6% is a bogus number if only for the reason that you did agree with (underemployment). ------ The point is that most countries do not count underemployment when calculating unemployment. So even if 6% is an underestimate, it is a good way to compare our unemployment to that of other countries. And our unemployment rates compare very favorably to those in Europe.
The numbers used to calculate GDP can be and IMO are manipulated. ------ Evidence?
The Mickey Mouse IP laws are protectionism at their worst... we need to let it level out. Arguments about stifling innovation are overblown. ------ I am against IP laws too, but what do they have to do with free trade???
Your opinions seem to all be based on the assumption that pure capitalism is the "right thing". ------- My argument is not based on pure capitalism being the "right thing." My argument is based on free trade being the "right thing." Free trade brings increased total wealth. What you choose to do with that wealth afterwards is your business. You can let the rich keep most of their profit, as we do in the US, or you can have the government redistribute that wealth. I'm not opposed to any of the things you say. It's just that none of them really have anything to do with free trade.
Saying that the poor are better off than they were is BS as evidenced by the poverty line itself. ------- I don't understand what you mean by this. The poverty line is slowly inching up. Real GDP per person is slowly going up. The poor are relatively poorer, but they have "more stuff" than they did before.
BTW, I did read the articles you pointed to. I disagree with most of them. You can easily google for some equally well thought out counterarguments. ------- You'll find other arguments, but the majority of economists do not agree with *those* arguments. Most economists agree that unfettered free trade is good for everyone. That's one of the few things they reach a concensus on.
Really? ------ Not really. I corrected myself on a successive post.
Changing market conditions caused largely by ill-conceived and poorly executed trade agreements. ------ No changing market conditions caused by the inherent fluctuations of a capitalist system. Capitalism operates on cycles, so there is a natural rate of unemployment resulting from changes during those cycles. Further, there is a natural rate of unemployment due simply to the fact that businesses fail (again, an entirely natural process in capitalism) and it takes time to get new businesses established. Let me give you an example of "natural" unemployment. Consider what happens when CDRs came out. People stopped making mix tapes and started making mix CDs. Demand for tapes went down, and a lot of peoplei involved in the tape industry lost there jobs. While the look for other jobs, or acquire new skills so they can get a different type of job, they contribute to natural unemployment.
6% is a bogus number. It doesn't count people who are underemployed, people who can't find their first job, or people who have been out of work for so long that they are no longer elligible for benefits. --------- You're wrong on several counts. The 6% number counts everyone who is able to work and looking for a job. So it counts that person who can find their first job, and that person who has been out of work so long he can't get benefits (unless he has stopped looking for a job). You're right that it does not count those who are underemployed. However, unemployment is calculated according to the same metrics in most of the world. When measuring using the same metrics, our unemployment is much lower than that of European countries. The unemployment rate in France was hovering at 12% until recently, and is now down to 9%.
Besides, the recession has been over for quite a while now... if you believe the liars in DC anyway. -------- Its not the "liars in DC" saying that the recession is over, but economists. Recession has a very specific, quantifiable definition. It is defined as two sucessive quarters of decline in real GDP. When that stops, the recession is over. That doesn't necessarily mean that *you* see any real benifet, but unemployment is down, investing is getting back on track, and the stock market is back over 10,000, so companies are starting to make money again. Besides, there is always unemployment. In periods of inflation, unemployment stays below the natural rate. In periods of recession, it goes above the natural rate. During the economic boom of the 1990s, unemployment was a bit over 4%, so we can infer that the natural rate is somewhere close to 5%, or a bit below the current rate of 5.9%.
They could reduce taxes for the vast majority of people and stop giving away the store to the fatcats. ------- It doesn't matter *who* you tax, only how much you tax. By introducing any sort of tax you introduce inefficiency. And its dishonest to say that they are "giving the store away to the fatcats." They pay the most taxes. When you have a fair cut, they get the most back. What you are saying is that they should take more money from the rich and distribute to everyone else. I agree with this wholeheartedly, but let's tell it like it is.
Revoke the Mickey Mouse laws and other pro-business legislation and just watch the wealth redistribute itself. -------- Wealth doesn't redistribute itself. Capitalism inherently increases the gap between rich and poor. Both rich and poor are better off, but the rich advance faster than the poor. We have seen t his precise effect earlier in the history of the US. Its also plain to see from first principles. Production is a function of the amount of capital you have available. The more capital you start with, the faster you make money. It's an exponential curve.
Taxes create inefficiency? No, bloated corrupt government creates inefficiency. Taxes are just the cost of running a government, military, and public infrastructures. -------- I refuse to have
So are trade deficits ----- There are no such things as trade deficits.
unemployment ----- Unemployment is unavoidable. There is a natural level of unemployment because of changing market conditions. The fact that we operate at an unemployment rate of about 6% even in a recession is a phenomenal achievement.
and an ever-growing class of people living below the poverty level. ------- Economic theory only promises maximal total efficiency, not equitable distrbution. To achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth, you have to have the government redistribute wealth by raising taxes. Since taxes create inherent inefficiency, its a tradeoff between maximal total efficiency and equitable redistribution. This is why the European economies have less beeoming economies than the US, but more equitable distribution.
Don't be so naive and theoretical. ----- This isn't unproven theory. These are basic, standard, well-accepted concepts in economics. There is a great deal of empircal evidence, as well, that shows that treaties like NAFTA actually ended up helping everyone involved, and that many of the protectionist laws the US has passed ended up costing the US economy hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for every $50,000 a year job they saved.
I'm no sexually repressed puritan (indeed, I'd have no problem with legal public nudity), but I draw the line at sexualizing girls under the age of consent.
Mostly that was several dozen mail spool files. Didn't I switch to a journaled file system in part to avoid this sort of thing? Grrrrrrrrrr. >>>>>>>>>>>>&g t; No you didn't. Usually journaled file systems only protect metadata integrity. So files will get corrupt, but entire directory trees will never suddenly dissapear. This is true of all journaled filesystems, even high-end ones like VxFS or XFS. Some filesystems (like ext3 and reiserfs) offer data journaling in addition to regular journaling, but at a significant speed hit. Data journaling is usually disabled by default, except in ext3.
The new Reiser4 will support atomic file operations naturally, at the full speed of the filesystem. As a result, you can get the benifets of data journaling without the performance hit.
Please take econ 101. When you send $$$ offshore, then other people have more money to buy *your* goods.
The car industry is a particularly good example. We suck at making cars. GM, Ford, and to a lesser extent Chrysler just keep churning out cheap, plasticky "cars". So we buy cars from the Japanese, Germans, or Koreans instead, because they are better at it than us. Then we concentrate on making things that we are good at (planes, industrial equipment, military hardware), and let them buy those things from us. Remember, Japan is our second largest trading partner, so they buy tons of our stuff too.
Is a load of shit, and goes against decades of economic theory. If other countries can deliver a better price/performance ratio (which, in the case of programming, we will find out in the long term) then having them do the work maximizes efficiency for both parties.
I'm sure lots of automotive worker jobs were lost when the Japanese came into the US market with better products. Tough nuggets. Stop releasing shitty products, and maybe somebody will buy them!
What possible justification could you have for letting people take off their clothes right there in front of you? ------ I wasn't aware that we needed justification for allowing people to do things. I thought all things were allowed, unless there is a justification for disallowing them...
My point is that there is nothing intrinsic to XFree that makes it impossible to write good drivers, which is what the original poster alledged. Clearly, NVIDIA's drivers are good drivers, which disproves his assertion.
I follow the fd.o mailing list quite closely, and the current concensus seems to be towards making Cairo the 2D API, with an OpenGL-accelerated back-end being the primary one for desktops.
a) the 2D API in OpenGL is reputed to be quite poor, which will make it harder to maintain the X server's code base; --------- That reputation is undeserved. I've programmed OpenGL, and you can do 2D quite well with it. You have to distinguish OpenGL's primitive 2D API with the mainstream of the API that can be used to do 2D as well as 3D. For example, instead of using glCopyPixels() (which is slow on a lot of consumer-level hardware), you'd probably draw sprites using a textured quad (and the NV_texture_rectangle extension).
b) graphics hardware already has dedicated 2D acceleration hardware that's tailor-made for window-server-like applications. ------- The 2D chips on most current hardware does not accelerate anti-aliased drawing, which makes it useless for something like Cairo.
The only thing OS X has, technically, is the machinery necessary to support transparency and window shadows.
It does *not* have OpenGL-accelerated drawing, and the very rich applications that it enables.
I'm sick of debunking Quartz "Extreme". OS X just uses OpenGL to accelerate compositing. Go read Apple's SIGGRAPH presentation on Quartz "Extreme" (page 18, as I remember) to see that the CPU actually draws the Quartz 2D graphics.
There is a difference between what Bin Laden sys and what Al Queda's goals are. Simply, Al Queda has no goals. He uses anti-Western rhetoric, but nobody takes him seriously except the loonies.
We are going to let them(NOT the UN!) run their country very shortly. >>>>>>>>>> No we're not. We're going to install a US-designed, US-backed government. If we let them have free reign about how to shape their government, they'd most likely choose a conservative theocracy. Why? Because their conservative muslims! Their culture doesn't do the whole democracy thing, not yet anyway.
It's a simple potential cost vs potential benifet analysis.
The potential benifet of getting rid of Saddam was minimal. Yes, he has done terrible things in the past, but you can't bring those people back. Thus, his past behavior only factors into the analysis as an indicator of his future behavior. Since he was under a great deal of international scrutiny, the chances of him acting similarly in the future, without the international community being able to stop him promptly, were minimal.
You also have to factor in the potential long term benifet of changing the organization of society. Experience has shown that such top-down democratization as we are attempting does not work without an underlying culture ready to support it. There is a reason why there are almost no democratic countries in the Middle East --- culturally, they are not ready for it. So to see a long term benifet from this democratization of Iraq, Iraq would somehow have to be different from most evey other Middle Eastern country.
One potential benefit is reduced state-supported terrorism. If Saddam was funding and arming terrorists, then getting rid of him would be better for our safety. Again, this benifet did not materialize. Even the Bush administration has admitted that Saddam really had no ties to Al Queda.
One last potential benifet is really the turning point. If Saddam had WMD, then there was a huge potential benefit in getting rid of him so he could not use it. WMDs posed a direct danger to the United States, and surrounding areas, because they could be used without giving us time to react. Since there were no WMDs, this benifet did not materialize.
The potential costs are very high. Say what you will about Saddam, you can't deny that Iraq was stable. Instability kills far more innocents than war. About 3000 Iraqi civilians were killed as a result of the Gulf War. 110,000 were killed as a result of all the infrastructure that was destroyed. 70,000 of those were children under the age of 15. After the Gulf War, the government remained in power. Now, in Iraq, he have no strong government, and the potential civilian death toll is even higher.
There is a very high potential that the resulting government in Iraq will be unsuccessful. Our new Afghan government is having serious problems, and internal instability and danger is again a problem in the country. There is a very real possibility that our western-style government in Iraq will fail, and that the country will be thrown into turmoil.
Now, add to these potential costs the actual cost of the military operation, the cost of the lost American and Iraqi lives, the cost of our decreased moral stature around the world, the cost of our breaking international principles of sovreignity, and the cost of increased terrorism as a result of our (effectively unilateral) actions.
To the American people, it was the WMDs, and to a lesser extent, terrorism, that sealed the deal. Without these huge potential benifets, the cost/benifet analysis of this situation works out, by a large margin, in favor of not going to war.
Correct logic would look like this: A) WMDs are the only justification for a war. B) There are no WMDs Therefore C) The war is not justified. -------- Change that slightly and you'll have it right. (A) should read:
A) WMDs were the primary justification for the war.
If there were no WMDs, that means the primary justification for the war did not in fact exist, and therefore, we should not have gone to war.
The problem with using C++ because it has resource management is that assumes the resource management model that C++ uses is appropriate for the problem space. >>>>>>> No it doesn't. The only resource management model is imposes is that it runs constructors and destructors. Everything else, from smart pointers to garbage collection is entirely optional.
You wouldn't use C++ resource management for buffer cache handling in an OS, would you? >>>>>>>> I would and I have. Overloading operator new for key data structures allows you to transparently allocate them from an object cache. Existing C kernels use this extensively, and C++ makes the idiom transparent. Also, templates allow for better performing data structures. The STL's sort(), for example, is often much faster than qsort(), because the former allows for inlining the predicate.
Yeah, but we won the war.And most everyone is better off for it. ----- I *hate* that argument. It's so stupid. Of *course* we won the war!!! We're the United States! Were we expecting to *lose*? It's like saying that the war was right because we found Saddam. Of *course* we found Saddam! We're the United States! Were we expecting not to find Saddam? Thinking that maybe one man would somehow elude the grasp of the most powerful nation on earth???
We went to war over WMDs. We went to war because we were lead to believe that there was an immediate threat to the saftey of Americans. If there were no WMDs, than we went to war for the wrong reason, and that makes the war wrong, plain and simple.
As for them being better off, that's an incredibly arrogant and paternalistic thing to say. Its their country. Let them run it. Don't assume that we are blessing them with our precious system of government, because honestly, they don't want it. Why do you think the reaction in Iraq has been: "thanks for getting rid of Saddam, now get the fuck out!" They don't want to become another America, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
*I'm* a mysogynist??? I'm about as pro-women as a man can get.
My question is, how is being against the sexualization of young girls mysogynist? I'd be against the sexualization of young boys too!
6% is a bogus number if only for the reason that you did agree with (underemployment).
------
The point is that most countries do not count underemployment when calculating unemployment. So even if 6% is an underestimate, it is a good way to compare our unemployment to that of other countries. And our unemployment rates compare very favorably to those in Europe.
The numbers used to calculate GDP can be and IMO are manipulated.
------
Evidence?
The Mickey Mouse IP laws are protectionism at their worst... we need to let it level out. Arguments about stifling innovation are overblown.
------
I am against IP laws too, but what do they have to do with free trade???
Your opinions seem to all be based on the assumption that pure capitalism is the "right thing".
-------
My argument is not based on pure capitalism being the "right thing." My argument is based on free trade being the "right thing." Free trade brings increased total wealth. What you choose to do with that wealth afterwards is your business. You can let the rich keep most of their profit, as we do in the US, or you can have the government redistribute that wealth. I'm not opposed to any of the things you say. It's just that none of them really have anything to do with free trade.
Saying that the poor are better off than they were is BS as evidenced by the poverty line itself.
-------
I don't understand what you mean by this. The poverty line is slowly inching up. Real GDP per person is slowly going up. The poor are relatively poorer, but they have "more stuff" than they did before.
BTW, I did read the articles you pointed to. I disagree with most of them. You can easily google for some equally well thought out counterarguments.
-------
You'll find other arguments, but the majority of economists do not agree with *those* arguments. Most economists agree that unfettered free trade is good for everyone. That's one of the few things they reach a concensus on.
Really?
------
Not really. I corrected myself on a successive post.
Changing market conditions caused largely by ill-conceived and poorly executed trade agreements.
------
No changing market conditions caused by the inherent fluctuations of a capitalist system. Capitalism operates on cycles, so there is a natural rate of unemployment resulting from changes during those cycles. Further, there is a natural rate of unemployment due simply to the fact that businesses fail (again, an entirely natural process in capitalism) and it takes time to get new businesses established. Let me give you an example of "natural" unemployment. Consider what happens when CDRs came out. People stopped making mix tapes and started making mix CDs. Demand for tapes went down, and a lot of peoplei involved in the tape industry lost there jobs. While the look for other jobs, or acquire new skills so they can get a different type of job, they contribute to natural unemployment.
6% is a bogus number. It doesn't count people who are underemployed, people who can't find their first job, or people who have been out of work for so long that they are no longer elligible for benefits.
---------
You're wrong on several counts. The 6% number counts everyone who is able to work and looking for a job. So it counts that person who can find their first job, and that person who has been out of work so long he can't get benefits (unless he has stopped looking for a job). You're right that it does not count those who are underemployed. However, unemployment is calculated according to the same metrics in most of the world. When measuring using the same metrics, our unemployment is much lower than that of European countries. The unemployment rate in France was hovering at 12% until recently, and is now down to 9%.
Besides, the recession has been over for quite a while now... if you believe the liars in DC anyway.
--------
Its not the "liars in DC" saying that the recession is over, but economists. Recession has a very specific, quantifiable definition. It is defined as two sucessive quarters of decline in real GDP. When that stops, the recession is over. That doesn't necessarily mean that *you* see any real benifet, but unemployment is down, investing is getting back on track, and the stock market is back over 10,000, so companies are starting to make money again. Besides, there is always unemployment. In periods of inflation, unemployment stays below the natural rate. In periods of recession, it goes above the natural rate. During the economic boom of the 1990s, unemployment was a bit over 4%, so we can infer that the natural rate is somewhere close to 5%, or a bit below the current rate of 5.9%.
They could reduce taxes for the vast majority of people and stop giving away the store to the fatcats.
-------
It doesn't matter *who* you tax, only how much you tax. By introducing any sort of tax you introduce inefficiency. And its dishonest to say that they are "giving the store away to the fatcats." They pay the most taxes. When you have a fair cut, they get the most back. What you are saying is that they should take more money from the rich and distribute to everyone else. I agree with this wholeheartedly, but let's tell it like it is.
Revoke the Mickey Mouse laws and other pro-business legislation and just watch the wealth redistribute itself.
--------
Wealth doesn't redistribute itself. Capitalism inherently increases the gap between rich and poor. Both rich and poor are better off, but the rich advance faster than the poor. We have seen t his precise effect earlier in the history of the US. Its also plain to see from first principles. Production is a function of the amount of capital you have available. The more capital you start with, the faster you make money. It's an exponential curve.
Taxes create inefficiency? No, bloated corrupt government creates inefficiency. Taxes are just the cost of running a government, military, and public infrastructures.
--------
I refuse to have
Correction to myself: Trade deficits exist, but they are not inherently harmful.
See here.
See here.
See here.
See here.
Most importantly, read this entire CBO report on the effects of NAFTA.
So are trade deficits
-----
There are no such things as trade deficits.
unemployment
-----
Unemployment is unavoidable. There is a natural level of unemployment because of changing market conditions. The fact that we operate at an unemployment rate of about 6% even in a recession is a phenomenal achievement.
and an ever-growing class of people living below the poverty level.
-------
Economic theory only promises maximal total efficiency, not equitable distrbution. To achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth, you have to have the government redistribute wealth by raising taxes. Since taxes create inherent inefficiency, its a tradeoff between maximal total efficiency and equitable redistribution. This is why the European economies have less beeoming economies than the US, but more equitable distribution.
Don't be so naive and theoretical.
-----
This isn't unproven theory. These are basic, standard, well-accepted concepts in economics. There is a great deal of empircal evidence, as well, that shows that treaties like NAFTA actually ended up helping everyone involved, and that many of the protectionist laws the US has passed ended up costing the US economy hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for every $50,000 a year job they saved.
You can find Ice at this page. From what I've seen, it's everything CORBA should have been, and easy to use to boot!
Underaged girls are the finest life has to offer?
I'm no sexually repressed puritan (indeed, I'd have no problem with legal public nudity), but I draw the line at sexualizing girls under the age of consent.
Mostly that was several dozen mail spool files. Didn't I switch to a journaled file system in part to avoid this sort of thing? Grrrrrrrrrr.
>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
No you didn't. Usually journaled file systems only protect metadata integrity. So files will get corrupt, but entire directory trees will never suddenly dissapear. This is true of all journaled filesystems, even high-end ones like VxFS or XFS. Some filesystems (like ext3 and reiserfs) offer data journaling in addition to regular journaling, but at a significant speed hit. Data journaling is usually disabled by default, except in ext3.
The new Reiser4 will support atomic file operations naturally, at the full speed of the filesystem. As a result, you can get the benifets of data journaling without the performance hit.
-1: Rude :)
Seriously, though, naked teenagers is just a wee bit on the creepy side!
They don't buy our cars. They buy other goods from us.
It's pretty standard economic theory, and something that is unusual in that almost all economists agree on it. Please read up on it.
Please take econ 101. When you send $$$ offshore, then other people have more money to buy *your* goods.
The car industry is a particularly good example. We suck at making cars. GM, Ford, and to a lesser extent Chrysler just keep churning out cheap, plasticky "cars". So we buy cars from the Japanese, Germans, or Koreans instead, because they are better at it than us. Then we concentrate on making things that we are good at (planes, industrial equipment, military hardware), and let them buy those things from us. Remember, Japan is our second largest trading partner, so they buy tons of our stuff too.
Is a load of shit, and goes against decades of economic theory. If other countries can deliver a better price/performance ratio (which, in the case of programming, we will find out in the long term) then having them do the work maximizes efficiency for both parties.
I'm sure lots of automotive worker jobs were lost when the Japanese came into the US market with better products. Tough nuggets. Stop releasing shitty products, and maybe somebody will buy them!
Arg! Droopy! Not safe for anybody!
-1: Creepy
What possible justification could you have for letting people take off their clothes right there in front of you?
------
I wasn't aware that we needed justification for allowing people to do things. I thought all things were allowed, unless there is a justification for disallowing them...
My point is that there is nothing intrinsic to XFree that makes it impossible to write good drivers, which is what the original poster alledged. Clearly, NVIDIA's drivers are good drivers, which disproves his assertion.
1) I wish I had gotten to hack on the BeOS kernel. Sadly though, I'm just a lowly hobbyist OS programmer.
2) BeOS never used C++ in the kernel, so it's irrelevent. BeOS's problems with memory stemmed from a crappy VM, nothing more.
I follow the fd.o mailing list quite closely, and the current concensus seems to be towards making Cairo the 2D API, with an OpenGL-accelerated back-end being the primary one for desktops.
a) the 2D API in OpenGL is reputed to be quite poor, which will make it harder to maintain the X server's code base;
---------
That reputation is undeserved. I've programmed OpenGL, and you can do 2D quite well with it. You have to distinguish OpenGL's primitive 2D API with the mainstream of the API that can be used to do 2D as well as 3D. For example, instead of using glCopyPixels() (which is slow on a lot of consumer-level hardware), you'd probably draw sprites using a textured quad (and the NV_texture_rectangle extension).
b) graphics hardware already has dedicated 2D acceleration hardware that's tailor-made for window-server-like applications.
-------
The 2D chips on most current hardware does not accelerate anti-aliased drawing, which makes it useless for something like Cairo.
The only thing OS X has, technically, is the machinery necessary to support transparency and window shadows.
It does *not* have OpenGL-accelerated drawing, and the very rich applications that it enables.
I'm sick of debunking Quartz "Extreme". OS X just uses OpenGL to accelerate compositing. Go read Apple's SIGGRAPH presentation on Quartz "Extreme" (page 18, as I remember) to see that the CPU actually draws the Quartz 2D graphics.
There is a difference between what Bin Laden sys and what Al Queda's goals are. Simply, Al Queda has no goals. He uses anti-Western rhetoric, but nobody takes him seriously except the loonies.
We are going to let them(NOT the UN!) run their country very shortly.
>>>>>>>>>>
No we're not. We're going to install a US-designed, US-backed government. If we let them have free reign about how to shape their government, they'd most likely choose a conservative theocracy. Why? Because their conservative muslims! Their culture doesn't do the whole democracy thing, not yet anyway.
It's a simple potential cost vs potential benifet analysis.
The potential benifet of getting rid of Saddam was minimal. Yes, he has done terrible things in the past, but you can't bring those people back. Thus, his past behavior only factors into the analysis as an indicator of his future behavior. Since he was under a great deal of international scrutiny, the chances of him acting similarly in the future, without the international community being able to stop him promptly, were minimal.
You also have to factor in the potential long term benifet of changing the organization of society. Experience has shown that such top-down democratization as we are attempting does not work without an underlying culture ready to support it. There is a reason why there are almost no democratic countries in the Middle East --- culturally, they are not ready for it. So to see a long term benifet from this democratization of Iraq, Iraq would somehow have to be different from most evey other Middle Eastern country.
One potential benefit is reduced state-supported terrorism. If Saddam was funding and arming terrorists, then getting rid of him would be better for our safety. Again, this benifet did not materialize. Even the Bush administration has admitted that Saddam really had no ties to Al Queda.
One last potential benifet is really the turning point. If Saddam had WMD, then there was a huge potential benefit in getting rid of him so he could not use it. WMDs posed a direct danger to the United States, and surrounding areas, because they could be used without giving us time to react. Since there were no WMDs, this benifet did not materialize.
The potential costs are very high. Say what you will about Saddam, you can't deny that Iraq was stable. Instability kills far more innocents than war. About 3000 Iraqi civilians were killed as a result of the Gulf War. 110,000 were killed as a result of all the infrastructure that was destroyed. 70,000 of those were children under the age of 15. After the Gulf War, the government remained in power. Now, in Iraq, he have no strong government, and the potential civilian death toll is even higher.
There is a very high potential that the resulting government in Iraq will be unsuccessful. Our new Afghan government is having serious problems, and internal instability and danger is again a problem in the country. There is a very real possibility that our western-style government in Iraq will fail, and that the country will be thrown into turmoil.
Now, add to these potential costs the actual cost of the military operation, the cost of the lost American and Iraqi lives, the cost of our decreased moral stature around the world, the cost of our breaking international principles of sovreignity, and the cost of increased terrorism as a result of our (effectively unilateral) actions.
To the American people, it was the WMDs, and to a lesser extent, terrorism, that sealed the deal. Without these huge potential benifets, the cost/benifet analysis of this situation works out, by a large margin, in favor of not going to war.
Correct logic would look like this:
A) WMDs are the only justification for a war.
B) There are no WMDs
Therefore
C) The war is not justified.
--------
Change that slightly and you'll have it right. (A) should read:
A) WMDs were the primary justification for the war.
If there were no WMDs, that means the primary justification for the war did not in fact exist, and therefore, we should not have gone to war.
The problem with using C++ because it has resource management is that assumes the resource management model that C++ uses is appropriate for the problem space.
>>>>>>>
No it doesn't. The only resource management model is imposes is that it runs constructors and destructors. Everything else, from smart pointers to garbage collection is entirely optional.
You wouldn't use C++ resource management for buffer cache handling in an OS, would you?
>>>>>>>>
I would and I have. Overloading operator new for key data structures allows you to transparently allocate them from an object cache. Existing C kernels use this extensively, and C++ makes the idiom transparent. Also, templates allow for better performing data structures. The STL's sort(), for example, is often much faster than qsort(), because the former allows for inlining the predicate.
Yeah, but we won the war.And most everyone is better off for it.
-----
I *hate* that argument. It's so stupid. Of *course* we won the war!!! We're the United States! Were we expecting to *lose*? It's like saying that the war was right because we found Saddam. Of *course* we found Saddam! We're the United States! Were we expecting not to find Saddam? Thinking that maybe one man would somehow elude the grasp of the most powerful nation on earth???
We went to war over WMDs. We went to war because we were lead to believe that there was an immediate threat to the saftey of Americans. If there were no WMDs, than we went to war for the wrong reason, and that makes the war wrong, plain and simple.
As for them being better off, that's an incredibly arrogant and paternalistic thing to say. Its their country. Let them run it. Don't assume that we are blessing them with our precious system of government, because honestly, they don't want it. Why do you think the reaction in Iraq has been: "thanks for getting rid of Saddam, now get the fuck out!" They don't want to become another America, plain and simple.