Since Bush intends to start a war with North Korea and after the North detonates a nuke on US soil we'll all be under martial law and the elections will be cancelled - or Bush will win simply because the public won't unseat him during an "emergency".
This is his "October Surprise". Been in the works for at least a year now if not longer. The voting fraud plans are just a backup - and now they've been pretty much exposed, so Bush has to fall back on Plan A.
Seven aircraft carriers heading for the Taiwan Straits as I type (unprecedented in US history - supposedly for an "exercise" to intimidate China - which never needed more than a couple carriers in the past to be intimidated)and a fleet of stealth bombers also sent to the area. All the "tripwire" troops on the DMZ have been moved south of Seoul to prevent them from being wiped out in the first three hours of the North's counterattack.
(They started that last year which is why I - and everyone else who was aware of the move - knew the US was intending to attack. Those troops have been their for fifty years precisely to prevent an NK first strike. The only reason to move them is because the US intends a first strike - using the same "WMD" excuse they used in Iraq.)
For the last ten years, the big watch-word in IT was CRM - "Customer Relationship Management" - the idea that you had to really treat the customer right and constantly get in the customer's face with how wonderful a company you were so they'd all want to do business with you since you were such a great friendly place.
I knew it was a fucking joke the minute I read about it - because I KNOW management - and management's idea of CRM is dropping spyware on your computer so they can bombard you with crap advertising for products that don't work and nobody wants - and treating their employees - those people who are the front-line to their customers - like dirt.
"CRM" is a joke concept given the nature of business in this country (for that matter, in most of the world.)
The Corporation is NOT your friend any more than the State is.
I do believe they probably do know at least approximately where Osama is, but I don't think that's enough to get Bush re-elected.
He needs a major "emergency" - which means either a nuclear detonation on US soil, or a major "hot war" - so the US public will not unseat him during an emergency - or the "emergency" can be used to justify canceling the elections - which a nuclear detonation and resulting martial law would do. A war with NK can provide both these scenarios.
Who needs a battle group to kill one guy? Nobody has enough security to prevent someone from killing them - especially if his enemies have $100 million to spend on the project (remember I said I'd make a $900 million profit on one billion). You think I couldn't take someone out for $100 million?
How many top-flight "contractors" do you think I could hire and equip for $100 million in cash? How many people in Iraq would have betrayed Saddam's security for a piece of that?
Maybe I would have had to go into the second $100 million. Whoop-de-do. I make an eight hundred million profit. I can live with that.
Assassination is always far more effective than war. Of course, if you have the luck of the Devil like Adolf Hitler (who survived at least five attempts), it might be a bit harder.
Bush is sending seven aircraft carriers to the Taiwan Straits - allegedly to intimidate China from threatening Taiwan - but in reality to attack North Korea. A flight of stealth bombers has been sent to the area as well - obviously to hit the NK nuclear facilities. The North Koreans reported over 150 spy plane overflights in the last month or so. This conveniently allows Bush to pull all US troops out of Iraq without having to explain why.
It also provides a nice "October Surprise" as the public will not unseat Bush in the elections during a "hot war". (Assuming the elections are held at all after the North is allowed by the CIA to detonate a nuke on US soil and we go to martial law).
This has been in the works for the last year at least - I predicted it last year as soon as the US announced it would move all the "tripwire" troops at the DMZ south of Seoul - so they don't all get killed in the first three hours of the North's retaliation.
"The UN had found it necessary to place a series of arms-inspection teams (by most accounts ineffective due to manpower constraints as well as their acceptance of rather bizarre rules) into Iraq"
Actually, by most accounts TODAY, the UN teams were remarkably effective in forcing Saddam to destroy or stop working on virtually everything he had as far as "WMDs" go.
And had the US allowed the inspections to continue, it was expected that Iraq would be cleared of WMDs. What most people forget, and the UN officials constantly reiterate, is that after the UN cleared Iraq of WMDs, there would be a monitoring program put in place which would have made it virtually IMPOSSIBLE for Iraq to develop nuclear weapons at all without being detected. He might have been able to conceal a few biowar labs somewhere, but they would have been mostly irrelevant as far as regional - let alone international - threats were concerned. Nuclear weapons development would have been impossible to develop secretly given UN monitoring directly on site.
Bush's war undermined all of that.
And of course, the idea that Bush and his crowd were simply "misled" by "bad intelligence" from Chalabi and his group is simply nonsense. They KNEW what they were saying was horseshit. It was KNOWN to be horseshit by everybody else (except media scabs like Judith Miller of the NY Times) including the UN and numerous intelligence agencies.
Cheney is STILL going around claiming stuff which is KNOWN to be horseshit. There's no excuse now. It's pure unadulterated lies and should be by itself grounds for immediate impeachment of both Bush and Cheney. And that doesn't even bring up Cheney's illegal involvement with Halliburton.
The motivations for all this are equally well-known. The neocons trumpeted this stuff for years before 9/11.
There were NO good high-level motives for the war - except getting rid of Saddam. Which, however, is totally irrelevant since there are plenty of bad people in the world who should be gotten rid of - the question is how? Do you spend two or three hundred billion dollars (the estimate if we stay in Iraq another couple years), thousands of civilian lives, hundreds (and potentially thousands) of US military casualties just to get rid of a dictator you don't like? When there are dozens more waiting to take his place (like Allawi whom WE have now put in power?)
You could have paid me one billion dollars and I'd have gotten rid of Saddam within ninety days - and made a 900 million dollar profit to boot! The country would have saved over 5,000 wounded and 800+ dead troops, and a couple hundred billion dollars, and twenty thousand Iraqi lives. Such a deal I offer you!
Had Hitler supported Rommel in North Africa as Rommel desired, Rommel would have swept through Turkey and captured the Caucasus oil fields. This would have solved Germany's fuel problems later in the war.
Which in turn would have fueled Germany's newly developed jet fighters which would have swept the skies of Allied aircraft in short order.
Also, if Hitler had been told of the effects of nuclear weapons by his scientists, he probably would have ordered them to develop one instead of concentrating on a nuclear engine. Germany might have had the bomb sooner than the US and definitely would have had the rocket technology to deliver it on London and the Allied invasion force at Normandy.
The US and the rest of the world would have won eventually because the US had the ECONOMIC might. But the war might have dragged on for another five or ten years.
And then where would Korea have been without the US to enter that war (because it was too exhausted fighting the Germans and Japanese another five years?)
The classic scene in "Battle of The Bulge" explains it all. Robert Shaw as the German commander is ordered by his senior officer to bypass a US hold out and continue the advance. He shows his senior a chocolate cake captured from a US prisoner. He explains that the Americans have fuel enough to fly cake across the Atlantic to their troops, and that the only way to defeat the US is to crush the US military's will to fight. Which illustrate my main point: the US did not WIN WWII - it BOUGHT WWII - and every war since.
Another point is that US military WWII war games and analysis of the relative performance of US and German troops show that German troops were twenty percent better trained and more effective than their US counterparts. This was illustrated later in the war when exhausted German battalions held off vastly superior numbers of US troops in Italy and elsewhere.
Actually it seems to me the article quotes Moore and does not deny he said what he said. That said, the article DOES say that the companies involved are going to sue anybody who distributes the movie illegally.
The article goes on to describe the back and forth between supporters and detractors of the film and the almost "polticial campaign" behavior of both sides. This fight may be more significant than the actual Presidential campaign it is intended to influence.
Of course, Bush is planning the Second Korean War as we speak as his "October Surprise", so all this may become irrelevant - except to prove Moore was right.
What the hell IS a "channel"? Just another metaphor for a file folder?
Oh, yeah, I can dig having a "Sci-Fi Channel", a "Playboy Channel", a whatever, to some degree. At least I know the overall genre it refers to. But a CBS? An ABC? An NBC? A TNN? What the hell is that? A conglomeration of crap mixed in with one or two (if we're lucky) useful media.
Someone once told me while window browsing, "I'm always amazed at how much stuff I DON'T want to buy." The same is true of the media. Obviously someone wants to buy it because it gets made and sold. But then most humans are morons, so this is no surprise.
It's a database issue. I want to find the stuff I like and ignore the stuff I don't. Give me a database with appropriate metadata, a good - REALLY good - search function, and links. Screw channels.
To discuss the actual article, I find it amusing that Microsoft reps can't handle the fact that Linux comes BUNDLED - LEGALLY - with TONS of applications and utilities.
And TONS more are available on Linux Format magazine CD's (and even 4GB DVD's)(I have over two dozen of these - GIGABYTES of software I haven't even looked at yet!) or from Web sites and places like Freshmeat and Sourceforge.
Sure, some of them are pre-release alpha.001 crap. But some of them are damn good (well, all right, at least as good as software gets these days - which is still mostly pathetic). This is true in the Windows world, too, if you spend some time on alt.comp.freeware.
Microsoft's plan is obviously to buy up everybody who produces any software anybody wants to buy. This plan obviously has a few flaws such as the inability of Microsoft - despite $50 billion in the bank - to buy up the entire industry. Also not to mention that a lot of people would rather be CEOs of their own companies than slaves to Bill.
No way Microsoft can ever compete with free software in this regard.
The subsequent Doctors always seemed too much like Brit fops. I couldn't take them "seriously" (as it were). Pertwee looked more like the original Doctor (Peter Cushing) and Baker had such a forceful personality that you could take him seriously.
In fact, Louise Jamison said at the convention I saw her at that frequently Baker would read one of the scripts, exclaim "Oh, what a load of rubbish!" and throw the script out the window - whereupon a production assistant would have to walk down several flights of stairs to retrieve it from the street. So he was a character to work with as well as in being the Doctor.
And of course he ended up marrying one of "his" "Companions".
Last time I saw her, she was a dwarf ("Total Recall"), so you'll forgive me if I was slow on the uptake. I do have a number of pictures of her on the ol' hard drive now - but not many. She simply isn't that big yet.
I agree, though, I've been waiting for a new Dr. Who for twenty years or so, so I'm hardly holding my breath or searching the Web for advance tickets.
Well, I DO have various pictures of her on my hard drive.
However, I have NOT been following the random actions of the BBC concerning Dr. Who.
When they produce an ACTUAL FILM, I will take note. You forget I used to watch the series twenty years ago. I've been waiting that long to see the "return of". I do have to breathe occasionally, you know, "under the rock" and all.
And unlike the average/.'er, I do need to work for a living - however rarely I get the chance.
Billy Piper as the Dr's companion? Well, maybe. My favorite was always Liz Sladen - she was cute as a button. Although Louise Jamison (Leela) wasn't bad - I had the pleasure of seeing her in person at a Dr. Who convention in San Francisco many years ago. Unlike a lot of stars, she was better-looking in person than on the screen. Had a lot of great set stories to tell about working with Tom Baker.
Just wondering, though - will we get to see more of the inside of the Tardis? Like where the Dr. and the "companion" sleep? Always wondered about that - those girls were real loyal to the Doc! Always wondered how long you could prolong an orgasm with the ability to control time!
Actually I'm aware of that. However, the Secret Service follows him wherever he goes on this visits to his parents and the court ordered his parents to make sure they keep him under control.
So the risk is small - and he's not yet actually "out" - and probably never will be. The Supreme Court has ruled that if you are found innocent by reason of insanity and involuntarily committed, you can remain committed indefinitely until the medical authorities decide to release you - and they never do because that would subject them to legal liability if their prognosis is wrong - and it's always wrong and they know it.
Slashdot Mirror
Since Bush intends to start a war with North Korea and after the North detonates a nuke on US soil we'll all be under martial law and the elections will be cancelled - or Bush will win simply because the public won't unseat him during an "emergency".
This is his "October Surprise". Been in the works for at least a year now if not longer. The voting fraud plans are just a backup - and now they've been pretty much exposed, so Bush has to fall back on Plan A.
Seven aircraft carriers heading for the Taiwan Straits as I type (unprecedented in US history - supposedly for an "exercise" to intimidate China - which never needed more than a couple carriers in the past to be intimidated)and a fleet of stealth bombers also sent to the area. All the "tripwire" troops on the DMZ have been moved south of Seoul to prevent them from being wiped out in the first three hours of the North's counterattack.
(They started that last year which is why I - and everyone else who was aware of the move - knew the US was intending to attack. Those troops have been their for fifty years precisely to prevent an NK first strike. The only reason to move them is because the US intends a first strike - using the same "WMD" excuse they used in Iraq.)
He says in his piece you have to buy a third-party partition manager to install any of these distros in a dual-boot configuration.
This may have been true five years ago - it's not now. Mandrake at least can resize even NTFS partitions during the install.
Which means his article is about as accurate as Bush's next statement about "WMDs".
He also drags up the notion that installing Linux is a nightmare of unsupported hardware - which is also no longer true (in most cases).
It's just more bullshit FUD.
For the last ten years, the big watch-word in IT was CRM - "Customer Relationship Management" - the idea that you had to really treat the customer right and constantly get in the customer's face with how wonderful a company you were so they'd all want to do business with you since you were such a great friendly place.
I knew it was a fucking joke the minute I read about it - because I KNOW management - and management's idea of CRM is dropping spyware on your computer so they can bombard you with crap advertising for products that don't work and nobody wants - and treating their employees - those people who are the front-line to their customers - like dirt.
"CRM" is a joke concept given the nature of business in this country (for that matter, in most of the world.)
The Corporation is NOT your friend any more than the State is.
I do believe they probably do know at least approximately where Osama is, but I don't think that's enough to get Bush re-elected.
He needs a major "emergency" - which means either a nuclear detonation on US soil, or a major "hot war" - so the US public will not unseat him during an emergency - or the "emergency" can be used to justify canceling the elections - which a nuclear detonation and resulting martial law would do. A war with NK can provide both these scenarios.
You got it.
Especially since CNN reported a Pentagon estimate that the US would lose 50,000 US casualties in Korea in the first ninety days of a war there.
Who needs a battle group to kill one guy? Nobody has enough security to prevent someone from killing them - especially if his enemies have $100 million to spend on the project (remember I said I'd make a $900 million profit on one billion). You think I couldn't take someone out for $100 million?
How many top-flight "contractors" do you think I could hire and equip for $100 million in cash? How many people in Iraq would have betrayed Saddam's security for a piece of that?
Maybe I would have had to go into the second $100 million. Whoop-de-do. I make an eight hundred million profit. I can live with that.
Assassination is always far more effective than war. Of course, if you have the luck of the Devil like Adolf Hitler (who survived at least five attempts), it might be a bit harder.
Bush is sending seven aircraft carriers to the Taiwan Straits - allegedly to intimidate China from threatening Taiwan - but in reality to attack North Korea. A flight of stealth bombers has been sent to the area as well - obviously to hit the NK nuclear facilities. The North Koreans reported over 150 spy plane overflights in the last month or so. This conveniently allows Bush to pull all US troops out of Iraq without having to explain why.
It also provides a nice "October Surprise" as the public will not unseat Bush in the elections during a "hot war". (Assuming the elections are held at all after the North is allowed by the CIA to detonate a nuke on US soil and we go to martial law).
This has been in the works for the last year at least - I predicted it last year as soon as the US announced it would move all the "tripwire" troops at the DMZ south of Seoul - so they don't all get killed in the first three hours of the North's retaliation.
"The UN had found it necessary to place a series of arms-inspection teams (by most accounts ineffective due to manpower constraints as well as their acceptance of rather bizarre rules) into Iraq"
Actually, by most accounts TODAY, the UN teams were remarkably effective in forcing Saddam to destroy or stop working on virtually everything he had as far as "WMDs" go.
And had the US allowed the inspections to continue, it was expected that Iraq would be cleared of WMDs. What most people forget, and the UN officials constantly reiterate, is that after the UN cleared Iraq of WMDs, there would be a monitoring program put in place which would have made it virtually IMPOSSIBLE for Iraq to develop nuclear weapons at all without being detected. He might have been able to conceal a few biowar labs somewhere, but they would have been mostly irrelevant as far as regional - let alone international - threats were concerned. Nuclear weapons development would have been impossible to develop secretly given UN monitoring directly on site.
Bush's war undermined all of that.
And of course, the idea that Bush and his crowd were simply "misled" by "bad intelligence" from Chalabi and his group is simply nonsense. They KNEW what they were saying was horseshit. It was KNOWN to be horseshit by everybody else (except media scabs like Judith Miller of the NY Times) including the UN and numerous intelligence agencies.
Cheney is STILL going around claiming stuff which is KNOWN to be horseshit. There's no excuse now. It's pure unadulterated lies and should be by itself grounds for immediate impeachment of both Bush and Cheney. And that doesn't even bring up Cheney's illegal involvement with Halliburton.
The motivations for all this are equally well-known. The neocons trumpeted this stuff for years before 9/11.
There were NO good high-level motives for the war - except getting rid of Saddam. Which, however, is totally irrelevant since there are plenty of bad people in the world who should be gotten rid of - the question is how? Do you spend two or three hundred billion dollars (the estimate if we stay in Iraq another couple years), thousands of civilian lives, hundreds (and potentially thousands) of US military casualties just to get rid of a dictator you don't like? When there are dozens more waiting to take his place (like Allawi whom WE have now put in power?)
You could have paid me one billion dollars and I'd have gotten rid of Saddam within ninety days - and made a 900 million dollar profit to boot! The country would have saved over 5,000 wounded and 800+ dead troops, and a couple hundred billion dollars, and twenty thousand Iraqi lives. Such a deal I offer you!
Good points.
However...
Had Hitler supported Rommel in North Africa as Rommel desired, Rommel would have swept through Turkey and captured the Caucasus oil fields. This would have solved Germany's fuel problems later in the war.
Which in turn would have fueled Germany's newly developed jet fighters which would have swept the skies of Allied aircraft in short order.
Also, if Hitler had been told of the effects of nuclear weapons by his scientists, he probably would have ordered them to develop one instead of concentrating on a nuclear engine. Germany might have had the bomb sooner than the US and definitely would have had the rocket technology to deliver it on London and the Allied invasion force at Normandy.
The US and the rest of the world would have won eventually because the US had the ECONOMIC might. But the war might have dragged on for another five or ten years.
And then where would Korea have been without the US to enter that war (because it was too exhausted fighting the Germans and Japanese another five years?)
The classic scene in "Battle of The Bulge" explains it all. Robert Shaw as the German commander is ordered by his senior officer to bypass a US hold out and continue the advance. He shows his senior a chocolate cake captured from a US prisoner. He explains that the Americans have fuel enough to fly cake across the Atlantic to their troops, and that the only way to defeat the US is to crush the US military's will to fight. Which illustrate my main point: the US did not WIN WWII - it BOUGHT WWII - and every war since.
Another point is that US military WWII war games and analysis of the relative performance of US and German troops show that German troops were twenty percent better trained and more effective than their US counterparts. This was illustrated later in the war when exhausted German battalions held off vastly superior numbers of US troops in Italy and elsewhere.
Actually it seems to me the article quotes Moore and does not deny he said what he said. That said, the article DOES say that the companies involved are going to sue anybody who distributes the movie illegally.
The article goes on to describe the back and forth between supporters and detractors of the film and the almost "polticial campaign" behavior of both sides. This fight may be more significant than the actual Presidential campaign it is intended to influence.
Of course, Bush is planning the Second Korean War as we speak as his "October Surprise", so all this may become irrelevant - except to prove Moore was right.
Once again, YOUR post is larger and less useful than the guy you're attacking. /.'ers! Jesus Christ!
Where's my moderator points? You're getting modded down!
If there's one.
What the hell IS a "channel"? Just another metaphor for a file folder?
Oh, yeah, I can dig having a "Sci-Fi Channel", a "Playboy Channel", a whatever, to some degree. At least I know the overall genre it refers to. But a CBS? An ABC? An NBC? A TNN? What the hell is that? A conglomeration of crap mixed in with one or two (if we're lucky) useful media.
Someone once told me while window browsing, "I'm always amazed at how much stuff I DON'T want to buy." The same is true of the media. Obviously someone wants to buy it because it gets made and sold. But then most humans are morons, so this is no surprise.
It's a database issue. I want to find the stuff I like and ignore the stuff I don't. Give me a database with appropriate metadata, a good - REALLY good - search function, and links. Screw channels.
To discuss the actual article, I find it amusing that Microsoft reps can't handle the fact that Linux comes BUNDLED - LEGALLY - with TONS of applications and utilities.
.001 crap. But some of them are damn good (well, all right, at least as good as software gets these days - which is still mostly pathetic). This is true in the Windows world, too, if you spend some time on alt.comp.freeware.
And TONS more are available on Linux Format magazine CD's (and even 4GB DVD's)(I have over two dozen of these - GIGABYTES of software I haven't even looked at yet!) or from Web sites and places like Freshmeat and Sourceforge.
Sure, some of them are pre-release alpha
Microsoft's plan is obviously to buy up everybody who produces any software anybody wants to buy. This plan obviously has a few flaws such as the inability of Microsoft - despite $50 billion in the bank - to buy up the entire industry. Also not to mention that a lot of people would rather be CEOs of their own companies than slaves to Bill.
No way Microsoft can ever compete with free software in this regard.
Tough luck, Bill! Have a nice day!
Well, I did like Baker as well as Pertwee.
The subsequent Doctors always seemed too much like Brit fops. I couldn't take them "seriously" (as it were). Pertwee looked more like the original Doctor (Peter Cushing) and Baker had such a forceful personality that you could take him seriously.
In fact, Louise Jamison said at the convention I saw her at that frequently Baker would read one of the scripts, exclaim "Oh, what a load of rubbish!" and throw the script out the window - whereupon a production assistant would have to walk down several flights of stairs to retrieve it from the street. So he was a character to work with as well as in being the Doctor.
And of course he ended up marrying one of "his" "Companions".
Lumley?
When did that happen?
Last time I saw her was in "The New Avengers" - God, that girl has legs.
I just looked up when she was confirmed to be the new companion.
/. time! (Considering this story will disappear off the front page by tonight...)
Thursday, 27th May 2004.
I've been "under a rock" for a whole month! Oh, my God!
Ages in
I also checked - I was wrong about her being in Total Recall. Oops! Don't know where I got that idea.
Last time I saw her, she was a dwarf ("Total Recall"), so you'll forgive me if I was slow on the uptake. I do have a number of pictures of her on the ol' hard drive now - but not many. She simply isn't that big yet.
I agree, though, I've been waiting for a new Dr. Who for twenty years or so, so I'm hardly holding my breath or searching the Web for advance tickets.
Well, I DO have various pictures of her on my hard drive.
/.'er, I do need to work for a living - however rarely I get the chance.
However, I have NOT been following the random actions of the BBC concerning Dr. Who.
When they produce an ACTUAL FILM, I will take note. You forget I used to watch the series twenty years ago. I've been waiting that long to see the "return of". I do have to breathe occasionally, you know, "under the rock" and all.
And unlike the average
Ah, yes, Jon Pertwee WAS the best Doctor Who!
And "The Master" was the best villain!
Let the flame wars begin!
I'll help!
Drew Barrymore?
Uh, maybe not.
You're on your own, kid.
Where do you think I get my handle?
Billy Piper as the Dr's companion? Well, maybe. My favorite was always Liz Sladen - she was cute as a button. Although Louise Jamison (Leela) wasn't bad - I had the pleasure of seeing her in person at a Dr. Who convention in San Francisco many years ago. Unlike a lot of stars, she was better-looking in person than on the screen. Had a lot of great set stories to tell about working with Tom Baker.
Just wondering, though - will we get to see more of the inside of the Tardis? Like where the Dr. and the "companion" sleep? Always wondered about that - those girls were real loyal to the Doc! Always wondered how long you could prolong an orgasm with the ability to control time!
Actually I'm aware of that. However, the Secret Service follows him wherever he goes on this visits to his parents and the court ordered his parents to make sure they keep him under control.
So the risk is small - and he's not yet actually "out" - and probably never will be. The Supreme Court has ruled that if you are found innocent by reason of insanity and involuntarily committed, you can remain committed indefinitely until the medical authorities decide to release you - and they never do because that would subject them to legal liability if their prognosis is wrong - and it's always wrong and they know it.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!
Now THAT should be modded +5: Funny!
Bush smart?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
RTFLMAO!!!
The US is accountable to YOU?
Who is "YOU"? George Bush?
Go on up to the White House and ask someone for an account.
See you in twenty or thirty years - after John Hinckley gets out.
Oh, you think voting makes you accountable?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Yeah, you could be wrong.
That would be bad, since it adds to stupidity as well.