Cost isn't everything. Sometimes quality matters as well. And quite often- so does supporting your local economy even when it appears to cost you more, because in the long run it will mean less taxes for homeless shelters.
So, why not Saudi Arabia? Because Saudi Arabia is an official ally. Saudi Arabia already provides us with needed capabilities in the region, and is critical at this early phase of change in the mideast. Saudi Arabia will be one of the first to go when our support wanes and its royalty is overthrown. By that time, hopefully strong Western-friendly official governments will be present in more nations in the locale which will influence the outcome in the lands of Arabia.
An official ally the funds training camps for terrorsts that attacked you is no ally at all- there is NO chance of ever having a Western-friendly government after the attrocities of Abu Gharib, no matter how you spin it it looks bad for anybody who isn't a fundamentalist Islamic to take over any of the nations in the region NOW.
None of what you, or I, say, of course, changes the fact that the people of Iraq are now indeed liberated, even in the face of radicals and insurgents within the country who thirst for control.
Yep, liberated to be arrested and beat up and humiliated in US Run prisons. At least Saddam had the mercy to kill those he tortured. Some liberation, that. And the Western-friendly government that is ruining 5000 years of Iraqi civilization that replaced the Western-friendly dictatorship of the 1970s that also was hell bent on destroying Iraqi civilization? We would have been FAR better off if we had just let the Soviets deal with the reigion to begin with and kept working on lower-energy transportion & eletricity generation.
And more importantly- turn some unemployed bums into door to door salesmen for a day. It might just give them a new lease on life- and will certainly enable them to live on the streets another week.
Not autonomous is the problem- you're solving the wrong problem. The problem isn't HOW DO WE GENERATE ELECTRICITY, it's HOW DO WE GET THE FUEL TO THE ROBOT WHEN WE NO LONGER KNOW OR CARE WHERE THE ROBOT IS.
My question is just how much sugar is in the skeleton of a insect that only has an exoskeleton to begin with....
I want to see a debate in Salem, OR
on
Open the Debates
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· Score: 1
That would be really cool. I probably couldn't get near it, but it would still be cool.
Thanks for correcting my spelling- but last we saw of Anubis, he had taken over a member of the SG headquarters and ended up sent to a planet in the middle of an ice age- won't be seeing him again real soon.
Better yet- what can you fit in 64 cubic inches that would survive reentry? Can you do it in say, 16 fewer cubic inches so that you can include a GPS reciever, and some sort of jet to deorbit on target?
Answer- yes. At one point, a couple of years back, I was fitting an X10 camera plus transmitter into a 2"x6" HO scale railcar- which is about the same idea. (that project ended with the life of my mother-in-law, as it was for use on my father-in-law's layout, which has since fallen into disuse over his two years of grief).
When we can build a handheld digital camera for less than $500? Heck- I bet with off the shelf parts any competant hardware hacker could build a cubesat for under $2000- Maybe the other $38,000 is the launch fees?
That's why this war is not "winnable" in the traditional sense; because we're fighting a movement (a radical religion, really), rather than a nation.
One way to win is to destroy all of your enemies. But my point with the question is that even Mr. Bush seems rather unsure of the point- during the RNC he gave three interviews that gave three entirely different answers to that question. And it's not the first thing he's waffled on- Offshore Outsourcing is another issue. His administration, up until this week, was all for Offshore Outsourcing as being good for America- now he's running adverts in Oregon that basically adopt the Kerry position of removing the tax break for companies that offshore and fight to actually bring back American jobs (I wonder if that means he's now willing to rescind MFN status on Singapore and Chile?)
Actually- every war up until Vietnam had an exit strategy of some sort. Vietnam and this one don't- which is why they both became such messes.
It takes a real fool to go into war without an exit strategy.
One thing you still don't realize about our current enemy though- they are death worshipers. They WANT the United States to stay engaged in Iraq for as long as possible. The longer the United States stays engaged in Iraq, the larger the chance of collateral damage. The more collateral damage, the more young men and women who lose family members to US forces. The more young men and women who are angry. The more angry Iraqis to join al Qaida. American Occupation of Iraq is the best thing that has happened to al Qaida recruitment since the Wahhabists took over the House of Saud. If we leave- they'll have to follow and find a new theater of operations to attack us in.
Kerry's testimony regarding atrocities in Vietnam was widely reported and even televised. Many Vietnam Veterans were quite angry about this - which is perhaps why they remember him.
True- ok, that counts for the other 240 some vets.
Swift boats are pretty small, and only have a crew of about 6 men (i.e. less than Kerry has in his "band of brothers." However, they operated in squads with several boats each. The Swift Boat vets have never claimed to be on the same boat, but they have claimed to be in the same squad, and this claim appears to be true. No question but that many of them had the chance to observe Kerry in action. Whether they tell the truth is another matter.
True or false- Bush joined the Air National Guard to defend Texas during the Vietnam war?
Now let's assume for a moment that you guys are correct, and Bush DID dodge the draft. Well guess what? The only difference between Bush and Kerry was that Kerry tried to do the same thing, but failed.
Not quite the same thing- Bush was way too stupid to ever get an educational deferment in Paris. His grades weren't good enough. That's a huge difference between Kerry and Clinton's method of avoiding the draft and Bush's from my point of view- Clinton and Kerry worked hard at school to avoid the draft by their own ability, Bush would have been sent by his parole officer to the draft board if it hadn't been for daddy pulling some strings.
You know, if you want to get in to character assassination, there's no end to what can be dug up on either side of the fence. You surely aren't under the impression that Kerry hasn't participated in many of the same things, are you? After all, he has already admitted to playing an active role in some of the "atrocities" committed by the "baby killers" in Vietnam. Would you rather have someone run the country who had a few too many 30 years ago, or someone who admits to have participated in war crimes 30 years ago?
Given the war we're currently engaged in and who we're fighting- the guy who actually knows how to commit war crimes without being tried by the international tribunal is WAY preferable to the guy who had a few to many and was arrested for cocaine possession in Texas. You must be under the impression that I'm the typical anti-war lefty- I'm not. I know that the only sure way out of the War on Terror at this point is genocide- shouldn't we have somebody in office who has actually done it?
I don't recall the left blowing up when the draft-dodging Clinton took office, so I don't see any justification for this being a major issue now. "Oh, but W is sending our people to die!" you say. And Clinton didn't (Somalia)? I'm more concerned with 2005 than the early 70's.
So, after all these years, the lie of the 1990s Republicans comes out- Character only counts when our side has more than the other guy.
Yes, a man's history can, to some extent, define whether or not he is trustworthy. But there's plenty of stuff that has come up in very recent history that I think can be used to make a more accurate assessment of where they are today.
You mean like the answer to the question "Is the war on terror winnable?"
Umm- Kerry actually seems to have a plan...He's saying he wants NO American military in Iraq by 2008. I personally think that's WAY too slow, but I also understand that you can't just draft a half a million unemployed to join the 100,000 professionals in an effort to get them out safely either. At least, not and hope to have them trained in any less than a four year period.
That 258 Swifties remember serving with John Kerry in Vietnam- but NOBODY in Alabama can remember George W. Bush serving there the year he was supposed to be showing up for training while working on the Senate campaign of a family friend? Never mind that the grand majority of those Swifties seem to be lying about serving with John Kerry (what is the crew complement of one of those little boats anyway? Certainly NOT over 200!) but at least they remember him being there- which is more than can be said for W during his fornication & cocaine & alcohol days....
I think chemical weapons are included in the definition of WMDs. They can certainly kill thousands in a single strike, ask the Kurds.
Of course, you realize that the sarin used in that attack came from the United States, right? Provided by Donald Rumsfeld back in the 1980s at the end of the Iraq-Iran war so that Hussien could take care of his little rebellion problem. We've yet to find any laboratory in Iraq that could actually manufacture the stuff today.
I listened to speaches of W, and I never thought we would find nukes, just bio or chemical and an active nuke program in the process of making nukes.
But we haven't, have we? NO active nuke program in the process of making nukes. No bioweapons labs. No chemical weapons labs. Just a few old shells stamped "Made in the USA" left over from 18 years ago in the Reagan Era. No NEW weapons have been found. No hint that Saddam was actively ready to attack his neighbors. NONE of what was promised has been found.
Still, one terrorist with a couple of chemical / biological weapons can really ruin your day in Manhattan.
Not if your building's HEPA filters on the air conditioner have been cleaned within the last year. It would take a contagious strain to actually due damage- and even that had better be a strain that doesn't show symptoms during the contagious stage and is a hell of a lot more contagious than the anthrax sent out to test our nation's defenses by an overly patriotic scientist in 2001.
I have not seen anything on the bill only letting W go into Iraq with UN permission, but I do remember the UN resolution promising dire consequences. Yes, it may be a gray area WRT the UN, but it is difficult to get some middle of the road media info. Moveon or foxnews won't give you a real analysis.
The UN isn't what W should be worried about- the House and Senate democrats might get to him first. War crimes don't HAVE to be tried in World Court- they can also be tried in impeachment proceedings.
Yeah, like the Bush Admin is going to listen to the unions in their search for cheap labor . Robert Zeollick won't rest until every middle class American has seen a drop in their income.
However, this sort of tariff practice isn't what I was originally thinking of- I was also thinking of the incredible way we've put our young men and women in Iraq in harm's way- with contracts for Chinese bullets and Haliburton meals that never seem to be delivered, etc.
The first answer made some sense- and made me want to provide the source code to the VB application I wrote and use for this purpose (Not a terribly unusual interface- pick a project, pick an activity, hit start, hit end when you're done, and at the end of the week generates a report for billing purposes). Only reason it's in VB is because that's what I'm being paid to write in- you could do it in any language you want that can display a user interface and recieve timer events and access a database.
But it doesn't allow you to avoid billing for the accounting related to the project. Not sure why you'd want to avoid that.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't that be ::1:0? Damn IPv6 shortcuts, take less than 20 seconds to type.
Already exists- Costco is the AntiWalmart- full of American goods and paying American Salaries and Benefits to American Employees.
Cost isn't everything. Sometimes quality matters as well. And quite often- so does supporting your local economy even when it appears to cost you more, because in the long run it will mean less taxes for homeless shelters.
So, why not Saudi Arabia? Because Saudi Arabia is an official ally. Saudi Arabia already provides us with needed capabilities in the region, and is critical at this early phase of change in the mideast. Saudi Arabia will be one of the first to go when our support wanes and its royalty is overthrown. By that time, hopefully strong Western-friendly official governments will be present in more nations in the locale which will influence the outcome in the lands of Arabia.
An official ally the funds training camps for terrorsts that attacked you is no ally at all- there is NO chance of ever having a Western-friendly government after the attrocities of Abu Gharib, no matter how you spin it it looks bad for anybody who isn't a fundamentalist Islamic to take over any of the nations in the region NOW.
None of what you, or I, say, of course, changes the fact that the people of Iraq are now indeed liberated, even in the face of radicals and insurgents within the country who thirst for control.
Yep, liberated to be arrested and beat up and humiliated in US Run prisons. At least Saddam had the mercy to kill those he tortured. Some liberation, that. And the Western-friendly government that is ruining 5000 years of Iraqi civilization that replaced the Western-friendly dictatorship of the 1970s that also was hell bent on destroying Iraqi civilization? We would have been FAR better off if we had just let the Soviets deal with the reigion to begin with and kept working on lower-energy transportion & eletricity generation.
And more importantly- turn some unemployed bums into door to door salesmen for a day. It might just give them a new lease on life- and will certainly enable them to live on the streets another week.
Not autonomous is the problem- you're solving the wrong problem. The problem isn't HOW DO WE GENERATE ELECTRICITY, it's HOW DO WE GET THE FUEL TO THE ROBOT WHEN WE NO LONGER KNOW OR CARE WHERE THE ROBOT IS.
My question is just how much sugar is in the skeleton of a insect that only has an exoskeleton to begin with....
That would be really cool. I probably couldn't get near it, but it would still be cool.
Thanks for correcting my spelling- but last we saw of Anubis, he had taken over a member of the SG headquarters and ended up sent to a planet in the middle of an ice age- won't be seeing him again real soon.
Better yet- what can you fit in 64 cubic inches that would survive reentry? Can you do it in say, 16 fewer cubic inches so that you can include a GPS reciever, and some sort of jet to deorbit on target?
Yeah, like Anibus's big pyramid ship attacking the Earth! (see last episode of SG1 in August).
Answer- yes. At one point, a couple of years back, I was fitting an X10 camera plus transmitter into a 2"x6" HO scale railcar- which is about the same idea. (that project ended with the life of my mother-in-law, as it was for use on my father-in-law's layout, which has since fallen into disuse over his two years of grief).
When we can build a handheld digital camera for less than $500? Heck- I bet with off the shelf parts any competant hardware hacker could build a cubesat for under $2000- Maybe the other $38,000 is the launch fees?
That's why this war is not "winnable" in the traditional sense; because we're fighting a movement (a radical religion, really), rather than a nation.
One way to win is to destroy all of your enemies. But my point with the question is that even Mr. Bush seems rather unsure of the point- during the RNC he gave three interviews that gave three entirely different answers to that question. And it's not the first thing he's waffled on- Offshore Outsourcing is another issue. His administration, up until this week, was all for Offshore Outsourcing as being good for America- now he's running adverts in Oregon that basically adopt the Kerry position of removing the tax break for companies that offshore and fight to actually bring back American jobs (I wonder if that means he's now willing to rescind MFN status on Singapore and Chile?)
But if they wanted to spend it in Oregon, I'd spend it paying 100 unemployed people $100 each to go door to door.
Actually- every war up until Vietnam had an exit strategy of some sort. Vietnam and this one don't- which is why they both became such messes.
It takes a real fool to go into war without an exit strategy.
One thing you still don't realize about our current enemy though- they are death worshipers. They WANT the United States to stay engaged in Iraq for as long as possible. The longer the United States stays engaged in Iraq, the larger the chance of collateral damage. The more collateral damage, the more young men and women who lose family members to US forces. The more young men and women who are angry. The more angry Iraqis to join al Qaida. American Occupation of Iraq is the best thing that has happened to al Qaida recruitment since the Wahhabists took over the House of Saud. If we leave- they'll have to follow and find a new theater of operations to attack us in.
Kerry's testimony regarding atrocities in Vietnam was widely reported and even televised. Many Vietnam Veterans were quite angry about this - which is perhaps why they remember him.
True- ok, that counts for the other 240 some vets.
Swift boats are pretty small, and only have a crew of about 6 men (i.e. less than Kerry has in his "band of brothers." However, they operated in squads with several boats each. The Swift Boat vets have never claimed to be on the same boat, but they have claimed to be in the same squad, and this claim appears to be true. No question but that many of them had the chance to observe Kerry in action. Whether they tell the truth is another matter.
Ok, granted.
(W only being suspected of doing so by the left)
True or false- Bush joined the Air National Guard to defend Texas during the Vietnam war?
Now let's assume for a moment that you guys are correct, and Bush DID dodge the draft. Well guess what? The only difference between Bush and Kerry was that Kerry tried to do the same thing, but failed.
Not quite the same thing- Bush was way too stupid to ever get an educational deferment in Paris. His grades weren't good enough. That's a huge difference between Kerry and Clinton's method of avoiding the draft and Bush's from my point of view- Clinton and Kerry worked hard at school to avoid the draft by their own ability, Bush would have been sent by his parole officer to the draft board if it hadn't been for daddy pulling some strings.
You know, if you want to get in to character assassination, there's no end to what can be dug up on either side of the fence. You surely aren't under the impression that Kerry hasn't participated in many of the same things, are you? After all, he has already admitted to playing an active role in some of the "atrocities" committed by the "baby killers" in Vietnam. Would you rather have someone run the country who had a few too many 30 years ago, or someone who admits to have participated in war crimes 30 years ago?
Given the war we're currently engaged in and who we're fighting- the guy who actually knows how to commit war crimes without being tried by the international tribunal is WAY preferable to the guy who had a few to many and was arrested for cocaine possession in Texas. You must be under the impression that I'm the typical anti-war lefty- I'm not. I know that the only sure way out of the War on Terror at this point is genocide- shouldn't we have somebody in office who has actually done it?
I don't recall the left blowing up when the draft-dodging Clinton took office, so I don't see any justification for this being a major issue now. "Oh, but W is sending our people to die!" you say. And Clinton didn't (Somalia)? I'm more concerned with 2005 than the early 70's.
So, after all these years, the lie of the 1990s Republicans comes out- Character only counts when our side has more than the other guy.
Yes, a man's history can, to some extent, define whether or not he is trustworthy. But there's plenty of stuff that has come up in very recent history that I think can be used to make a more accurate assessment of where they are today.
You mean like the answer to the question "Is the war on terror winnable?"
Umm- Kerry actually seems to have a plan...He's saying he wants NO American military in Iraq by 2008. I personally think that's WAY too slow, but I also understand that you can't just draft a half a million unemployed to join the 100,000 professionals in an effort to get them out safely either. At least, not and hope to have them trained in any less than a four year period.
That 258 Swifties remember serving with John Kerry in Vietnam- but NOBODY in Alabama can remember George W. Bush serving there the year he was supposed to be showing up for training while working on the Senate campaign of a family friend? Never mind that the grand majority of those Swifties seem to be lying about serving with John Kerry (what is the crew complement of one of those little boats anyway? Certainly NOT over 200!) but at least they remember him being there- which is more than can be said for W during his fornication & cocaine & alcohol days....
At least Pluto. Such a record wouldn't be Nova proof, it's too close to the sun.
I think chemical weapons are included in the definition of WMDs. They can certainly kill thousands in a single strike, ask the Kurds.
Of course, you realize that the sarin used in that attack came from the United States, right? Provided by Donald Rumsfeld back in the 1980s at the end of the Iraq-Iran war so that Hussien could take care of his little rebellion problem. We've yet to find any laboratory in Iraq that could actually manufacture the stuff today.
I listened to speaches of W, and I never thought we would find nukes, just bio or chemical and an active nuke program in the process of making nukes.
But we haven't, have we? NO active nuke program in the process of making nukes. No bioweapons labs. No chemical weapons labs. Just a few old shells stamped "Made in the USA" left over from 18 years ago in the Reagan Era. No NEW weapons have been found. No hint that Saddam was actively ready to attack his neighbors. NONE of what was promised has been found.
Still, one terrorist with a couple of chemical / biological weapons can really ruin your day in Manhattan.
Not if your building's HEPA filters on the air conditioner have been cleaned within the last year. It would take a contagious strain to actually due damage- and even that had better be a strain that doesn't show symptoms during the contagious stage and is a hell of a lot more contagious than the anthrax sent out to test our nation's defenses by an overly patriotic scientist in 2001.
I have not seen anything on the bill only letting W go into Iraq with UN permission, but I do remember the UN resolution promising dire consequences. Yes, it may be a gray area WRT the UN, but it is difficult to get some middle of the road media info. Moveon or foxnews won't give you a real analysis.
The UN isn't what W should be worried about- the House and Senate democrats might get to him first. War crimes don't HAVE to be tried in World Court- they can also be tried in impeachment proceedings.
Yeah, like the Bush Admin is going to listen to the unions in their search for cheap labor . Robert Zeollick won't rest until every middle class American has seen a drop in their income.
However, this sort of tariff practice isn't what I was originally thinking of- I was also thinking of the incredible way we've put our young men and women in Iraq in harm's way- with contracts for Chinese bullets and Haliburton meals that never seem to be delivered, etc.
The first answer made some sense- and made me want to provide the source code to the VB application I wrote and use for this purpose (Not a terribly unusual interface- pick a project, pick an activity, hit start, hit end when you're done, and at the end of the week generates a report for billing purposes). Only reason it's in VB is because that's what I'm being paid to write in- you could do it in any language you want that can display a user interface and recieve timer events and access a database.
But it doesn't allow you to avoid billing for the accounting related to the project. Not sure why you'd want to avoid that.
I personally like this option- but how to get the new voters to hear it, that's the question.
BTW, in Oregon, we do vote at home on our lazy asses- and they give us a whole month to do it.