Are you only supposed to use iTunes to play those CDs?
Of course not, dumbass. You know, if you'd spent that time reading the terms of service instead of being snide, you'd be better educated and none of us would be so tired of you.
Yes, it is. We even have a term for it: "breach of contract."
The contract stiplulates the penalty for breaking the contract: refusal of service.
Right. Which means if you run PlayFair or Hymn or I'mABigScriptKiddieLookAtMeWoo or whatever on one of your iTunes songs, you are no longer legally authorized to listen to any of your iTunes songs. You are, at that point, engaging in copyright violation, which if you do it enough is a felony!
You're wrong. A mouse or keyboard or similar input device complies with the HID (human interface device) device class specification. A scanner belongs to the Image class. Totally different drivers.
Most don't. Most go out of business. Those that succeed, like Oracle, say, do it buy building a product that has a strong market and selling the heck out of it.
Apple's hardware isn't the least bit proprietary, by the way. The only part of it they build themselves is the system controller. Everything else, from the CPUs to the graphics to the hard drives to the fans, is available on the open market.
THEY STILL REFUSE TO JOIN US IN THE 21st CENTURY AND MAKE A MULTI-BUTTON MOUSE.
Because God knows, nobody else's mice work on Apple computers.
Look, let me see if I can explain this to you using small words so you don't get confused.
1. Apple sells computers. (We've gotta start somewhere.)
2. With each Apple computer come a keyboard and a mouse. When you go to the Apple store, you don't have to tell them that you want a mouse. One comes right there in the box.
3. Apple believes, rightly, that the zero-button mouse is the right choice for the majority of their customers. So dropping the zero-button mouse in favor of something else is not an option.
4. If Apple designs and manufactures a three-button mouse and offers it as an option, customers who want to buy it will complain about the mouse that comes in the box with the Mac. They're complain that they're being asked to pay for two mice when they only want one. There will be strongly worded posts to Slashdot about the Apple "mouse tax."
5. If Apple removes the mouse from the Mac box entirely, then all customers will have to buy a mouse separately, which will annoy everybody equally. Annoying a very small number of your customers is fine. Annoying all of your customers is bad business.
6. In any case, building a different mouse would pose all sorts of logistical problems. (Oops. "Logistical" isn't a very small word, is it? Well, that's okay. Just skip ahead if you get scared.) There are questions of packaging, bills of materials, additional part numbers, separate warranty processing... it'd be a mess. An unnecessary mess.
7. So what's the best option for Apple? To manufacture a three-button mouse, stock it, and offer it for sale to customers who want one, I guess. That way the majority of Apple customers, who are quite happy with the zero-button mouse, won't notice a change, and the other customers will have a choice.
8. But wait. Some customers will want a two-button mouse, some will want two buttons and a scroll wheel, and some will want three buttons. Crap. Now Apple has to manufacture four different kinds of mice.
9. Okay, so we have our optimum scenario. Apple customers all get zero-button mice, and those who want one have the option of buying one of several different kinds of other mice.
10. Which is, you'll notice, exactly like the status quo, except Apple has to spend a lot of money designing, building, packaging, stocking, and distributing mice.
Why doesn't Apple make a three-button mouse? That's why.
Why not do for OpenOffice.org what they did for Darwin? It's under GPL/LGPL
You just answered your own question. Apple wouldn't be able to touch Open Office without giving it all away.
Besides, it's my humble opinion that a Cocoa-based word processor and spreadsheet, written from scratch using advanced Mac OS X technologies, would be a far better choice. Just look at how much better Keynote is than anything else in its class.
I know sooooo many people that would buy OS X for x86 its not even funny.
Oh, well, that's it then. Let's scribble that little statement down, put it in a manilla folder marked "business plan," and get to work!
The port is at least 90% done
That's a lie and you know it.
They wouldn't care about piracy
Bull. Apple doesn't really care very much about Mac OS X piracy because you already paid for your Mac OS X license when you bought your Mac. So what's the point in enforcing copy protection and licensing when you've already been paid?
But in a "put Mac OS X on your Diamond Shamrock-brand PC that you got for $19.95 after filling up your gas tank ten times" world, the situation would be very different.
margins even on their hardware are crap
Apple has the best margins in the industry. Go read a 10-K sometime. Apple maintains average margins of 30%. Average! That's incredible.
they have a very nice office suite (called apple works) that does a good job of opening and saving office formats
False. I mean, it's true that they have AppleWorks, but it's false that it can interoperate with Office.
I think they could sell 10-15 million copies at around $100
You made that number up. Come back when you've used your brain instead of your imagination.
see I can make up completely irrelevant numbers too like your 3500/seat
Hey, man, at least I had a thought process. I made an educated guess. You just pulled something out of your ass. They're two different things.
Well, given that in the time since I last posted, I went downstairs and blew the dust off of my old iMac (400 MHz G3) and installed Panther on it, I'd say I know whereof I speak.
I didn't stopwatch it or anything, but it was less than 10 minutes.
How much does Apple charge for a license of Mac OS X? Nominally $129, but in point of fact, you have to include the cost of the hardware Apple sells as well. A middle-of-the-road Mac costs about $1,500, OS X included. And that's for an operating system that actually, you know, exists. One that's already been developed. The price of licenses of a new operating system that would require a great deal of development would naturally be higher.
Beyond that, I made it up.
Darwin runs on x86.
Which has about as much to do with Mac OS X as a spinning wheel does to Nike's corporate bottom line.
Apple is frequently reputed to be maintaining an x86 port of Aqua
No, they're not. I don't know where you get these silly rumors, but that one is just completely untrue.
Stop believing stuff you read last year on MacWhispers.com, for starters.:-)
I was arguing that recent events have proved costs to be so incredibly relative that the entire concept of linking labor with cost is essentially meaningless.
That's untrue, though. Obviously.
Do try to step outside of your philosophical box once in a while- at least enough to realize that economics is a human invention, and therefore completely outside of anything related to NATURE.
Holy fuck, man. Can't you for just two seconds wrap your floppy ol' head around the fact that we are not talking about economics here? You are trying to apply an economic argument (the fixed cost of labor) to a philosophical question (the natural rights of property owners).
OS X treats the right button of a two-button mouse as a control-click, which seems logical enough..
Elaboration follows:
On a Mac, control-click sends the target a mouse-button-2 event. If you plug in a two-button mouse, the Mac automatically understands the second button as mouse-button-2. It's not that the Mac is remapping the second mouse click to some other kind of event; just the opposite.
Furthermore, a third mouse button works as well. Clicking the third button sends a mouse-button-3 event. Same with scroll wheels, and so on and so on.
Basically you can plug in just about any USB input device and it'll Just Work.
Apple would have to sell it for $3,500 a seat to recoup the costs of doing and maintaining the port, and they'd be eaten alive by piracy unless they spent even more money building some kind of kick-ass licensing system which would just get cracked by the script kiddies anyway.
And by the way, they'd then have to spend even more money creating a Microsoft Office 2004-compatible office suite, because you know MS would kill Office for Mac in a heartbeat.
All in all, sounds like a losing proposition to me.
However- the "state of nature" Locke was talking about was the COST OF LABOR- and given enough technology, labor has no cost.
That's wrong two ways. First, because no, you idiot, that's not what Locke was saying; why don't you go read and learn?
Second, it's wrong because it's impossible for the cost of any human endeavor to ever be zero. There's always opportunity cost. Hell, even the cost of food to sustain the participants for the duration must be taken into account. The cost of an endeavor can never be zero, no matter how many technological terrors you construct.
Don't just make statements- prove them.
Oh, please. "It's all free!" "No, it isn't." "Don't just make statement- prove them!"
You've gotta be kidding.
Show me that I'm wrong that Locke is basically outdated by recent events and trade agreements.
That's the point where I have to hang it up. You're arguing that the philosophy on which all of Western liberal society is based is out of date because you have a modem. Or something.
You're so far out in space right now we can barely maintain radio contact with you.
Let me see if I can make it perfectly clear: Property rights are not related, in any way, to economic conditions. They are natural rights, arising as an inevitable consequence from the state of nature.
thanks to the Internet, there's almost no cost to using it
That's both a misinterpretation of the basic philosophy and wrong.
You know what's really funny? I doubt that you could actually write an acceptable patent application for any of those things. Not you in particular, but basically anybody.
I mean, yeah, we all know what a compiler is and what it does, but how many of us could describe its inner workings in sufficient detail to write a patent application? Same thing for displaying files on a desktop.
Maybe you could write a patent application for the binary number system, but I'd be kinda surprised.
Re:Interesting way to make a political statement
on
"Real" Real Time Strategy?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Then, they tell you that they aren't going to sell you any food
That never happened. The sanctions imposed on Iraq never covered food or medical supplies. What happened is that Iraq wasn't allowed to sell its oil on the open market, which was its only significant source of revenue. So a program was set up through which Iraq could sell some oil and use the revenues to buy certain things, like food and medical supplies. Only instead of, you know, doing that, they handed oil vouchers out like bribes instead.
But it seems silly to expect anyone in Iraq to not be cynical and incredibly suspicious of US foreign policy after that, don't you think?
Already shown to be unexploded ordinance from Gulf War 1.
Well, first of all, no, that hasn't been shown, by anybody. And secondly, the leftover stockpiles from Iran-Iraq are precisely what Saddam was accused of hiding.
And that VX likely came through Saudi Arabia
Except that's not where it was found. It was found at the Jordanian-Syrian border.
The truth is Pres. Bush said Saddam had tried to buy uraniam from Niger.. AFTER being told it was NOT true
Except it was true. Again with the googling.
Al-Queda/Saddam links are non-existant.
Al-Qaida/Saddam links are plentiful and persuasive. One: the Czech connection linking Iraqi Military Intelligence to al-Qaida before 9/11. Two: the Ansar al-Islam connection. Three: documentary evidence uncovered in Baghdad during the occupation. There's more. You just need to open your eyes to it.
I think that the US media has painted the brightest picture possible and still be considered independant.
Is this some kind of funny, funny joke?
Try thinking for yourself for a change.
Right back atcha. Use that big old brain of yours.
there are a lot of not nice governments and we aren't invading their countries
Sin of false equivalence. If you are unable to distinguish between the government of Iraq and the government of, say, Yemen, then you are either insufficiently informed or lacking in moral conscience. To wit: Iraq invaded a neighbor, fought a war, lost, surrendered, and agreed to a set of terms that included verifiable disarmament. They refused to comply with those terms.
Saddam does not seem to have posed any serious threat to the United States
Sin of willful blindness. Saddam was personally writing checks in the amount of $25,000 to families of murder-bombers. He was paying for terrorism. The fact that that terrorism was not, at the time, directed toward the United States is hardly a point on which I'd like to bet my family's lives.
There is no evidence to suggest any relationship between Saddam and Al Quaida
Sin of willful blindness, instance #2. You're ignoring the intelligence we have from the Czech republic tying Iraqi Military Intelligence to al-Qaida before 9/11, the documentary evidence of same uncovered in Baghdad after the invasion, and the extensive evidence uncovered by our own treasury department linking Iraqi Military Intelligence to al-Qaida through Ansar al-Islam.
if Saddam had any deployable WMDs (which is unlikely) they were certainly far from a state of readiness at which they would pose any threat to the even the neighbors of Iraq
Sin of willful blindness, instance #3. We know without a doubt that Saddam had deployable WMD, because one of them went off in Baghdad yesterday. An artillery shell is about as deployable as it gets.
But that's not all. We know that Saddam had proscribed long-range missiles aimed at both Israel and Kuwait before and during the invasion because (1) our special forces troops on the ground destroyed them in the western desert, and (2) Iraqi forces fired them at Kuwait City during the invasion.
The lead up to war and the intelligence supporting it demonstrates either gross incompetence or deliberate misleading on the part of the administration.
I don't even know how to describe this sin. You're choosing to believe false accusations and ignore evidence. You're blinded by your prejudices.
The handling of Iraq since the invasion has been a complete disaster, mostly due to an (apparhent) complete failure to anticipate anything but the most rosy of post war senarios.
Yeah. Willful blindness again, I guess. "Quagmire!"
Do you get all your news from The Guardian, or what?
I wish there were some kind of minimum age limit on Slashdot accounts. At some point, you just have to draw a line and say "no children beyond this point."
You can't justify torture, but you can point out hypocrisy and put said torture in perspective.
Of course you can justify torture. It's not even hard.
Example: you have, in your custody, a person who set a bomb. You don't know where that bomb is, but you know it exists and you know that the person in your custody set it. You also know that it's going to go off at some point in the future and kill people. If it's a nuclear bomb, it might kill millions of people.
Ta-da: torturing that guy is justified.
Sure, that's an extreme example. I made it simple so we don't have to tackle the question of what "torture" means exactly.
Example: is putting somebody in a cell and leaving him there, without light or human contact, for an extended period of time "torture?"
What about depriving somebody of sleep for an extending period of time? Is that "torture?"
When we think of "torture," we think of a car battery to the scrotum or bamboo shoots under the fingernails. We think of injury, and in the worst cases, life-threatening or permanently crippling injury.
But there are lots of ways to make people uncomfortable that don't involve injury. Sleep-deprivation is one. Exposure to heat or cold is another. Extended periods of solitude, or nakedness, or loud noise. None of these things is harmful in any physiological sense. They're just unpleasant.
Have you ever had a toothache? It doesn't hurt very much, but the thing is that it never stops. It never lets up. So it's a killer.
You can convince somebody to give you information by exposing them to a low level of discomfort for a long time. Is this "torture?"
I have no problem at all with torture, in the sense of the application of non-injuring discomfort. It's prison, not church camp. You shouldn't expect to be comfortable.
Now, cutting off limbs or applying electricity or fire... that's another question. Sure, it can be justified under certain circumstances, but it's much harder to excuse at least.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you only supposed to use iTunes to play those CDs?
Of course not, dumbass. You know, if you'd spent that time reading the terms of service instead of being snide, you'd be better educated and none of us would be so tired of you.
Breaking a contract is not necissarily illegal
Yes, it is. We even have a term for it: "breach of contract."
The contract stiplulates the penalty for breaking the contract: refusal of service.
Right. Which means if you run PlayFair or Hymn or I'mABigScriptKiddieLookAtMeWoo or whatever on one of your iTunes songs, you are no longer legally authorized to listen to any of your iTunes songs. You are, at that point, engaging in copyright violation, which if you do it enough is a felony!
I'm pretty sure a scanner is an input device
You're wrong. A mouse or keyboard or similar input device complies with the HID (human interface device) device class specification. A scanner belongs to the Image class. Totally different drivers.
A scanner is not an input device.
Most don't. Most go out of business. Those that succeed, like Oracle, say, do it buy building a product that has a strong market and selling the heck out of it.
Apple's hardware isn't the least bit proprietary, by the way. The only part of it they build themselves is the system controller. Everything else, from the CPUs to the graphics to the hard drives to the fans, is available on the open market.
THEY STILL REFUSE TO JOIN US IN THE 21st CENTURY AND MAKE A MULTI-BUTTON MOUSE.
Because God knows, nobody else's mice work on Apple computers.
Look, let me see if I can explain this to you using small words so you don't get confused.
1. Apple sells computers. (We've gotta start somewhere.)
2. With each Apple computer come a keyboard and a mouse. When you go to the Apple store, you don't have to tell them that you want a mouse. One comes right there in the box.
3. Apple believes, rightly, that the zero-button mouse is the right choice for the majority of their customers. So dropping the zero-button mouse in favor of something else is not an option.
4. If Apple designs and manufactures a three-button mouse and offers it as an option, customers who want to buy it will complain about the mouse that comes in the box with the Mac. They're complain that they're being asked to pay for two mice when they only want one. There will be strongly worded posts to Slashdot about the Apple "mouse tax."
5. If Apple removes the mouse from the Mac box entirely, then all customers will have to buy a mouse separately, which will annoy everybody equally. Annoying a very small number of your customers is fine. Annoying all of your customers is bad business.
6. In any case, building a different mouse would pose all sorts of logistical problems. (Oops. "Logistical" isn't a very small word, is it? Well, that's okay. Just skip ahead if you get scared.) There are questions of packaging, bills of materials, additional part numbers, separate warranty processing... it'd be a mess. An unnecessary mess.
7. So what's the best option for Apple? To manufacture a three-button mouse, stock it, and offer it for sale to customers who want one, I guess. That way the majority of Apple customers, who are quite happy with the zero-button mouse, won't notice a change, and the other customers will have a choice.
8. But wait. Some customers will want a two-button mouse, some will want two buttons and a scroll wheel, and some will want three buttons. Crap. Now Apple has to manufacture four different kinds of mice.
9. Okay, so we have our optimum scenario. Apple customers all get zero-button mice, and those who want one have the option of buying one of several different kinds of other mice.
10. Which is, you'll notice, exactly like the status quo, except Apple has to spend a lot of money designing, building, packaging, stocking, and distributing mice.
Why doesn't Apple make a three-button mouse? That's why.
And also because Steve doesn't like you.
Why not do for OpenOffice.org what they did for Darwin? It's under GPL/LGPL
You just answered your own question. Apple wouldn't be able to touch Open Office without giving it all away.
Besides, it's my humble opinion that a Cocoa-based word processor and spreadsheet, written from scratch using advanced Mac OS X technologies, would be a far better choice. Just look at how much better Keynote is than anything else in its class.
...because you know MS would kill Office for Mac in a heartbeat.
I know it's too much to ask you to fucking read, but one can dream, can't one?
I know sooooo many people that would buy OS X for x86 its not even funny.
Oh, well, that's it then. Let's scribble that little statement down, put it in a manilla folder marked "business plan," and get to work!
The port is at least 90% done
That's a lie and you know it.
They wouldn't care about piracy
Bull. Apple doesn't really care very much about Mac OS X piracy because you already paid for your Mac OS X license when you bought your Mac. So what's the point in enforcing copy protection and licensing when you've already been paid?
But in a "put Mac OS X on your Diamond Shamrock-brand PC that you got for $19.95 after filling up your gas tank ten times" world, the situation would be very different.
margins even on their hardware are crap
Apple has the best margins in the industry. Go read a 10-K sometime. Apple maintains average margins of 30%. Average! That's incredible.
they have a very nice office suite (called apple works) that does a good job of opening and saving office formats
False. I mean, it's true that they have AppleWorks, but it's false that it can interoperate with Office.
I think they could sell 10-15 million copies at around $100
You made that number up. Come back when you've used your brain instead of your imagination.
see I can make up completely irrelevant numbers too like your 3500/seat
Hey, man, at least I had a thought process. I made an educated guess. You just pulled something out of your ass. They're two different things.
Well, given that in the time since I last posted, I went downstairs and blew the dust off of my old iMac (400 MHz G3) and installed Panther on it, I'd say I know whereof I speak.
I didn't stopwatch it or anything, but it was less than 10 minutes.
Where on earth do you get $3,500 a seat?
:-)
How much does Apple charge for a license of Mac OS X? Nominally $129, but in point of fact, you have to include the cost of the hardware Apple sells as well. A middle-of-the-road Mac costs about $1,500, OS X included. And that's for an operating system that actually, you know, exists. One that's already been developed. The price of licenses of a new operating system that would require a great deal of development would naturally be higher.
Beyond that, I made it up.
Darwin runs on x86.
Which has about as much to do with Mac OS X as a spinning wheel does to Nike's corporate bottom line.
Apple is frequently reputed to be maintaining an x86 port of Aqua
No, they're not. I don't know where you get these silly rumors, but that one is just completely untrue.
Stop believing stuff you read last year on MacWhispers.com, for starters.
I was arguing that recent events have proved costs to be so incredibly relative that the entire concept of linking labor with cost is essentially meaningless.
That's untrue, though. Obviously.
Do try to step outside of your philosophical box once in a while- at least enough to realize that economics is a human invention, and therefore completely outside of anything related to NATURE.
Holy fuck, man. Can't you for just two seconds wrap your floppy ol' head around the fact that we are not talking about economics here? You are trying to apply an economic argument (the fixed cost of labor) to a philosophical question (the natural rights of property owners).
And you're telling me to step out of my box?
Pretty uppity, if you ask me.
Visit the Mac forums you will see many scanners, all-in-one print/scan/fax devices, etc do not work well on Macs.
Please read more carefully in the future: "Basically you can plug in just about any USB input device and it'll Just Work." A true statement.
anyone know how long the install would take on a comparable macintosh?
;-)
Less than 10 minutes.
has anyone run any speed tests yet?
Yes. It took seven hours to complete a task that a Mac would have done in under 10 minutes.
OS X treats the right button of a two-button mouse as a control-click, which seems logical enough..
Elaboration follows:
On a Mac, control-click sends the target a mouse-button-2 event. If you plug in a two-button mouse, the Mac automatically understands the second button as mouse-button-2. It's not that the Mac is remapping the second mouse click to some other kind of event; just the opposite.
Furthermore, a third mouse button works as well. Clicking the third button sends a mouse-button-3 event. Same with scroll wheels, and so on and so on.
Basically you can plug in just about any USB input device and it'll Just Work.
Apple would have to sell it for $3,500 a seat to recoup the costs of doing and maintaining the port, and they'd be eaten alive by piracy unless they spent even more money building some kind of kick-ass licensing system which would just get cracked by the script kiddies anyway.
And by the way, they'd then have to spend even more money creating a Microsoft Office 2004-compatible office suite, because you know MS would kill Office for Mac in a heartbeat.
All in all, sounds like a losing proposition to me.
How efficiently does it run? I.e., how fast/expensive a box do I need to get a normal experience?
From the post: He said it took 5 hours to run the first install CD
Sounds like it's not physically possible to throw enough hardware at this thing to get a normal experience at this point.
However- the "state of nature" Locke was talking about was the COST OF LABOR- and given enough technology, labor has no cost.
That's wrong two ways. First, because no, you idiot, that's not what Locke was saying; why don't you go read and learn?
Second, it's wrong because it's impossible for the cost of any human endeavor to ever be zero. There's always opportunity cost. Hell, even the cost of food to sustain the participants for the duration must be taken into account. The cost of an endeavor can never be zero, no matter how many technological terrors you construct.
Don't just make statements- prove them.
Oh, please. "It's all free!" "No, it isn't." "Don't just make statement- prove them!"
You've gotta be kidding.
Show me that I'm wrong that Locke is basically outdated by recent events and trade agreements.
That's the point where I have to hang it up. You're arguing that the philosophy on which all of Western liberal society is based is out of date because you have a modem. Or something.
You're so far out in space right now we can barely maintain radio contact with you.
I _am_ an adult
Then I guess it would be the acme of foolishness to inquire if you might be inclined to act like it?
As with the rest of your posts, I didn't bother to read on. It's certain to have been childish and silly.
Grow up a bit, then try again.
However, this whole line of thought from Locke depends on LABOR ITSELF being scarce
Um. No. I'm afraid you're misinterpreting Locke here.
Let me see if I can make it perfectly clear: Property rights are not related, in any way, to economic conditions. They are natural rights, arising as an inevitable consequence from the state of nature.
thanks to the Internet, there's almost no cost to using it
That's both a misinterpretation of the basic philosophy and wrong.
You know what's really funny? I doubt that you could actually write an acceptable patent application for any of those things. Not you in particular, but basically anybody.
I mean, yeah, we all know what a compiler is and what it does, but how many of us could describe its inner workings in sufficient detail to write a patent application? Same thing for displaying files on a desktop.
Maybe you could write a patent application for the binary number system, but I'd be kinda surprised.
Then, they tell you that they aren't going to sell you any food
That never happened. The sanctions imposed on Iraq never covered food or medical supplies. What happened is that Iraq wasn't allowed to sell its oil on the open market, which was its only significant source of revenue. So a program was set up through which Iraq could sell some oil and use the revenues to buy certain things, like food and medical supplies. Only instead of, you know, doing that, they handed oil vouchers out like bribes instead.
But it seems silly to expect anyone in Iraq to not be cynical and incredibly suspicious of US foreign policy after that, don't you think?
Nope. That's tin-foil-hat talk.
Educate yourself. You are ignorant of the facts.
Huh? source?
Google it. We ain't your momma.
Already shown to be unexploded ordinance from Gulf War 1.
Well, first of all, no, that hasn't been shown, by anybody. And secondly, the leftover stockpiles from Iran-Iraq are precisely what Saddam was accused of hiding.
And that VX likely came through Saudi Arabia
Except that's not where it was found. It was found at the Jordanian-Syrian border.
The truth is Pres. Bush said Saddam had tried to buy uraniam from Niger.. AFTER being told it was NOT true
Except it was true. Again with the googling.
Al-Queda/Saddam links are non-existant.
Al-Qaida/Saddam links are plentiful and persuasive. One: the Czech connection linking Iraqi Military Intelligence to al-Qaida before 9/11. Two: the Ansar al-Islam connection. Three: documentary evidence uncovered in Baghdad during the occupation. There's more. You just need to open your eyes to it.
I think that the US media has painted the brightest picture possible and still be considered independant.
Is this some kind of funny, funny joke?
Try thinking for yourself for a change.
Right back atcha. Use that big old brain of yours.
Let's catalogue your sins.
there are a lot of not nice governments and we aren't invading their countries
Sin of false equivalence. If you are unable to distinguish between the government of Iraq and the government of, say, Yemen, then you are either insufficiently informed or lacking in moral conscience. To wit: Iraq invaded a neighbor, fought a war, lost, surrendered, and agreed to a set of terms that included verifiable disarmament. They refused to comply with those terms.
Saddam does not seem to have posed any serious threat to the United States
Sin of willful blindness. Saddam was personally writing checks in the amount of $25,000 to families of murder-bombers. He was paying for terrorism. The fact that that terrorism was not, at the time, directed toward the United States is hardly a point on which I'd like to bet my family's lives.
There is no evidence to suggest any relationship between Saddam and Al Quaida
Sin of willful blindness, instance #2. You're ignoring the intelligence we have from the Czech republic tying Iraqi Military Intelligence to al-Qaida before 9/11, the documentary evidence of same uncovered in Baghdad after the invasion, and the extensive evidence uncovered by our own treasury department linking Iraqi Military Intelligence to al-Qaida through Ansar al-Islam.
if Saddam had any deployable WMDs (which is unlikely) they were certainly far from a state of readiness at which they would pose any threat to the even the neighbors of Iraq
Sin of willful blindness, instance #3. We know without a doubt that Saddam had deployable WMD, because one of them went off in Baghdad yesterday. An artillery shell is about as deployable as it gets.
But that's not all. We know that Saddam had proscribed long-range missiles aimed at both Israel and Kuwait before and during the invasion because (1) our special forces troops on the ground destroyed them in the western desert, and (2) Iraqi forces fired them at Kuwait City during the invasion.
The lead up to war and the intelligence supporting it demonstrates either gross incompetence or deliberate misleading on the part of the administration.
I don't even know how to describe this sin. You're choosing to believe false accusations and ignore evidence. You're blinded by your prejudices.
The handling of Iraq since the invasion has been a complete disaster, mostly due to an (apparhent) complete failure to anticipate anything but the most rosy of post war senarios.
Yeah. Willful blindness again, I guess. "Quagmire!"
Do you get all your news from The Guardian, or what?
Please do the world a favor, kill yourself.
Nice. Real grown-up.
I wish there were some kind of minimum age limit on Slashdot accounts. At some point, you just have to draw a line and say "no children beyond this point."
You can't justify torture, but you can point out hypocrisy and put said torture in perspective.
Of course you can justify torture. It's not even hard.
Example: you have, in your custody, a person who set a bomb. You don't know where that bomb is, but you know it exists and you know that the person in your custody set it. You also know that it's going to go off at some point in the future and kill people. If it's a nuclear bomb, it might kill millions of people.
Ta-da: torturing that guy is justified.
Sure, that's an extreme example. I made it simple so we don't have to tackle the question of what "torture" means exactly.
Example: is putting somebody in a cell and leaving him there, without light or human contact, for an extended period of time "torture?"
What about depriving somebody of sleep for an extending period of time? Is that "torture?"
When we think of "torture," we think of a car battery to the scrotum or bamboo shoots under the fingernails. We think of injury, and in the worst cases, life-threatening or permanently crippling injury.
But there are lots of ways to make people uncomfortable that don't involve injury. Sleep-deprivation is one. Exposure to heat or cold is another. Extended periods of solitude, or nakedness, or loud noise. None of these things is harmful in any physiological sense. They're just unpleasant.
Have you ever had a toothache? It doesn't hurt very much, but the thing is that it never stops. It never lets up. So it's a killer.
You can convince somebody to give you information by exposing them to a low level of discomfort for a long time. Is this "torture?"
I have no problem at all with torture, in the sense of the application of non-injuring discomfort. It's prison, not church camp. You shouldn't expect to be comfortable.
Now, cutting off limbs or applying electricity or fire... that's another question. Sure, it can be justified under certain circumstances, but it's much harder to excuse at least.