Its good to see kazaa lite succeeding. Although people equate file sharing with music piracy, Kazaa has actually started to get some legitimate uses.
Here in the lab for instance, many of my colleagues have been releasing their scientific papers onto Kazaa instead of through more established journals such as 'new scientist'. Because p2p is such an efficient way of sharing information(hence why it is so good for pirating mp3s) this means that the work we are doing can be shared with scientists all over the world simultanously and for free. We can also get feedback on our theories from other kazaa users.
The only problem is that some scientists have misused the system and are trading papers that have come from other scientists without their consent. There is crrently some debate at alt.physics.p2p about whether this counts as fair use as they had already bought the journal and thus had a license for it.
I know that there will be a great deal of hysteria about this and about how our world is turning into something out of '1974' but when you think it over this is going to be an invaluable tool in helping fight the war on terror.
Think for example what would have happened if this had been n place 3 years ago. The government could have watched the hijackers enrolling on flight courses and could have questioned their need to be able to fly 747s. It could have detected their meetings with other members of al-jazeera which would have given them far more warning that an attack was imminent.
law abiding people, will have nothing to fear. the system will probably only be used to track groups who pose a threat to the US such as islamists. People who have lived here for a few generations will probably not be tracked at all.
here in the lab we adopted open office about a year ago as Microsoft did not give a comprehensive equation editor in which we could create our theorums. So far our experiences have been mixed, major findings are:
File formats are causing a problem. We are unable to send people Open office documents as they can only support MS files. We thus always convert to HTML but valuable information can get lost in the process.
The spreadsheet is good and has proved invaluable when used for nth level modelling. There is no option for a r squared analysis in the statistics package.
The word processor is good, although somewhere it is set to autoreplace the word lepton with leprechaun which is proving most annoying as I write my paper on particle physics.
The article is an interesting read and some of the mechanisms he mentions for speed improvements are pretty cool but I think the days when file systems could make a difference are in the past.
10 years ago, for instance, hard drive speeds were the limiting factor (200s-1 was typical) and so a good file system could generate a fairly decent performance gain. Nowadays we have hard drives that are up to 14Tb and later this year IBM will be launching their quantum series were information will be stored in the nucleus of the atoms making up the platter giving it lightening speed and rendering any improvements to the filesystem as superfluous
Although I'm happy with my current browser (opera) there are many ways in which it could be improved.
1. Improved support for windows. The Linux version of opera is quite stable but the windows version repeatedly crashes, especially when I got to pages that have perl in them.
2. popup supression. Popups have become one of my least favourite things about the internet. If the browser could suppress ANY pages that use java to create popups then the problem could be solved at a stroke.
3. Speed. Opera is far more usable than IE but it is much slower at rendering large pages. This can be speeded up if I remove java but this is more of a hack than a proper solution.
4. improved caching. The browser could cache all links on a page regardless of whether you visit them or not. This would make surfing a lot quicker even when you are using analogue.
I know that you meant this as a joke but there is acyually an idea (very much at the conceptual stage at the moment) along similar lines produced by the chinese space agency.
What they have proposed is to put a large platform at about 20000 ft, from which they could launch small rockets, thereby greatly reducing the amount of fuel that needs to spent overcoming the giant gravity well. Both the platform and the rockets could be put into position by the use of balloons, although hydrogen rather than helium would probably be used as it has a higher specific impulse.
Now to be fair this is really only a conceptual idea, and the new chinese space shuttle will probably render it unnecessary but it prove to be useful for smaller space industries who lack the infrastructure needed for traditional launches.
Actually the game of poker is etremely interesting from a pure mathematics point of view as equations involved to play the optimum way (as governed by both game theory and match theory) reduce to a version of the travelling salesman problem.
One of the main problems with building a good form of artificial intelligence for games is the accounting facial expressions. Some of the processors used on the high end chess machines (such as deep blue) actually had some extra instructions on the processor to deal with this.
Its really good to see that ATI are sorting out the linux debacle withe their drivers, hell even BSD has better support than Linux and that isn't even a graphics intensive system.
Hopefully what they'll do is make it a completely open source effort so that their drivers can be tweaked to suit each individual kernel and so that directx support can be added. Given that ATI are making the fastest graphics cards on the planet at the moment this has to be one of the best bits of news I've heard all week.
Its about time that SETI got some serious funding, its mainly been kept going by enthusiastic amateurs over the last few years and at one point in the early 80s it actually looked like it was going to close.
One thing they should be able to do with is money is investigate the interesting readings they've been getting from proxima centuri, where several M class planets have been discovered. The chances of it being life are small but the fact is that the 55Gev readings they've been getting are a complete mystery so even if the're just coming from a tachyon field it should produce some interesting new data
Although many people here at slashdot don't agree with the RIAA and their anti digital stance I think that we have to have some sympathy with them here. Unlike traditional radio it is easy to make copys of songs that have been webcasted and then place them on peer to peer networks such as bittorrent and napster. What inevitably happens is that people will record internet radio stations all day and then put all the CD quality songs up for download, thereby harming the music industry.
What might be a better idea is to limit webcasting to unsigned bands that need the publicity. In this way we could listen to tracks first before buying and the inevitable piracy would actually work in favour of the music industry.
Hopefully the job change will allow him to concentrate a bit more on python, its a great language that we in the lab are using to replace all our old apps that were written in VB and java.
One thing I would like to see would be python to become even more object oriented which would give it greater flexibility and would mean that the code would not be so long (our Vb code is about 2-3x shorter than the python code). Perhaps they could do this by borrowing a few tips from perl, which although slower has code that looks much neater.
Its good to see NASA responding well with some serious missions after the Atlantis disaster. After all the cutbacks during the Clinton era I really thought it might get to the point where they did nothing but put satellites into orbit.
What would really interest me however would be if they switched their attention from Mars to Venus. Most scientists agree that life on Mars is not feasable wheras Venus, which is closer to the sun, has a far more interesting chemical makeup. Although too hot for any carbon based lifeforms to be found, many scientists have thought that in Venus's rich ammonia lakes a Silicon based life could have emerged. Although these would be very basic forms of life (not as advanced a monkeys) discovering them would mean that we could no longer view ourselves as being at the center of the universe.
I think this is an area where Microsoft has done extremely well. Their products are technically superior to the competitiors but more importantly they are easy to use because they cut down on jargon.
Think about it, while linux still uses outdated terms such as root and grep the Windows equivalents are administrator and find. If I mention GNOME or KDE then people look at me with blank faces but if I mention Word people know exactly what I mean because it does exactly what it says.
What would be really interesting would be if someone could produce a linux distro without the jargon. call the start menu the start menu and replace RPMs with linux update, then we might see significant numbers of people using Linux.
The main problem with.Net is that it ties you to a specific OS which makes it a pain from a business economics point of view
Here at the lab for example we run a lot of mission critical syatems written in Java. Although these systems are ultra reliable they are slow and as such we are severely hampered by the hardware we can afford.
A few months ago we got a.Net system to trial and we migrated some of the apps over to it for evaluation. The results showed that.Net was so much faster than java and the support for multi threaded processes far superior. From a technical point of view we wanted to switch but the university wouldn't let us. Switching to.NET would mean swapping from NT to XP and they just wouldn't meet that level of cost.
If someone would port.NET to linux it wuld become a viable option but until then I think will only ever be a niche product.
This is just another example of how much better far eastern countries are at bringing up their children than we in America. In Thailand children are made by law to study the ancient martial arts of Judo and Placebo and school dinners consist of healthy national dishes such as sushi which are rich in vitamins and minerals.
Here in America we are lucky if children eat anything other than McDonalds and physical education is almost non existent. Is it any wonder that over 60% of our children are clinically obese and that heart disease and lung cancer now claim 3 times the number of deaths than they did 2 hundred years ago.
I think you'd actually lose your balance as the friction force would act on your feet whereas the drag force would act on your whole body. Anyway at what speed would the two forces be equal?
drag = 0.5*C*A*D*V^2
where:
C is the drag coefficient
A is the cross section area
D is the density of air
V is the velocity
The frictional force will equal FMg
Where:
F is the coefficient of friction between the walkway and the shoes of the person
M is the mass of the person
g is acceleration due to gravity
Anyway using C = 1, A = 1.4m^2, D = 1.3KgM-3, F = 1, M = 70kg the forces will balance at about 23ms-1 or 51mph
One of the major reasons why this technology is limited to small applications can be found in its name and specifically in the word Organic. These things are basically made of of carbon, which because of its higher valency (than silicon) will readilly react with oxygen to form Co2 and give off heat. Consequently these things are likely to catch fire if left anywhere near even a moderate source of heat and could even produce a major problem with regard to global warning as when they are thrown away the carbon dioxide produced will eventually find its way into the ozone layer.
From the article:
'The absence of perpetual motion machines seems to show that no one has succeeded in overcoming the limitations prescribed by Carnot'.
Although it is true that no perpetual motion machines have ever been built the second law of thermodynamics is only a statistical law and so can be broken in very special circumstances. Richard Feynmann once proposed a perpetual motion machine that should work in theory (on a small scale governed by the heisenburg uncertainty principle) even though we do not have the technology needed to make it. It works as follows:
you will need:
a device to turn mass into energy (d1) and a device to turn energy into mass (d2).
Place d1 at a point on the earths surface and d2 at a height above it. Use d1 to turn some mass into photons and shine these photons at d2 where they are turned back into mass. Let the mass fall down to d1 and harvest the kinetic energy released. Repeat ad infinitum.
Now as stated this would only work under a small distance were d1 and d2 were placed very close together so hardly any useful energy could be gotten out of it, but it does show that the 2nd law is not as undeniable as is often thought.
Yes but have you ever used MS office on OSX, it is slow and incredibly buggy (jokes about microsoft aside office on XP is rock solid) and that's with standard hardware and a fast RISC processor to work on, imagine what it would be like under Linux with all sorts of random hardware thrown in there.
The real reason they won't port office to Linux however, isn't about speed or reliability but simply because Office on Linux just wouldn't sell. Most Linux users realise that there are good free alternatives like star office and open office which are just as good as Microsoft without needing you pay extortionate prices.
Office on Linux would be a commercial nightmare.
I find it really hard to believe that MS handed over any Sendo technology to Orange. This is how it works:
Orange is a network operator, it manufactures nothing, not paperclips, not tractors and certainly not smartphones. The phone in question is made by a Taiwanese company called HTC, who make various elctronic gadgets including the Ipaq.
The correct name for this phone is the Canary but it is sold in Europe as the Orange SPV, presumably because most consumers haven't heard of HTC and don't really associate them with quality phones. Microsoft passing Sendo information to Orange would be like Wall Mart receiving information from Intel about how to design better processors.
This could be excellent news for the proseperity of the third world in general and the redution in the digital divide in particular.
At present many third world countries such as Ethiopia, Rhodesia and India have serious problems in that computers are an unobtainable luxery that the ordinary man on the street cannot afford. If we can get free software into these countries then we can alleviate much of the hardware costs associated with running a computer and so make it easier for undeveloped societies to have access to modern technology (ok the hardware costs are still there but how much does a second hand computer cost these days?).
The impact of this cannot be underestimated. If you think how much computers have impacted on your work and how much time/money they save then you will realise why third world countries cannot compete on a level playing field with us Americans. If we can get Linux into these countries we can enable them to make money so they will not be a drain on the ric countries but will instead be able to make money and provide for themselves.
(or several google molecules in the case of ol' Thom's thread)
Asuming you mean a googol (10^100) then I don't think your statement is correct seeing that the number of particles in the universe has been estimated at somewhere between 10^72 and 10^85.
As a side note 10^100 atoms of carbon would weigh around 1.7E74 Kg which would be quite heavy really.
you're right but I think the problem was that in your original comment you used the phrase 'we were the good guys, they were the bad guys' or similar. While I'm sure you don't literally believe this, it would appear that some people think that just because one thing is bad any preferable alternative to it must be good.
This logic was recently put into practice in the war against Iraq when war proponents argued that the war was a good thing because life under a new (american approved) administration was far better than life under Saddam. While they were (almost certainly) right that did not necessarily mean that a war was good or even the best option.
This raises an interesting point. why should the state finance the unemployed? At the end of the day most people are unemployed because they don't want to apply for the jobs that are available.
Consider this. I knew someone who was a well paid sysadmin. I don't know what his salary was but it must have been over $500000. Anyway he gets made redundant but he only applies for similar jobs. There are plent of jobs in menial work available but does he try his hardest to get them. Does he hell, he knows he can get his unemployment benefit so he bides his time.
Now unemployment pay is a fairly recent inovation which we've managed to get by without through most of history. The fact is that it puts a terrible strain on the economy ( those in work have less disposable income, those receiving benefit have slightly more but a gret deal gets skimmed off by beaurocracy) and simply encourages laziness.
A better solution would be to set up an institution were those who have little money could live. Theyu could then receive basic needs (water. food, shelter) in return for carrying out menial work. When they had cleared their debts and found a source of employment they would be free to leave. This would discourage those too lazy to find work and reduce the burden on hard working citizens who are currently struggling on the money they get.
Slashdot Mirror
Its good to see kazaa lite succeeding. Although people equate file sharing with music piracy, Kazaa has actually started to get some legitimate uses.
Here in the lab for instance, many of my colleagues have been releasing their scientific papers onto Kazaa instead of through more established journals such as 'new scientist'. Because p2p is such an efficient way of sharing information(hence why it is so good for pirating mp3s) this means that the work we are doing can be shared with scientists all over the world simultanously and for free. We can also get feedback on our theories from other kazaa users.
The only problem is that some scientists have misused the system and are trading papers that have come from other scientists without their consent. There is crrently some debate at alt.physics.p2p about whether this counts as fair use as they had already bought the journal and thus had a license for it.
I know that there will be a great deal of hysteria about this and about how our world is turning into something out of '1974' but when you think it over this is going to be an invaluable tool in helping fight the war on terror.
Think for example what would have happened if this had been n place 3 years ago. The government could have watched the hijackers enrolling on flight courses and could have questioned their need to be able to fly 747s. It could have detected their meetings with other members of al-jazeera which would have given them far more warning that an attack was imminent.
law abiding people, will have nothing to fear. the system will probably only be used to track groups who pose a threat to the US such as islamists. People who have lived here for a few generations will probably not be tracked at all.
here in the lab we adopted open office about a year ago as Microsoft did not give a comprehensive equation editor in which we could create our theorums. So far our experiences have been mixed, major findings are:
File formats are causing a problem. We are unable to send people Open office documents as they can only support MS files. We thus always convert to HTML but valuable information can get lost in the process.
The spreadsheet is good and has proved invaluable when used for nth level modelling. There is no option for a r squared analysis in the statistics package.
The word processor is good, although somewhere it is set to autoreplace the word lepton with leprechaun which is proving most annoying as I write my paper on particle physics.
The article is an interesting read and some of the mechanisms he mentions for speed improvements are pretty cool but I think the days when file systems could make a difference are in the past.
10 years ago, for instance, hard drive speeds were the limiting factor (200s-1 was typical) and so a good file system could generate a fairly decent performance gain. Nowadays we have hard drives that are up to 14Tb and later this year IBM will be launching their quantum series were information will be stored in the nucleus of the atoms making up the platter giving it lightening speed and rendering any improvements to the filesystem as superfluous
Although I'm happy with my current browser (opera) there are many ways in which it could be improved.
1. Improved support for windows. The Linux version of opera is quite stable but the windows version repeatedly crashes, especially when I got to pages that have perl in them.
2. popup supression. Popups have become one of my least favourite things about the internet. If the browser could suppress ANY pages that use java to create popups then the problem could be solved at a stroke.
3. Speed. Opera is far more usable than IE but it is much slower at rendering large pages. This can be speeded up if I remove java but this is more of a hack than a proper solution.
4. improved caching. The browser could cache all links on a page regardless of whether you visit them or not. This would make surfing a lot quicker even when you are using analogue.
I know that you meant this as a joke but there is acyually an idea (very much at the conceptual stage at the moment) along similar lines produced by the chinese space agency.
What they have proposed is to put a large platform at about 20000 ft, from which they could launch small rockets, thereby greatly reducing the amount of fuel that needs to spent overcoming the giant gravity well. Both the platform and the rockets could be put into position by the use of balloons, although hydrogen rather than helium would probably be used as it has a higher specific impulse.
Now to be fair this is really only a conceptual idea, and the new chinese space shuttle will probably render it unnecessary but it prove to be useful for smaller space industries who lack the infrastructure needed for traditional launches.
Actually the game of poker is etremely interesting from a pure mathematics point of view as equations involved to play the optimum way (as governed by both game theory and match theory) reduce to a version of the travelling salesman problem.
One of the main problems with building a good form of artificial intelligence for games is the accounting facial expressions. Some of the processors used on the high end chess machines (such as deep blue) actually had some extra instructions on the processor to deal with this.
Its really good to see that ATI are sorting out the linux debacle withe their drivers, hell even BSD has better support than Linux and that isn't even a graphics intensive system.
Hopefully what they'll do is make it a completely open source effort so that their drivers can be tweaked to suit each individual kernel and so that directx support can be added. Given that ATI are making the fastest graphics cards on the planet at the moment this has to be one of the best bits of news I've heard all week.
Its about time that SETI got some serious funding, its mainly been kept going by enthusiastic amateurs over the last few years and at one point in the early 80s it actually looked like it was going to close.
One thing they should be able to do with is money is investigate the interesting readings they've been getting from proxima centuri, where several M class planets have been discovered. The chances of it being life are small but the fact is that the 55Gev readings they've been getting are a complete mystery so even if the're just coming from a tachyon field it should produce some interesting new data
Although many people here at slashdot don't agree with the RIAA and their anti digital stance I think that we have to have some sympathy with them here. Unlike traditional radio it is easy to make copys of songs that have been webcasted and then place them on peer to peer networks such as bittorrent and napster. What inevitably happens is that people will record internet radio stations all day and then put all the CD quality songs up for download, thereby harming the music industry.
What might be a better idea is to limit webcasting to unsigned bands that need the publicity. In this way we could listen to tracks first before buying and the inevitable piracy would actually work in favour of the music industry.
Hopefully the job change will allow him to concentrate a bit more on python, its a great language that we in the lab are using to replace all our old apps that were written in VB and java.
One thing I would like to see would be python to become even more object oriented which would give it greater flexibility and would mean that the code would not be so long (our Vb code is about 2-3x shorter than the python code). Perhaps they could do this by borrowing a few tips from perl, which although slower has code that looks much neater.
Its good to see NASA responding well with some serious missions after the Atlantis disaster. After all the cutbacks during the Clinton era I really thought it might get to the point where they did nothing but put satellites into orbit.
What would really interest me however would be if they switched their attention from Mars to Venus. Most scientists agree that life on Mars is not feasable wheras Venus, which is closer to the sun, has a far more interesting chemical makeup. Although too hot for any carbon based lifeforms to be found, many scientists have thought that in Venus's rich ammonia lakes a Silicon based life could have emerged. Although these would be very basic forms of life (not as advanced a monkeys) discovering them would mean that we could no longer view ourselves as being at the center of the universe.
I think this is an area where Microsoft has done extremely well. Their products are technically superior to the competitiors but more importantly they are easy to use because they cut down on jargon.
Think about it, while linux still uses outdated terms such as root and grep the Windows equivalents are administrator and find. If I mention GNOME or KDE then people look at me with blank faces but if I mention Word people know exactly what I mean because it does exactly what it says.
What would be really interesting would be if someone could produce a linux distro without the jargon. call the start menu the start menu and replace RPMs with linux update, then we might see significant numbers of people using Linux.
The main problem with .Net is that it ties you to a specific OS which makes it a pain from a business economics point of view
.Net system to trial and we migrated some of the apps over to it for evaluation. The results showed that .Net was so much faster than java and the support for multi threaded processes far superior. From a technical point of view we wanted to switch but the university wouldn't let us. Switching to .NET would mean swapping from NT to XP and they just wouldn't meet that level of cost.
.NET to linux it wuld become a viable option but until then I think will only ever be a niche product.
Here at the lab for example we run a lot of mission critical syatems written in Java. Although these systems are ultra reliable they are slow and as such we are severely hampered by the hardware we can afford.
A few months ago we got a
If someone would port
This is just another example of how much better far eastern countries are at bringing up their children than we in America. In Thailand children are made by law to study the ancient martial arts of Judo and Placebo and school dinners consist of healthy national dishes such as sushi which are rich in vitamins and minerals.
Here in America we are lucky if children eat anything other than McDonalds and physical education is almost non existent. Is it any wonder that over 60% of our children are clinically obese and that heart disease and lung cancer now claim 3 times the number of deaths than they did 2 hundred years ago.
I think you'd actually lose your balance as the friction force would act on your feet whereas the drag force would act on your whole body. Anyway at what speed would the two forces be equal?
drag = 0.5*C*A*D*V^2
where:
C is the drag coefficient
A is the cross section area
D is the density of air
V is the velocity
The frictional force will equal FMg
Where:
F is the coefficient of friction between the walkway and the shoes of the person
M is the mass of the person
g is acceleration due to gravity
Anyway using C = 1, A = 1.4m^2, D = 1.3KgM-3, F = 1, M = 70kg the forces will balance at about 23ms-1 or 51mph
One of the major reasons why this technology is limited to small applications can be found in its name and specifically in the word Organic. These things are basically made of of carbon, which because of its higher valency (than silicon) will readilly react with oxygen to form Co2 and give off heat. Consequently these things are likely to catch fire if left anywhere near even a moderate source of heat and could even produce a major problem with regard to global warning as when they are thrown away the carbon dioxide produced will eventually find its way into the ozone layer.
From the article: 'The absence of perpetual motion machines seems to show that no one has succeeded in overcoming the limitations prescribed by Carnot'.
Although it is true that no perpetual motion machines have ever been built the second law of thermodynamics is only a statistical law and so can be broken in very special circumstances. Richard Feynmann once proposed a perpetual motion machine that should work in theory (on a small scale governed by the heisenburg uncertainty principle) even though we do not have the technology needed to make it. It works as follows:
you will need:
a device to turn mass into energy (d1) and a device to turn energy into mass (d2).
Place d1 at a point on the earths surface and d2 at a height above it. Use d1 to turn some mass into photons and shine these photons at d2 where they are turned back into mass. Let the mass fall down to d1 and harvest the kinetic energy released. Repeat ad infinitum.
Now as stated this would only work under a small distance were d1 and d2 were placed very close together so hardly any useful energy could be gotten out of it, but it does show that the 2nd law is not as undeniable as is often thought.
Yes but have you ever used MS office on OSX, it is slow and incredibly buggy (jokes about microsoft aside office on XP is rock solid) and that's with standard hardware and a fast RISC processor to work on, imagine what it would be like under Linux with all sorts of random hardware thrown in there. The real reason they won't port office to Linux however, isn't about speed or reliability but simply because Office on Linux just wouldn't sell. Most Linux users realise that there are good free alternatives like star office and open office which are just as good as Microsoft without needing you pay extortionate prices. Office on Linux would be a commercial nightmare.
Never underestimate the power of commoditization.
I somehow doubt that space shuttles will ever be a commodity.
I find it really hard to believe that MS handed over any Sendo technology to Orange. This is how it works:
Orange is a network operator, it manufactures nothing, not paperclips, not tractors and certainly not smartphones. The phone in question is made by a Taiwanese company called HTC, who make various elctronic gadgets including the Ipaq.
The correct name for this phone is the Canary but it is sold in Europe as the Orange SPV, presumably because most consumers haven't heard of HTC and don't really associate them with quality phones. Microsoft passing Sendo information to Orange would be like Wall Mart receiving information from Intel about how to design better processors.
This could be excellent news for the proseperity of the third world in general and the redution in the digital divide in particular.
At present many third world countries such as Ethiopia, Rhodesia and India have serious problems in that computers are an unobtainable luxery that the ordinary man on the street cannot afford. If we can get free software into these countries then we can alleviate much of the hardware costs associated with running a computer and so make it easier for undeveloped societies to have access to modern technology (ok the hardware costs are still there but how much does a second hand computer cost these days?).
The impact of this cannot be underestimated. If you think how much computers have impacted on your work and how much time/money they save then you will realise why third world countries cannot compete on a level playing field with us Americans. If we can get Linux into these countries we can enable them to make money so they will not be a drain on the ric countries but will instead be able to make money and provide for themselves.
(or several google molecules in the case of ol' Thom's thread)
Asuming you mean a googol (10^100) then I don't think your statement is correct seeing that the number of particles in the universe has been estimated at somewhere between 10^72 and 10^85.
As a side note 10^100 atoms of carbon would weigh around 1.7E74 Kg which would be quite heavy really.
you're right but I think the problem was that in your original comment you used the phrase 'we were the good guys, they were the bad guys' or similar. While I'm sure you don't literally believe this, it would appear that some people think that just because one thing is bad any preferable alternative to it must be good. This logic was recently put into practice in the war against Iraq when war proponents argued that the war was a good thing because life under a new (american approved) administration was far better than life under Saddam. While they were (almost certainly) right that did not necessarily mean that a war was good or even the best option.
This raises an interesting point. why should the state finance the unemployed? At the end of the day most people are unemployed because they don't want to apply for the jobs that are available.
Consider this. I knew someone who was a well paid sysadmin. I don't know what his salary was but it must have been over $500000. Anyway he gets made redundant but he only applies for similar jobs. There are plent of jobs in menial work available but does he try his hardest to get them. Does he hell, he knows he can get his unemployment benefit so he bides his time.
Now unemployment pay is a fairly recent inovation which we've managed to get by without through most of history. The fact is that it puts a terrible strain on the economy ( those in work have less disposable income, those receiving benefit have slightly more but a gret deal gets skimmed off by beaurocracy) and simply encourages laziness.
A better solution would be to set up an institution were those who have little money could live. Theyu could then receive basic needs (water. food, shelter) in return for carrying out menial work. When they had cleared their debts and found a source of employment they would be free to leave. This would discourage those too lazy to find work and reduce the burden on hard working citizens who are currently struggling on the money they get.