1) I have not said that. Imperialistic aims can be achieved through unconventionnal colonialism. 2) You have less say, me too, and that is the issue: "we the people" are being dispossessed of our power by the big players.
Colonizing is not that much about "exploiting natural resources": this may just be a consequence. Colonizing is depriving a foreign people of its freedom and/or dignity. Owning a country's economy is a vicious but efficient way to do that. For a profit if you will... Imposing a culture is another aspect of it.
Note: I am not a US citizen and I do not put all blame on the US for this! In a certain way, China has very much say in Cambodia, for instance, because Chinese merchants are so powerfull there... I just think we are much too much ruled by a cast of stateless persons and that they deprive us of our democratic rights for their profit. It just happens that the USA are one of their heralds, as is today's China in fact.
It is completely off-topic but... the US doesn't have any vassal states or colonies
1) no colonies in the classical sense of the word, for sure, but the US has so much say in so many countries (through the IMF for instance) that this could be discussed.
2) Why dominate governments when the real power-players are companies and sects? It is enough to dominate both. Furthermore, this is a much more discrete and cunning approach to domination: neither the "slave" people nor the "master" people are aware of it, which means fewer troubles, and much money can be brought back silently that way: itn't it all what colonizing is about?
The troll is hungry and will now cook some potatoes. Bye!
Airbus receives subsidies, no question about that. But most fr-it-de-uk state help has come through per-plane loans that must be repaid if the aircraft is successfull, and as far as I know, they were repaid for the latest planes Airbus developped.
The states bear the risks, but if it proves successfull, Airbus has to give the money back. Is that such a bad scheme? How does that compares to hidden subsidies?
One has to understand that there is an internal weapon race in the US, privately driven: a fierce contest between lobbyists to decide which company will earn the biggest profits.
I suspect mercenaries companies could be the current winners in profit margin terms.
Net result: a big US military, very useful or very destructive depending on the time and place... I just hope the Chinese do not intend to be militaristic-driven in thz same way, because they do not even try to look like peace-loving democrats...
There may still be a dollar risk. Apparently, Airbus has been cautious to increase the dollar-zone built content of the plane, but they are selling it in dollar and the bulk of their expenses should still in Euro...
How long could they sustain a 1Euro for $2 rate? -- Just found a 0.2 € sig.
Sir Norman Foster was the Architect, not the Engineer.
The Engineers were wholy French: the Eiffage company, heir of Mr. Gustave Eiffel's company.
For your delight, please note that this is bridge was privately funded: Eiffage will earn a toll for each vehicle crossing the bridge during many years to earn the money they just invested in the Bridge, and then the state will own it.
In a corporate environment, msi packaging and group policy have already been mentionned and would be usefull.
As for me specifically, I currently face two hurdles: - being a longtime Moz user, and desiring to switch from Windows to Linux, I wish I had a tool to import my Windows-based Mozilla E-mail archive in my brand new Linux-based Mozilla! I suppose this may be of some interest for some corporate users too. - I cannot drag and drop a whole folder + subfolders from a POP3 account to an Imap account. Granted, I would not do it every day, but this would help for some migrations operations. - calendaring has already been mentionned and I feel this is needed, but beware of features: Outlook is soo feature rich it is astonishing. And the users use them... Many of those features are broken or ill implemented or only funtionnal in a fully MSFT environment though, so there is marketshare to grab.
I completely agree with 1) : this seems the obvious way to subscribe. One could even imagine that left clicking on a RSS promoting URL will trigger the question "do you want to subscribe" instead of a page mentionning that some XML thing was not found.
Software makers are patenting their software, not the idea of software.
I fear this is blatantly false. Amazon's "buying in one click" patents an idea, not an implementation.
Eolas intended to patent the way plugins are called (or designed, I do not know), not the way it is done. Isn't it what copyright is made for, protecting implementation if not the ideas ?
The issue is: if one does not run Windows with administrator privilieges, one cannot install a huge number of drivers and software, they cannot either use them.
From printers to scanners and CDRom burning tools, there are loads of MS-related stuff that has never been tested -and which does _not_ work- on a properly configured Windows box.
The solution? An improperly configurend Windows box, with full rights for the malware...
That _was_ a kind of ad hominem and please forgive me (and congratulation to have answered with another! Now the circle is broken:-), but it is very anoying to repeat over and over the same things to people who apparently make voluntary mistakes in order to proove their point. And what you said was simply false.
The decisions about Galileo were agreed between the (science?) ministers of all EU countries assembled in the ad hoc Council of Ministers (yours included probably), and not by the EU Commission-of-bureaucrats.
As for your other points:
- I do not believe that a country can honestly maintain its independence without its proper agriculture and industry, and it is a pity that Britain's is fading.
- you certainly know that France respects EU competition rules better than other EU rules... As for some "competition" rules, you'll pardon me if I deem them "stupid": I am not at all pleased when I see private nuclear power plants in the UK, considering the state of your railways. And is your electricity cheaper than in France? "Free markets everywhere" has become a dogma. I hate most of those.
- the Eurofighter project? Dassault was certainly very arrogant and this is a shame. But the Rafale program seems much more successfull to me (cheaper, ready for a long time, much nicer and it flies well...). It is a collective failure and we are all paying the price (X22...).
- CAP a "rip-off"? I do not really understand your word there, but at least we are not dependent upon anybody for what we eat as we were after WWII, and that's a great strategic success.
- your last point: who do you believe? How do you make up your mind? Based on whose data? Do you trust corporate data more than state or EU data? I do not.
Galileo derives from the states will and will be privately built: does this satisfy you, or are states definitely evil?
Costs which arose when systems need to be pre-emptively rebooted or crashed, resulting in unscheduled downtime, were not taken into account.
For all I know about Gartner's definition of TCO, downtimes and the production losses it generates, the costs to re-type corrupted documents (especially with Word 2003 which is a pure pain in this field), those of turnaround methods routinely used by users and technicians alike to avoid all kinds of pains, all those costs are not taken into account in the TCO definition.
They are obviously very difficult to compute because 1 engineer hour lost costs much more than 1 secretary hour even if they are triggered by the same failure. Meanwhile, those are huge costs for the companies.
On the other hand, I do agree with another poster: let us not underestimate the costs to migrate datas, especially "Office" data, to Open-Office: even if it works a record-high 97%, the remaining 3% will generate huge pains, especially when documents have evolved for numerous generations, with data pasted from various spreadsheet / word processors into Word.
I recall having spent hours to convert a 50 pages Word document to OOffice Writer, because the original contained many hundreds "styles", some of them still bearing strange names like "Word-Perfect bold title 1" and so on (with language distinctions too!): the original.doc contained the memory of all software used to type the various agregated bits of text, and I am not so sure Word had effectively re-coded all those heterogeneous parts in its own format. This was a real pain.
By the Way, Word was randomly crashing on this same document, but it managed to print it sometimes in full:-)
Just another ignoramus anti-EU Brit? Certainly. The decision is taken by the _elected_ governments, including the British one, and not by "bureacrats".
And France is not, by far, the main promoter of the project, even if it has interests in it. Thanks to a not-so-stupidly-ultra-liberal policy, France manages to retain industries on its soil when Britain capitalises on "finance": French companies are major actors in both consortiums competing for the project, eventhough the financial gains will be more evenhandedly shared among EU members.
I found some data in French about the repartitions of shares in the consiortium. It is not dated unfortunately, and even maybe outdated because I cannot see anything about China, Israel or Morroco there. "La repartition de ces gains entre les 15 pays de l'ASE a ete fixee a 17,31% chacun pour la France, l'Allemagne, l'Italie et le Royaume-Uni ; 10,14% pour l'Espagne ; 4,79% pour la Belgique ; 3,54% pour la Suisse ; 3,07% pour les Pays-Bas et 2,33% pour la Suede, pour ne citer qu'eux."
There are few carriers (one recent French and 2-4 old British one?). For the subs, there are more, including top-level nuclear French subs both for conventionnal attack and information gathering (6, "Rubis" class) and for nuclear dissuasion (the third of the new generation "SNLE" has just been launched (http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3224,36 -388624,0.html
Besides, I think Europe should not ruin itself to follow the US weapon madness because this led the CSSR to go bankrupt and the USA are currently ruinning themselves with their so-costly military. But we Europeans should really keep our eyes on Russian madmen and on Chinese "free markets" dictators. Those are our next militaristic ennemies. Hopefully, the US people won't let its rullers attack Europe. And terrorism should be fought mostly with intelligence means backed by top level troops as in Afghanistan.
If I remeber correctly, this New-york, 14th Nov 2001 crash occured with an Airbus A310 which, like the A300, is NOT equipped with a fly-by-wire mechanism.
Apart from Concorde which had a kind of computer-controlled command set, electronic plane control was first introduced on commercial aircraft with the Airbus A320.
French troops have been in Ivory coast for a long time because of a defense agreement. More troops were sent in 2002 folowing a request of the Ivorian government, which they saved from a rebelion (so goes the official story and France was thanked by Gbagbo for that). Some time later, there was an unanimous agreement in the UN to send African peacekeepers _provided_ they would be helped by the French should the situation worsen.
The latest sad events clearly showed that France's aim was not to occupy the country or throw Mr. Gbagbo out, because this could have be done in minutes -as what was done with the mercenaries-run Ivorian Air Force- but the Ivorian government was left in place as you know.
I am not so sure this specific post is off-topic, eventhough the USA seem to play fair with France in this crisis.
Does anyone know if the GPS signal was lost in Ivory Coast lately ? If French soldiers had relied on the tenfold more precise Gallileo signal, would they have avoided to wander near the presidential palace and would they have found immediately the Ivoire Hotel they were looking for (and that they finaly found ?).
As far as I understand the issue, this same exploit is more a blind spot in the HTML / Javascript model that a browser issue. The same kind of trick could be used with frames which bear a "name" too: has it been alreday dealt with? Is a website allowed to load a page in a frame that has been provided by another site, provided it guess the correct name of that frame? - if "yes", then there is a vulnerability with frames and iframes too, using the same trick, and popup blocking will not solve it. - if "no" -for instance if frames and iframes that are already dispayed can only be javascript-relaoaded by the same server or domain that had generated them in the first place- then lets proceed in the same way with popup windows. This has been suggested elsewhere in this discussion.
But the real solution lies with the sites developpers: if one wants to develop a truly secure site with popup or frames, one has to produce unpredictable names for any "target" and urls by dynamically generating random frame names and maintaining them throughout the user's session, and use SSL to transmit the whole thing.
Quite a pain for web developpers isn't it? The other way to do it is to avoid complicated things like frames and popups so that there can be no doubts about the page origin. A least not in Firefox...
An official Esa site about SMART is here
(in English)
Some information in French.
The Washington Times deals with a Moon too, but another one: Rvd Moon's "church" owns it and it has been recently frequently used to promote US Pentagon anonymous sources' views. It is soooo strange to see it pointed by/. in the same article where the "old Europe's ESA" link is broken!!!
If that means going against the wishes of the rest of the world, so be it.
I am pretty sure most warmongers in history used such reasonning.
The reasonning would be sound if:
a. GWB and his team were honest (they are not OR they are fanatic);
b. the US had a limited impact on other nations, but it has a huge impact (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst).
You are not alone on earth, there are other human beings around and what POTUS does impacts me and most others. I wish that the impact could be lessened, bettered or that I had a say... GWB acts as the King of Earth but he is just "elected" by some happy few Americans. This is wrong.
That was not intelligence, it was political arm-twisting, to get the intelligence agencies to say what the White House wanted to hear.
Agreed, and the same occured in the UK. As for all those Bushies replying that all intelligence agencies -even France's!- thought Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs, just remember that the first country that would have said otherwise would have been labelled as a fool at best, or as a traitor. So no country came publicly to claim that Iraq had probably no credible WMDs, except Iraq itself...
Meanwhile, as the debates in the UN have proven, most countries were very skeptical and were relying on MM. Blix and El Baradei honesty and competence. They were right.
Unfortunately those two were bypassed and dismissed as too cautious or spineless...
As an aside, it's my understanding that France has, in fact, sent advisors to help train police and anti-terrorism forces in Iraq.
I do not think so. France and Germany have offered for more than a year to train Iraqi police and military officers outside Iraq. Bush&Cie have answered that it was unecessary because the 'coalition' was ok. That was so time ago. I imagine some kind of Halliburton expected to make profit from that at that time and would not consider any concurence by the public sector...
Recently, we heard that it may be useful and that it should be done with NATO. France and Germany and Belgium and Turkey answered "perhaps but not in Iraq".
"We want to see you in the Iraq hole" is what Bush answers, "we are fed up to be shooted at alone with the British and the Poles."
There are no French soldiers in Iraq.
And Bush has made so that there Iraqi policement are not trained as they could, by the way. Nice move, George, one more.
Iraq had been blowing off the UN and weapon inspectors for some time.
As it has since been proven, Irak had destroyed its weapon programs except for some weak missiles. Unfortunately for Saddam, he was unable to provide proofs of that. The inspectors were feeling bullied but remained open-minded and, indeed, they succeeded.
The fact is, the members of the UN who voted against taking action in Iraq did so for their own interest. France and Russia were both in on the food for oil scam. China was seeking to limit US power.
And Japan was n 1. And "oil for food" profits for France (at least) were really nothing worth risking dire ties with the US. This argument is very weak, the reasons of France opposition are to be found elsewhere, and perhaps -very simply- in Chirac's own words : "this part of the world has really no need of another war".
Finally, there were apparently eleven UN Security Council members which were against going to war with Saddam, and most of them were not implicated in "oil for food". Definitely a weak argument. And we could speak of the accounting mechanisms that the provisionnal authority in Irak should have setted up to comply with US sponsored resolutions after the war, and which never were. I wonder if Mr. Safire has enquired about them, he who is so found of this would-be "oil for food" scam...
I fear the analogy was right, but another point is that apparently, orders were not provided by the President as they could/should have and for all I have read, Cheney told the military that they had clearance to shoot down the planes. I have not read until now any clear-cut account showing that Bush had indeed given the order and that he had followed its application. Perhaps have I not read the right places, but Mr. Clarke's account is clear: he was at the center of the crisis management and he never heard Bush Jr. say 'I order you to shoot the planes if they threaten Washington'.
And you say "there was no information that needed him". He waited seven minutes without asking for further information. I bet Mr. Card was rather abashed to discover that his beloved Prez. would just keep on reading when he was told 'the country is under attack'...
Well... I have never been to Turkey but I do not hate Turks, why should I? And message boards are places to find outrageous comments if you are looking for some.
I have emphasised no differences, but could you please underline the common points? Are you going back to Constantinople? Would you argue that a part of Turkey is West of the Dardanelles?
And the Turks I met were living in Paris. Sorry if I haven't met more. And as for the polls, I doubt one would find different results in Moroco or in Tunisia, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
1) I have not said that. Imperialistic aims can be achieved through unconventionnal colonialism.
2) You have less say, me too, and that is the issue: "we the people" are being dispossessed of our power by the big players.
Colonizing is not that much about "exploiting natural resources": this may just be a consequence. Colonizing is depriving a foreign people of its freedom and/or dignity. Owning a country's economy is a vicious but efficient way to do that. For a profit if you will... Imposing a culture is another aspect of it.
Note: I am not a US citizen and I do not put all blame on the US for this! In a certain way, China has very much say in Cambodia, for instance, because Chinese merchants are so powerfull there... I just think we are much too much ruled by a cast of stateless persons and that they deprive us of our democratic rights for their profit. It just happens that the USA are one of their heralds, as is today's China in fact.
the US doesn't have any vassal states or colonies
1) no colonies in the classical sense of the word, for sure, but the US has so much say in so many countries (through the IMF for instance) that this could be discussed.
2) Why dominate governments when the real power-players are companies and sects? It is enough to dominate both. Furthermore, this is a much more discrete and cunning approach to domination: neither the "slave" people nor the "master" people are aware of it, which means fewer troubles, and much money can be brought back silently that way: itn't it all what colonizing is about?
The troll is hungry and will now cook some potatoes. Bye!
Airbus receives subsidies, no question about that. But most fr-it-de-uk state help has come through per-plane loans that must be repaid if the aircraft is successfull, and as far as I know, they were repaid for the latest planes Airbus developped.
The states bear the risks, but if it proves successfull, Airbus has to give the money back. Is that such a bad scheme? How does that compares to hidden subsidies?
One has to understand that there is an internal weapon race in the US, privately driven: a fierce contest between lobbyists to decide which company will earn the biggest profits.
I suspect mercenaries companies could be the current winners in profit margin terms.
Net result: a big US military, very useful or very destructive depending on the time and place... I just hope the Chinese do not intend to be militaristic-driven in thz same way, because they do not even try to look like peace-loving democrats...
Arm races are generally bad.
There may still be a dollar risk. Apparently, Airbus has been cautious to increase the dollar-zone built content of the plane, but they are selling it in dollar and the bulk of their expenses should still in Euro...
How long could they sustain a 1Euro for $2 rate?
--
Just found a 0.2 € sig.
The Engineers were wholy French: the Eiffage company, heir of Mr. Gustave Eiffel's company.
For your delight, please note that this is bridge was privately funded: Eiffage will earn a toll for each vehicle crossing the bridge during many years to earn the money they just invested in the Bridge, and then the state will own it.
In a corporate environment, msi packaging and group policy have already been mentionned and would be usefull.
As for me specifically, I currently face two hurdles:
- being a longtime Moz user, and desiring to switch from Windows to Linux, I wish I had a tool to import my Windows-based Mozilla E-mail archive in my brand new Linux-based Mozilla! I suppose this may be of some interest for some corporate users too.
- I cannot drag and drop a whole folder + subfolders from a POP3 account to an Imap account. Granted, I would not do it every day, but this would help for some migrations operations.
- calendaring has already been mentionned and I feel this is needed, but beware of features: Outlook is soo feature rich it is astonishing. And the users use them... Many of those features are broken or ill implemented or only funtionnal in a fully MSFT environment though, so there is marketshare to grab.
I completely agree with 1) : this seems the obvious way to subscribe. One could even imagine that left clicking on a RSS promoting URL will trigger the question "do you want to subscribe" instead of a page mentionning that some XML thing was not found.
I fear this is blatantly false. Amazon's "buying in one click" patents an idea, not an implementation.
Eolas intended to patent the way plugins are called (or designed, I do not know), not the way it is done. Isn't it what copyright is made for, protecting implementation if not the ideas ?
The issue is: if one does not run Windows with administrator privilieges, one cannot install a huge number of drivers and software, they cannot either use them.
From printers to scanners and CDRom burning tools, there are loads of MS-related stuff that has never been tested -and which does _not_ work- on a properly configured Windows box.
The solution? An improperly configurend Windows box, with full rights for the malware...
The decisions about Galileo were agreed between the (science?) ministers of all EU countries assembled in the ad hoc Council of Ministers (yours included probably), and not by the EU Commission-of-bureaucrats.
As for your other points:
- I do not believe that a country can honestly maintain its independence without its proper agriculture and industry, and it is a pity that Britain's is fading.
- you certainly know that France respects EU competition rules better than other EU rules... As for some "competition" rules, you'll pardon me if I deem them "stupid": I am not at all pleased when I see private nuclear power plants in the UK, considering the state of your railways. And is your electricity cheaper than in France? "Free markets everywhere" has become a dogma. I hate most of those.
- the Eurofighter project? Dassault was certainly very arrogant and this is a shame. But the Rafale program seems much more successfull to me (cheaper, ready for a long time, much nicer and it flies well...). It is a collective failure and we are all paying the price (X22...).
- CAP a "rip-off"? I do not really understand your word there, but at least we are not dependent upon anybody for what we eat as we were after WWII, and that's a great strategic success.
- your last point: who do you believe? How do you make up your mind? Based on whose data? Do you trust corporate data more than state or EU data? I do not.
Galileo derives from the states will and will be privately built: does this satisfy you, or are states definitely evil?
For all I know about Gartner's definition of TCO, downtimes and the production losses it generates, the costs to re-type corrupted documents (especially with Word 2003 which is a pure pain in this field), those of turnaround methods routinely used by users and technicians alike to avoid all kinds of pains, all those costs are not taken into account in the TCO definition.
They are obviously very difficult to compute because 1 engineer hour lost costs much more than 1 secretary hour even if they are triggered by the same failure. Meanwhile, those are huge costs for the companies.
On the other hand, I do agree with another poster: let us not underestimate the costs to migrate datas, especially "Office" data, to Open-Office: even if it works a record-high 97%, the remaining 3% will generate huge pains, especially when documents have evolved for numerous generations, with data pasted from various spreadsheet / word processors into Word. .doc contained the memory of all software used to type the various agregated bits of text, and I am not so sure Word had effectively re-coded all those heterogeneous parts in its own format. This was a real pain.
I recall having spent hours to convert a 50 pages Word document to OOffice Writer, because the original contained many hundreds "styles", some of them still bearing strange names like "Word-Perfect bold title 1" and so on (with language distinctions too!): the original
By the Way, Word was randomly crashing on this same document, but it managed to print it sometimes in full :-)
Just another ignoramus anti-EU Brit? Certainly. The decision is taken by the _elected_ governments, including the British one, and not by "bureacrats".
And France is not, by far, the main promoter of the project, even if it has interests in it. Thanks to a not-so-stupidly-ultra-liberal policy, France manages to retain industries on its soil when Britain capitalises on "finance": French companies are major actors in both consortiums competing for the project, eventhough the financial gains will be more evenhandedly shared among EU members.
I found some data in French about the repartitions of shares in the consiortium. It is not dated unfortunately, and even maybe outdated because I cannot see anything about China, Israel or Morroco there.
"La repartition de ces gains entre les 15 pays de l'ASE a ete fixee a 17,31% chacun pour la France, l'Allemagne, l'Italie et le Royaume-Uni ; 10,14% pour l'Espagne ; 4,79% pour la Belgique ; 3,54% pour la Suisse ; 3,07% pour les Pays-Bas et 2,33% pour la Suede, pour ne citer qu'eux."
There are few carriers (one recent French and 2-4 old British one?).6 -388624,0.html
For the subs, there are more, including top-level nuclear French subs both for conventionnal attack and information gathering (6, "Rubis" class) and for nuclear dissuasion (the third of the new generation "SNLE" has just been launched (http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3224,3
Besides, I think Europe should not ruin itself to follow the US weapon madness because this led the CSSR to go bankrupt and the USA are currently ruinning themselves with their so-costly military. But we Europeans should really keep our eyes on Russian madmen and on Chinese "free markets" dictators. Those are our next militaristic ennemies.
Hopefully, the US people won't let its rullers attack Europe. And terrorism should be fought mostly with intelligence means backed by top level troops as in Afghanistan.
If I remeber correctly, this New-york, 14th Nov 2001 crash occured with an Airbus A310 which, like the A300, is NOT equipped with a fly-by-wire mechanism.
Apart from Concorde which had a kind of computer-controlled command set, electronic plane control was first introduced on commercial aircraft with the Airbus A320.
I am no specialist there.
French troops have been in Ivory coast for a long time because of a defense agreement. More troops were sent in 2002 folowing a request of the Ivorian government, which they saved from a rebelion (so goes the official story and France was thanked by Gbagbo for that). Some time later, there was an unanimous agreement in the UN to send African peacekeepers _provided_ they would be helped by the French should the situation worsen.
The latest sad events clearly showed that France's aim was not to occupy the country or throw Mr. Gbagbo out, because this could have be done in minutes -as what was done with the mercenaries-run Ivorian Air Force- but the Ivorian government was left in place as you know.
I am not so sure this specific post is off-topic, eventhough the USA seem to play fair with France in this crisis.
Does anyone know if the GPS signal was lost in Ivory Coast lately ? If French soldiers had relied on the tenfold more precise Gallileo signal, would they have avoided to wander near the presidential palace and would they have found immediately the Ivoire Hotel they were looking for (and that they finaly found ?).
As far as I understand the issue, this same exploit is more a blind spot in the HTML / Javascript model that a browser issue. The same kind of trick could be used with frames which bear a "name" too: has it been alreday dealt with? Is a website allowed to load a page in a frame that has been provided by another site, provided it guess the correct name of that frame?
- if "yes", then there is a vulnerability with frames and iframes too, using the same trick, and popup blocking will not solve it.
- if "no" -for instance if frames and iframes that are already dispayed can only be javascript-relaoaded by the same server or domain that had generated them in the first place- then lets proceed in the same way with popup windows. This has been suggested elsewhere in this discussion.
But the real solution lies with the sites developpers: if one wants to develop a truly secure site with popup or frames, one has to produce unpredictable names for any "target" and urls by dynamically generating random frame names and maintaining them throughout the user's session, and use SSL to transmit the whole thing.
Quite a pain for web developpers isn't it? The other way to do it is to avoid complicated things like frames and popups so that there can be no doubts about the page origin. A least not in Firefox...
Hey, Steve! Just compile a Linux kernel and you will discover at last the joy to use some home-built software!
cd /usr/src/linux/
...
make
An official Esa site about SMART is here (in English)
Some information in French.
The Washington Times deals with a Moon too, but another one: Rvd Moon's "church" owns it and it has been recently frequently used to promote US Pentagon anonymous sources' views. It is soooo strange to see it pointed by /. in the same article where the "old Europe's ESA" link is broken!!!
I am pretty sure most warmongers in history used such reasonning.
The reasonning would be sound if:
a. GWB and his team were honest (they are not OR they are fanatic);
b. the US had a limited impact on other nations, but it has a huge impact (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst).
You are not alone on earth, there are other human beings around and what POTUS does impacts me and most others. I wish that the impact could be lessened, bettered or that I had a say... GWB acts as the King of Earth but he is just "elected" by some happy few Americans. This is wrong.
Agreed, and the same occured in the UK. As for all those Bushies replying that all intelligence agencies -even France's!- thought Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs, just remember that the first country that would have said otherwise would have been labelled as a fool at best, or as a traitor. So no country came publicly to claim that Iraq had probably no credible WMDs, except Iraq itself...
Meanwhile, as the debates in the UN have proven, most countries were very skeptical and were relying on MM. Blix and El Baradei honesty and competence. They were right.
Unfortunately those two were bypassed and dismissed as too cautious or spineless...
I do not think so. France and Germany have offered for more than a year to train Iraqi police and military officers outside Iraq. Bush&Cie have answered that it was unecessary because the 'coalition' was ok. That was so time ago. I imagine some kind of Halliburton expected to make profit from that at that time and would not consider any concurence by the public sector...
Recently, we heard that it may be useful and that it should be done with NATO. France and Germany and Belgium and Turkey answered "perhaps but not in Iraq".
"We want to see you in the Iraq hole" is what Bush answers, "we are fed up to be shooted at alone with the British and the Poles."
There are no French soldiers in Iraq.
And Bush has made so that there Iraqi policement are not trained as they could, by the way. Nice move, George, one more.
Iraq had been blowing off the UN and weapon inspectors for some time.
As it has since been proven, Irak had destroyed its weapon programs except for some weak missiles. Unfortunately for Saddam, he was unable to provide proofs of that. The inspectors were feeling bullied but remained open-minded and, indeed, they succeeded.
The fact is, the members of the UN who voted against taking action in Iraq did so for their own interest. France and Russia were both in on the food for oil scam. China was seeking to limit US power.
And Japan was n 1. And "oil for food" profits for France (at least) were really nothing worth risking dire ties with the US. This argument is very weak, the reasons of France opposition are to be found elsewhere, and perhaps -very simply- in Chirac's own words : "this part of the world has really no need of another war".
Finally, there were apparently eleven UN Security Council members which were against going to war with Saddam, and most of them were not implicated in "oil for food". Definitely a weak argument. And we could speak of the accounting mechanisms that the provisionnal authority in Irak should have setted up to comply with US sponsored resolutions after the war, and which never were. I wonder if Mr. Safire has enquired about them, he who is so found of this would-be "oil for food" scam...
I fear the analogy was right, but another point is that apparently, orders were not provided by the President as they could/should have and for all I have read, Cheney told the military that they had clearance to shoot down the planes. I have not read until now any clear-cut account showing that Bush had indeed given the order and that he had followed its application. Perhaps have I not read the right places, but Mr. Clarke's account is clear: he was at the center of the crisis management and he never heard Bush Jr. say 'I order you to shoot the planes if they threaten Washington'.
And you say "there was no information that needed him". He waited seven minutes without asking for further information. I bet Mr. Card was rather abashed to discover that his beloved Prez. would just keep on reading when he was told 'the country is under attack'...
Well... I have never been to Turkey but I do not hate Turks, why should I? And message boards are places to find outrageous comments if you are looking for some.
I have emphasised no differences, but could you please underline the common points? Are you going back to Constantinople? Would you argue that a part of Turkey is West of the Dardanelles?
And the Turks I met were living in Paris. Sorry if I haven't met more. And as for the polls, I doubt one would find different results in Moroco or in Tunisia, for instance.