Re:Not this crap again
on
Who won?
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Whoa, anti-Bush rant including monkey reference! Instant +5!
Here's a thought, not everybody thinks like you. That poll-following, contradictory ass named Kerry was just as much of a monkey, but at least people knew where Bush stood and what he planned to do. People also liked the tax cuts that have contributed to the roaring economy and low unemployment we have right now.
This is the reason a lot of people don't like liberals--their incredibly condescending, hateful tone. If you disagree with them, you must be a stupid idiot, or better yet, a "Nazi" or "neocon." It's like the passion of an Apple fanatic combined with the closed-mindedness of a Windows user...
Re:Not this crap again
on
Who won?
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
I have nightmares of the 750,000 that Saddam killed and his invasion of Kuwait. I also have dreams about all the people Clinton bombed in Kosovo and other places without U.N. approval.
Oh, wow, you're like every stereotype, every emotional Daily "Screw Them' Kos talking point rolled into one. The typical self-loathing leftie who wants us all to feel guilty for even existing.
Bush and his administration are fear-mongers
As opposed to the Democrats who in one breath claimed "Republicans are trying to scare Americans into voting for them!" then in the next breath shouted "We're less safe than we were before 9/11! Bush isn't guarding the ports! The Republicans are not keeping us safe, so vote for Democrats!" The same folks who threatened seniors that Bush was taking away their money. The same folks who sent out fake draft letters to kids to try to scare them into voting for Kerry. Sounds like fear-mongering to me.
pushing their plans for, funnily enough, world domination and personal profit by making your average American think we need to do things their way to survive the terrorists.
Where is the "world domination?" Are you saying Bush plans to invade Canada? Europe? I mean, what are you basing this hyperbole on exactly? Even more importantly, how do you respond to the actual plans by Islamic terrorists to dominate the world through the mantra of forced conversion?
To boot, the Iraq war civilian casualties lie somewhere between 150,000 and over half a million, depending on who you ask. That's a lot of innocent people killed for a cause the world wasn't behind.
You can blame Iraqis killing Iraqis for that. Granted, it's nowhere near the U.N.'s figure of 750,000 innocent Iraqis killed under the Saddam regime, but I'm sure you're no Saddam cheerleader. Right?
Here's a hint: you want to save the world? Cut global economics.
Aaaaand here comes the tired anti-capitalist rant, concocted in your dorm room, no doubt adorned with Pearl Jam and Michael Moore posters and a signed Naom Chomsky book on your bookshelf. Is there ever a liberal who doesn't rant against globalism and then whips out their cell phone or laptop to surf the Internet? Hello, you're already a part of globalism.
Stop screwing other countries over with your mega-corporations underselling the locals, forcing them to give up their lives and culture to be part of your conglomerate or die.
Let's examine this statement with a clear head:
You use the term "mega-corporations" which is supposed to be negative, but to me suggests a successful business. I know being a successful business is bad to you, but in the real world, there's nothing wrong with it, especially since those same mega-corporations brought us the infrastructure for the Internet and the technology that built the computer you're using to type your post. Congratulations, mega-corporations!
Then you claim they are "forcing" people to give up their lives and culture. Can you cite a single example of anyone forcing anybody to do anything?
You claim locals were actually given an ultimatum--join a conglomerate "or die." Do you have a specific example of these threats of physical harm? The media would be very interested.
Enterpreneurs are the heart of American economics: the ability to thrive and grow and the freedom to do it is why America is a superpower economically. But it's about time we start managing the floodgates of our enthusiasm and start working WITH other countries instead of just trampling them and using what's left to sell our goods.
What countries are "trampling" on with our economics? If someone in Paris doesn't want to buy a Big Mac, they don't have to.
Is there ever a liberal who doesn't believe everyone is an involuntary victim with no will of their own who needs to be "saved" by a big, expensive nanny government?
Ugh. I'm off to read Reason magazine.
Re:About "Dubya"
on
Who won?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If I had posted the same quote but stated that it reminds me of bitter liberals who think Bush "stole" the election, would I get a +5 Insightful too? Genuinely curious how the Slashdot political spectrum would have responded.
Wrong. Insurgents are responsible for the deaths of 3,000 soldiers. Or if you want to go further, the soldiers WHO WILLINGLY VOLUNTEERED TO JOIN THE MILITARY are responsible for their own lives.
I know it's not as hip and "Vietnam-esque" to actually let people take responsibility for themselves and acknowledge that we don't have a draft. But claiming Bush is personally responsible for 3,000 soldier deaths is like saying Mayor Bloomberg is personally responsible for any NYPD officer who dies in the line of duty while fighting crime. Should we pull out of the fight on crime because cops keep dying and criminals don't stop?
Except that the book we're commenting on here offers evidence that this was not what happened, and in fact it was fraud that won Bush his second term. If you would like to dispute the data, then sobeit, but making pronouncements like that doesn't make them true.
Well, saying it offers evidence suggests it actually proves anything, when really this book just tries to raise questions. Honestly, the obsession with the exit polls on the part of some Democrats sounds like sour grapes. Bush went into the election with a higher approval rating than Kerry. The Rasmussen polls leading up to the election accurately predicted the final results within a few percentage points. I repeat, the polls were showing Bush ahead anyway.
People just need to accept that Kerry lost and Bush won. If there was a conspiracy, it would have been blown open right now. I could make just as much of a case that Kerry should have lost even more than he did, after Democrats were found registering dead people to vote, paying homeless people to go in and vote for Kerry, and slashing the tires of Republican voter vans. Yeah, all this stuff happened and was briefly reported and then swept under the rug by the media.
I'm so sick of these dumbass conspiracy theories. I'm always amused how the Bush administration is supposed to be incompetent and idiotic when you don't like some policy but highly organized geniuses when it comes to elections you lose. Pick one!
You can choose to believe copyright has failed all you want (which you do simply to justify piracy, no doubt); it won't make it true. Even more crazy, you are actually arguing here that releasing a product for sale is somehow "abusing copyright." Getting crazier, you argue that playing live is somehow different from recording yourself playing live. And even further down the looney train, you are arguing that you somehow have a right to get their music without compensating them for it.
Some of us have principles and will actually pay the people for their work. If your boss ever decides, "Hey, this source code you wrote? Yeah, you don't own it, so you can't say you wrote it. You see, copyright has 'failed as a social contract,' which means nobody has the rights to anything they worked on, so I'm not going to give you a paycheck this month," don't go crying to anybody.
I love when people lie and claim you have to pay "every year" even though new versions of OS X come out about every 2 to 3 years. Kudos for silently jacking up the price to $150 as well.
I seriously doubt you ever used a Mac or quit using it because of that.
So don't buy iTMS music. Do what most people do and rip the CD.
Nobody can possibly expect any entity to sell digital media files without some form of protection. Otherwise, you're just selling files that everyone will immediately distribute to ruin your business.
A lot of people trot out the cassette tape argument, but it's incredibly disingenuous to argue that it compares at all to the massively connected P2P networks of today, where you can get anything you want through the use of search terms that browse millions of user libraries for files. In the days of bootleg tapes, it was much, much smaller scale.
This is all about just controlling the supply line so that only studio-backed projects can get money. They want the ability to sh*t can a movie by not distributing it, and vice versa, to make money from only the ones they are investing in.
It might also be about making sure people get paid for their work. Like the creator of Serenity. Just a thought.
Can you describe a situation in which it would ever bite him in the ass? We live in a free market. If DRM becomes too restrictive, consumers simply abandon that product for something else, and the DRM dies. I know some Slashdotters live in a melodramatic hyper-reality where DRM are equatable to slavery, sweatshops, and other human evils, but consumers are great at regulating things for themselves. DRM is not that big of a deal. People just need to stop forming their worldviews based on Slashdot headlines.
I see no moral issue with DRM-encumbered products. If you don't like DRM, you don't have to buy them.
Sadly, the high-fever melodrama of Slashdot and Digg users has drowned out this sort of calm, objective opinion. I am so tired of see five DRM articles a day on the front pages of these sites. The only DRM I interact with is from the few albums I've bought from iTunes, and I always forget the DRM is even there because it's so liberal.
iTunes users have the most liberal DRM out there. You can be an iPod user and not ever have anything to do with DRM, so one wonders why your friends switched players, particularly when the popular alternatives are even more limiting.
Blu-ray can go up to 200GB. With HD-DVD being publicly cracked before Blu-ray, that's pretty much the death knell in my eyes. The movie studios are even more paranoid about DRM than the music industry.
People, this is not VHS vs. Betamax. It is 2007, and porn is freely available on the Internet. Not to mention that companies like Vivid are Blu-ray exclusive. And so is Disney. You can't go around forming your worldview based solely on Digg and Slashdot headlines. It's just plain ignorant!
Not only that, 100GB and 200GB Blu-ray discs were announced last year.
Assuming Sony is actually preventing porn from appearing on Blu-ray (the only story we have about it is what some guy said people told him at a convention), porn is freely available on the Internet anyway, and Blu-ray has more studio support (Disney in particular), so I don't see it making a lot of difference.
I can't speak about the other two, but I'm sure Geraldo was sent home for that little map he drew in the dirt that everyone raised a stink about.
No, I do not know how many are currently embedded but I'd imagine the number is low as the journalists weren't really a fan of it.
There are none embedded, and along this new troop surge is a plan for news organizations to begin using embedded reporters again. I doubt they'll admit it, but it may have to do with the problems that have arisen with hiring stringers. For instance, the Photoshop job of the smoke from an Israeli strike in Lebanon that required the AP to issue a picture-kill on a bunch of war photography.
The definition of "victory" in an insurgent is probably what were a quibbling over here.
Fair enough. Perhaps I should word it this way--there has been no "loss" in a battle with insurgents in that troops haven't been overtaken by the enemy or lost any ground. I mean, it's really not as dire for the troops as it's made out to be, and it's certainly not another Vietnam. Most of the killing is between warring factions of Iraqis. Like I said, I'm tired of the war too, but not for ethical or moral reasons. I'm just tired of waiting for Iraqi security forces to get trained to the point they can safeguard their own country.
For me, it's an issue of performance. I disagree with the eagerness to pull out on the part of some folks just because there are troops getting killed. If there were a draft, it would be a totally different story. But given that it's a volunteer army, it would be like arguing to have the LAPD "pull out" of the war on crime because officers keep getting killed and criminals haven't gone away. I find a lot of the anti-war arguments could be applied toward arguing for abandoning the fight against crime on the part of policeman. Both are groups you willingly sing up for to do dangerous work. So while I mourn for troops who are killed, I don't mourn them any more than I mourn cops or firefighters, and I don't want to stop fighting crime or fires when they die. I guess that's what annoys me about some protesters (like Sheehan) who want to act like it's the 1960s where we have a draft that is sending "our children" against their will to die. What we have is a group of adults signing up for dangerous work like any other group in our society. The lack of a draft changes the situation quite a bit for me, as you can tell.
Well, I'm happy someone likes them. Being one who has to do tech support for co-workers, Personalized Menus are hell for the people here who are not tech-savvy, because they can't find anything and they never seem to remember that they have to click the tiny double-arrows at the bottom of the menu. People are told to go to Page Setup, and they don't see it on the File menu, so they start going through other menus to find it. Then I get called. It's a poor solution for the problem of menus that have too many items on them.
It's as annoying to me as the problem of keeping functionality in right-click menus, because as most people know, you tell someone to right-click a menu and then tell them to click Properties, they will ask you every time: "Left or right click?" And from then on, they will ask you if they left or right click when they're told to click anything, because now you've confused them with the idea of multiple behaviors from the mouse. These techie solutions for organizing functionality just mess with people's heads (and it's why I defend Apple's one-button design mantra).
Ah, "Personalized Menus." The feature I always cite to prove that Microsoft is clueless when it comes to interface research, and that they implement things just to have a marketing bulletpoint. Personalized menus sounds good on paper but is irritatingly awful in practice. A menu that actively hides its items from you--wonderful!
This is where embedded reporters come in. These guys travel with the troops and if they report anything untoward, they are immediately sent home with little or no oversight from those in charge of propaganda. They know this and numerous ones who haven't toed the line have come forward as whistle blowers.
This is the point where I, again, mention that no news organization currently has any embedded reporters over there. They pay Iraqi stringers for information, which leads to controversies like the alleged burning Sunnis. As for military censorship, these "whistleblowers" of yours remain conveniently unnamed.
This is why you think that the US has won all engagements in Iraq and it is also the biggest difference between the Vietnam conflict.
The reason I think the U.S. has won every military engagement is because we have. Every scuffle with insurgents, in spite of any troop loss, has ended in a U.S. victory. The reason we had to retake Fallujah is because more insurgents returned to take their place after we left, because Iraq currently has no security force strong enough to police its own country.
Whatever, it's their contry and it's not busineess of G.W.Bush nor US neocons to decide what will happen with it.
Indeed, which is why Iraq has an elected government of its own.
"Neocons" is a derogatory phrase used by some folks in the same way KKK members use the n-word to describe blacks. It's something you use to insult an entire cross-section of people because they have opinions you disagree with, and you believe you are above them or are "enlightened" in some way. Of course, they feel the same way about you.
We've lost over 3,000 engagements and have the caskets to prove it.
No, we haven't lost a single engagement since the war started. For some reason, you're equating troops with engagements, which means you must not be aware of what an engagement is. As I stated before, we've had the smallest casualty rate of any war in recorded history, but a hostile media has made sure everyone thinks it's a "quagmire" of daily bloodshed when simply asking the troops over there gives you a much different story. Something is very wrong when the people who are actually over there give you a much different account than what is portrayed by news organizations who don't even have reporters over there anymore. However, I can see some people are unwilling to be critical of media coverage when it favors a political position they may have.
Your Vietnam vet story is unfortunate but irrelevant to the topic, even excluding the fact that Vietnam was a much bloodier war with many more lives lost.
Well, you clearly have a preconception--that Bush is a complete failure despite record-high economy and record-low unemployment--that you expect the media to reinforce. If you're asking for my permission, then sure, you can dislike Bush. Just be aware that the media overwhelmingly leans to the left according to every study done on the matter. If your opinion doesn't change after objectively considering such factors, then your opinion is just as valid as mine, and I respect it.
Because it's not "the people" fighting. It's armed militia groups fighting each other, aided with resources from Iran who is trying to destabilize the country for political reasons. These groups are killing more Iraqis than they are American troops. Freedom fighters fight against the forced control of another country, but here, Iraqis already have their own elected government. That is why the media keeps referring to a civil war in Iraq, because there are armed groups battling it out amongst themselves.
That's also why it's silly when people compare Iraq to Vietnam. First, there's no draft. Second, we actually haven't lost any engagement since the war started, and we've lost the least amount of troops in recorded history. There was actually an article recently discussing how the American people, for some reason, are much less tolerant of the Iraq War than previous wars that were much bloodier, be it a negative American media or simple weariness. And third, the fighting has more to do with armed groups killing each other than any organized resistance against the U.S. military, who are only there now because Iraqi security hasn't stepped up to police its own country.
I'm one of these guys who wishes we'd pull out already, but acknowledges that a lot of people have a much more negative image of Iraq than what is reality over there due to, among other things, hostile elements in the media who just don't like Bush. Most people don't even know the major news orgs no longer have embedded reporters over there and are relying on hired Iraqi stringers for eyewitness accounts, which leads to underreported controversies like the AP's shaky claims of burned Sunnis.
It probably sounds like I'm a hawk or something, so I expect some critical replies. I just happen to be aware enough to realize news organizations aren't about informing the public as some sort of civil duty but are businesses that rely on ratings and sales like every other company, and they are more interested in "storylines" that grab attention rather than painting an objective picture. I'm pretty much calling them drama queens, which is what they typically are. The fact is that we rely on the media for our image of what's happening over there, and little has been reported on this process of information dissemination originating from anonymous stringers. It's amazing how inaccurate the news is--and I'm not just talking about Iraq coverage--when you do some research behind the story and find out how the situation really is.
I subscribe to a "one-thirds mantra"--I take everything I hear and assume a third of it is probably true while the rest requires my own verification. I strip out the hype and melodrama and sprinkle on some common sense.
If I hear the iPhone is going to be a groundbreaking revolution, I just assume it's probably going to be a cool, cutting-edge phone but I have to see for myself. If I hear Iraq is a "quagmire" and that troop deaths have reached a "grim milestone" (did you notice all the media outlets use the same phrases?), I just assume there is some resistance delaying our inevitable pullout and that casualties are more than the military would like, but probably not as big a deal as is reported (and research shows that to be true--again, an extremely small casualty rate compared to past wars). If I hear Barak Obama is a "rising superstar" or a "rock star" of the Democratic Party (again, notice how they all use the same phrases?), I assume he's probably just some charismatic guy the left-leaning elements of the media are fawning over but not that big a deal.
Same goes for this story. I strip out two-thirds of the hype and melodrama and assume there has been use of Google Earth by terrorists, but that such a thing is braindead obvious because terrorists have been using the Internet to get as much information as they can for years, and that the military already knew this. I also assume this satellite imagery is available outside of Google Earth and would have been in their possession even if Google wasn't around.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa, anti-Bush rant including monkey reference! Instant +5!
Here's a thought, not everybody thinks like you. That poll-following, contradictory ass named Kerry was just as much of a monkey, but at least people knew where Bush stood and what he planned to do. People also liked the tax cuts that have contributed to the roaring economy and low unemployment we have right now.
This is the reason a lot of people don't like liberals--their incredibly condescending, hateful tone. If you disagree with them, you must be a stupid idiot, or better yet, a "Nazi" or "neocon." It's like the passion of an Apple fanatic combined with the closed-mindedness of a Windows user...
I have nightmares of the 750,000 that Saddam killed and his invasion of Kuwait. I also have dreams about all the people Clinton bombed in Kosovo and other places without U.N. approval.
As opposed to the Democrats who in one breath claimed "Republicans are trying to scare Americans into voting for them!" then in the next breath shouted "We're less safe than we were before 9/11! Bush isn't guarding the ports! The Republicans are not keeping us safe, so vote for Democrats!" The same folks who threatened seniors that Bush was taking away their money. The same folks who sent out fake draft letters to kids to try to scare them into voting for Kerry. Sounds like fear-mongering to me.
Where is the "world domination?" Are you saying Bush plans to invade Canada? Europe? I mean, what are you basing this hyperbole on exactly? Even more importantly, how do you respond to the actual plans by Islamic terrorists to dominate the world through the mantra of forced conversion?
You can blame Iraqis killing Iraqis for that. Granted, it's nowhere near the U.N.'s figure of 750,000 innocent Iraqis killed under the Saddam regime, but I'm sure you're no Saddam cheerleader. Right?
Aaaaand here comes the tired anti-capitalist rant, concocted in your dorm room, no doubt adorned with Pearl Jam and Michael Moore posters and a signed Naom Chomsky book on your bookshelf. Is there ever a liberal who doesn't rant against globalism and then whips out their cell phone or laptop to surf the Internet? Hello, you're already a part of globalism.
Let's examine this statement with a clear head:
What countries are "trampling" on with our economics? If someone in Paris doesn't want to buy a Big Mac, they don't have to.
Is there ever a liberal who doesn't believe everyone is an involuntary victim with no will of their own who needs to be "saved" by a big, expensive nanny government?
Ugh. I'm off to read Reason magazine.
If I had posted the same quote but stated that it reminds me of bitter liberals who think Bush "stole" the election, would I get a +5 Insightful too? Genuinely curious how the Slashdot political spectrum would have responded.
Wrong. Insurgents are responsible for the deaths of 3,000 soldiers. Or if you want to go further, the soldiers WHO WILLINGLY VOLUNTEERED TO JOIN THE MILITARY are responsible for their own lives.
I know it's not as hip and "Vietnam-esque" to actually let people take responsibility for themselves and acknowledge that we don't have a draft. But claiming Bush is personally responsible for 3,000 soldier deaths is like saying Mayor Bloomberg is personally responsible for any NYPD officer who dies in the line of duty while fighting crime. Should we pull out of the fight on crime because cops keep dying and criminals don't stop?
Well, saying it offers evidence suggests it actually proves anything, when really this book just tries to raise questions. Honestly, the obsession with the exit polls on the part of some Democrats sounds like sour grapes. Bush went into the election with a higher approval rating than Kerry. The Rasmussen polls leading up to the election accurately predicted the final results within a few percentage points. I repeat, the polls were showing Bush ahead anyway.
People just need to accept that Kerry lost and Bush won. If there was a conspiracy, it would have been blown open right now. I could make just as much of a case that Kerry should have lost even more than he did, after Democrats were found registering dead people to vote, paying homeless people to go in and vote for Kerry, and slashing the tires of Republican voter vans. Yeah, all this stuff happened and was briefly reported and then swept under the rug by the media.
I'm so sick of these dumbass conspiracy theories. I'm always amused how the Bush administration is supposed to be incompetent and idiotic when you don't like some policy but highly organized geniuses when it comes to elections you lose. Pick one!
You can choose to believe copyright has failed all you want (which you do simply to justify piracy, no doubt); it won't make it true. Even more crazy, you are actually arguing here that releasing a product for sale is somehow "abusing copyright." Getting crazier, you argue that playing live is somehow different from recording yourself playing live. And even further down the looney train, you are arguing that you somehow have a right to get their music without compensating them for it.
Some of us have principles and will actually pay the people for their work. If your boss ever decides, "Hey, this source code you wrote? Yeah, you don't own it, so you can't say you wrote it. You see, copyright has 'failed as a social contract,' which means nobody has the rights to anything they worked on, so I'm not going to give you a paycheck this month," don't go crying to anybody.
I love when people lie and claim you have to pay "every year" even though new versions of OS X come out about every 2 to 3 years. Kudos for silently jacking up the price to $150 as well.
I seriously doubt you ever used a Mac or quit using it because of that.
So don't buy iTMS music. Do what most people do and rip the CD.
Nobody can possibly expect any entity to sell digital media files without some form of protection. Otherwise, you're just selling files that everyone will immediately distribute to ruin your business.
You also have to sleep at night knowing none of your money is going toward the artist or record labels who actually created the music.
It might also be about making sure people get paid for their work. Like the creator of Serenity. Just a thought.
Can you describe a situation in which it would ever bite him in the ass? We live in a free market. If DRM becomes too restrictive, consumers simply abandon that product for something else, and the DRM dies. I know some Slashdotters live in a melodramatic hyper-reality where DRM are equatable to slavery, sweatshops, and other human evils, but consumers are great at regulating things for themselves. DRM is not that big of a deal. People just need to stop forming their worldviews based on Slashdot headlines.
Sadly, the high-fever melodrama of Slashdot and Digg users has drowned out this sort of calm, objective opinion. I am so tired of see five DRM articles a day on the front pages of these sites. The only DRM I interact with is from the few albums I've bought from iTunes, and I always forget the DRM is even there because it's so liberal.
iTunes users have the most liberal DRM out there. You can be an iPod user and not ever have anything to do with DRM, so one wonders why your friends switched players, particularly when the popular alternatives are even more limiting.
Blu-ray can go up to 200GB. With HD-DVD being publicly cracked before Blu-ray, that's pretty much the death knell in my eyes. The movie studios are even more paranoid about DRM than the music industry.
People, this is not VHS vs. Betamax. It is 2007, and porn is freely available on the Internet. Not to mention that companies like Vivid are Blu-ray exclusive. And so is Disney. You can't go around forming your worldview based solely on Digg and Slashdot headlines. It's just plain ignorant!
Not only that, 100GB and 200GB Blu-ray discs were announced last year.
Assuming Sony is actually preventing porn from appearing on Blu-ray (the only story we have about it is what some guy said people told him at a convention), porn is freely available on the Internet anyway, and Blu-ray has more studio support (Disney in particular), so I don't see it making a lot of difference.
There are none embedded, and along this new troop surge is a plan for news organizations to begin using embedded reporters again. I doubt they'll admit it, but it may have to do with the problems that have arisen with hiring stringers. For instance, the Photoshop job of the smoke from an Israeli strike in Lebanon that required the AP to issue a picture-kill on a bunch of war photography.
Fair enough. Perhaps I should word it this way--there has been no "loss" in a battle with insurgents in that troops haven't been overtaken by the enemy or lost any ground. I mean, it's really not as dire for the troops as it's made out to be, and it's certainly not another Vietnam. Most of the killing is between warring factions of Iraqis. Like I said, I'm tired of the war too, but not for ethical or moral reasons. I'm just tired of waiting for Iraqi security forces to get trained to the point they can safeguard their own country.
For me, it's an issue of performance. I disagree with the eagerness to pull out on the part of some folks just because there are troops getting killed. If there were a draft, it would be a totally different story. But given that it's a volunteer army, it would be like arguing to have the LAPD "pull out" of the war on crime because officers keep getting killed and criminals haven't gone away. I find a lot of the anti-war arguments could be applied toward arguing for abandoning the fight against crime on the part of policeman. Both are groups you willingly sing up for to do dangerous work. So while I mourn for troops who are killed, I don't mourn them any more than I mourn cops or firefighters, and I don't want to stop fighting crime or fires when they die. I guess that's what annoys me about some protesters (like Sheehan) who want to act like it's the 1960s where we have a draft that is sending "our children" against their will to die. What we have is a group of adults signing up for dangerous work like any other group in our society. The lack of a draft changes the situation quite a bit for me, as you can tell.
Well, I'm happy someone likes them. Being one who has to do tech support for co-workers, Personalized Menus are hell for the people here who are not tech-savvy, because they can't find anything and they never seem to remember that they have to click the tiny double-arrows at the bottom of the menu. People are told to go to Page Setup, and they don't see it on the File menu, so they start going through other menus to find it. Then I get called. It's a poor solution for the problem of menus that have too many items on them.
It's as annoying to me as the problem of keeping functionality in right-click menus, because as most people know, you tell someone to right-click a menu and then tell them to click Properties, they will ask you every time: "Left or right click?" And from then on, they will ask you if they left or right click when they're told to click anything, because now you've confused them with the idea of multiple behaviors from the mouse. These techie solutions for organizing functionality just mess with people's heads (and it's why I defend Apple's one-button design mantra).
Ah, "Personalized Menus." The feature I always cite to prove that Microsoft is clueless when it comes to interface research, and that they implement things just to have a marketing bulletpoint. Personalized menus sounds good on paper but is irritatingly awful in practice. A menu that actively hides its items from you--wonderful!
This is the point where I, again, mention that no news organization currently has any embedded reporters over there. They pay Iraqi stringers for information, which leads to controversies like the alleged burning Sunnis. As for military censorship, these "whistleblowers" of yours remain conveniently unnamed.
The reason I think the U.S. has won every military engagement is because we have. Every scuffle with insurgents, in spite of any troop loss, has ended in a U.S. victory. The reason we had to retake Fallujah is because more insurgents returned to take their place after we left, because Iraq currently has no security force strong enough to police its own country.
Indeed, which is why Iraq has an elected government of its own.
"Neocons" is a derogatory phrase used by some folks in the same way KKK members use the n-word to describe blacks. It's something you use to insult an entire cross-section of people because they have opinions you disagree with, and you believe you are above them or are "enlightened" in some way. Of course, they feel the same way about you.
No, we haven't lost a single engagement since the war started. For some reason, you're equating troops with engagements, which means you must not be aware of what an engagement is. As I stated before, we've had the smallest casualty rate of any war in recorded history, but a hostile media has made sure everyone thinks it's a "quagmire" of daily bloodshed when simply asking the troops over there gives you a much different story. Something is very wrong when the people who are actually over there give you a much different account than what is portrayed by news organizations who don't even have reporters over there anymore. However, I can see some people are unwilling to be critical of media coverage when it favors a political position they may have.
Your Vietnam vet story is unfortunate but irrelevant to the topic, even excluding the fact that Vietnam was a much bloodier war with many more lives lost.
Well, you clearly have a preconception--that Bush is a complete failure despite record-high economy and record-low unemployment--that you expect the media to reinforce. If you're asking for my permission, then sure, you can dislike Bush. Just be aware that the media overwhelmingly leans to the left according to every study done on the matter. If your opinion doesn't change after objectively considering such factors, then your opinion is just as valid as mine, and I respect it.
Because it's not "the people" fighting. It's armed militia groups fighting each other, aided with resources from Iran who is trying to destabilize the country for political reasons. These groups are killing more Iraqis than they are American troops. Freedom fighters fight against the forced control of another country, but here, Iraqis already have their own elected government. That is why the media keeps referring to a civil war in Iraq, because there are armed groups battling it out amongst themselves.
That's also why it's silly when people compare Iraq to Vietnam. First, there's no draft. Second, we actually haven't lost any engagement since the war started, and we've lost the least amount of troops in recorded history. There was actually an article recently discussing how the American people, for some reason, are much less tolerant of the Iraq War than previous wars that were much bloodier, be it a negative American media or simple weariness. And third, the fighting has more to do with armed groups killing each other than any organized resistance against the U.S. military, who are only there now because Iraqi security hasn't stepped up to police its own country.
I'm one of these guys who wishes we'd pull out already, but acknowledges that a lot of people have a much more negative image of Iraq than what is reality over there due to, among other things, hostile elements in the media who just don't like Bush. Most people don't even know the major news orgs no longer have embedded reporters over there and are relying on hired Iraqi stringers for eyewitness accounts, which leads to underreported controversies like the AP's shaky claims of burned Sunnis.
It probably sounds like I'm a hawk or something, so I expect some critical replies. I just happen to be aware enough to realize news organizations aren't about informing the public as some sort of civil duty but are businesses that rely on ratings and sales like every other company, and they are more interested in "storylines" that grab attention rather than painting an objective picture. I'm pretty much calling them drama queens, which is what they typically are. The fact is that we rely on the media for our image of what's happening over there, and little has been reported on this process of information dissemination originating from anonymous stringers. It's amazing how inaccurate the news is--and I'm not just talking about Iraq coverage--when you do some research behind the story and find out how the situation really is.
I subscribe to a "one-thirds mantra"--I take everything I hear and assume a third of it is probably true while the rest requires my own verification. I strip out the hype and melodrama and sprinkle on some common sense.
If I hear the iPhone is going to be a groundbreaking revolution, I just assume it's probably going to be a cool, cutting-edge phone but I have to see for myself. If I hear Iraq is a "quagmire" and that troop deaths have reached a "grim milestone" (did you notice all the media outlets use the same phrases?), I just assume there is some resistance delaying our inevitable pullout and that casualties are more than the military would like, but probably not as big a deal as is reported (and research shows that to be true--again, an extremely small casualty rate compared to past wars). If I hear Barak Obama is a "rising superstar" or a "rock star" of the Democratic Party (again, notice how they all use the same phrases?), I assume he's probably just some charismatic guy the left-leaning elements of the media are fawning over but not that big a deal.
Same goes for this story. I strip out two-thirds of the hype and melodrama and assume there has been use of Google Earth by terrorists, but that such a thing is braindead obvious because terrorists have been using the Internet to get as much information as they can for years, and that the military already knew this. I also assume this satellite imagery is available outside of Google Earth and would have been in their possession even if Google wasn't around.