Nobody with any brains worth uploading is going to upload into a machine controlled by someone else - no matter how much they trust that person (unless of course they're dying anyway and have no other choice.)
The real issue is the metaphysical problem of the "upload" itself. If the process is destructive of the human brain from which the mind is uploaded, then you've killed the human mind you're supposed to be preserving (even if you've copied it - which is the next problem). If the process is NOT destructive, then you've merely COPIED the human mind, not "uploaded" it. This makes you PERSISTENT, not IMMORTAL because the human brain is still mortal. Worse, the human brain now has a direct competitor in the copy. This might be desirable but it doesn't solve the basic problem of time-space residency of the original mind.
The only way "uploading" can be done is an UPGRADE - you have to physically transform the human brain into a superior (and much more robust) one DIRECTLY while insuring continuity between the existing mind and the resulting mind. Thus, you start out with your single brain and end up with a single (but better) brain. No copying, no competition, no metaphysical problems of continuity. This is the ONLY practical way to do it without introducing problems.
I seem to be the only Transhumanist who gets this.
"Many of the questions this new world poses are mind-bending?for example, who ?you? really are. You?ve created a copy of your brain and uploaded it, but the original you is still hanging around dirtside."
This is why it won't be done - it doesn't solve the immortality issue. Copying you does NOT make YOU immortal - it just makes you PERSISTENT.
I as a Transhumanist personally have a more "robust" notion of immortality than that. Unfortunately, most Transhumans don't seem to understand this simple metaphysical fact.
Also, making a copy of me would put me in the position of the character Omne in the Star Trek novel where it was stated that creating a competing copy of himself was the ultimate risk since one of him in the Universe was too many already. (He also said it was the ultimate challenge which is why he had to do it.)
Best science fiction I've read in months is John C. Wright's trilogy, "The Golden Age", "Phoenix Exultant", and "The Golden Transcendence". Ubiquitous nanotech, distributed brains, super-AI's running the human universe.
The best place to see what a future universe might look like is the Orion's Arm game site. Page after page of super-AI's, cyborgs, nanotech, femototech, picotech, "clarketech". Fabulously imaginative resource here.
Refute anything I said, or fuck right the hell off.
First of all, where did I say such a conspiracy requires "hundreds or even thousands" of people? What I described requires almost NO people - a few higher ups in the FBI and the CIA, and a lot compartmentalization in the lower ranks?
You don't think the FBI covered up fore-knowledge of the events? Read anything about Sibel Edmonds. Read Coleen Rowly's memo to the FBI director here
It's the brainless "remote airplane" conspiracy theories that postulate hundreds of passengers "disappearing" that require a lot of people to be quieted. My explanation requires none of that. All of it was done by a few Mossad assets and a handful of criminals employed by the CIA. The actual attack and other related activities were carried out by the Al Qaeda patsies who knew nothing (which, based on the article, seems to be their chronic condition.)
You want to see how far the Pentagon would go to fake an attack on the US? Google for the "Northwoods documents". Most of the sites carrying them are rightwing loony sites but the documents themselves are genuine.
You want to see how far Israel will go to put intelligence agents in the United States? Read this
You're just another ignorant "citizen" who gets his news from Fox and thinks he's "well-informed".
The letter goes on to cite mid-twentieth-century articles from, among other sources, Science, The Journal of Immunology, and The New England Journal of Medicine, and lists the names of such books as Tomorrow's Weapons (1964), Peace or Pestilence (1949), and Chemical Warfare (1921).
THIS is where Al Qaeda gets his bioweapons info?
Gimme a fucking break!
And these guys are supposed to be getting suitcase nukes and the like?
Bullshit.
This is amateur night at its worst. It makes my bank robberies look high-tech.
No wonder they used box cutters to hijack the 9/11 planes - and why they were so easily used as "patsies" to do that job so the neocons could have their "terrorist Pearl Harbor" as desired in the PNAC documents.
More than ever, I am convinced just by this one article that Mossad was behind 9/11 all the way. It was no accident that Mossad agents were arrested filming the collapse of the towers or that Mossad agents were following the 9/11 operators around for months before the attack.
You don't need any of these stupid "remote control airplane" conspiracy theories to explain 9/11. It was a simple "false flag"/agent-provocateur operation. Mossad uses its infiltrators to get Al Qaeda to go with the plan. Then they make sure - with CIA help - Al Qaeda operators get whatever they need - including flight training from a school in Florida with connections to the drug trade, the DEA and the CIA. Then the boys at the top conveniently ignore FBI and CIA reports from the field that something is up - as proven by Crowly and Edmonds' testimonies. That's all you need to make it happen.
The US and Israeli governments KNEW 9/11 was going to happen - because they set it up. Classic "Reichstag fire" incident.
Couldn't be more obvious if you threw one of the hijacker's passports on the wreckage...
Ahem, I suspect Muslim men get laid more regularly than Christian fundamentalists do (unless you add in Jerry Falwell's total which skews the figures.)
Rate of return in any investment drops to the "general rate of return" which is historically some small figure of 1-2% or whatever as soon as competitors enter the market in search of whatever "monopoly profit" existed when the specific market was first created.
However, it only works one on one for chimps. For humans, it's a little more complicated since it depends on things like money, control of media, etc.
It also only works if the new dominant chimp really can beat the old one. For humans, when the old one controls the CIA, the Pentagon and some other useful assets, it's a little harder. Which is why I expect an "October Surprise".
Bush Junior has been told often enough by Bush Senior what happened when he tried to get re-elected. Bush Senior and Bush Junior are going to make sure that doesn't happen to Bush Junior.
So polls and election prattle are mostly irrelevant. What matters is "the plan" and how easily the morons in the US can be "fooled again" as the song goes.
And the Libs and Greens aren't anywhere near able to cope with that territory.
I was IN Vietnam, 1967-1968, Cam Ranh Bay and Vung Ro Bay.
Did I say we are currently losing that many troops? No. I said we are GOING to lose that many troops. We COULD lose fifty thousand in the next year (although I suspect we will flee much sooner than that, so the losses may actually be only the five or ten thousand I usually indicate.)
IF combat deaths have been going down, which is NOT not true for the months of June and July if you look at the actual figures instead of listening to Bill O'Reilly, it is because the US is hunkered down in its bases and has reduced patrols nearly across the entire country - especially in the now "no-go" cities like Fallujah where the US is reduced to bombing civilians from the air since they have no clue where their enemy actually is.
Sadr's "army" is a bunch of ill-trained, lightly-armed militants and he has thousands more where they came from. Kill all you want. For every one you kill, five more of his relatives join up. You just don't get the nature of nationalist insurgency, do you?
As for how many people in Iraq hate the US, last poll I saw, the figure was around 80%. By now, it's gone up to 90, especially among the Shia, as illustrated by the demonstrations and increased insurgency activity in the south.
As Juan Cole points out, even clerics in the hardline Sunni areas are now supporting al-Sadr! The largest Sunni clerical body issued a fatwa against any Iraqi security officer supporting the US occupation.
It's only a matter of time until Grand Ayatollah Sistani is forced by events to dump his "long game" plan and issue his own fatwa, which will immediately put another 100,000 insurgents on the street, and hundreds of thousand more protestors and rioters. The British commander in Basra has already said months ago that if 100,000 rioters show up on his doorstep, it's all over for the British part of the occupation.
Stop listening to Rush and O'Reilly and Hannity and Savage and you might learn something.
Here's something I just read today:
An opinion poll last October shows 33 per cent of Fox News viewers think the US has found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, when it has not, and 67 per cent think Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda, which the recently published September 11 Commission report concluded he did not.
The figures for listeners to National Public Radio were 11 per cent and 16 per cent respectively.
The poll shows not only are Fox News viewers often the least-informed news consumers, alarmingly, they also regard themselves as well-informed.
Until the mass national resistance really starts, and the US bases find themselves cut off from food, water, fuel, and ammo.
It should take about a week or two (once it starts, and when that will be is anybody's guess), then in another thirty to ninety days after that, the US military will be forced to surrender or sue for a ceasefire to be allowed to evacuate - leaving behind a few tens of billions of dollars of US weaponry I'm sure the Iraqis will find a use for.
With the stoppage of Turkish transport trucks, a shortage is already being felt in US supplies.
Preferably within the next twelve months as the Iraqi people hand the US the worst military defeat in its history.
When five or ten thousand (or more) US bodies come back, try telling the families of those troops how they "won" the "War on Terror".
"Our bases cover the whole country". Try reading what is going on in Iraq. The US controls NOTHING but the Green Zone and wherever the biggest concentration of US troops happens to be at the moment (which right now is Najaf - and we don't control that yet even.) Most of the major cities in Iraq are now "no-go" zones for US troops since the cost to try to control them is too high for the US commanders on the ground.
That is why they are trying desperately to put down al-Sadr in Najaf - and now that is bogging down in negotiations while at the same time infuriating what few Shia weren't infuriated already.
They hate the US *government* (and many of them hate US citizens for supporting the US government - or being oblivious - like you - to the nature and policy effects of that government.)
And yes, the Europeans are hated too, because they did the same shit years before we did.
Doesn't excuse us.
Re:You forgot to minus out the saved lives.
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You won't have to wait five years.
I predict the Iraqis will send the US home in bodybags within the next twelve months - maybe sooner.
There is absolutely no possible way the US military can sustain an occupation in a country of twenty five million people who hate the US.
When the mass national resistance really starts (and as the head of one two-million strong tribe in Iraq put it, "We'll make Vietnam look like a picnic."), the US military will suffer the worst military defeat in US history - one that will make Vietnam pale (because it took ten years in Vietnam to do what the Iraqis will do in two or less.)
I repeat: the US military will lose THOUSANDS of troops in Iraq within the next twelve months (unless they are granted a ceasefire in order to evacuate which is just possible.)
It's irrevelant if they didn't hate Americans before.
They hate Americans now.
If you don't believe that, you are seriously out of touch with the situation in Iraq - no doubt due to the fact that US media has decided Iraq is no longer a "story" since the "handover" - at least compared to some stupid murder and the elections.
When five or ten thousand more US troops come home from Iraq in bodybags, maybe you'll get the picture - their families sure will.
Another "distro competence" issue, apparently. SUSE has a rep for being more "cutting edge" on hardware support.
Why the other distros don't simply watch what each other does and then do the same is beyond me. Some "Not Invented Here" human bullshit, I guess. After all, the point of open source IS to be able to use what somebody else does and make it better.
I didn't say there were NO technical issues, I said most of the complaints about Linux aren't about technical issues. And I don't count bad drivers as actual "technical" issues, they're more "distro competence" issues or issues related to lack of industry support - which is indeed a problem for Linux but is not Linux's fault. The driver issue is also one that, as I indicated, varies by user depending on their hardware. I've read people complaining that their AC97 onboard audio doesn't work with Linux - mine works fine with ALSA.
And, yes, I wouldn't be surprised if regression testing was lacking in most of the distros.
The bug with parted and the 2.6 kernel disk geometry reporting would have been caught if somebody had regression tested a Linux install in a dual boot environment. Supposedly the Fedora people claimed none of their testers dual boot with Windows - a seriously lame excuse. They KNOW a lot of people dual boot, and they KNOW the kernel geometry reporting changed, and they KNOW (or should at least suspect) that parted was affected, and they KNOW installation is the most difficult time for Linux users, so a thorough testing of the partitioning process in a dual boot environment should have been done.
Well, some people view Linux as having "problems", but not being "crap".
In my view, Linux (and Windows) are crap because they are both based on primitive windowing/mouse and other "low" technology. I think both of them could be much better designed. And no, I don't think having reversible windows or writing on the edges of windows or storing files in XML form is a significant improvement.
However, while Linux has "problems", they are only significant to the more naive user base. They are nothing that some training and some willingness on the part of the user to learn something new couldn't fix. In other words, these "problems" are social, not technological (except in the sense that ALL such "problems" are technological as per my previous paragraph.)
Most of Linux "problems" are merely the result of being different from Windows and the lack of willingness of people to learn something new. Anybody who ignores this is obviously a troll.
As far as the overall design of Linux, obviously it is superior to Windows where it counts - in security and reliability. Anybody who ignores that is obviously a troll. While the current incarnation of Windows (2000 and XP)is clearly superior in reliability to its previous incarnations (9x), it's still nothing to write home about. I had 2000 installed for less than two months, and a third party program ruined the Registry, and then after that reinstall, 2000 hosed the Registry all by its lonesone for no discernable reason, requiring another reinstall.
As for security, forget about it. Since at least 1997, Gates has been promising Windows will be secure "next time".
Which is why people who complain about Linux "problems" such as "usability" are merely trolls.
Yes, there are Linux trolls. But if for no other reason than that there are fewer Linux users, there are a hell of a lot less Linux trolls than Windows trolls. Of course, if you judge that by visiting Linux newsgroups, you might get a different impression.
Slashdot STARTED as a Linux/OSS promoting system. So what do you expect? Bill Gates to be welcomed here? To suggest that is to be a troll on the face of it.
Groklaw is the same - a promoter of OSS (although from the standpoint of legal issues, not technology). Do you expect everybody to welcome Windows trolls?
If you have an HONEST appraisal of Linux problems, which happens to be wrong partially or completely, that's one thing. To just sling uncritical generalities about "usability" is being a troll.
I can be - and have been - a Linux troll at times, just to bug the Windows trolls. That comes under the heading of "fun", not serious. I suppose some people I think are Windows trolls do the same thing. So maybe both sides should just shut up and let the market decide.
It's just that statistically speaking, most of the anti-Linux comments I've read are not only false, they are known by the speaker to be false. This is detectable because the speaker invariably has nothing specific to say to prove his point, but relies on generalities.
If somebody presents a specific problem with Linux, such as that Linux has trouble getting drivers written for it by hardware manufacturers, nobody can really deny this is true. OTOH, the issue is how bad is this problem overall. If you assume it is a show-stopper, without considering other factors such as the type of user you're referring to or the effect of pre-installation, etc., you're simply wrong and if you then IGNORE these other factors, you become a troll.
The trolls are easily detectable because they make bullshit arguments such as that Linux is not "usable", or that Linux is not "learnable", or other general statements which simply aren't true regardless of the type of user. I know they aren't true because I had to learn Windows and Linux from scratch over the last three years and I see no difference between them in that regard.
I also see no evidence for the usual pro-Windows assertion that Windows is more "intuitive". What I have discovered is that NEITHER OS is particularly "intuitive". So anyone who asserts this as a certainty is necessarily a Windows troll with an agenda (or simply a moron - I suppose we must distinguish between morons and trolls, but I really get tired of trying to bother, especially since it doesn't seem to take much for a Windows moron to turn into a Windows troll - and Windows trolls are by definition morons.)
My standard statement remains true: 1) Windows is CRAP. 2) Linux is ALSO CRAP (whether it is EQUALLY crap is another issue - given the difficulty of writing a virus for it and its renowned stability, I think not.) 3) Linux is FREE crap.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that Linux wins that comparison. It does take a Windows troll to state that statement one is not true, statement two is true, and then ignore statement three.
If you do that, you are either a moron or a troll - or both. You're a moron if you actually believe that stuff, and you're a moron and a troll if you knowingly present statement two while deliberately ignoring statements one and three.
The bottom line: there are people who claim to like Linux except for [insert defect here] but who are KNOWINGLY lying about their like for Linux. That's the people I was referring to specifically.
And like I said, they're usually easy to detect simply by the fact that they telegraph their dislike BY saying "I like Linux but..." That's an OLD liar's game that fools no one - but liars always seem to need to continue using it.
The real bottom line: who cares? If Linux can't compete, IT WON'T. If it can, IT WILL. A third option is Linux AND Windows AND the Mac will be replaced by something else in ten or twenty years.
So anybody's opinion isn't worth the bandwidth to transmit it.
But this is/. - and opinions are the stock in trade here.
I am Kwame Rufatata from the SCO Group in the wonderful lake-strewn state of Utah.
I am writing to tell you that I have a problem which you can help me solve. It seems that we have received a large sum of money from an unnamed company in the wonderful lake-strewn state of Washington that we do not wish to pay the exorbitant taxes of the government on.
So, we would like to transfer these funds to an account outside the jurisdiction of the government. To do this, we need someone who is prepared to use their account to transfer our funds in order to conceal their point of origin.
If you will please give us your bank account number, we will transfer our funds through your account to an unnamed institution in the wonderful lake-strewn country of Switzerland. In return for this service, we will gratefully transfer you to a service fee of 10% of the funds transferred through your account. This could amount to as much as FIVE MILLION DOLLARS!
Please respond to my email as soon as possible, because our investors may force us to pay out these funds due to our falling stock price.
"Groklaw turned into this orgy of groupthink with respect to issues of Linux technical and usability merit."
Really? Every time I go there, it's entirely about the law and how stupid SCO is. I don't think I've ever read anything about "Linux usability" there. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, since I don't read *every* post.
"Let's not turn Slashdot into that."
Not likely. Too many Windows trolls post here. Especially the ones that act like they really like Linux, "it's just that Linux [fill in the blanks about usability, installs, and other ruminant evacuation.]" Sorry, these morons fool no one.
"In February, Sterling and Jan Cuny, vice chair of the Computing Research Association in Washington, D.C., persuaded Microsoft to fund a CRA-sponsored workshop for female computer science and engineering graduate students to help counter both their alienation and escalating dropout rates. "
Is this the same Microsoft headed by Bill Gates who is quoted as having said, "We can hire twice the women at half the pay rate for men because they're only women so they'll do the grunt work?"
I always wondered what Melinda thought about that quote? I suppose when given the chance to marry a billionaire, feminism goes out the window.
If so, go here for the Koha Integrated Library System - an open-source ILS used by several libraries in New Zealand and elsewhere.
Also go here for the Open Source For Libraries Web site which has links to numerous open source library systems and tools. Including a story on how Arizona State University West moved entirely to Linux as the underlying OS for their library.
Between those two sources, you should find plenty to check out.
Any terrorist with any competence (hard to find, I know, but some must exist somewhere) will not be in the least deterred by a bunch of cameras - unless he happens to look EXACTLY like Osama bin Laden.
In the immortal words of Wulfgar (Rutger Hauer doing his Carlos the Jackal impression) in the movie "Nighthawks", "Remember - there is no security."
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Glad to see you think that way.
That means you're going to die. We won't. That means you lose.
Have a nice day, primate.
No, no.
Nobody with any brains worth uploading is going to upload into a machine controlled by someone else - no matter how much they trust that person (unless of course they're dying anyway and have no other choice.)
The real issue is the metaphysical problem of the "upload" itself. If the process is destructive of the human brain from which the mind is uploaded, then you've killed the human mind you're supposed to be preserving (even if you've copied it - which is the next problem). If the process is NOT destructive, then you've merely COPIED the human mind, not "uploaded" it. This makes you PERSISTENT, not IMMORTAL because the human brain is still mortal. Worse, the human brain now has a direct competitor in the copy. This might be desirable but it doesn't solve the basic problem of time-space residency of the original mind.
The only way "uploading" can be done is an UPGRADE - you have to physically transform the human brain into a superior (and much more robust) one DIRECTLY while insuring continuity between the existing mind and the resulting mind. Thus, you start out with your single brain and end up with a single (but better) brain. No copying, no competition, no metaphysical problems of continuity. This is the ONLY practical way to do it without introducing problems.
I seem to be the only Transhumanist who gets this.
"Many of the questions this new world poses are mind-bending?for example, who ?you? really are. You?ve created a copy of your brain and uploaded it, but the original you is still hanging around dirtside."
This is why it won't be done - it doesn't solve the immortality issue. Copying you does NOT make YOU immortal - it just makes you PERSISTENT.
I as a Transhumanist personally have a more "robust" notion of immortality than that. Unfortunately, most Transhumans don't seem to understand this simple metaphysical fact.
Also, making a copy of me would put me in the position of the character Omne in the Star Trek novel where it was stated that creating a competing copy of himself was the ultimate risk since one of him in the Universe was too many already. (He also said it was the ultimate challenge which is why he had to do it.)
Best science fiction I've read in months is John C. Wright's trilogy, "The Golden Age", "Phoenix Exultant", and "The Golden Transcendence". Ubiquitous nanotech, distributed brains, super-AI's running the human universe.
The best place to see what a future universe might look like is the Orion's Arm game site. Page after page of super-AI's, cyborgs, nanotech, femototech, picotech, "clarketech". Fabulously imaginative resource here.
Hey, moron!
Refute anything I said, or fuck right the hell off.
First of all, where did I say such a conspiracy requires "hundreds or even thousands" of people? What I described requires almost NO people - a few higher ups in the FBI and the CIA, and a lot compartmentalization in the lower ranks?
You don't think the FBI covered up fore-knowledge of the events? Read anything about Sibel Edmonds. Read Coleen Rowly's memo to the FBI director here
It's the brainless "remote airplane" conspiracy theories that postulate hundreds of passengers "disappearing" that require a lot of people to be quieted. My explanation requires none of that. All of it was done by a few Mossad assets and a handful of criminals employed by the CIA. The actual attack and other related activities were carried out by the Al Qaeda patsies who knew nothing (which, based on the article, seems to be their chronic condition.)
You want to see how far the Pentagon would go to fake an attack on the US? Google for the "Northwoods documents". Most of the sites carrying them are rightwing loony sites but the documents themselves are genuine.
You want to see how far Israel will go to put intelligence agents in the United States? Read this
You're just another ignorant "citizen" who gets his news from Fox and thinks he's "well-informed".
Read this from the article:
The letter goes on to cite mid-twentieth-century articles from, among other sources, Science, The Journal of Immunology, and The New England Journal of Medicine, and lists the names of such books as Tomorrow's Weapons (1964), Peace or Pestilence (1949), and Chemical Warfare (1921).
THIS is where Al Qaeda gets his bioweapons info?
Gimme a fucking break!
And these guys are supposed to be getting suitcase nukes and the like?
Bullshit.
This is amateur night at its worst. It makes my bank robberies look high-tech.
No wonder they used box cutters to hijack the 9/11 planes - and why they were so easily used as "patsies" to do that job so the neocons could have their "terrorist Pearl Harbor" as desired in the PNAC documents.
More than ever, I am convinced just by this one article that Mossad was behind 9/11 all the way.
It was no accident that Mossad agents were arrested filming the collapse of the towers or that Mossad agents were following the 9/11 operators around for months before the attack.
You don't need any of these stupid "remote control airplane" conspiracy theories to explain 9/11. It was a simple "false flag"/agent-provocateur operation. Mossad uses its infiltrators to get Al Qaeda to go with the plan. Then they make sure - with CIA help - Al Qaeda operators get whatever they need - including flight training from a school in Florida with connections to the drug trade, the DEA and the CIA. Then the boys at the top conveniently ignore FBI and CIA reports from the field that something is up - as proven by Crowly and Edmonds' testimonies. That's all you need to make it happen.
The US and Israeli governments KNEW 9/11 was going to happen - because they set it up. Classic "Reichstag fire" incident.
Couldn't be more obvious if you threw one of the hijacker's passports on the wreckage...
Oh, wait...
Ahem, I suspect Muslim men get laid more regularly than Christian fundamentalists do (unless you add in Jerry Falwell's total which skews the figures.)
Rate of return in any investment drops to the "general rate of return" which is historically some small figure of 1-2% or whatever as soon as competitors enter the market in search of whatever "monopoly profit" existed when the specific market was first created.
So what else is new?
Yup, that's how you humans do it.
However, it only works one on one for chimps. For humans, it's a little more complicated since it depends on things like money, control of media, etc.
It also only works if the new dominant chimp really can beat the old one. For humans, when the old one controls the CIA, the Pentagon and some other useful assets, it's a little harder. Which is why I expect an "October Surprise".
Bush Junior has been told often enough by Bush Senior what happened when he tried to get re-elected. Bush Senior and Bush Junior are going to make sure that doesn't happen to Bush Junior.
So polls and election prattle are mostly irrelevant. What matters is "the plan" and how easily the morons in the US can be "fooled again" as the song goes.
And the Libs and Greens aren't anywhere near able to cope with that territory.
Let me guess, you get your news from Fox, right?
I was IN Vietnam, 1967-1968, Cam Ranh Bay and Vung Ro Bay.
Did I say we are currently losing that many troops? No. I said we are GOING to lose that many troops. We COULD lose fifty thousand in the next year (although I suspect we will flee much sooner than that, so the losses may actually be only the five or ten thousand I usually indicate.)
IF combat deaths have been going down, which is NOT not true for the months of June and July if you look at the actual figures instead of listening to Bill O'Reilly, it is because the US is hunkered down in its bases and has reduced patrols nearly across the entire country - especially in the now "no-go" cities like Fallujah where the US is reduced to bombing civilians from the air since they have no clue where their enemy actually is.
Sadr's "army" is a bunch of ill-trained, lightly-armed militants and he has thousands more where they came from. Kill all you want. For every one you kill, five more of his relatives join up. You just don't get the nature of nationalist insurgency, do you?
As for how many people in Iraq hate the US, last poll I saw, the figure was around 80%. By now, it's gone up to 90, especially among the Shia, as illustrated by the demonstrations and increased insurgency activity in the south.
As Juan Cole points out, even clerics in the hardline Sunni areas are now supporting al-Sadr!
The largest Sunni clerical body issued a fatwa against any Iraqi security officer supporting the US occupation.
It's only a matter of time until Grand Ayatollah Sistani is forced by events to dump his "long game" plan and issue his own fatwa, which will immediately put another 100,000 insurgents on the street, and hundreds of thousand more protestors and rioters. The British commander in Basra has already said months ago that if 100,000 rioters show up on his doorstep, it's all over for the British part of the occupation.
Stop listening to Rush and O'Reilly and Hannity and Savage and you might learn something.
Here's something I just read today:
An opinion poll last October shows 33 per cent of Fox News viewers think the US has found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, when it has not, and 67 per cent think Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda, which the recently published September 11 Commission report concluded he did not.
The figures for listeners to National Public Radio were 11 per cent and 16 per cent respectively.
The poll shows not only are Fox News viewers often the least-informed news consumers, alarmingly, they also regard themselves as well-informed.
Heh, heh.
Fortunately I don't drink.
Of course, as a Bruce Sterling character said once, "I don't need drugs. I have my power fantasies."
Until the mass national resistance really starts, and the US bases find themselves cut off from food, water, fuel, and ammo.
It should take about a week or two (once it starts, and when that will be is anybody's guess), then in another thirty to ninety days after that, the US military will be forced to surrender or sue for a ceasefire to be allowed to evacuate - leaving behind a few tens of billions of dollars of US weaponry I'm sure the Iraqis will find a use for.
With the stoppage of Turkish transport trucks, a shortage is already being felt in US supplies.
Try again, dummy.
Preferably within the next twelve months as the Iraqi people hand the US the worst military defeat in its history.
When five or ten thousand (or more) US bodies come back, try telling the families of those troops how they "won" the "War on Terror".
"Our bases cover the whole country". Try reading what is going on in Iraq. The US controls NOTHING but the Green Zone and wherever the biggest concentration of US troops happens to be at the moment (which right now is Najaf - and we don't control that yet even.) Most of the major cities in Iraq are now "no-go" zones for US troops since the cost to try to control them is too high for the US commanders on the ground.
That is why they are trying desperately to put down al-Sadr in Najaf - and now that is bogging down in negotiations while at the same time infuriating what few Shia weren't infuriated already.
Another ignoramus.
They envy the US *lifestyle* (i.e., wealth).
They hate the US *government* (and many of them hate US citizens for supporting the US government - or being oblivious - like you - to the nature and policy effects of that government.)
And yes, the Europeans are hated too, because they did the same shit years before we did.
Doesn't excuse us.
You won't have to wait five years.
I predict the Iraqis will send the US home in bodybags within the next twelve months - maybe sooner.
There is absolutely no possible way the US military can sustain an occupation in a country of twenty five million people who hate the US.
When the mass national resistance really starts (and as the head of one two-million strong tribe in Iraq put it, "We'll make Vietnam look like a picnic."), the US military will suffer the worst military defeat in US history - one that will make Vietnam pale (because it took ten years in Vietnam to do what the Iraqis will do in two or less.)
I repeat: the US military will lose THOUSANDS of troops in Iraq within the next twelve months (unless they are granted a ceasefire in order to evacuate which is just possible.)
It's irrevelant if they didn't hate Americans before.
They hate Americans now.
If you don't believe that, you are seriously out of touch with the situation in Iraq - no doubt due to the fact that US media has decided Iraq is no longer a "story" since the "handover" - at least compared to some stupid murder and the elections.
When five or ten thousand more US troops come home from Iraq in bodybags, maybe you'll get the picture - their families sure will.
Good for you.
Another "distro competence" issue, apparently. SUSE has a rep for being more "cutting edge" on hardware support.
Why the other distros don't simply watch what each other does and then do the same is beyond me. Some "Not Invented Here" human bullshit, I guess.
After all, the point of open source IS to be able to use what somebody else does and make it better.
I didn't say there were NO technical issues, I said most of the complaints about Linux aren't about technical issues. And I don't count bad drivers as actual "technical" issues, they're more "distro competence" issues or issues related to lack of industry support - which is indeed a problem for Linux but is not Linux's fault. The driver issue is also one that, as I indicated, varies by user depending on their hardware. I've read people complaining that their AC97 onboard audio doesn't work with Linux - mine works fine with ALSA.
And, yes, I wouldn't be surprised if regression testing was lacking in most of the distros.
The bug with parted and the 2.6 kernel disk geometry reporting would have been caught if somebody had regression tested a Linux install in a dual boot environment. Supposedly the Fedora people claimed none of their testers dual boot with Windows - a seriously lame excuse. They KNOW a lot of people dual boot, and they KNOW the kernel geometry reporting changed, and they KNOW (or should at least suspect) that parted was affected, and they KNOW installation is the most difficult time for Linux users, so a thorough testing of the partitioning process in a dual boot environment should have been done.
Well, some people view Linux as having "problems", but not being "crap".
In my view, Linux (and Windows) are crap because they are both based on primitive windowing/mouse and other "low" technology. I think both of them could be much better designed. And no, I don't think having reversible windows or writing on the edges of windows or storing files in XML form is a significant improvement.
However, while Linux has "problems", they are only significant to the more naive user base. They are nothing that some training and some willingness on the part of the user to learn something new couldn't fix. In other words, these "problems" are social, not technological (except in the sense that ALL such "problems" are technological as per my previous paragraph.)
Most of Linux "problems" are merely the result of being different from Windows and the lack of willingness of people to learn something new. Anybody who ignores this is obviously a troll.
As far as the overall design of Linux, obviously it is superior to Windows where it counts - in security and reliability. Anybody who ignores that is obviously a troll. While the current incarnation of Windows (2000 and XP)is clearly superior in reliability to its previous incarnations (9x), it's still nothing to write home about. I had 2000 installed for less than two months, and a third party program ruined the Registry, and then after that reinstall, 2000 hosed the Registry all by its lonesone for no discernable reason, requiring another reinstall.
As for security, forget about it. Since at least 1997, Gates has been promising Windows will be secure "next time".
Which is why people who complain about Linux "problems" such as "usability" are merely trolls.
Yes, there are Linux trolls. But if for no other reason than that there are fewer Linux users, there are a hell of a lot less Linux trolls than Windows trolls. Of course, if you judge that by visiting Linux newsgroups, you might get a different impression.
Slashdot STARTED as a Linux/OSS promoting system. So what do you expect? Bill Gates to be welcomed here? To suggest that is to be a troll on the face of it.
Groklaw is the same - a promoter of OSS (although from the standpoint of legal issues, not technology). Do you expect everybody to welcome Windows trolls?
If you have an HONEST appraisal of Linux problems, which happens to be wrong partially or completely, that's one thing. To just sling uncritical generalities about "usability" is being a troll.
I can be - and have been - a Linux troll at times, just to bug the Windows trolls. That comes under the heading of "fun", not serious. I suppose some people I think are Windows trolls do the same thing. So maybe both sides should just shut up and let the market decide.
Not quite.
/. - and opinions are the stock in trade here.
It's just that statistically speaking, most of the anti-Linux comments I've read are not only false, they are known by the speaker to be false. This is detectable because the speaker invariably has nothing specific to say to prove his point, but relies on generalities.
If somebody presents a specific problem with Linux, such as that Linux has trouble getting drivers written for it by hardware manufacturers, nobody can really deny this is true. OTOH, the issue is how bad is this problem overall. If you assume it is a show-stopper, without considering other factors such as the type of user you're referring to or the effect of pre-installation, etc., you're simply wrong and if you then IGNORE these other factors, you become a troll.
The trolls are easily detectable because they make bullshit arguments such as that Linux is not "usable", or that Linux is not "learnable", or other general statements which simply aren't true regardless of the type of user. I know they aren't true because I had to learn Windows and Linux from scratch over the last three years and I see no difference between them in that regard.
I also see no evidence for the usual pro-Windows assertion that Windows is more "intuitive". What I have discovered is that NEITHER OS is particularly "intuitive". So anyone who asserts this as a certainty is necessarily a Windows troll with an agenda (or simply a moron - I suppose we must distinguish between morons and trolls, but I really get tired of trying to bother, especially since it doesn't seem to take much for a Windows moron to turn into a Windows troll - and Windows trolls are by definition morons.)
My standard statement remains true:
1) Windows is CRAP.
2) Linux is ALSO CRAP (whether it is EQUALLY crap is another issue - given the difficulty of writing a virus for it and its renowned stability, I think not.)
3) Linux is FREE crap.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that Linux wins that comparison. It does take a Windows troll to state that statement one is not true, statement two is true, and then ignore statement three.
If you do that, you are either a moron or a troll - or both. You're a moron if you actually believe that stuff, and you're a moron and a troll if you knowingly present statement two while deliberately ignoring statements one and three.
The bottom line: there are people who claim to like Linux except for [insert defect here] but who are KNOWINGLY lying about their like for Linux. That's the people I was referring to specifically.
And like I said, they're usually easy to detect simply by the fact that they telegraph their dislike BY saying "I like Linux but..." That's an OLD liar's game that fools no one - but liars always seem to need to continue using it.
The real bottom line: who cares? If Linux can't compete, IT WON'T. If it can, IT WILL. A third option is Linux AND Windows AND the Mac will be replaced by something else in ten or twenty years.
So anybody's opinion isn't worth the bandwidth to transmit it.
But this is
I am Kwame Rufatata from the SCO Group in the wonderful lake-strewn state of Utah.
I am writing to tell you that I have a problem which you can help me solve. It seems that we have received a large sum of money from an unnamed company in the wonderful lake-strewn state of Washington that we do not wish to pay the exorbitant taxes of the government on.
So, we would like to transfer these funds to an account outside the jurisdiction of the government. To do this, we need someone who is prepared to use their account to transfer our funds in order to conceal their point of origin.
If you will please give us your bank account number, we will transfer our funds through your account to an unnamed institution in the wonderful lake-strewn country of Switzerland. In return for this service, we will gratefully transfer you to a service fee of 10% of the funds transferred through your account. This could amount to as much as FIVE MILLION DOLLARS!
Please respond to my email as soon as possible, because our investors may force us to pay out these funds due to our falling stock price.
Sincerely,
Darl^H^H^H^HKwame Rufatata
SCO Group
"Groklaw turned into this orgy of groupthink with respect to issues of Linux technical and usability merit."
Really? Every time I go there, it's entirely about the law and how stupid SCO is. I don't think I've ever read anything about "Linux usability" there. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, since I don't read *every* post.
"Let's not turn Slashdot into that."
Not likely. Too many Windows trolls post here. Especially the ones that act like they really like Linux, "it's just that Linux [fill in the blanks about usability, installs, and other ruminant evacuation.]" Sorry, these morons fool no one.
"In February, Sterling and Jan Cuny, vice chair of the Computing Research Association in Washington, D.C., persuaded Microsoft to fund a CRA-sponsored workshop for female computer science and engineering graduate students to help counter both their alienation and escalating dropout rates. "
Is this the same Microsoft headed by Bill Gates who is quoted as having said, "We can hire twice the women at half the pay rate for men because they're only women so they'll do the grunt work?"
I always wondered what Melinda thought about that quote? I suppose when given the chance to marry a billionaire, feminism goes out the window.
Sounds like regular Windows to me...
Yes, this is sarcasm, morons.
If so, go here for the Koha Integrated Library System - an open-source ILS used by several libraries in New Zealand and elsewhere.
Also go here for the Open Source For Libraries Web site which has links to numerous open source library systems and tools. Including a story on how Arizona State University West moved entirely to Linux as the underlying OS for their library.
Between those two sources, you should find plenty to check out.
Any terrorist with any competence (hard to find, I know, but some must exist somewhere) will not be in the least deterred by a bunch of cameras - unless he happens to look EXACTLY like Osama bin Laden.
In the immortal words of Wulfgar (Rutger Hauer doing his Carlos the Jackal impression) in the movie "Nighthawks", "Remember - there is no security."