What happened to education? It should be paramount that the first (6-9) years of education concentrate on teaching the kids how to learn, not how to master one or two specific workflow tools (which will inevitably be somewhat different anyway by the time the student enters the job market).
Later in secondary and tertiary education, when the kids have already learnt how to acquire new skills, it'll be easy to introduce them to more specific tools. Until then it'll be largely waste of education resources *and* the kids' appetite for learning to teach them how to make neat presentations and other fluff before they've even learnt to create, arrange and filter through actual content properly.
(Ed)ubuntu with its simplified and remotely manageable desktop is perfectly adequate for young students' needs and national education authorities should pool their resources together to build even better teaching tools and applications for their purposes while localizing tools and apps created by others. Perhaps the Edubuntu site could become a venue for such multinational collaboration effort? One area that could be an early priority is building a set of (multimedia?) tools for easy content-creation by teachers.
Just google for noise cancellation. Audio isn't a problem even today.
Screen size and resolution issues can also be solved already, but it'll take another year or two of concerted effort (engineering & economies of scale) to make such displays truly cost-effective. Battery life, transmission/reception technology and other feature integration (in both software and hardware) issues will also need to be solved before the handset TV can really take off.
And it will take off, once the new TV-viewing feature is about as well integrated as cameras are in today's phones. You don't use all the features on your phone at all times, but when you want it it's there.
At first there will be only limited programming options a la early terrestial TV broadcasting, but eventually your little mobile media-communicator will have access to nearly every feed that is broadcast, including your own encrypted domestic video feeds. A miniature high-definition camera on your mobile allows you to be one of those feeds to any number of other people. The provider-to-consumer type video feed that we've come to know as "TeleVision" will simply find a new mobile implementation of that old idea.
So what if the first models only have a 2-inch screen. Soon someone will develop a flip-style screen that doubles the viewable area. Someone else will then create a Nokia Communicator type version of the Flip with a 5-inch 16:9 screen etc. Others will embed the screen onto eye-glasses and eventually into contact lenses. Before you know it you can have 3D hologram projectors embedded into your shirt buttons...
Mobile communications are here, and there's no going back.
Of course, the society will have to deal with the new social repercussions stemming from the general availability of mobile screen-staring, but we're already dealing with similar issues with people texting and fiddling with their smartphones and organizers on the move.
I found nothing about the phony push for war particularly hilarious. Not the initial marketing slogan "Shock'n Awe" nor the US military's recent light-hearted "Shake'n Bake" slogan for baking people alive in Fallujah. Or anything that has taken place in Iraq between these cheerful American sloganisms.
But talking about the manufactured evidence that supposedly incriminated Iraq in the eyes of the hypocritical invaders (Chinese military occupation and genocide in Tibet seems to be perfectly acceptable for both Blair & Bush!), it's the story of the one mentally unstable Iraqi refugee, a pathological liar nicknamed Curveball, that explains how crazy unverified rumours were processed into "undeniable facts" by the wannabe aggressor regimes.
In the run-up to the war and long into the invasion the "wholly-embedded" US media was scarily jingoistic so it is a minor relief that the "patriotic" war-journalism has finally given way to some soul- and fact-searching.
It is a long and detailed chronicle of an empire hell-bent on starting a war, and how media-massaged 88% popularity ratings make it easy for the most hapless of Führers to manipulate the state machinery and the populace of "the greatest democracy".
I wonder how many americans are still boycotting produce from the democratic and anti-war Old Europe but have no trouble buying Chinese imports and thereby aiding and abetting the oppressive and expansionist dictatorship there? Actually almost the whole planet was against the war but the fact that some sycophantic governments took decision to participate in the "grand coalition of the billing" against the popular opinion camouflaged that fact from the american public for a while. Meanwhile the Chinese state propaganda machine is still having a field day reporting about the American military quaqmire while the Communist Party is busy creating alliances with anti-Bush developing countries around the globe.
The most unfortunate long-term result of that American uni-lateralism may not be the civil war and splitting of Iraq into smaller ethno-religious states but the split between the USA and Europe which will benefit the Sino-Russian neo-imperial block. With moral-free business ties reigning supreme so far above the so-called "western values of freedom and democracy" that it isn't even funny, the politically bullied or already occupied neighbours of those authoritarian powers will be the biggest losers in this sad saga started by a handful of neo-cons backed by the american religious far-right.
Photo schmoto... most photo printing folks probably also print some documents in black and white and considering the price of photo inks, people might consider getting a cheap mono laser. After recently studying the market, I learned that Samsung has for a few years now made some very compact and best of all cheap laser printers with Linux official support.
(and no, I'm not affiliated with Samsung in any way or form)
You really think any of them are going to step forward? Frauenhofer owns patents on just about Everything That Is MP3. So pursuing a case against Sony for violating LAME's copyright would only expose yourself to a patent-infringement lawsuit from Frauenhofer.
Sshhh! Frauenhofer actually needs to slip a check or two under LAME's door before the two can walk into the sunset happily ever after. Half of something (esp. from $ONY) is a whole lot more than all of nothing, and lawyers aren't exactly free either.
And since you brought up the MP3 "ownership", wouldn't it be poetic justice if $ONY's rootkit was repurposed to benevolently convert all the world's MP3's into OGG's before setting up a BT tracker...:-)
"But your honor, it was designed to screw our customers, not us!"
Thanks for the correction. My past perceptions (I had barely used Debian before installing Ubuntu) may have let me down there and KDE has indeed been catching up... probably after the GPL'ing of non-commercial version of Qt.
On the other hand increasing number of GNOME developers have found paid-for employment over the last couple of years so that has further levelled the balance of pow.. effort. Back in the day GNOME was the only serious DE to go with Debian so would rephrasing it to say "based on the historically GNOME-centric Debian..." have been more accurate?;-)
Anyway, as the mother of all non-profit distros spanning soon two dozen CDs and nearly all imaginable platforms, neutral parity between the two main DEs is natural for Debian and I can only hope that the collaboration with Ubuntu/Kubuntu continues to work smoothly.
The Kiwi-based performance-optimized (and 1-CD) version of OpenSUSE (which syncs with SUSE's repositories, now also with apt) sounds like an interesting alternative to Ubuntu, well, if only their GNOME version would keep up with their KDE and Minimal releases!:^)
The thing is, SUSE not only has been but will continue to be a strongly KDE-centric distro. Their plan as of last week was to make GNOME the default desktop of the Novell-branded enterprise stuff but the retail-centric SUSE was to keep doing their KDE-centric thing as usual. Heck, SUSE has historically kept their GNOME support at a bare minimum, and that is probably the root for some of SUSE's KDE fans' rather vocal dislike of GNOME. Ubuntu OTOH has its roots in GNOME and therefore its users are also generally happy with its better-supported GNOME desktop.
Case in point: OpenSUSE's SUPER and SLICK editions are totally KDE-centric, performance optimized (incl. Con Kolivas' kernel optimizations) releases with a 1-CD install available and access to SUSE's repositories for additional (KDE) apps. The KDE and Minimal versions have been GA for a long time already, but their GNOME version is still stuck at -RC1, out over 2 months ago.
So to revenge Novell the now-reversed plan to make GNOME the default desktop on the Novell-branded enterprise stuff (which the KDE fans never cared about anyway), they're now dumping the massively KDE-centric SUSE en masse, in favour of... KDE on Kubuntu, which is based on the GNOME-centric Ubuntu which in turn is based on the GNOME-centric Debian...? Sometimes this stuff works in mysterious ways.:-)
Even if KDE eventually gained parity with GNOME under Ubuntu, I can't quite see it becoming a "preferred" choice there anytime soon, if ever. Likewise I can't see SUSE, the KDE-centric consumer release from Novell, giving GNOME anywhere near parity, let alone preferred position, on that platform.
If SUSE's KDE efforts aren't sufficient to the hardcore KDE fans, perhaps their best alternatives would be to invest all their time and money into an upstart totally KDE-only distro, or perhaps they could persuade the other KDE-centric major distro, Mandriva, to drop all their GNOME and Xfce (GTK is bad, right?) support? Having recently gotten out of bankruptcy protection, Mandriva would probably welcome the huge buying power of the KDE-only fans with open arms.
Perhaps Novell's corporate and institutional customers - you know the ones who help Novell pay for all their Linux development and promotion - prefer the LGPL'd tools for their internal development? Likewise for 3rd parties whose business is building specialized commercial applications for such corporate and institutional customers?
Let's also not forget that the move towards standardizing on the GNOME desktop doesn't mean that they're dumping interoperability with applications written for the K Destop Environment. KDE apps will still run great, and the user can still pick Plastik as their theme. Novell may officially only support the (ever-improving) GNOME configuration tools (and importantly their localization), but those who will never ever use anything else but the K Desktop Environment until the day they die can still continue using and helping maintain the KDE-based OpenSUSE. Novell GPL'd the previously semi-OpenSourced SuSE so they aren't actually picking up their toys and taking anything away from the KDE userbase.
I've been using GNOME for a couple of years now and like every release more than the previous one, but I'm also fine working under KDE every now and then. I did actually "standardize" on GNOME (currently under Ubuntu) after being a customer of both SuSE and Mandrake who let their GNOME support wither in the past. However I never felt any venomous anger towards these distro vendors over their choice.
If KDE/Qt is to someone the one and only acceptable desktop environment and giving the current v2.12 release of GNOME a fair test run is too far outside their parameters for tolerance, by all means switch to Mandrake-Conectiva or adopt one of the numerous remaining KDE-only distros (and make its developers to swear on the blood of their first-borns that they will never ever stop being KDE-centrik!). But hating Novell over this and seeing evil konspiracies where only kost-kutting rationalization exists is quite silly and unproductive IMO
Dude, those were guys operating the empire extending from China in the east and India in the south to eastern Europe were Mongolians who had invaded China and operated it as one of their four imperial domains. After overthrowing the foreign Mongolian invaders' Yuan dynasty, the crafty Chinese emperors that followed chose to co-opt the Mongolian empire as belonging to them!
The Mongolians also invaded Tibet in its entirety, being the only foreign power to do so before the Chinese communist army in 1950, and that invasion by the Mongols is used by the supposedly anti-imperial and anti-feudal Chinese communists today as a key argument as to why the Tibetan nation is theirs, and only theirs, to occupy, rip off and commit genocide as they please.
The actual worth of America's massive debt to the People's Republic of China is a secondary consideration to the CCP leadership. What matters to them is how that control of America's finances can be used to knock the USA off its sole superpower perch so that the People's Republic of China (aka the Middle Kingdom to which all other nations are historically subservient) can reassume their role as the most powerful nation.
Even if the value of the US currency would go down, it'd just make it more attractive for the Chinese to buy up US-based assets considered strategic to their objectives. Unlike the cash-rich Japanese in the 80's, the Chinese wouldn't care much about the largely symbolic real estate but would go for targets which would allow them to gain control of the US economy and production.
All in all, it's strange how the ruling classes of America (large corporations and their political friends) seem to doing everything in their considerable power to help an expansionist and aggressive dictatorship to grow into an uncontrollable behemoth. Tibetans, Uighurs and ("Inner", huh) Mongolians are left to their own devices to cope with the sinister sinization of their lands while the Taiwanese live under the constant fear of invasion by the CCP's military arm, the euphemistically titled "People's Liberation Army".
Bush, Blair & Co tout their invasion and occupation of Iraq as a "moral duty" while they're bending over backwards to roll out the red carpet to China's totalitarian rulers. Blair, who refused to even meet the exiled leader of the Tibetans last year will be kissing Chairman Hu's butt next week, hell-bent on resuming the sale of military technology to the aggressive dictatorship! They're trying hard to reach Putinist Russia's high moral standards apparently.
How is this all related to PRC's ambitious space program? Well, were we rejoicing when monsieurs Hitler and Stalin made progress on their respective paramilitary programs while building up ultranationalist fervour among their under-critical populations?
If this was about a peaceful and democratic China which wasn't committing genocide against its defenseless neighbours or oppressing its own people over "thought crimes" I'd be happy as a clam. I know there are good people in China; I've met such people myself. But too many, especially of those with knowledge of english and access to the 'net, are ultranationalistic stooges supporting their unelected regime with total disregard to the crimes they've committed.
Microsoft has an extensive Old Boys' Network in the tech industry, but in particular within the financial industry. There's no lack of money managers eager to do Microsoft's bidding in exchange for a piece of Microsoft's money laundering business.
A revitalized Novell-SUSE-Ximian combo is a massive threat to Microsoft (Hello New Zealand!) and if there are any even barely semilegal (under the current US regi... administration) wink-wink-nod-nod ways of getting the large financial firms to undermine Novell's image and finances, the goebbelsesque masterminds within the Strategic Acquisitions and Finances department of Microsoft are certainly pulling all their strings to that effect. That's their sole reason d'etre!
One recent example: When MS wanted their "Linux Powerhouse" and Office competitors Corel dead (but actually managed to buy it instead through a proxy; DOJ who?), they used ex-MS executives and their former or current colleagues and an MS-affiliated Vector Capital venture firm (financed by certain Paul Allen and operated by ex-MS execs) to do the probing, buying, insider bribing (offers of a glittery parachutes and a get-out-of-jail-free cards, anyone?), doctored "third party" evaluation of the company finances and its business projections (by top Wall St firms) etc. Even Corel's new and supposedly independently created pro-MS business strategy in 2001 was devised by a consultancy firm (McKinsey and Company) with links to people involved in the shady takeover.
Innocuous manipulation of competitors' share price (Down, boy!), or interference in competitors' corporate affairs through seemingly neutral investment houses or venture investors (Split 'em up for quick short-term profit!) is probably taking place all the time. The corporate hijacking of Corel was an amazingly outrageous maneuver, taking place as it did so soon after MS had nominally "lost" their monopoly case against the US-DOJ, and Microsoft's strategic planners certainly feel that they have even more leeway these days.
"Should Novell go south... blah blah blah?"
At the time of the MS-engineered takeover Corel was finalizing its turnaround and had loads of cash left (they were eventually bought out for a mere $30-40M for the dozen or so products!) but for some reason the larger investment firms and certain media kept referring to the company as "beleagured" (Hello Apple!), keeping up a constant stream of negative speculation. That is, of course, intended to have an effect on potential customers...
So now we have the even cash-richer Novell in the unenviable position of being a major MS competitor and yet having its "missteps" and future disembowellings spculated in the press.. But this time Novell also has some big backers (Hello Big Blue!) in its corner and I'd expect Novell to break through any glass ceilings or FUD campaigns instead of laying down its arms and capitulating before the Barbarian Gates.
While I'm all for stem cell research, isn't gene therapy more suitable for curing defects in protein-producing genes? In Usher's case, the affected genes are already known (thanks to the mapping!) and the methods for either knocking off the defective gene or replacing them with a healthy one are probably already being devised or fine-tuned.
Meanwhile, check out if carnosine might slow down the damage to your retinas. It is being used as eyedrops to alleviate the degeneration of proteins associated with aging but seems to have many other health benefits as well.
SUPER sounds like a grand idea to spread the SUSE community wider outside corporate confines.
1-CD Installs (performance-patched with Minimal, KDE and GNOME-centric sets) in particular are very welcome as the official SUSE and SUSE-OSS DVDs or 5-CD sets are on the heavy side and most users don't need anywhere near the full set of packages included there. The 1-CD Install set, as Ubuntu has already shown, keeps the user experience simple (while allowing for future expansion) and lowers the barrier for user-to-user proliferation of the distro.
The growing community around the OSS distro versions also helps Novell/SUSE to grow the momentum and mindshare of their commercial and supported releases. It'll be easier for Novell/SUSE to sell systems and support to businesses and other institutions when there may already be people around who are familiar and comfortable with their widely available free-for-all offerings. It'll also encourage third parties to pay more attention to making SUSE compatible packages.
I hope they'll get around to creating the planned liveCD version of SUPER as well, as an easily redistributable alternative to the current liveDVD offering.
FWIW, since Ubuntu stormed the scene I've mainly promoted it to people interested in trying out Linux, but for the technically-inept I've still recommended a SUSE box. These new OSS versions, and in particular the planned liveCD version, would dramatically lower the barrier of trying SUSE out but I'd still recommend a box set for the inexperienced users due to their better QA, less breakage and availability of official support.
One option is to carry a bootable CD or even a (8cm/3") mini CDR|W alongside the bootable USB stick with all the data.
Although a bit more bulge in your pocket, this way you can boot from the CD drive if the USB boot option is unavailable but still mount and massage the data on the stick as usual.
Since the machines lacking the USB boot option tend to be relatively ancient and often lacking in the RAM department as well, I carry a CD version of DamnSmallLinux just to be safe, and Knoppix on a 12cm/5" CD too since in my experience it often works on tricky hardware and carries a decent set of tools as well.
Carrying both media naturally undermines the stealth and ultra-portability arguments of using a single USB stick but with DSL on a mini CD you get pretty close while having better chances of getting your distro to boot.
Besides, the mini CDs aren't all that uncool considering every jock and his dog is carrying an "MP3 stick" these days anyway.;-)
Why should I pay my TV licence, so people around the world can download the content for free? BBC should make the content free for UK licencepayers, and chargeable for everyone else...
Well, first of all ideally there wouldn't be any specific TV licencing fees with all the bureacracy it (and its collection and enforcement) entails and there would be at least one tax-payer supported, neutral and unbiased source for TV programming in every country. This, however, wouldn't be acceptable to the commercial networks.
So most of us end up paying licence fees to have access to a programming source supposedly and hopefully not beholden to "third party interests". (not referring to the lib dems in this case).
OTOH that representative of the people in the UK, the UK government, would also like to spread the UK culture and political influence as far as wide as possible (this mainly applies to the "global players" which want to influence world affairs). If foreign people are actually willing to imbibe UK's culture and influence, why not let them? How much is it going to cost the UK tax payers anyway since the programming is already done? Besides, those foreigners at the receiving end are paying something in the form of network access and potentially they'll also be "torrenting" the programming to other foreigners...
Wouldn't it also be a good thing if everyone in the world had access to everyone else's programming to see how things are portrayed in that part of the world (language issues notwithstanding)?
Currently the communist party dictatorship of China is already pushing their english- and chinese-language propaganda over the internet and satellite feeds to anyone willing to swallow their version of reality. On the opposite corner are the commercial US networks which spread their unique version of the US infotainment and entertainment. I believe it's a good thing for everyone, UK licence payers included, that there are also some relatively neutral broadcasters like the BBC and the german Deutsche Welle providing other informative and cultural (national and global) points of view free of charge to anyone who's interested.
It must be heavenly for the Party supporters to be able to mod down critical voices overseas when they have no democratic voice in their own country. Or to possibly even have access to facts not fabricated by the CCP's Propaganda Department, but yet choosing to imbibe the Party's "simplified" scripture as if it was manna from the Yellow Emperor himself.
Guess what, had we been discussing the technical merits of the then-brand new V2 rockets in early 1940s the Nazi sympathizers would have tried modding down any debate about the Holocaust... Same would've been true about Stalin fans intent on brushing that regime's genocides under the carpet. Should we have simply debated those regimes' technical achievements in total separation of their crimes against humanity? Would you have been happy talking only about the flight charasteristics of the Zero fighter while Nanjing was being raped?
Well, the more Tibet is raped the more shame it will bring to the future generations of Chinese...
No one is troubled by the "centralized" nature of China in itself; all nations, pre-invasion Tibet naturally included, have their own forms of central government. It's when an expansionist nation begins swallowing up other nations when the flag of an imperial aggression goes up. Or was Imperial Japan within its rights to invade China after all? No, of course not! The Chinese people are different from the Japanese in language, culture, script, ethnicity etc. (just like Tibetans are different from the Chinese!) and naturally deserve to determine their own national affairs without foreign annexations or aggressions.
What happened to the peoples living outside those borders of the original Chinese homeland? How many wars did it take over the centuries to turn those former neighbors into minorities under Han Chinese rule?
Now, if you knew about Tibet's actual history, instead of the neo-imperialist propaganda conjured up by China's current dictators, you'd realize that only in 1950 Tibet lost its national self-determination, thanks to Mao's invading communist army. China's past god-kings have always made silly claims of ownership of foreign lands, and especially China's neighbors, but like Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam, India etc. etc. Tibet was de facto independent before the communist invasion. Heck, there are even some brave Chinese historians who understand this, but thanks to the CCP's imperial agenda the Chinese people only get to ever hear about the make-believe propaganda version.
The claim that Tibet was somehow even nominally under a Chinese despot's rule some 300 years ago -- a time of imperialism before the birth of a modern nation state -- and that nominal imperial rule should somehow translate into an acceptable modern-day occupation of one's peaceful neighbors is a violent and anachronistic claim indeed.
Why do you, as a Chinese invidual, feel the need to accept and publically support the occupation of your neighboring peoples?
Don't just take my word for it. Grow a conscience and check out even one of the uncountable videos about the tortured Tibetans who managed to escape into exile from the police state that is occupied Tibet. Talk to some of the thousands of Tibetans who escape from their own land every year (because those still under occupation are too afraid to talk, especially to the Chinese) and then come back to defend China's ongoing military occupation of Tibet.
The techie side of mine rejoices that good 'ol capsules are still going up, if not for reasons of pure scientific progress then at least to, hmm, unify the Chinese nation under the iron grip of CCP's enlightened national-socialistic guidance...
My humanistic side OTOH keeps wondering why the Chinese people allow their dictatorial state machinery to continue the decades-long genocidal occupation of their peaceful Tibetan neighbors. If the brutal war-time occupation of parts of China by Japan's imperial army two generations ago is still a cause of pure hatred for the Chinese, can't they see that they themselves are continuing to totally extinguish the Tibetan nation, its language, its culture... stealing their natural resources (minerals and forests) while dumping China's nuclear and other waste on their ecologically delicate lands... causing the deaths of over a million Tibetans... mass-migrating millions upon millions of Chinese into Tibet, leaving Tibetans as impoverished minority in their own country...
People in the free world who have any respect for humanity should of course continue working towards ending this travesty of international justice but it is ultimately up to the Chinese people themselves to stop the crimes that are being committed in their name.
So while the ruling Party of China keeps on refining their rockets, the rest of us might as well put some effort on helping the Chinese people and their oppressed neighbors get better access to media and communications tools outside the state propaganda and censorship machine. The way MSN (MicroSoft Network) and Yahoo supports that oppressive machinery through their collaboration is nothing short of shameful.
How about we just cut the crap and stop trying to stop people from simply living. [....] Maybe we can start a new trend of just selling our human rights for profit! Because right now they're just being stolen.
You're worried about your human rights being sold for profit? What do you think the official organizers of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, the Chinese Communist Party, are doing in Chinese-occupied Tibet every single day? The London games organizers may be greedy and stupid assholes but are they wiping out whole nations (not just Tibetans but Uighurs too) while the "corporate sponsors" (i.e. governments and multinationals of the world) are not just clapping their hands but actively participating in feeding the oppressive machinery of China's neo-imperial dictators.
If awarding the olympic games to Berlin in 1936 was a grave mistake, Moscow 1980 (at the height of USSR's expansionist frenzy) and soon Beijing 2008 are all the proof one needs to show that vague concepts like humanity, brotherhood and fair play (between peoples) have no place left in today's "olympic movement by multinationals".
Any modern distro will boot from a sata drive. I have been booting from one in Redhat Enterprise for 2 years and I am writing from an Ubuntu install booted from a sata drive.
Depends on you definition of "modern".
The only way I managed to get Hoary to boot trouble-free was by moving the boot partition to an IDE drive. Both my mobo's built-in SATA chipset and the add-on card were supposedly supported by Garzik's patches but none of the h/w combinations I tried worked with the original Hoary install (which I'd consider to be "modern").
Maybe things have changes in the last month or so, but the last time I looked the SATA patches have taken their sweet time getting into the mainline kernel and various SATA chipsets remain unbootable or problematic even when patched to the max.
Since the latest official releases (Hoary & Mandrake 10.1, actually I even tried FC3) of the top distros based on distrowatch rankings didn't boot here using two different supposedly supported SATA chipsets I'd consider your simplistic claim to be wrong.
I'm glad your setup has worked for two years already but saying that "any modern distro will boot from a sata drive" simply isn't true. Now, if you claimed that by the end of the year most modern distros will boot from a SATA drive just fine I'd probably agree with you, but until all SATA chipsets are actually supported and properly integrated into distros it'd be better to caution users about potential pitfalls instead of making blanket statements.
Sympathy for the Japanese is largely misplaced....occupied China for 12 years....Thousands of prisoners were abused, tortured and murdered...the Japanese still refuse to take responsibility...when one remembers the brutality and sheer animalistic behaviour of the Japanese...
The Japanese terror ended some 60 years ago, they've apologized and provided China generous aid for decades (although the Communists took credit for all that reconstruction), but now that you seem to express comprehension of what it was like to live under brutal and murderous oppression, I would like you to replace "Japanese" with "Chinese" in the section I quoted; and (partially) "occupied China" with "totally occupied Tibet", and that "for 12 years" should now read "for the last 55 years and still remorselessly ongoing".
Should sympathy for the Chinese also be misplaced in your view?
Think about China destroying her peaceful neighbour, Tibet's language, Tibet's culture, Tibet's religion, Tibetans' national identity... not partially but in all of Tibet. Almost one fifth of all Tibetans have already died under China's military occupation.
The insane and decadent dictator Mao is still being idolized in China as the #1 national hero, not by one elected prime minister making anachronistic shrine visits but by all of the China's self-appointed regime, and by extension every Chinese citizen. All of China's school and history text books are methodically warped to erase any unflattering events and crimes from history, and yet many Chinese who reside overseas to study, work (or spy on the host nations) with access to information outside Party Censors' grip, still refuse to accept the truth about China's brutality against Tibet.
The Japanese already realize that they weren't actually "liberating" their victims. How about the Chinese end their own ongoing crime against their Tibetan neighbours and then we can all have a hearty talk about who deserves most of the sympathy? Okay
What Mao and the Chinese Communists did is after the war and had no effect on any of the parties involved in WWII. Thus, your statement about "sympathy for the chinese" makes no sense in the current discussion.
Wonderful spin! As soon as Mao had driven the Nationalists out of China and declared his personal "proletarian dictatorship" in 1949, he sent his indoctrinated thugs to invade China's peaceful neighbour Tibet (which had remained neutral in the madness of WWII).
Unlike Japan, which has apologized to China and has for decades provided generous aid (for which the Communist Party naturally took all credit for), China continues to hold all of Tibet under terror and oppressive military rule to this day, without slightest sense of remorse.
Although the Japanese occupation of China and other nations was obviously murderous and inhumanely brutal, that occupation ended almost 60 years ago. And luckily China's language(s), religion, national traditions or national identity were never under threat of total annihilation and extinction. Not so with occupied Tibet!
The chinese would deserve a lot more sympathy if they themselves stopped wiping the Tibetan nation off the planet NOW.
If you read my comment you'll see that I said if the US military is not lying... make your own conclusions, I dont have the energy to explain it to you.
Okay, but that wasn't exactly obvious in your previous message. The victims of this shooting (italians) had a very different view of the events and even the invited italian experts in the US military panel couldn't underwrite the american report because it completely ignored the statements by the victims themselves. The US military OTOH is rather infamous for not owning up to their "deadly mistakes" but yet you're willing to take their brothers-in-arms' conclusions at a face value?
Basically, by accepting that report, you also accept its underlying premise that the italian victims' statements were unreliable (i.e. the victims lied) because they contradicted the storyline by the honourable US gunmen manning that roadblock.
Re you saying "if the US military is not lying"... I wasn't able to read that deep between the lines, so I'm glad that you bothered to spend a minute to clear that up for me.
Your original post titled "accident" (emphasis added):
From scanning through the report I can only conclude that it was an accident. The US soldiers where poorly trained for the mission, and the driver of the car wasn't paying enough attention to his surroundings.
Tragic yes, but nothing more (assuming the italians agree with the description of the events of course, people can always lie)
Scanning through the report which was released by the US military themselves (i.e. the suspects), you can only come to the conclusion that it was an accident?
Hell yeah, mission accomplished. It has now been proven yet again that the US military doesn't cover up dirty deeds by its soldiers or commanders. This report by the US military, the greatest and most honest military machine ever created, is absolute proof of that.
Tragic yes, but nothing more
If the Chinese, Russians or Arabs overthrew your government and had similar military occupation across your country shooting at anything that moves, would that same description still apply?
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Later in secondary and tertiary education, when the kids have already learnt how to acquire new skills, it'll be easy to introduce them to more specific tools. Until then it'll be largely waste of education resources *and* the kids' appetite for learning to teach them how to make neat presentations and other fluff before they've even learnt to create, arrange and filter through actual content properly.
(Ed)ubuntu with its simplified and remotely manageable desktop is perfectly adequate for young students' needs and national education authorities should pool their resources together to build even better teaching tools and applications for their purposes while localizing tools and apps created by others. Perhaps the Edubuntu site could become a venue for such multinational collaboration effort? One area that could be an early priority is building a set of (multimedia?) tools for easy content-creation by teachers.
Screen size and resolution issues can also be solved already, but it'll take another year or two of concerted effort (engineering & economies of scale) to make such displays truly cost-effective. Battery life, transmission/reception technology and other feature integration (in both software and hardware) issues will also need to be solved before the handset TV can really take off.
And it will take off, once the new TV-viewing feature is about as well integrated as cameras are in today's phones. You don't use all the features on your phone at all times, but when you want it it's there.
At first there will be only limited programming options a la early terrestial TV broadcasting, but eventually your little mobile media-communicator will have access to nearly every feed that is broadcast, including your own encrypted domestic video feeds. A miniature high-definition camera on your mobile allows you to be one of those feeds to any number of other people. The provider-to-consumer type video feed that we've come to know as "TeleVision" will simply find a new mobile implementation of that old idea.
So what if the first models only have a 2-inch screen. Soon someone will develop a flip-style screen that doubles the viewable area. Someone else will then create a Nokia Communicator type version of the Flip with a 5-inch 16:9 screen etc. Others will embed the screen onto eye-glasses and eventually into contact lenses. Before you know it you can have 3D hologram projectors embedded into your shirt buttons...
Mobile communications are here, and there's no going back.
Of course, the society will have to deal with the new social repercussions stemming from the general availability of mobile screen-staring, but we're already dealing with similar issues with people texting and fiddling with their smartphones and organizers on the move.
But talking about the manufactured evidence that supposedly incriminated Iraq in the eyes of the hypocritical invaders (Chinese military occupation and genocide in Tibet seems to be perfectly acceptable for both Blair & Bush!), it's the story of the one mentally unstable Iraqi refugee, a pathological liar nicknamed Curveball, that explains how crazy unverified rumours were processed into "undeniable facts" by the wannabe aggressor regimes.
In the run-up to the war and long into the invasion the "wholly-embedded" US media was scarily jingoistic so it is a minor relief that the "patriotic" war-journalism has finally given way to some soul- and fact-searching.
How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball' The Iraqi informant's German handlers say they had told U.S. officials that his information was 'not proven,' and were shocked when President Bush and Colin L. Powell used it in key prewar speeches. (LA Times, November 20, 2005)
It is a long and detailed chronicle of an empire hell-bent on starting a war, and how media-massaged 88% popularity ratings make it easy for the most hapless of Führers to manipulate the state machinery and the populace of "the greatest democracy".
I wonder how many americans are still boycotting produce from the democratic and anti-war Old Europe but have no trouble buying Chinese imports and thereby aiding and abetting the oppressive and expansionist dictatorship there? Actually almost the whole planet was against the war but the fact that some sycophantic governments took decision to participate in the "grand coalition of the billing" against the popular opinion camouflaged that fact from the american public for a while. Meanwhile the Chinese state propaganda machine is still having a field day reporting about the American military quaqmire while the Communist Party is busy creating alliances with anti-Bush developing countries around the globe.
The most unfortunate long-term result of that American uni-lateralism may not be the civil war and splitting of Iraq into smaller ethno-religious states but the split between the USA and Europe which will benefit the Sino-Russian neo-imperial block. With moral-free business ties reigning supreme so far above the so-called "western values of freedom and democracy" that it isn't even funny, the politically bullied or already occupied neighbours of those authoritarian powers will be the biggest losers in this sad saga started by a handful of neo-cons backed by the american religious far-right.
(and no, I'm not affiliated with Samsung in any way or form)
Sshhh! Frauenhofer actually needs to slip a check or two under LAME's door before the two can walk into the sunset happily ever after. Half of something (esp. from $ONY) is a whole lot more than all of nothing, and lawyers aren't exactly free either.
And since you brought up the MP3 "ownership", wouldn't it be poetic justice if $ONY's rootkit was repurposed to benevolently convert all the world's MP3's into OGG's before setting up a BT tracker... :-)
"But your honor, it was designed to screw our customers, not us!"
On the other hand increasing number of GNOME developers have found paid-for employment over the last couple of years so that has further levelled the balance of pow.. effort. Back in the day GNOME was the only serious DE to go with Debian so would rephrasing it to say "based on the historically GNOME-centric Debian..." have been more accurate? ;-)
Anyway, as the mother of all non-profit distros spanning soon two dozen CDs and nearly all imaginable platforms, neutral parity between the two main DEs is natural for Debian and I can only hope that the collaboration with Ubuntu/Kubuntu continues to work smoothly.
The Kiwi-based performance-optimized (and 1-CD) version of OpenSUSE (which syncs with SUSE's repositories, now also with apt) sounds like an interesting alternative to Ubuntu, well, if only their GNOME version would keep up with their KDE and Minimal releases! :^)
Case in point: OpenSUSE's SUPER and SLICK editions are totally KDE-centric, performance optimized (incl. Con Kolivas' kernel optimizations) releases with a 1-CD install available and access to SUSE's repositories for additional (KDE) apps. The KDE and Minimal versions have been GA for a long time already, but their GNOME version is still stuck at -RC1, out over 2 months ago.
So to revenge Novell the now-reversed plan to make GNOME the default desktop on the Novell-branded enterprise stuff (which the KDE fans never cared about anyway), they're now dumping the massively KDE-centric SUSE en masse, in favour of... KDE on Kubuntu, which is based on the GNOME-centric Ubuntu which in turn is based on the GNOME-centric Debian...? Sometimes this stuff works in mysterious ways. :-)
Even if KDE eventually gained parity with GNOME under Ubuntu, I can't quite see it becoming a "preferred" choice there anytime soon, if ever. Likewise I can't see SUSE, the KDE-centric consumer release from Novell, giving GNOME anywhere near parity, let alone preferred position, on that platform.
If SUSE's KDE efforts aren't sufficient to the hardcore KDE fans, perhaps their best alternatives would be to invest all their time and money into an upstart totally KDE-only distro, or perhaps they could persuade the other KDE-centric major distro, Mandriva, to drop all their GNOME and Xfce (GTK is bad, right?) support? Having recently gotten out of bankruptcy protection, Mandriva would probably welcome the huge buying power of the KDE-only fans with open arms.
Let's also not forget that the move towards standardizing on the GNOME desktop doesn't mean that they're dumping interoperability with applications written for the K Destop Environment. KDE apps will still run great, and the user can still pick Plastik as their theme. Novell may officially only support the (ever-improving) GNOME configuration tools (and importantly their localization), but those who will never ever use anything else but the K Desktop Environment until the day they die can still continue using and helping maintain the KDE-based OpenSUSE. Novell GPL'd the previously semi-OpenSourced SuSE so they aren't actually picking up their toys and taking anything away from the KDE userbase.
I've been using GNOME for a couple of years now and like every release more than the previous one, but I'm also fine working under KDE every now and then. I did actually "standardize" on GNOME (currently under Ubuntu) after being a customer of both SuSE and Mandrake who let their GNOME support wither in the past. However I never felt any venomous anger towards these distro vendors over their choice.
If KDE/Qt is to someone the one and only acceptable desktop environment and giving the current v2.12 release of GNOME a fair test run is too far outside their parameters for tolerance, by all means switch to Mandrake-Conectiva or adopt one of the numerous remaining KDE-only distros (and make its developers to swear on the blood of their first-borns that they will never ever stop being KDE-centrik!). But hating Novell over this and seeing evil konspiracies where only kost-kutting rationalization exists is quite silly and unproductive IMO
The Mongolians also invaded Tibet in its entirety, being the only foreign power to do so before the Chinese communist army in 1950, and that invasion by the Mongols is used by the supposedly anti-imperial and anti-feudal Chinese communists today as a key argument as to why the Tibetan nation is theirs, and only theirs, to occupy, rip off and commit genocide as they please.
Even if the value of the US currency would go down, it'd just make it more attractive for the Chinese to buy up US-based assets considered strategic to their objectives. Unlike the cash-rich Japanese in the 80's, the Chinese wouldn't care much about the largely symbolic real estate but would go for targets which would allow them to gain control of the US economy and production.
All in all, it's strange how the ruling classes of America (large corporations and their political friends) seem to doing everything in their considerable power to help an expansionist and aggressive dictatorship to grow into an uncontrollable behemoth. Tibetans, Uighurs and ("Inner", huh) Mongolians are left to their own devices to cope with the sinister sinization of their lands while the Taiwanese live under the constant fear of invasion by the CCP's military arm, the euphemistically titled "People's Liberation Army".
Bush, Blair & Co tout their invasion and occupation of Iraq as a "moral duty" while they're bending over backwards to roll out the red carpet to China's totalitarian rulers. Blair, who refused to even meet the exiled leader of the Tibetans last year will be kissing Chairman Hu's butt next week, hell-bent on resuming the sale of military technology to the aggressive dictatorship! They're trying hard to reach Putinist Russia's high moral standards apparently.
How is this all related to PRC's ambitious space program? Well, were we rejoicing when monsieurs Hitler and Stalin made progress on their respective paramilitary programs while building up ultranationalist fervour among their under-critical populations?
If this was about a peaceful and democratic China which wasn't committing genocide against its defenseless neighbours or oppressing its own people over "thought crimes" I'd be happy as a clam. I know there are good people in China; I've met such people myself. But too many, especially of those with knowledge of english and access to the 'net, are ultranationalistic stooges supporting their unelected regime with total disregard to the crimes they've committed.
A revitalized Novell-SUSE-Ximian combo is a massive threat to Microsoft (Hello New Zealand!) and if there are any even barely semilegal (under the current US regi... administration) wink-wink-nod-nod ways of getting the large financial firms to undermine Novell's image and finances, the goebbelsesque masterminds within the Strategic Acquisitions and Finances department of Microsoft are certainly pulling all their strings to that effect. That's their sole reason d'etre!
One recent example: When MS wanted their "Linux Powerhouse" and Office competitors Corel dead (but actually managed to buy it instead through a proxy; DOJ who?), they used ex-MS executives and their former or current colleagues and an MS-affiliated Vector Capital venture firm (financed by certain Paul Allen and operated by ex-MS execs) to do the probing, buying, insider bribing (offers of a glittery parachutes and a get-out-of-jail-free cards, anyone?), doctored "third party" evaluation of the company finances and its business projections (by top Wall St firms) etc. Even Corel's new and supposedly independently created pro-MS business strategy in 2001 was devised by a consultancy firm (McKinsey and Company) with links to people involved in the shady takeover.
Innocuous manipulation of competitors' share price (Down, boy!), or interference in competitors' corporate affairs through seemingly neutral investment houses or venture investors (Split 'em up for quick short-term profit!) is probably taking place all the time. The corporate hijacking of Corel was an amazingly outrageous maneuver, taking place as it did so soon after MS had nominally "lost" their monopoly case against the US-DOJ, and Microsoft's strategic planners certainly feel that they have even more leeway these days.
"Should Novell go south... blah blah blah?"
At the time of the MS-engineered takeover Corel was finalizing its turnaround and had loads of cash left (they were eventually bought out for a mere $30-40M for the dozen or so products!) but for some reason the larger investment firms and certain media kept referring to the company as "beleagured" (Hello Apple!), keeping up a constant stream of negative speculation. That is, of course, intended to have an effect on potential customers...
So now we have the even cash-richer Novell in the unenviable position of being a major MS competitor and yet having its "missteps" and future disembowellings spculated in the press.. But this time Novell also has some big backers (Hello Big Blue!) in its corner and I'd expect Novell to break through any glass ceilings or FUD campaigns instead of laying down its arms and capitulating before the Barbarian Gates.
Meanwhile, check out if carnosine might slow down the damage to your retinas. It is being used as eyedrops to alleviate the degeneration of proteins associated with aging but seems to have many other health benefits as well.
1-CD Installs (performance-patched with Minimal, KDE and GNOME-centric sets) in particular are very welcome as the official SUSE and SUSE-OSS DVDs or 5-CD sets are on the heavy side and most users don't need anywhere near the full set of packages included there. The 1-CD Install set, as Ubuntu has already shown, keeps the user experience simple (while allowing for future expansion) and lowers the barrier for user-to-user proliferation of the distro.
The growing community around the OSS distro versions also helps Novell/SUSE to grow the momentum and mindshare of their commercial and supported releases. It'll be easier for Novell/SUSE to sell systems and support to businesses and other institutions when there may already be people around who are familiar and comfortable with their widely available free-for-all offerings. It'll also encourage third parties to pay more attention to making SUSE compatible packages.
I hope they'll get around to creating the planned liveCD version of SUPER as well, as an easily redistributable alternative to the current liveDVD offering.
FWIW, since Ubuntu stormed the scene I've mainly promoted it to people interested in trying out Linux, but for the technically-inept I've still recommended a SUSE box. These new OSS versions, and in particular the planned liveCD version, would dramatically lower the barrier of trying SUSE out but I'd still recommend a box set for the inexperienced users due to their better QA, less breakage and availability of official support.
Although a bit more bulge in your pocket, this way you can boot from the CD drive if the USB boot option is unavailable but still mount and massage the data on the stick as usual.
Since the machines lacking the USB boot option tend to be relatively ancient and often lacking in the RAM department as well, I carry a CD version of DamnSmallLinux just to be safe, and Knoppix on a 12cm/5" CD too since in my experience it often works on tricky hardware and carries a decent set of tools as well.
Carrying both media naturally undermines the stealth and ultra-portability arguments of using a single USB stick but with DSL on a mini CD you get pretty close while having better chances of getting your distro to boot.
Besides, the mini CDs aren't all that uncool considering every jock and his dog is carrying an "MP3 stick" these days anyway. ;-)
Well, first of all ideally there wouldn't be any specific TV licencing fees with all the bureacracy it (and its collection and enforcement) entails and there would be at least one tax-payer supported, neutral and unbiased source for TV programming in every country. This, however, wouldn't be acceptable to the commercial networks.
So most of us end up paying licence fees to have access to a programming source supposedly and hopefully not beholden to "third party interests". (not referring to the lib dems in this case).
OTOH that representative of the people in the UK, the UK government, would also like to spread the UK culture and political influence as far as wide as possible (this mainly applies to the "global players" which want to influence world affairs). If foreign people are actually willing to imbibe UK's culture and influence, why not let them? How much is it going to cost the UK tax payers anyway since the programming is already done? Besides, those foreigners at the receiving end are paying something in the form of network access and potentially they'll also be "torrenting" the programming to other foreigners...
Wouldn't it also be a good thing if everyone in the world had access to everyone else's programming to see how things are portrayed in that part of the world (language issues notwithstanding)?
Currently the communist party dictatorship of China is already pushing their english- and chinese-language propaganda over the internet and satellite feeds to anyone willing to swallow their version of reality. On the opposite corner are the commercial US networks which spread their unique version of the US infotainment and entertainment. I believe it's a good thing for everyone, UK licence payers included, that there are also some relatively neutral broadcasters like the BBC and the german Deutsche Welle providing other informative and cultural (national and global) points of view free of charge to anyone who's interested.
Guess what, had we been discussing the technical merits of the then-brand new V2 rockets in early 1940s the Nazi sympathizers would have tried modding down any debate about the Holocaust... Same would've been true about Stalin fans intent on brushing that regime's genocides under the carpet. Should we have simply debated those regimes' technical achievements in total separation of their crimes against humanity? Would you have been happy talking only about the flight charasteristics of the Zero fighter while Nanjing was being raped?
Well, the more Tibet is raped the more shame it will bring to the future generations of Chinese...
Where were China's borders during the rule of Qin kingdom? Exactly, they were around the territory that belonged to his subjects, the (Han) Chinese people.
What happened to the peoples living outside those borders of the original Chinese homeland? How many wars did it take over the centuries to turn those former neighbors into minorities under Han Chinese rule?
Now, if you knew about Tibet's actual history, instead of the neo-imperialist propaganda conjured up by China's current dictators, you'd realize that only in 1950 Tibet lost its national self-determination, thanks to Mao's invading communist army. China's past god-kings have always made silly claims of ownership of foreign lands, and especially China's neighbors, but like Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam, India etc. etc. Tibet was de facto independent before the communist invasion. Heck, there are even some brave Chinese historians who understand this, but thanks to the CCP's imperial agenda the Chinese people only get to ever hear about the make-believe propaganda version.
The claim that Tibet was somehow even nominally under a Chinese despot's rule some 300 years ago -- a time of imperialism before the birth of a modern nation state -- and that nominal imperial rule should somehow translate into an acceptable modern-day occupation of one's peaceful neighbors is a violent and anachronistic claim indeed.
Why do you, as a Chinese invidual, feel the need to accept and publically support the occupation of your neighboring peoples?
Don't just take my word for it. Grow a conscience and check out even one of the uncountable videos about the tortured Tibetans who managed to escape into exile from the police state that is occupied Tibet. Talk to some of the thousands of Tibetans who escape from their own land every year (because those still under occupation are too afraid to talk, especially to the Chinese) and then come back to defend China's ongoing military occupation of Tibet.
My humanistic side OTOH keeps wondering why the Chinese people allow their dictatorial state machinery to continue the decades-long genocidal occupation of their peaceful Tibetan neighbors. If the brutal war-time occupation of parts of China by Japan's imperial army two generations ago is still a cause of pure hatred for the Chinese, can't they see that they themselves are continuing to totally extinguish the Tibetan nation, its language, its culture... stealing their natural resources (minerals and forests) while dumping China's nuclear and other waste on their ecologically delicate lands... causing the deaths of over a million Tibetans... mass-migrating millions upon millions of Chinese into Tibet, leaving Tibetans as impoverished minority in their own country...
People in the free world who have any respect for humanity should of course continue working towards ending this travesty of international justice but it is ultimately up to the Chinese people themselves to stop the crimes that are being committed in their name.
So while the ruling Party of China keeps on refining their rockets, the rest of us might as well put some effort on helping the Chinese people and their oppressed neighbors get better access to media and communications tools outside the state propaganda and censorship machine. The way MSN (MicroSoft Network) and Yahoo supports that oppressive machinery through their collaboration is nothing short of shameful.
You're worried about your human rights being sold for profit? What do you think the official organizers of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, the Chinese Communist Party, are doing in Chinese-occupied Tibet every single day? The London games organizers may be greedy and stupid assholes but are they wiping out whole nations (not just Tibetans but Uighurs too) while the "corporate sponsors" (i.e. governments and multinationals of the world) are not just clapping their hands but actively participating in feeding the oppressive machinery of China's neo-imperial dictators.
If awarding the olympic games to Berlin in 1936 was a grave mistake, Moscow 1980 (at the height of USSR's expansionist frenzy) and soon Beijing 2008 are all the proof one needs to show that vague concepts like humanity, brotherhood and fair play (between peoples) have no place left in today's "olympic movement by multinationals".
Depends on you definition of "modern".
The only way I managed to get Hoary to boot trouble-free was by moving the boot partition to an IDE drive. Both my mobo's built-in SATA chipset and the add-on card were supposedly supported by Garzik's patches but none of the h/w combinations I tried worked with the original Hoary install (which I'd consider to be "modern").
Maybe things have changes in the last month or so, but the last time I looked the SATA patches have taken their sweet time getting into the mainline kernel and various SATA chipsets remain unbootable or problematic even when patched to the max.
Since the latest official releases (Hoary & Mandrake 10.1, actually I even tried FC3) of the top distros based on distrowatch rankings didn't boot here using two different supposedly supported SATA chipsets I'd consider your simplistic claim to be wrong.
I'm glad your setup has worked for two years already but saying that "any modern distro will boot from a sata drive" simply isn't true. Now, if you claimed that by the end of the year most modern distros will boot from a SATA drive just fine I'd probably agree with you, but until all SATA chipsets are actually supported and properly integrated into distros it'd be better to caution users about potential pitfalls instead of making blanket statements.
The Japanese terror ended some 60 years ago, they've apologized and provided China generous aid for decades (although the Communists took credit for all that reconstruction), but now that you seem to express comprehension of what it was like to live under brutal and murderous oppression, I would like you to replace "Japanese" with "Chinese" in the section I quoted; and (partially) "occupied China" with "totally occupied Tibet", and that "for 12 years" should now read "for the last 55 years and still remorselessly ongoing".
Should sympathy for the Chinese also be misplaced in your view?
Think about China destroying her peaceful neighbour, Tibet's language, Tibet's culture, Tibet's religion, Tibetans' national identity... not partially but in all of Tibet. Almost one fifth of all Tibetans have already died under China's military occupation.
The insane and decadent dictator Mao is still being idolized in China as the #1 national hero, not by one elected prime minister making anachronistic shrine visits but by all of the China's self-appointed regime, and by extension every Chinese citizen. All of China's school and history text books are methodically warped to erase any unflattering events and crimes from history, and yet many Chinese who reside overseas to study, work (or spy on the host nations) with access to information outside Party Censors' grip, still refuse to accept the truth about China's brutality against Tibet.
The Japanese already realize that they weren't actually "liberating" their victims. How about the Chinese end their own ongoing crime against their Tibetan neighbours and then we can all have a hearty talk about who deserves most of the sympathy? Okay
Wonderful spin! As soon as Mao had driven the Nationalists out of China and declared his personal "proletarian dictatorship" in 1949, he sent his indoctrinated thugs to invade China's peaceful neighbour Tibet (which had remained neutral in the madness of WWII).
Unlike Japan, which has apologized to China and has for decades provided generous aid (for which the Communist Party naturally took all credit for), China continues to hold all of Tibet under terror and oppressive military rule to this day, without slightest sense of remorse.
Although the Japanese occupation of China and other nations was obviously murderous and inhumanely brutal, that occupation ended almost 60 years ago. And luckily China's language(s), religion, national traditions or national identity were never under threat of total annihilation and extinction. Not so with occupied Tibet!
The chinese would deserve a lot more sympathy if they themselves stopped wiping the Tibetan nation off the planet NOW.
Okay, but that wasn't exactly obvious in your previous message. The victims of this shooting (italians) had a very different view of the events and even the invited italian experts in the US military panel couldn't underwrite the american report because it completely ignored the statements by the victims themselves. The US military OTOH is rather infamous for not owning up to their "deadly mistakes" but yet you're willing to take their brothers-in-arms' conclusions at a face value?
Basically, by accepting that report, you also accept its underlying premise that the italian victims' statements were unreliable (i.e. the victims lied) because they contradicted the storyline by the honourable US gunmen manning that roadblock.
Re you saying "if the US military is not lying"... I wasn't able to read that deep between the lines, so I'm glad that you bothered to spend a minute to clear that up for me.
Your original post titled "accident" (emphasis added):
Hell yeah, mission accomplished. It has now been proven yet again that the US military doesn't cover up dirty deeds by its soldiers or commanders. This report by the US military, the greatest and most honest military machine ever created, is absolute proof of that.
Tragic yes, but nothing more
If the Chinese, Russians or Arabs overthrew your government and had similar military occupation across your country shooting at anything that moves, would that same description still apply?