You've got to be kidding me, there is little or no challenge in finding the number of killed in most US wars.
But all the news reports and government press annoucements are reporting fatalities when normally they report casualties. So yes, if you notice that they are now reporting a different number than normal, you can go out and find it. Many people, who as another noted are probably not aware of the difference between casualty and fatality, would not do this and accept the official account.
It's about spin.
Why not just give the totals?
Because there is no "total number of soldiers who lost a significant portion of at least one leg".
Without even looking at the numbers, which I linked to and for which you are welcome, you should have already known that lesser injuries and illness accounted for a large portion of casualties, like it has in every other conflict.
Sorry if I gave you the impression there would be ~46,000 legless soldiers.
What are apparently minor wounds account for another large chunk.
"Not requiring air transport" is not the same as "minor" by any means. Of course there were minor injuries, but they aren't broken out that way, just like loss-of-limb injuries aren't.
Who really gives half a shit if the Iraqies have a peaceful democracy? Who wants to spend a trillion American tax dollars so that the Iraqies can have a peaceful democracy? Not me.
Allegedly many people do, including the Commander in Chief of the armed forces and the American voters who let him keep that position in 2004.
I agree. We should do it tomorrow.
Since that method of ending the attacks is only about 10 zillion times more effective than your "anger all of Iraq through excessive violence" strategy, and you agree that it is the method we should take, why did you even suggest the vastly less effective and much much more costly and stupid method?
Of course you probably aren't considering the long-term consequences of that decision. Iraq isn't going to just vanish when we leave.
But, of course, they didn't. Why? Because the people in charge said, "Holy fuck, guys, we can't win against this shit!" and that was that.
Not people, person. Not only did the military leaders think the war should go on, but it didn't matter because it was only the Emperor's word that mattered. And yes, he told them to surrender because he knew he wouldn't have a country to rule. Had he for whatever reason failed to issue that edict, then we would still be fighting the war.
Whereas in Iraq there is no "person in charge" to tell the insurgents to stop to begin with. Mohammed is not going to appear in the sky and say "Oh damn, seriously guys, I didn't mean for you to get all that martyr-y, just stop already". Therefore, we will continue to fight this war for as long as we are there, and excessive violence will not end it but only make it worse.
Which we should have done from day one if Iraq was a target worthy of military action. There is no reason to have boots on the ground in Iraq.
You have something you think is worth fighting for, so you blow it up with a nuke. Brilliant.
What in your mind makes a target worthy of military action?
Since boots on the ground are the only things that can hold territory, occupy and control land, exploit its resources, replace its government, etc. etc. you seem to be implying that no offensive action is ever worth it, and neither is any defensive action which requires anything of the above. Certainly no mission which could be described as "peacekeeping". What, exactly, is worth it in your mind?
If the thought was to draw the sword of military might to bear against Iraq, than this could have much more effectively been done with standoff weaponry. But obviously it was never the intent.
"Draw the sword of military might to bear"? What does that even mean? You talk about it as an "intent", as if it were a goal unto itself.
Either eliminating the enemy, or causing them to give up hope in their cause.
What would be the positive outcome of that be?
You cannot claim "the end of fighting" as a positive outcome of the fight that you started.
I agree that the VC should be used to attempt more ports as a method of testing just how different the Japanese and American markets are. What I'm not sure about is how much of the American market is like the Japanese market, and how much of it is a group of very vocal fanboys online.
There are certainly still some differences in the kinds of games that U.S. and Japanese gamers like. However, I think this gap is shrinking, and I think the Nintendo execs are mistaken about a number of games.
More importantly there's no way you can say that Super Mario World falls in that gap. The main thrust of my "markets are becoming one" argument is that Japan is getting SMW, but we in the U.S. apparently have to wait until N of America thinks it's strategically appropriate for us to have it. Thanks to the internet we can see that this is the case and be insulted by it, which is why they can't continue to think of the markets as being completely separate.
Perhaps you didn't quite read what I wrote. I know lots of people use the term "all you can think about" very loosely, but I actually meant it exactly the way it sounds. When something is all you can think about, you literally can't focus your thoughts on anything else.
You're right, I didn't realize you meant it literally. In which case what you're describing is a very small number of people who literally can't focus on anything else. You're only describing a tiny portion of real addicts!
For most people work, social activities and sleep make up most of their life. So basically what I was saying is if you can't think about anything but the game and you become irritable any time you can't play it, you're most likely addicted. Sure doesn't sound like "just obsession" to me anyhow.
Actually, being irritated when drawn away with the object of one's interest is exactly what obsession is all about.
Now I think you maybe missed my point, which is that the main thing that characterizes an addiction is that you can't stop even though you want to.
If you don't want to stop and have no reason to stop because you aren't being harmed, then that's not addiction.
If you are deathly afraid that you are going to lose your job if you show up late again, but you still can't pull yourself away from WoW, then yes, you have an addiction.
You are making the assumption that we need to convince the Iraqies to love us, and/or that we yearn for their love.
Love would be nice, but fear works, too. In fact, terror really seems to be a language that the Muslim world appreciates. Ultimately, though, I don't really care if our enemies love, fear, hate, loath, or mildly dislike us. The goal is for them to quit attacking us. I don't really care what motivates them to do this.
Um, no, the goal is to establish a stable, peaceful Democracy.
Blowing up cities until the populace lays down their arms and begs for mercy out of sheer fear for their lives will not accomplish this.
If all we wanted was to not be attacked by Iraqis any more, we could just fucking leave.
What the hell do you think we're doing there, anyway?
Flattening a city in Iraq would help because A) there'd be a lot less Iraqies and B) it would sure-as-shit get the attention of the ones left. Every time someone wrings their hands about how this sort of thing doesn't work I just point to Japan.
Well maybe you should stop, because it's a bad example.
The Japanese stopped fighting because their Emperor told them to lay down arms and stop fighting, and for no other reason. Death by itself didn't sway them, because dying for the their Emperor was considered a great honor. The Kamikaze, you realize, were revered. If the Emperor had said "Fight to the last man! The honor of our great nation demands nothing less!" then we would still be fighting in Japan, or at least until we decided to just go with nuclear genocide. Remember those soldiers we found on Pacific atols who had never gotten the order to surrender and were still fighting the war decades after it ended? That would have been every Japanese person.
Now the situation in Iraq is similar in that Muslim culture, especially Shiite Muslim culture, has a strong martyrdom tradition. For the insurgents in Iraq, dying fighting the infidel enemy is a wonderful thing -- this is why they are willing to blow themselves up to strike at their enemy. The major difference from Japan is that this tradition is rooted in religion, and the order effectively comes from Allah himself. Even if the religious leaders called for peace, the jihadists would ignore it. If al Sadr ordered his Madhi Army to put down its arms, then it wouldn't be his Madhi Army any more. So your attempt to pacify them would backfire, simply creating tons of new insurgents who are more determined to fight to the death, not less, even as the leaders asked the to stop (before their power base was killed out from under them). In other words, the Muslim equivalent of the Japanese Emperor is The Prophet, and he is never going to tell the insurgents to stop in response to aggression.
Oh yeah, there's another reason why destroying an Iraqi city would be retardedly counterproductive. As soon as we did, the Green Zone in Baghdad would be overrun as the entire population rose up against us. Our position in Iraq is not that secure. A true nation-wide uprising, like we saw in Mosul in 2004, only in every city in Iraq at once, would end the U.S. occupation in a week. We could nuke the cities, sure, but we'd be doing it from airbases in Kuwait.
So military invasions are pretty much now a proven waste of time, money, and lives. They cost HUGE amounts of money, die daily, and don't project military force to any level likely to bring positive outcomes for our side. And on top of this they simply fuel the fires of resistance wherever they are.
Your analysis is correct, except I still wonder what "positive outcomes" you think sufficient military force could bring.
It's interesting that no-one ever quotes the glowing praise for the PS3 in this isuppli article.
"While many fret over the high cost and price of the PlayStation 3 compared to the competition, iSuppli believes the console provides more processing power and capability than any consumer electronics device in history. Because of this, the PlayStation 3 is a great bargain, well worth its $599 price and $840.35 cost, iSuppli believes."
Of course the PS3 is a bargain, as they are selling it for less than it costs to produce. Hard to call that a bad deal.
Unless you don't have $600. Or the $800-$1000 needed to get one on Ebay if you want a non-hypothetical PS3. "Great deal for what you get" and "way too fucking expensive" are not mutually exclusive!
Nobody buys a console because its internals are architecturally pleasing (don't get me wrong, the Cell is a sweet chip, but that neither makes a PS3 cheaper nor does it make one appear on the store shelves so I can buy it). They buy it because of the games. And right now PS3 is in the same place Xbox was in. What great games did it have? Halo and... um... Halo.
So the reason so few quote the praise for the PS3 is because it's pretty much irrelevent. We're talking about a console launch. Few doubt that the PS3 is, hardware-wise, a very nice piece of machinery. I certainly don't doubt it. That doesn't make me want one, that doesn't mean I can afford one if I did want one, that doesn't mean I could find one to buy if I could afford one, and that doesn't make Sony lose any less money on the purchase if I am finally able to complete it.
It's simple: A console that is very expensive (limiting demand) and is difficult to produce (limiting supply) is headed towards a smaller marketshare, possibly meaning that fewer games are produced for it. As Sony loses a lot of money on each sale and has to sell many games to turn a profit, this means that if it plays out that way not only will PS3 be a failure in the marketshare sense but also in a financial sense. They need to increase the supply and reduce the price before they can attain a marketshare that will keep developers devoted to them, and thus keep consumers devoted.
Notice how whether or not the PS3 is an engineering masterpiece doesn't enter into it? As an engineer I would really like to live in the universe where whoever has the coolest microarchitectures wins, but sadly it doesn't work that way. A lot of times the coolest microarchitecture is the one that fails the hardest because it is difficult to manufacture and thus too expensive and too hard to supply in volume.
Now if the PS3 was a crappy piece of hardware, and still cost $600 with short supplies, then PS3 failure would be a forgone conclusion. However I don't think anyone worth mentioning is saying it's crappy hardware, so I'm not sure what "thesis" you think that part of the isuppli article is contradicting.
who do not feel that the intractible, insoluble problems faced by every other great power in history apply to them.
Because they don't know about them. This is an administration who thinks that ignorance is the ideal foundation for decision making. Bush deliberately avoids education, preferring to get talking points from his advisors. I think it unlikely that Rumsfeld had ever opened a book covering military history in his entire life.
This little gem of an idea was on the news for about 10 minutes a couple of years ago, when the Pentagon opined that Chalabi was an Iranian double-agent who duped the US with bad intel so Iran could foment a regime change to destabilize the region so the Shia majority could take control.
For those who don't recall, Chalabi was our man. He and his intrepid group of fellow exiles were going to help us win the hearts of the people as well as give us the necessary intel to dismantle the Baathist regime. He sat next to Laura Bush, and seemed to be getting groomed for taking over Iraq.
Then the bit about him telling Iran everything he could hit the news, and I knew we were fucked. Okay, so the guy who talked the admin into this fool enterprise and convinced them that everything would go great turns out to have been working for Iran?! Gee, Iran sure wouldn't like to see Saddam gone and the U.S. weakened and militarily ineffectual due to being stuck in Iraq so Iran is free to do whatever it wants, like pursue nukes.
Chalabi was an Iraqi exile who hated Saddam, because Saddam wanted him dead. Our admins, being retards who like sloganizing better than critical thinking, thought "the enemy of our enemy is our friend!" Idiots! Saddam had lots of enemies, and most of those enemies are also enemies of ours! "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is what your enemy says to you when he's trying to sucker you into helping him with his other enemy while letting him get close enough to you to stab you in the back.
Yes, this is costing us, the taxpayer money. Currently to the tune of over $300 billion.
That money didn't just vanish you know (though certainly a lot of it is unaccounted for).
It largely has gone to the defense contractors, the boeings and halliburtons and so on and so forth. We are spending that money, not shoveling it into a furnace to fuel a war machine. The shoveling is metaphorical. The profit for the defense industry is very very literal.
So yeah. You are losing a shit-load of money. Wealthy corporations are making a shit-load of money. Your money.
I don't think he meant unwinnable as in not able to beat their armies, he meant in terms of what we're seeing right now - total loss of control of what was left after occupation.
Anybody who has yet to internalize the fact that winning the conventional phase of the war was irrelevent in comparison to the non-conventional war that followed is too hopelessly stupid to bother with, imo.
You'd think Vietnam would have taught them, but some people are just too dumb to figure out that conventional war is just one way to fight a war, and dominance in conventional warfare means very little in other forms of warfare. They still want everything to be WWII, carpet bombing and armored formations rolling across the countryside.
So if when someone said "it was obvious we couldn't win" he thought they were referring to winning conventional war -- rather than, you know, the actual war of which the conventional phase was a small part -- then that just means he's too stupid to understand what's going on now.
The soldier I asked was pretty drunk, but I figure we can forgive that since he was discharged due to losing his right leg above the knee from a roadside bomb.
If you see him again, buy him a beer for me.
This is something we don't hear about very much. I was deeply distrubed when the news and government started to only report U.S. fatalities. Every other report of war I'd ever heard talked about casualties, as in soldiers taken out of combat by death or injury. It sounded very suspicious -- the numbers sounded fairly low (at the time) relative to other conflicts, but all I knew about other conflicts were casualties, which are always several times higher than the number outright killed. Yet those numbers weren't being mentioned, making it sound like a deliberate attempt to hide the larger and thus more depressing number.
So as we cross past the 3,000 mark of dead coalition soldiers, we have 46,000 non-mortal casualties. Not all of those are crippling injuries, but nevertheless we're going to be seeing a whole lot more soldiers like the one you met. Especially like that, since the roadside bomb taking out a soldier's legs but not killing them seems to be the most common mode of injury.
I hope to God all those people who support this war will "Support the Troops" when they see one sitting at the traffic light on a board, no legs, holding a sign that says "Iraq vet, need food and work" and drop the man some cash. I know I will.
What do you mean? NYT is a huge pack of lies. What the OP seems to have completely forgotten about was how the NYT spent so much time lying in order to support the administration. Their utter credulity and willingness to forward any government propaganda as if it was God's Truth (remember the Trailers of Mass Destruction?) was what started them on this path towards irrelevence, to the point that they had to publish an article about their own shitty reporting in order to try to maintain some journalistic integrity. If they then swerved the other way and try to paint everything against Bush using the same shoddy journalism, in a futile attempt to appear to be "on the ball" after they dropped it so badly, why would I be surprised?
As far as I'm concerned, the NYTs only purpose is that it still seems to have some of the best contacts of any paper and can get leaked copies of memos and reports before anyone else. I do not trust them to accurately represent the contents, but at least the memos' existence gets in the news to be covered by other news outlets.
Not that they have anything I want in the first place which makes it doubly insulting.
Yeah, but that insult there is exactly the point.
The point is that right now you are providing no revenue for Universal.
If they get this license fee in place, then you will. Even though you do not consume and have no desire to consume Universal product.
Don't mistake their retarded rhetoric for their true intentions.
They know that most people use their iPods legitimately to hold music they purchased on CD or through iTunes. They know that, if they are able to slip this license fee in, most people will still continue to buy their products legitimately. Very few people doing that today will be put off enough to stop.
So for them, it only increases their income without them having to do a damn thing more. And they know it.
"Piracy tax" is just the dressing they use to hide their real intention to siphon money they aren't entitled to from unsuspecting consumers. They're calling you a bloody pirate just as an excuse to be able to steal from you. They are the ones that want to be the pirates.
Offtopic: anything more than $0 (even Canadian dollars) is too much to be 'reasonable' for a 'pirate tax'.
Would it be too much if it meant that, having already paid the price of your piracy, that you could not be sued for subsequent pirate activity?
I believe this is the situation in Canada. They pay the tax, yes, but then the Canadian music industry cannot go after any of the Canadian pirates. So in theory, you could just go out and download every song they ever published. I bet it's the recording industry who would think they got the short end of the stick on that one!
It won't work that way in the U.S. of course. In the U.S., we will end up paying the tax on anything even remotely capable of pirating music (which is soon going to be everything in your house from your computer to your door mat), and you will be emminently sueable (soon to be jailable) if you actually do pirate anything. They'll charge you coming and going, even if you never touch anything they make, and imprison you if you dare not pay them. Because here in the U.S., we hate the idea of government-owned business, but we love the idea of business-owned government.
So scientists can only make educated guesses, but you know the all-capital TRUTH.
Uh-huh. The sad thing here is that you are impunging upon the capabilities of scientists who have studied and used these techniques, learning both the advantages and limitations, for years as being mere "educated guesses", while your "TRUTH" with regard to carbon dating is certainly less educated than any of the scientists you are slurring.
But apparently only scientists need an education to make their guesses. For others, the TRUTH just seems to appear out of a combination of learned dogma, sheer arrogance, and some cranial-rectal connection to the aether that I don't understand. It's like, just sitting there, they become Enlightened like a Buddhist monk and the TRUTH falls upon them fully formed.
Must be nice. Too bad the scientists are stuck with their limited learning and educated guesses and empirical evidence. Pulling stuff out of one's ass^W^W^W^W^W Enlightenment has no such limitations.
I'm getting tired of waiting, so please, just hurry up and deliver on that promise, i'm tired of shovelling snow....
Look, I'm sure you've heard this before, but global warming means more heat energy overall on the earth, not that any particular spot on earth is warmer or colder. Some will get hotter, others will get colder, it's just the average that goes up.
How does this affect you? Well, according to my models, it looks like the spot you're at is one slated to become much, much colder, windier too, and with more of that stingy icicle-snow that you hate so much. Sorry about that.
Oh, and don't bother trying to move to someplace that is going to get warmer instead of colder. According to my models when you move the cold spot follows, even when I model you moving to Ecuador or slowly crossing the Sahara. I don't know what's up with that. If it makes you feel any better, at least you can try making some money from hopeful but currently unlikely hosts of the Winter Olympics.
If the game is all you can think about, and you find yourself irritated that you're unable to play because you're "tied down" by things like social functions, work, sleeping, etc you're probably addicted.
No, that's a sign of obsession. Obsession can be bad, it can even be a part of addiction, but it isn't addiction. Obsession can also be something that you're just a lot more intersted in than whatever else you are doing. Did I think about WoW almost constantly when I was playing it the most? Yes. But so what? I would think about wrestling almost all the time when I was doing that because I liked wrestling more than I like Senior AP English or my job at Little Caesars. I was obsessed, sure, but at the end of the day it wasn't anything harmful (uh, except the whole starving myself part, different story), and when the season ended I was sad (withdrawal?), but oh well, that was it. That's not addiction.
Addiction is when you want to stop the behavior, but can't.
Addiction is when the behavior is harming yourself and your loved ones, but you can't stop yourself from doing it and continuing the harm.
Your typical adult nicotine addict (like my mother) knows it's bad for them, doesn't actually like cigarettes and wishes they could stop, but when they try they find themselves unable to.
An alcoholic, who frequently is in denial about their problem, may black out and fall down the stairs breaking a leg, go to jail for drunk driving, lose their job, their wife, their friends, even their home and still continue drinking.
It is certainly possible to be addicted to a video game, and believe me I can feel the pull when the hit-the-lever-fifty-times-get-a-peanut mechanics of all MMOs kicks in. There are people who have lost spouses and jobs to WoW. There are people who don't even find the game fun anymore but still play, even to the point of losing their jobs. Those people are addicted. Your average loser who plays 40 hours a week, who only talks about WoW with their friends, but still holds down their job and maintains whatever passes for their social life while still getting a kick out of Pwning N00bz0rs, they're just obsessed.
"2 slot GC cartridge port" You mean memory card ports? I assumed that it used the normal Wii game disc port to accept GC games.
But yeah, it would be silly, but I have yet to hear any plans of putting GC games on the VC -- have you heard differently? Most of them would overflow the built in flash card anyway.
I hate the fact that some games never make it to the US or Europe for no good reason. The VC titles should lower the costs/ risk to doing this, so why don't they?
Because Nintendo (and the other game makers, but we're focusing on Nintendo) still thinks they need to treat the Nippon and U.S.A. markets as though they were completely different entitities. I have no idea why. It seems especially silly to me when we can just go on the internet, see what the other markets are getting, and if there is something we want that we aren't getting but some other market is, we're going to be pissed about it. Like, say, Super Mario World.
Maybe this is something Fils-Aime can take to his Japanese superiors. Like you say, the VC is a less risky venue for experimenting with bringing some equality to the markets, and some of those choices like SMW are real no-brainers.
"[UPDATE: Readers have noted that some games slated for the Wii Virtual Console in Japan and not for the U.S. by year's end include surefire American favorites like "Super Mario World." On Tuesday, Fils-Aime addressed that point: "I do think here in the Americas we want to be a bit more strategic in how we use the titles... If there's a month where we don't have a fantastic lineup of Nintendo-packaged software, that's where I want to release a great SNES game or a great N64 game to maintain the momentum."]"
So yeah, they're taking a strategic approach to game releases, which is what I always thought they were going to do. I never expected them to release an old Mario/Zelda game around when they release a new one, or to flood the VC with all the triple-A titles right off the bat, much as I would like them to. Filling in gaps in the release schedule of new games with good VC games is also something I would have expected. The strange part is that apparently they don't think this is as important in Japan. The bad part is that it looks like we're getting shafted as a result (even though all those games will almost certainly come out on the U.S. VC in time).
I think Nintendo doesn't fully understand the difference between Japanese and U.S. game markets, and more to the point doesn't understand how they've been coming closer together over the past few years especially now that the internet lets us all know what the other markets are getting well in advance.
I agree the VC seems pricy. At 50% or less of the current price I'd buy them hand over fist, but as it is I will pick and choose, ultimately spending less money. As far as improvements, maybe, but I'd bet they lack the source to even many of the 1st party titles, and adding features like online play via an emulator without changing the original code and without completely borking the game is tough.
But I'm quite certain that Nintendo is aware of the necessity of 3rd party support. In fact one of their execs explicitly stated in an interview that the lack of 3rd party support was a major failing of the last two generations, and that they were trying very hard to fix the problem this time around.
Whether it works is another story. Certainly so far the Wii has much better 3rd party support than either the Gamecube or N64 (ha!) had at this point.
And goldeneye on the wii? It's good that we get a classic game, but what about new franchises?
Goldeneye would be for the virtual console, and classic games is what the VC is all about.
New franchises are good, though. Never played Animal Crossing (doesn't seem like my style anyway), but I did enjoy Pikmin as a great new franchise for the GC. Will they come up with a new, fantastic game on the Wii? Maybe, and I'm sure that if someone there (in particular Miyamoto) gets a good idea Nintendo will go with it. Nintendo would certainly like to do so. But you can't just as a game designer say "I'm sick of rehashes, I'm going to invent something brand new and awesome!" So we'll see.
Seriously tho, it's been done lots of times in a lot of countries; you not only stop printing them, you set a deadline for validity.
Aside from the fact that it is currently not legal to invalidate currency in the U.S., why would you want to do this? The lifespan of paper currency that's actually involved in the economy isn't terribly long, and has to be replaced frequently. It would be replaced with coins, and the paper would naturally fade out. The only paper $1 bills left at that point would be those that are not changing hands in any appreciable way.
With the dollar (unlike more regularly upgraded and less distributed currencies), there's the risk that there's actually so much unaccounted for mattress and black market (real and/or counterfeit) currency that its sudden reentry into circulation might even cause fluctuations in the exchange rates, which would further devalue the dollar as a general exchange medium.
That money still exists no matter what you do. If you invalidate the $1 bill then you simply give an incentive for everyone posessing these $1-bill stuffed matresses to dump them all onto the market within a short time period, causing exactly the problem you're trying to avoid. The solution: Don't invalidate them. Slowly, over time, they will re-enter the economy and most likely be replaced very quickly. Market disruption is minimized, and even better nobody gets screwed finding out in fifty years that their grandmother's secret stash of $1 bills is now worthless because it is not recognized currency (instead it is worthless because of inflation).
All you have to do to replace the $1 bill is stop printing them. Personally, I'm not convinced that's a good idea, but it would work.
Slashdot Mirror
That was a great rant, Mr. Homeless Person On the Corner, but I will not give you a dollar!
Man, now I'm bummed out.
You've got to be kidding me, there is little or no challenge in finding the number of killed in most US wars.
But all the news reports and government press annoucements are reporting fatalities when normally they report casualties. So yes, if you notice that they are now reporting a different number than normal, you can go out and find it. Many people, who as another noted are probably not aware of the difference between casualty and fatality, would not do this and accept the official account.
It's about spin.
Why not just give the totals?
Because there is no "total number of soldiers who lost a significant portion of at least one leg".
Without even looking at the numbers, which I linked to and for which you are welcome, you should have already known that lesser injuries and illness accounted for a large portion of casualties, like it has in every other conflict.
Sorry if I gave you the impression there would be ~46,000 legless soldiers.
What are apparently minor wounds account for another large chunk.
"Not requiring air transport" is not the same as "minor" by any means. Of course there were minor injuries, but they aren't broken out that way, just like loss-of-limb injuries aren't.
Who really gives half a shit if the Iraqies have a peaceful democracy? Who wants to spend a trillion American tax dollars so that the Iraqies can have a peaceful democracy? Not me.
Allegedly many people do, including the Commander in Chief of the armed forces and the American voters who let him keep that position in 2004.
I agree. We should do it tomorrow.
Since that method of ending the attacks is only about 10 zillion times more effective than your "anger all of Iraq through excessive violence" strategy, and you agree that it is the method we should take, why did you even suggest the vastly less effective and much much more costly and stupid method?
Of course you probably aren't considering the long-term consequences of that decision. Iraq isn't going to just vanish when we leave.
But, of course, they didn't. Why? Because the people in charge said, "Holy fuck, guys, we can't win against this shit!" and that was that.
Not people, person. Not only did the military leaders think the war should go on, but it didn't matter because it was only the Emperor's word that mattered. And yes, he told them to surrender because he knew he wouldn't have a country to rule. Had he for whatever reason failed to issue that edict, then we would still be fighting the war.
Whereas in Iraq there is no "person in charge" to tell the insurgents to stop to begin with. Mohammed is not going to appear in the sky and say "Oh damn, seriously guys, I didn't mean for you to get all that martyr-y, just stop already". Therefore, we will continue to fight this war for as long as we are there, and excessive violence will not end it but only make it worse.
Which we should have done from day one if Iraq was a target worthy of military action. There is no reason to have boots on the ground in Iraq.
You have something you think is worth fighting for, so you blow it up with a nuke. Brilliant.
What in your mind makes a target worthy of military action?
Since boots on the ground are the only things that can hold territory, occupy and control land, exploit its resources, replace its government, etc. etc. you seem to be implying that no offensive action is ever worth it, and neither is any defensive action which requires anything of the above. Certainly no mission which could be described as "peacekeeping". What, exactly, is worth it in your mind?
If the thought was to draw the sword of military might to bear against Iraq, than this could have much more effectively been done with standoff weaponry. But obviously it was never the intent.
"Draw the sword of military might to bear"? What does that even mean? You talk about it as an "intent", as if it were a goal unto itself.
Either eliminating the enemy, or causing them to give up hope in their cause.
What would be the positive outcome of that be?
You cannot claim "the end of fighting" as a positive outcome of the fight that you started.
I agree that the VC should be used to attempt more ports as a method of testing just how different the Japanese and American markets are. What I'm not sure about is how much of the American market is like the Japanese market, and how much of it is a group of very vocal fanboys online.
There are certainly still some differences in the kinds of games that U.S. and Japanese gamers like. However, I think this gap is shrinking, and I think the Nintendo execs are mistaken about a number of games.
More importantly there's no way you can say that Super Mario World falls in that gap. The main thrust of my "markets are becoming one" argument is that Japan is getting SMW, but we in the U.S. apparently have to wait until N of America thinks it's strategically appropriate for us to have it. Thanks to the internet we can see that this is the case and be insulted by it, which is why they can't continue to think of the markets as being completely separate.
Perhaps you didn't quite read what I wrote. I know lots of people use the term "all you can think about" very loosely, but I actually meant it exactly the way it sounds. When something is all you can think about, you literally can't focus your thoughts on anything else.
You're right, I didn't realize you meant it literally. In which case what you're describing is a very small number of people who literally can't focus on anything else. You're only describing a tiny portion of real addicts!
For most people work, social activities and sleep make up most of their life. So basically what I was saying is if you can't think about anything but the game and you become irritable any time you can't play it, you're most likely addicted. Sure doesn't sound like "just obsession" to me anyhow.
Actually, being irritated when drawn away with the object of one's interest is exactly what obsession is all about.
Now I think you maybe missed my point, which is that the main thing that characterizes an addiction is that you can't stop even though you want to.
If you don't want to stop and have no reason to stop because you aren't being harmed, then that's not addiction.
If you are deathly afraid that you are going to lose your job if you show up late again, but you still can't pull yourself away from WoW, then yes, you have an addiction.
You are making the assumption that we need to convince the Iraqies to love us, and/or that we yearn for their love.
Love would be nice, but fear works, too. In fact, terror really seems to be a language that the Muslim world appreciates. Ultimately, though, I don't really care if our enemies love, fear, hate, loath, or mildly dislike us. The goal is for them to quit attacking us. I don't really care what motivates them to do this.
Um, no, the goal is to establish a stable, peaceful Democracy.
Blowing up cities until the populace lays down their arms and begs for mercy out of sheer fear for their lives will not accomplish this.
If all we wanted was to not be attacked by Iraqis any more, we could just fucking leave.
What the hell do you think we're doing there, anyway?
Flattening a city in Iraq would help because A) there'd be a lot less Iraqies and B) it would sure-as-shit get the attention of the ones left. Every time someone wrings their hands about how this sort of thing doesn't work I just point to Japan.
Well maybe you should stop, because it's a bad example.
The Japanese stopped fighting because their Emperor told them to lay down arms and stop fighting, and for no other reason. Death by itself didn't sway them, because dying for the their Emperor was considered a great honor. The Kamikaze, you realize, were revered. If the Emperor had said "Fight to the last man! The honor of our great nation demands nothing less!" then we would still be fighting in Japan, or at least until we decided to just go with nuclear genocide. Remember those soldiers we found on Pacific atols who had never gotten the order to surrender and were still fighting the war decades after it ended? That would have been every Japanese person.
Now the situation in Iraq is similar in that Muslim culture, especially Shiite Muslim culture, has a strong martyrdom tradition. For the insurgents in Iraq, dying fighting the infidel enemy is a wonderful thing -- this is why they are willing to blow themselves up to strike at their enemy. The major difference from Japan is that this tradition is rooted in religion, and the order effectively comes from Allah himself. Even if the religious leaders called for peace, the jihadists would ignore it. If al Sadr ordered his Madhi Army to put down its arms, then it wouldn't be his Madhi Army any more. So your attempt to pacify them would backfire, simply creating tons of new insurgents who are more determined to fight to the death, not less, even as the leaders asked the to stop (before their power base was killed out from under them). In other words, the Muslim equivalent of the Japanese Emperor is The Prophet, and he is never going to tell the insurgents to stop in response to aggression.
Oh yeah, there's another reason why destroying an Iraqi city would be retardedly counterproductive. As soon as we did, the Green Zone in Baghdad would be overrun as the entire population rose up against us. Our position in Iraq is not that secure. A true nation-wide uprising, like we saw in Mosul in 2004, only in every city in Iraq at once, would end the U.S. occupation in a week. We could nuke the cities, sure, but we'd be doing it from airbases in Kuwait.
So military invasions are pretty much now a proven waste of time, money, and lives. They cost HUGE amounts of money, die daily, and don't project military force to any level likely to bring positive outcomes for our side. And on top of this they simply fuel the fires of resistance wherever they are.
Your analysis is correct, except I still wonder what "positive outcomes" you think sufficient military force could bring.
It's interesting that no-one ever quotes the glowing praise for the PS3 in this isuppli article.
"While many fret over the high cost and price of the PlayStation 3 compared to the competition, iSuppli believes the console provides more processing power and capability than any consumer electronics device in history. Because of this, the PlayStation 3 is a great bargain, well worth its $599 price and $840.35 cost, iSuppli believes."
Of course the PS3 is a bargain, as they are selling it for less than it costs to produce. Hard to call that a bad deal.
Unless you don't have $600. Or the $800-$1000 needed to get one on Ebay if you want a non-hypothetical PS3. "Great deal for what you get" and "way too fucking expensive" are not mutually exclusive!
Nobody buys a console because its internals are architecturally pleasing (don't get me wrong, the Cell is a sweet chip, but that neither makes a PS3 cheaper nor does it make one appear on the store shelves so I can buy it). They buy it because of the games. And right now PS3 is in the same place Xbox was in. What great games did it have? Halo and... um... Halo.
So the reason so few quote the praise for the PS3 is because it's pretty much irrelevent. We're talking about a console launch. Few doubt that the PS3 is, hardware-wise, a very nice piece of machinery. I certainly don't doubt it. That doesn't make me want one, that doesn't mean I can afford one if I did want one, that doesn't mean I could find one to buy if I could afford one, and that doesn't make Sony lose any less money on the purchase if I am finally able to complete it.
It's simple: A console that is very expensive (limiting demand) and is difficult to produce (limiting supply) is headed towards a smaller marketshare, possibly meaning that fewer games are produced for it. As Sony loses a lot of money on each sale and has to sell many games to turn a profit, this means that if it plays out that way not only will PS3 be a failure in the marketshare sense but also in a financial sense. They need to increase the supply and reduce the price before they can attain a marketshare that will keep developers devoted to them, and thus keep consumers devoted.
Notice how whether or not the PS3 is an engineering masterpiece doesn't enter into it? As an engineer I would really like to live in the universe where whoever has the coolest microarchitectures wins, but sadly it doesn't work that way. A lot of times the coolest microarchitecture is the one that fails the hardest because it is difficult to manufacture and thus too expensive and too hard to supply in volume.
Now if the PS3 was a crappy piece of hardware, and still cost $600 with short supplies, then PS3 failure would be a forgone conclusion. However I don't think anyone worth mentioning is saying it's crappy hardware, so I'm not sure what "thesis" you think that part of the isuppli article is contradicting.
who do not feel that the intractible, insoluble problems faced by every other great power in history apply to them.
Because they don't know about them. This is an administration who thinks that ignorance is the ideal foundation for decision making. Bush deliberately avoids education, preferring to get talking points from his advisors. I think it unlikely that Rumsfeld had ever opened a book covering military history in his entire life.
This little gem of an idea was on the news for about 10 minutes a couple of years ago, when the Pentagon opined that Chalabi was an Iranian double-agent who duped the US with bad intel so Iran could foment a regime change to destabilize the region so the Shia majority could take control.
For those who don't recall, Chalabi was our man. He and his intrepid group of fellow exiles were going to help us win the hearts of the people as well as give us the necessary intel to dismantle the Baathist regime. He sat next to Laura Bush, and seemed to be getting groomed for taking over Iraq.
Then the bit about him telling Iran everything he could hit the news, and I knew we were fucked. Okay, so the guy who talked the admin into this fool enterprise and convinced them that everything would go great turns out to have been working for Iran?! Gee, Iran sure wouldn't like to see Saddam gone and the U.S. weakened and militarily ineffectual due to being stuck in Iraq so Iran is free to do whatever it wants, like pursue nukes.
Chalabi was an Iraqi exile who hated Saddam, because Saddam wanted him dead. Our admins, being retards who like sloganizing better than critical thinking, thought "the enemy of our enemy is our friend!" Idiots! Saddam had lots of enemies, and most of those enemies are also enemies of ours! "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is what your enemy says to you when he's trying to sucker you into helping him with his other enemy while letting him get close enough to you to stab you in the back.
It's a joke. Try saying it out loud.
This is costing us, not making us money.
Yes, this is costing us, the taxpayer money. Currently to the tune of over $300 billion.
That money didn't just vanish you know (though certainly a lot of it is unaccounted for).
It largely has gone to the defense contractors, the boeings and halliburtons and so on and so forth. We are spending that money, not shoveling it into a furnace to fuel a war machine. The shoveling is metaphorical. The profit for the defense industry is very very literal.
So yeah. You are losing a shit-load of money. Wealthy corporations are making a shit-load of money. Your money.
Get it now?
I don't think he meant unwinnable as in not able to beat their armies, he meant in terms of what we're seeing right now - total loss of control of what was left after occupation.
Anybody who has yet to internalize the fact that winning the conventional phase of the war was irrelevent in comparison to the non-conventional war that followed is too hopelessly stupid to bother with, imo.
You'd think Vietnam would have taught them, but some people are just too dumb to figure out that conventional war is just one way to fight a war, and dominance in conventional warfare means very little in other forms of warfare. They still want everything to be WWII, carpet bombing and armored formations rolling across the countryside.
So if when someone said "it was obvious we couldn't win" he thought they were referring to winning conventional war -- rather than, you know, the actual war of which the conventional phase was a small part -- then that just means he's too stupid to understand what's going on now.
The soldier I asked was pretty drunk, but I figure we can forgive that since he was discharged due to losing his right leg above the knee from a roadside bomb.
If you see him again, buy him a beer for me.
This is something we don't hear about very much. I was deeply distrubed when the news and government started to only report U.S. fatalities. Every other report of war I'd ever heard talked about casualties, as in soldiers taken out of combat by death or injury. It sounded very suspicious -- the numbers sounded fairly low (at the time) relative to other conflicts, but all I knew about other conflicts were casualties, which are always several times higher than the number outright killed. Yet those numbers weren't being mentioned, making it sound like a deliberate attempt to hide the larger and thus more depressing number.
So as we cross past the 3,000 mark of dead coalition soldiers, we have 46,000 non-mortal casualties. Not all of those are crippling injuries, but nevertheless we're going to be seeing a whole lot more soldiers like the one you met. Especially like that, since the roadside bomb taking out a soldier's legs but not killing them seems to be the most common mode of injury.
I hope to God all those people who support this war will "Support the Troops" when they see one sitting at the traffic light on a board, no legs, holding a sign that says "Iraq vet, need food and work" and drop the man some cash. I know I will.
Figures are from http://www.icasualties.org/oif/
What do you mean? NYT is a huge pack of lies. What the OP seems to have completely forgotten about was how the NYT spent so much time lying in order to support the administration. Their utter credulity and willingness to forward any government propaganda as if it was God's Truth (remember the Trailers of Mass Destruction?) was what started them on this path towards irrelevence, to the point that they had to publish an article about their own shitty reporting in order to try to maintain some journalistic integrity. If they then swerved the other way and try to paint everything against Bush using the same shoddy journalism, in a futile attempt to appear to be "on the ball" after they dropped it so badly, why would I be surprised?
As far as I'm concerned, the NYTs only purpose is that it still seems to have some of the best contacts of any paper and can get leaked copies of memos and reports before anyone else. I do not trust them to accurately represent the contents, but at least the memos' existence gets in the news to be covered by other news outlets.
Not that they have anything I want in the first place which makes it doubly insulting.
Yeah, but that insult there is exactly the point.
The point is that right now you are providing no revenue for Universal.
If they get this license fee in place, then you will. Even though you do not consume and have no desire to consume Universal product.
Don't mistake their retarded rhetoric for their true intentions.
They know that most people use their iPods legitimately to hold music they purchased on CD or through iTunes. They know that, if they are able to slip this license fee in, most people will still continue to buy their products legitimately. Very few people doing that today will be put off enough to stop.
So for them, it only increases their income without them having to do a damn thing more. And they know it.
"Piracy tax" is just the dressing they use to hide their real intention to siphon money they aren't entitled to from unsuspecting consumers. They're calling you a bloody pirate just as an excuse to be able to steal from you. They are the ones that want to be the pirates.
Offtopic: anything more than $0 (even Canadian dollars) is too much to be 'reasonable' for a 'pirate tax'.
Would it be too much if it meant that, having already paid the price of your piracy, that you could not be sued for subsequent pirate activity?
I believe this is the situation in Canada. They pay the tax, yes, but then the Canadian music industry cannot go after any of the Canadian pirates. So in theory, you could just go out and download every song they ever published. I bet it's the recording industry who would think they got the short end of the stick on that one!
It won't work that way in the U.S. of course. In the U.S., we will end up paying the tax on anything even remotely capable of pirating music (which is soon going to be everything in your house from your computer to your door mat), and you will be emminently sueable (soon to be jailable) if you actually do pirate anything. They'll charge you coming and going, even if you never touch anything they make, and imprison you if you dare not pay them. Because here in the U.S., we hate the idea of government-owned business, but we love the idea of business-owned government.
What I say happens to be the TRUTH
So scientists can only make educated guesses, but you know the all-capital TRUTH.
Uh-huh. The sad thing here is that you are impunging upon the capabilities of scientists who have studied and used these techniques, learning both the advantages and limitations, for years as being mere "educated guesses", while your "TRUTH" with regard to carbon dating is certainly less educated than any of the scientists you are slurring.
But apparently only scientists need an education to make their guesses. For others, the TRUTH just seems to appear out of a combination of learned dogma, sheer arrogance, and some cranial-rectal connection to the aether that I don't understand. It's like, just sitting there, they become Enlightened like a Buddhist monk and the TRUTH falls upon them fully formed.
Must be nice. Too bad the scientists are stuck with their limited learning and educated guesses and empirical evidence. Pulling stuff out of one's ass^W^W^W^W^W Enlightenment has no such limitations.
So, how is it possible that birds were once as big as 747's?
The 747s were smaller back then. Duh!
I'm getting tired of waiting, so please, just hurry up and deliver on that promise, i'm tired of shovelling snow....
Look, I'm sure you've heard this before, but global warming means more heat energy overall on the earth, not that any particular spot on earth is warmer or colder. Some will get hotter, others will get colder, it's just the average that goes up.
How does this affect you? Well, according to my models, it looks like the spot you're at is one slated to become much, much colder, windier too, and with more of that stingy icicle-snow that you hate so much. Sorry about that.
Oh, and don't bother trying to move to someplace that is going to get warmer instead of colder. According to my models when you move the cold spot follows, even when I model you moving to Ecuador or slowly crossing the Sahara. I don't know what's up with that. If it makes you feel any better, at least you can try making some money from hopeful but currently unlikely hosts of the Winter Olympics.
If the game is all you can think about, and you find yourself irritated that you're unable to play because you're "tied down" by things like social functions, work, sleeping, etc you're probably addicted.
No, that's a sign of obsession. Obsession can be bad, it can even be a part of addiction, but it isn't addiction. Obsession can also be something that you're just a lot more intersted in than whatever else you are doing. Did I think about WoW almost constantly when I was playing it the most? Yes. But so what? I would think about wrestling almost all the time when I was doing that because I liked wrestling more than I like Senior AP English or my job at Little Caesars. I was obsessed, sure, but at the end of the day it wasn't anything harmful (uh, except the whole starving myself part, different story), and when the season ended I was sad (withdrawal?), but oh well, that was it. That's not addiction.
Addiction is when you want to stop the behavior, but can't.
Addiction is when the behavior is harming yourself and your loved ones, but you can't stop yourself from doing it and continuing the harm.
Your typical adult nicotine addict (like my mother) knows it's bad for them, doesn't actually like cigarettes and wishes they could stop, but when they try they find themselves unable to.
An alcoholic, who frequently is in denial about their problem, may black out and fall down the stairs breaking a leg, go to jail for drunk driving, lose their job, their wife, their friends, even their home and still continue drinking.
It is certainly possible to be addicted to a video game, and believe me I can feel the pull when the hit-the-lever-fifty-times-get-a-peanut mechanics of all MMOs kicks in. There are people who have lost spouses and jobs to WoW. There are people who don't even find the game fun anymore but still play, even to the point of losing their jobs. Those people are addicted. Your average loser who plays 40 hours a week, who only talks about WoW with their friends, but still holds down their job and maintains whatever passes for their social life while still getting a kick out of Pwning N00bz0rs, they're just obsessed.
"2 slot GC cartridge port" You mean memory card ports? I assumed that it used the normal Wii game disc port to accept GC games.
But yeah, it would be silly, but I have yet to hear any plans of putting GC games on the VC -- have you heard differently? Most of them would overflow the built in flash card anyway.
I hate the fact that some games never make it to the US or Europe for no good reason. The VC titles should lower the costs/ risk to doing this, so why don't they?
Because Nintendo (and the other game makers, but we're focusing on Nintendo) still thinks they need to treat the Nippon and U.S.A. markets as though they were completely different entitities. I have no idea why. It seems especially silly to me when we can just go on the internet, see what the other markets are getting, and if there is something we want that we aren't getting but some other market is, we're going to be pissed about it. Like, say, Super Mario World.
Maybe this is something Fils-Aime can take to his Japanese superiors. Like you say, the VC is a less risky venue for experimenting with bringing some equality to the markets, and some of those choices like SMW are real no-brainers.
Continue reading. The next paragraph:
... If there's a month where we don't have a fantastic lineup of Nintendo-packaged software, that's where I want to release a great SNES game or a great N64 game to maintain the momentum."]"
"[UPDATE: Readers have noted that some games slated for the Wii Virtual Console in Japan and not for the U.S. by year's end include surefire American favorites like "Super Mario World." On Tuesday, Fils-Aime addressed that point: "I do think here in the Americas we want to be a bit more strategic in how we use the titles
So yeah, they're taking a strategic approach to game releases, which is what I always thought they were going to do. I never expected them to release an old Mario/Zelda game around when they release a new one, or to flood the VC with all the triple-A titles right off the bat, much as I would like them to. Filling in gaps in the release schedule of new games with good VC games is also something I would have expected. The strange part is that apparently they don't think this is as important in Japan. The bad part is that it looks like we're getting shafted as a result (even though all those games will almost certainly come out on the U.S. VC in time).
I think Nintendo doesn't fully understand the difference between Japanese and U.S. game markets, and more to the point doesn't understand how they've been coming closer together over the past few years especially now that the internet lets us all know what the other markets are getting well in advance.
I agree the VC seems pricy. At 50% or less of the current price I'd buy them hand over fist, but as it is I will pick and choose, ultimately spending less money. As far as improvements, maybe, but I'd bet they lack the source to even many of the 1st party titles, and adding features like online play via an emulator without changing the original code and without completely borking the game is tough.
But I'm quite certain that Nintendo is aware of the necessity of 3rd party support. In fact one of their execs explicitly stated in an interview that the lack of 3rd party support was a major failing of the last two generations, and that they were trying very hard to fix the problem this time around.
Whether it works is another story. Certainly so far the Wii has much better 3rd party support than either the Gamecube or N64 (ha!) had at this point.
And goldeneye on the wii? It's good that we get a classic game, but what about new franchises?
Goldeneye would be for the virtual console, and classic games is what the VC is all about.
New franchises are good, though. Never played Animal Crossing (doesn't seem like my style anyway), but I did enjoy Pikmin as a great new franchise for the GC. Will they come up with a new, fantastic game on the Wii? Maybe, and I'm sure that if someone there (in particular Miyamoto) gets a good idea Nintendo will go with it. Nintendo would certainly like to do so. But you can't just as a game designer say "I'm sick of rehashes, I'm going to invent something brand new and awesome!" So we'll see.
Seriously tho, it's been done lots of times in a lot of countries; you not only stop printing them, you set a deadline for validity.
Aside from the fact that it is currently not legal to invalidate currency in the U.S., why would you want to do this? The lifespan of paper currency that's actually involved in the economy isn't terribly long, and has to be replaced frequently. It would be replaced with coins, and the paper would naturally fade out. The only paper $1 bills left at that point would be those that are not changing hands in any appreciable way.
With the dollar (unlike more regularly upgraded and less distributed currencies), there's the risk that there's actually so much unaccounted for mattress and black market (real and/or counterfeit) currency that its sudden reentry into circulation might even cause fluctuations in the exchange rates, which would further devalue the dollar as a general exchange medium.
That money still exists no matter what you do. If you invalidate the $1 bill then you simply give an incentive for everyone posessing these $1-bill stuffed matresses to dump them all onto the market within a short time period, causing exactly the problem you're trying to avoid. The solution: Don't invalidate them. Slowly, over time, they will re-enter the economy and most likely be replaced very quickly. Market disruption is minimized, and even better nobody gets screwed finding out in fifty years that their grandmother's secret stash of $1 bills is now worthless because it is not recognized currency (instead it is worthless because of inflation).
All you have to do to replace the $1 bill is stop printing them. Personally, I'm not convinced that's a good idea, but it would work.