails 90% of the time.
The day my push mower won't start because of a faulty sensor is probably the day I really get mad. Why? Because with all this technology, I think many, especially engineers, might have forgotten that true genisus is making something complex simple. Too often I think we are making simple things way too complex.
Actually, you should look at all the hazardous and eviromentally damanaging chemicals and processes it takes to produce solar cells.
Sometimes I'll see a dell or creative MP3 player, but hands down I notice more people listening to ipods. On planes most of those people are using a windows based laptop too.
Last time I checked, the requirement was for Apple to release back the code, not release back well documented code.
Back when I was involved with some opensource projects I took upon the task to essentially take code from about 4 different forks and intergrate various features into an uber version combining the best of all worlds and adding a couple cool new features.
Some of the code was in PERL, some was in PHP, most wasn't documented, but I didn't bitch about it.
If people would complain "We want this feature", I'd simple say, "Its opensource,you want it...code it!".
I think some people in OSS land begin to get pissed the moment someone takes something that is OSS and finds away to make money directly or indirectly from it.
First off, airliners are a known target of terrorists. It is very likely that if terrorists wanted to target an aircraft for destruction, these would be their likely choice because you can cause the most amount of death and destruction. Now its still damn hard to take down an airliner these days, but if I were to hedge my bets, the A380 has "Al-queda target" written all over it. It fits with their M.O.
Second is the PR angle. Right now the deadliest air crash of all time happened when 2 747's collided on a runway in Tenerife killing 574 people. That was due to pilot error. If anything, at somepoint the A380 is going to crash. If its a passanger version with 600 people aboard, one crash is going to cause more deaths than 2 747's. The Media will go nuts over the story. Second off is how many times will insurance companies pay out until they decide, $600M+ per crash is a little steep for payout? That's if it was settled for $2M a person. Likely much higher with lawsuit happy trial lawyers.
However, I can remember reading consistantly that the hub-spoke method was seriously outdated and many are predicting the shift away for a majority of domestic (US) flights because the cost and ablity to fly point-to-point has dropped dramatically.
For international flights, its a different story. Hub-Spoke will continue to be dominate mainly because of port of entry considerations.
Linux is a clone of Unix. Most of the GUI interfaces have options like "Look like XP or Look like OSX".
Linux was a useful stepping stone for me make in 1999 to learn the basic concepts of a *iux world. However, in 2002 I bought a Mac, haven't loaded Linux since.
Folks in Linux will come back a year later and say, "See, we made Linux now do what OSX can, or XP can". By that time Apple's realeased another 200 new features, granted some better than others.
I'll have to back this story up about 5 years because that's how long we've had an HDTV and HD service from Dishnetwork. In 2000 our TV's were between 25 - 30 years old and in various stages of kicking the bucket so for christmas we bought one large 65" HDTV. Also I say we, but I was in college and even now only get to enjoy it on holidays or when I am at home, so really its my father that gets to enjoy it.
My mother died 6 years ago and he lives alone and opted for the 500 channel package with all the movie networks. For most of the first couple years all we got were HBO and Showtime in HD. I can remember seeing the Matrix in HD vs SD vs DVD and the HD quality kicked the snot out of even the DVD.
We did have a brief period where Dish changed their HD broadcasting format, without really telling us....poof whatching a movie in HD and the channel dissapeared...and then wanted us to buy a $100 add on module for the model 6000 reciever because "That model is old". We also paid $800 for the damn thing because it was the first HD receiver on the market. Took dad 5 minutes on the phone bitching that, "Look we didn't do anything, your the ones that changed it. We paid the premium for getting it first, and last time I checked if you change things mid-course, you have to make it right!" Two days later we had the module free of charge.
The other major factor is we cannot get HD over our cable lines. It is in fact, impossible. Why? We were one of the first areas around to get cable circa 1982. All the lines in this area are not digital capable. They should have all the lines upgraded by the end of this year, but we can't get digital if we wanted. That little fact, that 5 years ago we didn't know if or when they would upgrade the cable lines, was the major factor for switching.
I think Dad pays about $200 a month now and that includes his phone, cell phone, DSL, and Sat package with 500 channels +HD package. Dish has a deal worked out with SBC, local phone provider anyway.
We'll loose signals during large storms, but usually only for a few minutes at most. Other than that "We decided to change HD broadcast formats and you now need another $100 part for your $800 revicer to make it work again" incident, we've been pretty pleased with our HD service. Just wish there was more content.
We knew the digital switchover was going to occur and many things would switch to HDTV. So we bought a 65" HDTV and made the switch to sat, the cable in this area was laid 25 years ago and is all analog, although by this time next year they claim it will be replaced.
For a while we got all 500 channels including HBO and Showtime in HD and then suddenly one day the HD channels went dead, even the preview HD channel on Dish.
Well turns out they changed their broadcasts in HD that required all 6000 model owners (the first HD sat reiever) to purchase a $100 upgrade to get back HD. We didn't mind because there wasn't any channels broadcasting in HD other than HBO and Showtime which we don't subscribe to.
We bitched and got the new module for our reciever free. After all we spent like $600 for it new, however if we want HD content, we have to pay an extra $10 a month and right now local channel programming in HD are not available on sat. So we are all set-up ready to for HD, but other than Discovery HD, there isn't really all that much to watch that we can get.
So 5 years later we are still wait and see.
As far as this router goes, I guess I'm not a huge gamer since my el-cheapo Netgear 11b wireless router seems to work just fine for playing games and hooking in a couple X-boxes for Halo every couple months with friends.
Then again I don't do a lot of gaming since all but one of my computers is a Mac now anyway.
This was all good an such, however there have been two things that have universally suffered: penmenship and spelling. I started typing reports and such at an early age and used it on everything but one report in the fifth grade which was mandated had to be hand written. Now my handwriting's been crap since day one, but I used to be able to spell worth a crap. Now I spell better in my second language (german) than I do in english primarily because I've been using spell check since MS Works 1.0 and anymore so long as I get close, office will automatically change the word.
I am sure that looking up information online has come in handy, but I can remember a couple years ago professors not allowing more than 1 internet resource per paper. And it was a good thing. Some went a step further and would allow no more than 2 electronic resources, which I found annoying because I often used Lexis-Nexis and EBSCOhost to find articles and frankly is there a difference if the New York Times article I found was on paper or electronic format if it says the same thing? Most of the students would grumble about having to actually go to the library and look up magazine articles or perodicals.
Frankly I think computers, and the Internet, has only fed the "I want it now" culture. If people now can't find the answer within the first page of Google, many are too lazy to dig deeper.
When it comes to computers in the classrooms, maybe we should hold off. Instead of having a shiny toy on every desk, anyone think we might should ensure that kids can actually read a book, spell, and do math without needing a machine to do it for them?
Just look at the number of exploits published for OpenBSD vs. Linux, Apple, other BSD's, and Windows. OpenBSD isn't batting 1.000, but higher than the others...