*Getting* from the Muslim world to the West was no trivial - or inexpensive - matter before 1971 (an age of expensive air travel - and before that, none at all). So was maintaining communications amongst cells of saboteurs and murderers. And the the vast monetary resources which increased oil prices provided to the Wahabis after 1971 are one of the reasons why Islamic terrorism is feasible at all - plastic explosive ain't cheap.
A lack of modern technology did nothing to stop European Crusaders from bitch-slapping the Muslim world back when travelling meant riding a horse, organising meant yelling across a field, and plastic expolosives were torches soaked in animal fat.
Your historical examples are erudite and worthy of repect, but I can't help pointing out that excepting enslavement and piracy, these are examples of rebellion against colonial powers. You're only arguing that the Muslim world is more apt to organize insurgency around Allah than around a secular leader. As far as slavery and piracy goes, I've got to wonder who the worst offenders were at that time.
If you want to claim that there is something a touch rotten about Islam compared to Judaism and Christianity then frankly I'd agree with you. That doesn't mean I think the Muslim world is actually hell bent for leather on eliminating Infidels on principal and that we've only noticed it just now. The "Clash of Civilizations" is something we could choose to sidestep. Whether we have or not comes down to $$$.
Well point #2 seems obvious enough to me. Remember when Tommy Franks was asked why Saddam didn't strike American forces with WMDs once the invasion was underway? "I think we knocked out his capability."
Wow! Our kung-fu is sooo bad-ass that we can know he had WMDs without being able to prove it to anyone and have such a military grip on their use that not one soldier ended up actually needing a gas mask even though we haven't been able to find anything on the ground.
As far as the bluffing thing goes, there may be some truth in there somewhere, but I think pride may have a lot more to do with the way events played out before the invasion began. I don't recall Saddam ever claiming that he did have WMDs. The most damning thing we can say is that there was only so much he would take to establish credibility -- and that threshold wasn't low enough to nullify the spin of American hawks. As he's said of the inspectors now that he's in custody, he didn't want them in the Presidential Palaces. That may sound strange to us considering that war was on the line, but keep in mind that this guy was a brutal dictator in a country that had already been defeated by Americans and that Iraq is in a part of the world that the West has been screwing with since World War One. If letting Arabs inspect the Lincon Bedroom, the Oval Office, and the White House would prevent another 9/11 would GW give the OK? If he did would he get re-elected? I wouldn't want that happening even though I'm going to vote against him. In fact, I wouldn't want that happening even though I'd consider it a trifle compared to the lives saved.
No you didn't just feed a troll. You simply missed the point entirely. Prepare to have your home invaded. I won't feel safe knowing that you might be able to make a WMD if you feel inclined and then think about maybe using it against me.
If it really were as simple as you claim Islamic terrorism directed at the West would have been a problem long before 1971 or so. I don't think the Koran has gone through any revisions recently.
if you really think they are really a figment of someone's imagination i suggest you ask the kurds. to postulate, even for a moment, that he never had them, or they never existed, puts you at the extreme fringe of people.
That is like marginalizing someone who claims the Germans don't have any gas chambers. They did. Then we kicked their asses. They don't have them anymore.
Keep in mind when you talk about Hussein's armament that we bombed the shit out of him during the Gulf War, subjected his retreating Republican Guard to a fish-in-a-barrel type of decimation, and then kept him in check throughout the Clinton administration with "no-fly" zones and occasional shellings. Yes, he kicked out the inspectors, but he also stood up on the world stage right after 9/11 to say, "Whoa, Dudes... It wasn't us!" His desire to maintain a hold on what he had left trumped the most basic standards of public dignity. In other words, he nearly begged to spared from another thrashing. Stalinesque dictators with big guns just don't behave like that when dealing with the outside world.
if/when he talks, lots of people are gonna fry. and that scares the shit out of the germans, french, and russians. where you think lots of his weapons came from?
What's he going to say? That he he got his WMDs from the West? We already knew that, and pointing the finger at France, Germany, or Russia will do nothing but prompt them to remind us that we gave him WMDs to use against Iranians. Should he say -- as he already has -- that he didn't have any WMDs? Again, we already knew that -- just as you really know that.
whether we find them or not, is actually irrelevant.
No it isn't. We've just shown the world that we're willing to throw a punch without being able to prove beforehand that it's justified. At first we just looked like assholes. Now, we look like liars.
if we do, you, or dean, or martin sheen, tim sarandon, the dixie chicks etc., gonna say the war was justified?
Why would that make any difference? He didn't even invade Israel let alone Hawaii.
he was a real threat.
He was a threat to Iran, Kuwait, and, on a smaller scale, Israel before we decided he was too big for his britches. Then he was just a threat to Iraqis. This guy couldn't even be called a Paper Tiger because he wasn't roaring.
He's not talking out his ass at all. Rumsfeld worked with the Reagan and Bush I administrations as a special envoy to Hussein back when we were propping him up in the Iraq-Iran war. Part of that deal involved suppling him with the chemical weapons he used to gas 20,000+ Iranians and a few thousand Kurds. This is old news that was vetted back '90. We've been seriously fucking with that part of the world since '45. Given that the Bush administration went on the defensive months ago over the apparent lack of WMDs I've got to wonder where all the armchair hawks have been getting their news.
Sony-Ericsson has come out with the T-630 which is supposed to address complaints with the screen on the T-610/616. It should be hitting the market anytime.
You don't get it. The problem with the Shuttle isn't that it doesn't run on Dilithium Crystals and sport a Transporter. It's that it's a big waste of time, money, and resources. Outside of looking good on the cover of Popular Science back in the '70 and providing a secure source of pork barrel spending for a few congressmen it does nothing that couldn't be done better by giant versions of that Estes rocket. We went to the Moon on tech that is 40 years old yet still insist on supporting the Pinto of space travel just so we can see someone weightless in a jump suit babysit spider web experiments.
I would love to hear an example of something that only a Shuttle-type vehicle could do, but I've yet to have that kind of luck. Delivering Hubble is the only thing the Shuttle has done -- outside of blow up -- that has caught my attention and that could have been done with conventional rockets. Quite frankly, I think if we were to eliminate astronauts from the program Science and Technology would be better served by NASA.
If necessity is the mother of invention then we'll figure out how to live on Mars (or what-have-you) when we need to. Until then pandering to some hypothetical need to "live" in space is a pathetic cop out -- as if to say, "We don't need to make this planet work." Honestly now, this desire to see Humans living in space is like some bizzare cult religion complete with its own apocolyptic Day of Reckoning.
I agree with you and kippy. This thing is a dangerous, useless sinkhole for cash and lives that should be replaced with the tech that wasn't broken back when the Shuttle arrived to fix it.
I'm not even convinced the manned vehicle should be "reusable".
I'm not even convinced the vehicle should be manned.
Flying in the Shuttle isn't very safe either. It's also very expensive and doesn't do anything that couldn't be done with plain ol' fashioned rockets. How many retrofits to the Spruce Goose of LEO are we going to make before we muster the guts to stop throwing good money after bad?
I don't think I get better software when developers worry more about ideology and personal spite than implementing new ideas with good code.
Where have you been? The negative development environment you've described has plagued XFree86 for quite a while. Frankly, that Xouvert has (unofficially) postured itself as an unstable/development branch of XFree86 rather than a flat out fork shows restraint and character to me.
Quickly now Slashdot, name one XFree86 developer off the top of your head besides Keith Packard. Remember how the author of XRender lost commit privileges? Recall the ATI written driver patches that have lain dormant in a maintainers inbox? Remember how the cygwin maintainer was browbeaten off the mailing list for wanting cvs commit access? Didn't Wexelblat say he had been working in the Windows world for years and claim the client-server architecture should be scrapped? Alan Cox himself said that, "XFree86 is hard to get involved with usefully, [and] resistant to cool ideas." He describes XFree86's advance as "plodding progress."
If you want what you claim to want you should consider appreciating Xouvert. It's there because XFree86 suffers from the very problems you've sketched.
Why do the record companies hate this so much? Because the underlings have undermined their authority.
What are you talking about? They don't have any "authority" in the traditional sense of the word beyond putting cds on retail shelves. And "underlings"? Do you think Shawn Fanning hasn't been vacationing in Barbados for the past few years? To me, an "underling" isn't someone who can write academic studies of network topology.
Think all the way back, changes in the recording industry, all the way to Thomas Edison, have resulted because a few people with a lot of money made changes. Magnetic Reel to Vinyl, Vinyl to Cassette, Cassette to CD (With the bastard child DAT in there somewhere), these changes all came about as a result of music industry exectives decreeing it.
What exactly is your point here? Are you saying that we would be better off listening to music imprinted on foil wrapped around a toilet paper roll so long as the tech was promoted by someone who couldn't afford to buy a suit? I'm really not sure what you're complaining about, but if it is limited to the media of distribution I can't help but note that I prefer cds to every medium that came before it -- including vinyl.
They hate downloading music because they didn't come up with it first.
Let me be blunt. They don't give a flying fuck about who came up with anything first at all. They care about their financial bottom line. Period.
It's superior to their physical distribution mechanisms...
No it isn't. CDs are relatively permanent, highly portable, easy to store, easy to find, recyclable at used record stores, sound better, and don't involve the consumer in a purile "moral" debate that would make Thomas Aquinas throw up his hands in exasperation.
... It takes... normal people like Jobs to put them in their place. I think it says alot about the music industry when Steve Jobs becomes the straight man.
I think you were joking about Jobs being "normal", but -- just in case -- I'd like to assert that normal people aren't self-made multi-millionares before age 25. As far as what iTunes says about the music industry I've got to note that the industry has already been trying it's own versions of iTunes for some time now, and that, again, I'm really not sure what you mean.
Count me in then. I remember reading his site back when I got my first burner. He's got (had?) a chart outlining his opinion of varied *nix SCSI implementations. IIRC, Solaris and BSD came out pretty good and Linux was roundly trashed. Yet there were no reasons offered for his remarkably low opinion. When I say "remarkably" I mean that Linux failed in a class of B+ to A students (according to him). I know nothing about comparative SCSI transort layers so I assume he could be correct, but I have never found any technical clue as to what inspires his distaste.
I don't think anyone was placing blame here. I agree that Nvidia has no obligation to the open source community. I think their Linux drivers work very well and appreciate the fact that they've made them available. That doesn't mean an open driver wouldn't make their hardware more useful to more people -- like pe1rxq for example. I apologise for my rather loud-mouthed initial response. I was annoyed because it seemed you were either talking at cross-purposes for the sake of an argument that doesn't exist, or didn't know the difference between a binary and code but felt the need to lay a little smack-down anyway.
Well, it's not like Quartz did that much for OS X's sluggish rendering since the only thing they tapped involved compositing windows for "genie" effects and it's not like the very notion of accelerating 2D rendering operations by going through OpenGL's API was done by Apple first. Regardless of who thought of it, it was possible in the *nix/XFree86 environment with evas over 2-1/2 years ago. Apple hasn't shown anyone what to do in this regard. Please understand that I'm not saying Apple sucks -- only that Quartz Extreme didn't make treating a desktop like a pdf file (a la mozilla's html GUI) any more bearable and that even if they locked themselves into a drawing pipeline that made Quartz Extreme necessary they didn't really put the concept to use in an effective way and didn't actually do it first.
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A lack of modern technology did nothing to stop European Crusaders from bitch-slapping the Muslim world back when travelling meant riding a horse, organising meant yelling across a field, and plastic expolosives were torches soaked in animal fat.
Your historical examples are erudite and worthy of repect, but I can't help pointing out that excepting enslavement and piracy, these are examples of rebellion against colonial powers. You're only arguing that the Muslim world is more apt to organize insurgency around Allah than around a secular leader. As far as slavery and piracy goes, I've got to wonder who the worst offenders were at that time.
If you want to claim that there is something a touch rotten about Islam compared to Judaism and Christianity then frankly I'd agree with you. That doesn't mean I think the Muslim world is actually hell bent for leather on eliminating Infidels on principal and that we've only noticed it just now. The "Clash of Civilizations" is something we could choose to sidestep. Whether we have or not comes down to $$$.
Wow! Our kung-fu is sooo bad-ass that we can know he had WMDs without being able to prove it to anyone and have such a military grip on their use that not one soldier ended up actually needing a gas mask even though we haven't been able to find anything on the ground.
As far as the bluffing thing goes, there may be some truth in there somewhere, but I think pride may have a lot more to do with the way events played out before the invasion began. I don't recall Saddam ever claiming that he did have WMDs. The most damning thing we can say is that there was only so much he would take to establish credibility -- and that threshold wasn't low enough to nullify the spin of American hawks. As he's said of the inspectors now that he's in custody, he didn't want them in the Presidential Palaces. That may sound strange to us considering that war was on the line, but keep in mind that this guy was a brutal dictator in a country that had already been defeated by Americans and that Iraq is in a part of the world that the West has been screwing with since World War One. If letting Arabs inspect the Lincon Bedroom, the Oval Office, and the White House would prevent another 9/11 would GW give the OK? If he did would he get re-elected? I wouldn't want that happening even though I'm going to vote against him. In fact, I wouldn't want that happening even though I'd consider it a trifle compared to the lives saved.
No you didn't just feed a troll. You simply missed the point entirely. Prepare to have your home invaded. I won't feel safe knowing that you might be able to make a WMD if you feel inclined and then think about maybe using it against me.
If it really were as simple as you claim Islamic terrorism directed at the West would have been a problem long before 1971 or so. I don't think the Koran has gone through any revisions recently.
That is like marginalizing someone who claims the Germans don't have any gas chambers. They did. Then we kicked their asses. They don't have them anymore.
Keep in mind when you talk about Hussein's armament that we bombed the shit out of him during the Gulf War, subjected his retreating Republican Guard to a fish-in-a-barrel type of decimation, and then kept him in check throughout the Clinton administration with "no-fly" zones and occasional shellings. Yes, he kicked out the inspectors, but he also stood up on the world stage right after 9/11 to say, "Whoa, Dudes... It wasn't us!" His desire to maintain a hold on what he had left trumped the most basic standards of public dignity. In other words, he nearly begged to spared from another thrashing. Stalinesque dictators with big guns just don't behave like that when dealing with the outside world.
if/when he talks, lots of people are gonna fry. and that scares the shit out of the germans, french, and russians. where you think lots of his weapons came from?
What's he going to say? That he he got his WMDs from the West? We already knew that, and pointing the finger at France, Germany, or Russia will do nothing but prompt them to remind us that we gave him WMDs to use against Iranians. Should he say -- as he already has -- that he didn't have any WMDs? Again, we already knew that -- just as you really know that.
whether we find them or not, is actually irrelevant.
No it isn't. We've just shown the world that we're willing to throw a punch without being able to prove beforehand that it's justified. At first we just looked like assholes. Now, we look like liars.
if we do, you, or dean, or martin sheen, tim sarandon, the dixie chicks etc., gonna say the war was justified?
Why would that make any difference? He didn't even invade Israel let alone Hawaii.
he was a real threat.
He was a threat to Iran, Kuwait, and, on a smaller scale, Israel before we decided he was too big for his britches. Then he was just a threat to Iraqis. This guy couldn't even be called a Paper Tiger because he wasn't roaring.
He's not talking out his ass at all. Rumsfeld worked with the Reagan and Bush I administrations as a special envoy to Hussein back when we were propping him up in the Iraq-Iran war. Part of that deal involved suppling him with the chemical weapons he used to gas 20,000+ Iranians and a few thousand Kurds. This is old news that was vetted back '90. We've been seriously fucking with that part of the world since '45. Given that the Bush administration went on the defensive months ago over the apparent lack of WMDs I've got to wonder where all the armchair hawks have been getting their news.
You just proved my point.
Sony-Ericsson has come out with the T-630 which is supposed to address complaints with the screen on the T-610/616. It should be hitting the market anytime.
I would love to hear an example of something that only a Shuttle-type vehicle could do, but I've yet to have that kind of luck. Delivering Hubble is the only thing the Shuttle has done -- outside of blow up -- that has caught my attention and that could have been done with conventional rockets. Quite frankly, I think if we were to eliminate astronauts from the program Science and Technology would be better served by NASA.
If necessity is the mother of invention then we'll figure out how to live on Mars (or what-have-you) when we need to. Until then pandering to some hypothetical need to "live" in space is a pathetic cop out -- as if to say, "We don't need to make this planet work." Honestly now, this desire to see Humans living in space is like some bizzare cult religion complete with its own apocolyptic Day of Reckoning.
I'm not even convinced the manned vehicle should be "reusable".
I'm not even convinced the vehicle should be manned.
Flying in the Shuttle isn't very safe either. It's also very expensive and doesn't do anything that couldn't be done with plain ol' fashioned rockets. How many retrofits to the Spruce Goose of LEO are we going to make before we muster the guts to stop throwing good money after bad?
What is backscatter?
He's got nothing on Dick Cheney.
What is the punishment for not showing up at the polls?
Where have you been? The negative development environment you've described has plagued XFree86 for quite a while. Frankly, that Xouvert has (unofficially) postured itself as an unstable/development branch of XFree86 rather than a flat out fork shows restraint and character to me.
Quickly now Slashdot, name one XFree86 developer off the top of your head besides Keith Packard. Remember how the author of XRender lost commit privileges? Recall the ATI written driver patches that have lain dormant in a maintainers inbox? Remember how the cygwin maintainer was browbeaten off the mailing list for wanting cvs commit access? Didn't Wexelblat say he had been working in the Windows world for years and claim the client-server architecture should be scrapped? Alan Cox himself said that, "XFree86 is hard to get involved with usefully, [and] resistant to cool ideas." He describes XFree86's advance as "plodding progress."
If you want what you claim to want you should consider appreciating Xouvert. It's there because XFree86 suffers from the very problems you've sketched.
You mean, like, wrapped around a comb? And then ya hum into it like a harmonica? Oooh! That's fun!
What are you talking about? They don't have any "authority" in the traditional sense of the word beyond putting cds on retail shelves. And "underlings"? Do you think Shawn Fanning hasn't been vacationing in Barbados for the past few years? To me, an "underling" isn't someone who can write academic studies of network topology.
Think all the way back, changes in the recording industry, all the way to Thomas Edison, have resulted because a few people with a lot of money made changes. Magnetic Reel to Vinyl, Vinyl to Cassette, Cassette to CD (With the bastard child DAT in there somewhere), these changes all came about as a result of music industry exectives decreeing it.
What exactly is your point here? Are you saying that we would be better off listening to music imprinted on foil wrapped around a toilet paper roll so long as the tech was promoted by someone who couldn't afford to buy a suit? I'm really not sure what you're complaining about, but if it is limited to the media of distribution I can't help but note that I prefer cds to every medium that came before it -- including vinyl.
They hate downloading music because they didn't come up with it first.
Let me be blunt. They don't give a flying fuck about who came up with anything first at all. They care about their financial bottom line. Period.
It's superior to their physical distribution mechanisms...
No it isn't. CDs are relatively permanent, highly portable, easy to store, easy to find, recyclable at used record stores, sound better, and don't involve the consumer in a purile "moral" debate that would make Thomas Aquinas throw up his hands in exasperation.
I think you were joking about Jobs being "normal", but -- just in case -- I'd like to assert that normal people aren't self-made multi-millionares before age 25. As far as what iTunes says about the music industry I've got to note that the industry has already been trying it's own versions of iTunes for some time now, and that, again, I'm really not sure what you mean.
Supposedly it will also allow dalutong to call his usb devices "camera" and "external_drive" (or whatever he wants). Very cool stuff.
Count me in then. I remember reading his site back when I got my first burner. He's got (had?) a chart outlining his opinion of varied *nix SCSI implementations. IIRC, Solaris and BSD came out pretty good and Linux was roundly trashed. Yet there were no reasons offered for his remarkably low opinion. When I say "remarkably" I mean that Linux failed in a class of B+ to A students (according to him). I know nothing about comparative SCSI transort layers so I assume he could be correct, but I have never found any technical clue as to what inspires his distaste.
[smartass] So that'll come in handy for hex editing. [/smartass]
You could always use a guitar or a piano...
Ahh, mea culpa. Pixel shader AA sounds very cool. I'll listen more and talk less... maybe.
I don't think anyone was placing blame here. I agree that Nvidia has no obligation to the open source community. I think their Linux drivers work very well and appreciate the fact that they've made them available. That doesn't mean an open driver wouldn't make their hardware more useful to more people -- like pe1rxq for example. I apologise for my rather loud-mouthed initial response. I was annoyed because it seemed you were either talking at cross-purposes for the sake of an argument that doesn't exist, or didn't know the difference between a binary and code but felt the need to lay a little smack-down anyway.
Well, it's not like Quartz did that much for OS X's sluggish rendering since the only thing they tapped involved compositing windows for "genie" effects and it's not like the very notion of accelerating 2D rendering operations by going through OpenGL's API was done by Apple first. Regardless of who thought of it, it was possible in the *nix/XFree86 environment with evas over 2-1/2 years ago. Apple hasn't shown anyone what to do in this regard. Please understand that I'm not saying Apple sucks -- only that Quartz Extreme didn't make treating a desktop like a pdf file (a la mozilla's html GUI) any more bearable and that even if they locked themselves into a drawing pipeline that made Quartz Extreme necessary they didn't really put the concept to use in an effective way and didn't actually do it first.