I guess this makes sense considering iPod and iTunes store are probably their main business. Does anyone think they might get out of the PC hardware business eventually (ie in 5-10 years) if it isn't as finacially lucrative as making mobile devices? I know they said they are selling a lot more macs to switchers (yeah I'm one of them..) but if sales eventually stagnate could anyone see them eventually dropping their desktop line and open sourcing OS X as a final kick in the nuts to microsoft?
Maybe I'm reading a bit much into the name change.;)
I'm not familiar with the data plans, is that for unlimited usage, or do they try to charge you per minute? I haven't looked at internet plans via cell phone for awhile because the last time I looked they were total rip offs.
The two OS probably have as much as common as say, Windows XP and Windows Mobile
Yeah, I'm a bit skeptical of a full OS X install running on that thing. It would be pretty cool if you could get some type of desktop and actually write apps for the iPhone on the iPhone. I'm probably the only one in the world who would want a feature like that.:P
Also, for an 'all in one' type device, there is one thing it's missing. Games! I'm not sure what kind of games could work well on a touch screen outside of puzzle/card games, but hopefully there will be a few that run on there.
that assumes they want to find us, or even find us worthy of contact. They may have found us already, reported back to their homeworld, and decided we're not worth their time to look at, maybe we're too far, (could take them a long time to get here) could be we don't (didn't) have a sufficiently advanced civlization. And heck if the probe took 250,000 years to find us, who's to say that the originating civilization hasn't given up, or disappeared, died out, sun went nova? who knows. and if it takes 500,000 years to search the galaxy, well, human civilization hasn't been around for nearly that long, we could have been one fo the first looked at 500,000 years ago, and found to be inhabited by all kinds of animals.
The other thing funny about assuming things about our hypothetical aliens is that we assume they have our same lifespan. While 250,000 years is a long time to us, maybe it's only a few generations to them? Or maybe it's much longer to them and they have lifespans of only 10 years....It's just impossible to know these things, but it's fun to speculate.
30 light-years, which would encompass approximately 1,000 stars.
I guess it depends on how abundant life is, but this doesn't seem like it is very far/much in the grand scheme of things.
Even if an advanced civilization is out there, what makes us think they would be using radio? It's possible, but I could see FM radio being obsolete 100 years from now. I know the article mentions radar too, but it seems like a lot to assume...that advance life evolved, and is around the same time in techonological progress than we are and uses the same type of technology. Given the massive distances between stars, astronomical mass extinction theories, and the time evolution takes, aren't the odds of two technically advanced civilizations being around at the same time...umm astronomical?:)
To take it a step further: I remember the Chaivo case a while back where a lady was determined to be brain dead. Her husband was allowed to pull the plug on her, not because she had no brain activity, but because she would never again have any brain activity. You can't say the same of an embryo.
Her husband was allowed to pull the plug on her because he stated that was her wish, and she had made it known to him. An unborn child doesn't have the same kind of choice.
While I think abortion is bad public policy (check out the birthrates of countries with legalized abortion), if it's going to be legal you might as well harvest whatever you can from the child's dead body...at least some good can come of the bad.
Now when Blizzard tells you they have 6 million users, you know it's true
I'm sure Blizzard has around 6 million users, but a lot of people own more than one account so they can play both factions on a PvP server so their numbers might not be spot on either.
This comment in particular is at the core of many problems in development. Anyone who thinks that they are the target audience doesn't have the humility to gather requirements that reflect actual use. Instead they build for the user in the mirror, and end up with crap.
Pretty much any developer is going to get a requirements list from users. My point is that software developers do actually use software and have an idea of what to put in even if it's not on a requirements sheet...like a warning before deleting your work.
Bottom line - Platt is full of it, but developers can do better at understanding user experience, and giving someone ownership of user experience on the product team. Joel Spolsky, the Rails folks, and many others are doing a great job of this, and more constructive than Platt.
I read joel on software along with checking out stuff from other sites. I agree he's a lot better than Platt.
Really, it just looks like this guy wanted to write something controversial to sell books. Lets look at some stuff from the article:
Retired microbiologist Diana Westmoreland is no stranger to technology -- except when it comes to computers.
"The programs are intimidating. The language that's used is a foreign one to me," said Westmoreland, who lives near Cardiff, Wales. "I'm the sort of person who, when something crashes, apologizes to the screen."
Well I'm sorry Diana...but is this any different than other technology in your life? Do you apologize to your toaster when it burns your toast? Do you apologize to cable provider if your cable goes out? I think you are a bit too sensitive there Diana.
The problem, says consultant David Platt, lies not with the user but with the programmers, who just don't think like the people who use their products.
That is funny, since most programmers are users too. If they don't use their own software, they use other peoples software.
One of his peeves is when a text-editing program like Microsoft Word asks users if they want to save their work before they close their document.
That question makes little sense to computer novices accustomed to working with typewriters or pen and paper, he said. For them, a clearer question would be: "Throw away everything you've just done?"
'Save' is pretty universally understood. Does this guy think that a toaster manual should talk about 'cooking' bread because 'toasting' bread is too hard for users to comprehend?
Boxes that ask users to confirm whether they want to take a step such as deleting a document are another example of what he calls a bad feature.
"Your car does not ask, 'Do you really want to start the engine?' when you turn the key," Platt said.
Those that can do, those that can't teach. Really, if you've ever worked as a developer and left a 'do you really want to delete this' message out of one of your programs, I'm sure you know what kind of trouble you can get into, even if you have savvy users.
The confirmation box has become so overused that no one pays any attention to it, even when it's warning about a document that should be kept, he said.
Confirmation boxes are overused on the web, but if your in a desktop program they usually aren't.
Error messages represent software communication at its worst, Platt said. In his book, he recounts how after trying to save a Web page from his Internet browser, he received a message that said it couldn't be done and gave him no other recourse but to hit the OK button.
"No, it is not OK with me that this operation didn't work and the program can't explain why," he wrote.
And if it spit out "ORACLE ERROR 666: Primary Key is already in use' you would whine that the error message is to technical, plus the programmer would be giving away information to potential hackers/script kiddies.
Platt, who has also written nine books for computer professionals, has a message for software developers: "Your. User. Is. Not. You."
People who write software programs value control. The user, on the other hand, just wants something that's easy to operate.
To illustrate his point, he notes that computer programmers tend to prefer manual transmissions. But not even 15 percent of the cars sold in the United States last year had that feature.
What percentage of computer programmers prefer manual transmissions? When comparing them to the general public, did you control for gender and race? Men tend to like manual transmissions, and they also tend to be overrepresented in the programming field. I can think of plenty of other variations that make this statistic suspect.
Similarly, many software programs come with functions -- like the ability to move the menu bar -- that the average person does not want or need. Programing instructions required for such features, Platt said, "increase the possibility of crashin
The funny thing to me is, the PHB's never calculate the employee downtime into the picture. For example, sure maybe you can save yourself a $40,000 tech if you are running macs and you have less problems, but they don't take into account the $100,000 of lost sales when the sales team can't work because their PC shit itself.
Second, prior to the invasion, Iraq was set to convert their oil exchange from dollars to Euros which would have had a pretty severe impact on the value of the dollar and hence the US economy.
If this was a large factor, expect an attack on Iran soon. Iran is changing over to the euro.
the whole bush went to war because of oil thing is obviously (to anybody who has half a clue?) bull shit.. Let me know when the extra oil starts rolling in I'm looking forward to the day because then atleast we could fucking say we got SOMETHING out of the deal.. Don't you think?!
You shouldn't get into the line of thinking that anyone who agrees with you 'has a clue' and anyone who doesn't must be clueless.
Anyway, the Iraq war was about more than just oil. It was mostly about the neoconservative/PNAC foreign policy. They tried to pressure Clinton into fighting a war against Iraq too. It's about more than just oil, it's about American military dominance, and the safety of Israel. After 9/11 these people basically converted Bush, who came into office with little to no foreign policy. Of course, now they all blame Bush for what happened, even though they claimed before the war that Iraq would be a cakewalk, and they pushed for it even before Bush was in office.
Leopard may have some built-in P2P functionality, allowing Apple to do BitTorrent-like distribution of movies from the iTunes Store. You could earn credit by being a seed.
I wonder what the ISP's would think of that. I know comcast has something in their ToS about not reselling bandwidth...I wonder if this would qualify?
I mean, hell, the mainstream industry companies have a hard enough time finding talent that can act and not be offensive to the eye. How are people on ultra-tight budgets supposed to do so?
They aren't. What they can do is focus on niche markets with their low budgets that the big guys can't hit.
We still don't have a motive for the crime -- Nixon was leading in the polls at the time of the break-in. Some suggest the motive might have been to steal the evidence that Nixon and George H.W. Bush were involved in the JFK assassination.
So the democrats had this, and just didn't release it...and they never mentioned it publically afterwords? Please, those kinds of theories are put forward just by authors looking to sell books to marks. They broke in to place wiretaps to see what the democrats were up to. Sure Nixon was leading in the polls, but does a thief stop stealing just because he has money?
When Ford pardoned Nixon, it did not get the messiness behind us, it just pushed it all in front of us by a few decades. The end of the 20th Century needed to see a crooked American president dragged before a court and sent to jail. If it had been done back then, we might not be seeing the kind of lawlessness we're getting from Jackass 2 in the White House today.
Really, and what "Lawlessness" is that, and how does it relate to what Nixon did? Are you acusing GW Bush of rigging the elections, and if so what happened this last time around? While some may question the "Domestic Surveillance" program, it is surely done for different reasons than Nixon's goons breaking and entering to try to get an upper hand in an election.
Instead, we came to a near constitutional crisis because a President cheated on his wife. It gave a free pass to presidents for generations to come.
Uhhh, no there wasn't anything near a 'constitutional crisis'. Also, Clinton wasn't impeached for "Cheating on his wife", it was for grand jury perjury, civil suit perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. All of these fall under 'High Crimes and Misdemeanors". While Clinton did obviously commit perjury, I personally am happy he wasn't impeached for it since it didn't really harm the country in any way.
Face it, when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, the only Americans he was sparing were the pissant Republicans that were hanging on by their fingernails anyway back then, and the paranoid, drug-addled fuck that had vacated the White House months before (see, history repeats itself!). He was doing the sleazebag political version of "Paying it Forward".
Or maybe he was just trying to do the right thing for the country? I do hope both parties get over the desire to impeach one anothers presidents for partisan discord.
Has it occurred to you that those killings are aimed at destabilizing the Russian government.
At destabilizing the Russian government? No, that is a new one. I have read articles which state the opinion that Putin is being framed. I don't really buy into that.
At making that government look evil.
To what end? Russia is getting into the WTO, and the US surely isn't going to do anything about a few Russia journalists and dissenters getting knocked off. Hell, Bush probably envies Putin for doing it.
I mean, what government agent/agency would use several million dollars worth of pollonium just to knock out one guy?
One that is trying to send a message to people who critize it. The same message that was sent with the slaying of Anna Politkovskaya, but louder. One that clearly says "It doesn't matter where in the world you are, if you fuck with us we will kill you and it will be painful".
Heck, they'd probably sell it on the black market for a bundle and use something cheaper.
Selling it on the black market to who? If they turn around and sell it to the wrong people and it's used against the west, it would end in nuclear war. The risk simply wouldn't be worth the reward.
The money just isn't there. Money is in the hands of Boris Berezovsky and similar. The motivation isn't there either,
Russia's GDP is about 1.5 trillion. Berezovsky is worth about a billion? The money is there.
why knock these people out at all? It isn't like they were denting the government's popularity, they weren't even scratching it.
I believe they were claiming they had proof the FSB faked a terrorist attack in Chechneya to validate some military action there.
[quote]I figure, with elections are only a couple of years away, the oligarchs don't want Putin's nominee beating one of their own.[/quote]
Maybe, but what is more likely? That Berezovsky somehow stole the Nuclear material and managed to use it on Litvinenko, or that the FSB did it under the orders of Putin? If Berezovsky hates Putin so much, why kill his detractors? Killing them surely hasn't turned the Russia people against Putin. A lot of articles I read claim that many Russians see Politkovskaya as a traitor anyway.
We've obviously been doing better than Russia and most or all of the other former Soviet republics, and capitalism clearly triumphed over communism, but when it comes to personal freedoms, we're doing to ourselves what we feared the Soviets would do to us. Did we really come out on top?
You don't see things like that happening over here. When Keith Oberman is gunned down for criticizing the government, then you can start comparing America to modern day Russia. Americans today don't face anywhere near the type of oppression that people did in Soviet Russia. While outlandish statements like that may earn you mod points here on slashdot, or replies on other fourms, they don't add to meaningful discussion.
A better question in my opinion would be, what would our founding fathers think of such government actions if they were alive today?
Or perhaps you are. Let me pick apart the major points of your short troll:
1. How exactly do you know they aren't terrorists? Could is be that you just assume the government is wrong because you dislike their policies? Here in the USA, we used to believe in our country, I guess you don't.
2. Torture, depending on what methods is a reliable way of getting Intel, despite what your left wing friends tell you. If you can tear yourself away from your friends reenforcing your opinion, google up the CIA book on how to effectively interrogate people from back in the 80's and you will see what techniques work and which ones don't. It basically involves mindfucking your prisoner into believing they are torturing themselves, and it's very effective. I could also point you at various techniques the police use on local levels successfully, but I'm sure you don't want to see anything other than what your worldview will support.
While I doubt this insight will do you any good, I hope some of the brighter people on slashdot will go out and read up about this stuff from places other than the Daily Kos and such. There are intelligent arguements against our foreign policy, specifically in Iraq. Making up propaganda like 'TORTURE DOESNT WORK!!!" flies in the face of a lot of evidence to the contrary, and waters down the real debate that should be going on in America, about when our armed forces should be used.
There are effective interrogation techniques that work, and yes the US military uses them.
Did they ever get Multiplayer working with SiN episodes? I pretty much played the original SiN just for the multiplayer, and I was waiting for episodes to have multiplayer support before I would buy it.
The original sin multiplayer, and the expansion pack wages of sin were a great deal of fun. There were a boatload of weapons, like remote controlled rockets and mines, an ion cannon, the standard BFG like nuke gun, and speeder bikes!
World of Warcraft will be long gone by 2010. They would be lucky to have 250,000 subscribers at that point. We've seen 'big name' MMO's fail before, such as star wars galaxies. I'm hoping fallout online will be a hit, I've played it all the way back to wasteland on the Apple2c.
Slashdot Mirror
If so, that little sucker better have at least 1 GB of ram.
I guess this makes sense considering iPod and iTunes store are probably their main business. Does anyone think they might get out of the PC hardware business eventually (ie in 5-10 years) if it isn't as finacially lucrative as making mobile devices? I know they said they are selling a lot more macs to switchers (yeah I'm one of them..) but if sales eventually stagnate could anyone see them eventually dropping their desktop line and open sourcing OS X as a final kick in the nuts to microsoft?
;)
Maybe I'm reading a bit much into the name change.
40 for data
I'm not familiar with the data plans, is that for unlimited usage, or do they try to charge you per minute? I haven't looked at internet plans via cell phone for awhile because the last time I looked they were total rip offs.
The two OS probably have as much as common as say, Windows XP and Windows Mobile
:P
Yeah, I'm a bit skeptical of a full OS X install running on that thing. It would be pretty cool if you could get some type of desktop and actually write apps for the iPhone on the iPhone. I'm probably the only one in the world who would want a feature like that.
Also, for an 'all in one' type device, there is one thing it's missing. Games! I'm not sure what kind of games could work well on a touch screen outside of puzzle/card games, but hopefully there will be a few that run on there.
But what if it comes in Brown?
If it's brown, flush it.
that assumes they want to find us, or even find us worthy of contact. They may have found us already, reported back to their homeworld, and decided we're not worth their time to look at, maybe we're too far, (could take them a long time to get here) could be we don't (didn't) have a sufficiently advanced civlization. And heck if the probe took 250,000 years to find us, who's to say that the originating civilization hasn't given up, or disappeared, died out, sun went nova? who knows. and if it takes 500,000 years to search the galaxy, well, human civilization hasn't been around for nearly that long, we could have been one fo the first looked at 500,000 years ago, and found to be inhabited by all kinds of animals.
The other thing funny about assuming things about our hypothetical aliens is that we assume they have our same lifespan. While 250,000 years is a long time to us, maybe it's only a few generations to them? Or maybe it's much longer to them and they have lifespans of only 10 years....It's just impossible to know these things, but it's fun to speculate.
30 light-years, which would encompass approximately 1,000 stars.
:)
I guess it depends on how abundant life is, but this doesn't seem like it is very far/much in the grand scheme of things.
Even if an advanced civilization is out there, what makes us think they would be using radio? It's possible, but I could see FM radio being obsolete 100 years from now. I know the article mentions radar too, but it seems like a lot to assume...that advance life evolved, and is around the same time in techonological progress than we are and uses the same type of technology. Given the massive distances between stars, astronomical mass extinction theories, and the time evolution takes, aren't the odds of two technically advanced civilizations being around at the same time...umm astronomical?
George Lucas wouldn't lie to me! Don't give me your wikipedia propaganda, I will be a Jedi!
To take it a step further: I remember the Chaivo case a while back where a lady was determined to be brain dead. Her husband was allowed to pull the plug on her, not because she had no brain activity, but because she would never again have any brain activity. You can't say the same of an embryo.
Her husband was allowed to pull the plug on her because he stated that was her wish, and she had made it known to him. An unborn child doesn't have the same kind of choice.
While I think abortion is bad public policy (check out the birthrates of countries with legalized abortion), if it's going to be legal you might as well harvest whatever you can from the child's dead body...at least some good can come of the bad.
Now when Blizzard tells you they have 6 million users, you know it's true
I'm sure Blizzard has around 6 million users, but a lot of people own more than one account so they can play both factions on a PvP server so their numbers might not be spot on either.
which still newer organisms were able to utilize through their mitochondria.
Humans have evolved into Jedi?
This comment in particular is at the core of many problems in development. Anyone who thinks that they are the target audience doesn't have the humility to gather requirements that reflect actual use. Instead they build for the user in the mirror, and end up with crap.
Pretty much any developer is going to get a requirements list from users. My point is that software developers do actually use software and have an idea of what to put in even if it's not on a requirements sheet...like a warning before deleting your work.
Bottom line - Platt is full of it, but developers can do better at understanding user experience, and giving someone ownership of user experience on the product team. Joel Spolsky, the Rails folks, and many others are doing a great job of this, and more constructive than Platt.
I read joel on software along with checking out stuff from other sites. I agree he's a lot better than Platt.
Really, it just looks like this guy wanted to write something controversial to sell books. Lets look at some stuff from the article:
Retired microbiologist Diana Westmoreland is no stranger to technology -- except when it comes to computers. "The programs are intimidating. The language that's used is a foreign one to me," said Westmoreland, who lives near Cardiff, Wales. "I'm the sort of person who, when something crashes, apologizes to the screen."
Well I'm sorry Diana...but is this any different than other technology in your life? Do you apologize to your toaster when it burns your toast? Do you apologize to cable provider if your cable goes out? I think you are a bit too sensitive there Diana.
The problem, says consultant David Platt, lies not with the user but with the programmers, who just don't think like the people who use their products.
That is funny, since most programmers are users too. If they don't use their own software, they use other peoples software.
One of his peeves is when a text-editing program like Microsoft Word asks users if they want to save their work before they close their document. That question makes little sense to computer novices accustomed to working with typewriters or pen and paper, he said. For them, a clearer question would be: "Throw away everything you've just done?"
'Save' is pretty universally understood. Does this guy think that a toaster manual should talk about 'cooking' bread because 'toasting' bread is too hard for users to comprehend?
Boxes that ask users to confirm whether they want to take a step such as deleting a document are another example of what he calls a bad feature. "Your car does not ask, 'Do you really want to start the engine?' when you turn the key," Platt said.
Those that can do, those that can't teach. Really, if you've ever worked as a developer and left a 'do you really want to delete this' message out of one of your programs, I'm sure you know what kind of trouble you can get into, even if you have savvy users.
The confirmation box has become so overused that no one pays any attention to it, even when it's warning about a document that should be kept, he said.
Confirmation boxes are overused on the web, but if your in a desktop program they usually aren't.
Error messages represent software communication at its worst, Platt said. In his book, he recounts how after trying to save a Web page from his Internet browser, he received a message that said it couldn't be done and gave him no other recourse but to hit the OK button. "No, it is not OK with me that this operation didn't work and the program can't explain why," he wrote.
And if it spit out "ORACLE ERROR 666: Primary Key is already in use' you would whine that the error message is to technical, plus the programmer would be giving away information to potential hackers/script kiddies.
Platt, who has also written nine books for computer professionals, has a message for software developers: "Your. User. Is. Not. You." People who write software programs value control. The user, on the other hand, just wants something that's easy to operate. To illustrate his point, he notes that computer programmers tend to prefer manual transmissions. But not even 15 percent of the cars sold in the United States last year had that feature.
What percentage of computer programmers prefer manual transmissions? When comparing them to the general public, did you control for gender and race? Men tend to like manual transmissions, and they also tend to be overrepresented in the programming field. I can think of plenty of other variations that make this statistic suspect.
Similarly, many software programs come with functions -- like the ability to move the menu bar -- that the average person does not want or need. Programing instructions required for such features, Platt said, "increase the possibility of crashin
The funny thing to me is, the PHB's never calculate the employee downtime into the picture. For example, sure maybe you can save yourself a $40,000 tech if you are running macs and you have less problems, but they don't take into account the $100,000 of lost sales when the sales team can't work because their PC shit itself.
Second, prior to the invasion, Iraq was set to convert their oil exchange from dollars to Euros which would have had a pretty severe impact on the value of the dollar and hence the US economy.
If this was a large factor, expect an attack on Iran soon. Iran is changing over to the euro.
the whole bush went to war because of oil thing is obviously (to anybody who has half a clue?) bull shit.. Let me know when the extra oil starts rolling in I'm looking forward to the day because then atleast we could fucking say we got SOMETHING out of the deal.. Don't you think?!
You shouldn't get into the line of thinking that anyone who agrees with you 'has a clue' and anyone who doesn't must be clueless.
Anyway, the Iraq war was about more than just oil. It was mostly about the neoconservative/PNAC foreign policy. They tried to pressure Clinton into fighting a war against Iraq too. It's about more than just oil, it's about American military dominance, and the safety of Israel. After 9/11 these people basically converted Bush, who came into office with little to no foreign policy. Of course, now they all blame Bush for what happened, even though they claimed before the war that Iraq would be a cakewalk, and they pushed for it even before Bush was in office.
Leopard may have some built-in P2P functionality, allowing Apple to do BitTorrent-like distribution of movies from the iTunes Store. You could earn credit by being a seed.
I wonder what the ISP's would think of that. I know comcast has something in their ToS about not reselling bandwidth...I wonder if this would qualify?
I mean, hell, the mainstream industry companies have a hard enough time finding talent that can act and not be offensive to the eye. How are people on ultra-tight budgets supposed to do so?
They aren't. What they can do is focus on niche markets with their low budgets that the big guys can't hit.
We still don't have a motive for the crime -- Nixon was leading in the polls at the time of the break-in. Some suggest the motive might have been to steal the evidence that Nixon and George H.W. Bush were involved in the JFK assassination.
So the democrats had this, and just didn't release it...and they never mentioned it publically afterwords? Please, those kinds of theories are put forward just by authors looking to sell books to marks. They broke in to place wiretaps to see what the democrats were up to. Sure Nixon was leading in the polls, but does a thief stop stealing just because he has money?
When Ford pardoned Nixon, it did not get the messiness behind us, it just pushed it all in front of us by a few decades. The end of the 20th Century needed to see a crooked American president dragged before a court and sent to jail. If it had been done back then, we might not be seeing the kind of lawlessness we're getting from Jackass 2 in the White House today.
Really, and what "Lawlessness" is that, and how does it relate to what Nixon did? Are you acusing GW Bush of rigging the elections, and if so what happened this last time around? While some may question the "Domestic Surveillance" program, it is surely done for different reasons than Nixon's goons breaking and entering to try to get an upper hand in an election.
Instead, we came to a near constitutional crisis because a President cheated on his wife. It gave a free pass to presidents for generations to come.
Uhhh, no there wasn't anything near a 'constitutional crisis'. Also, Clinton wasn't impeached for "Cheating on his wife", it was for grand jury perjury, civil suit perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. All of these fall under 'High Crimes and Misdemeanors". While Clinton did obviously commit perjury, I personally am happy he wasn't impeached for it since it didn't really harm the country in any way.
Face it, when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, the only Americans he was sparing were the pissant Republicans that were hanging on by their fingernails anyway back then, and the paranoid, drug-addled fuck that had vacated the White House months before (see, history repeats itself!). He was doing the sleazebag political version of "Paying it Forward".
Or maybe he was just trying to do the right thing for the country? I do hope both parties get over the desire to impeach one anothers presidents for partisan discord.
Has it occurred to you that those killings are aimed at destabilizing the Russian government.
At destabilizing the Russian government? No, that is a new one. I have read articles which state the opinion that Putin is being framed. I don't really buy into that.
At making that government look evil.
To what end? Russia is getting into the WTO, and the US surely isn't going to do anything about a few Russia journalists and dissenters getting knocked off. Hell, Bush probably envies Putin for doing it.
I mean, what government agent/agency would use several million dollars worth of pollonium just to knock out one guy?
One that is trying to send a message to people who critize it. The same message that was sent with the slaying of Anna Politkovskaya, but louder. One that clearly says "It doesn't matter where in the world you are, if you fuck with us we will kill you and it will be painful".
Heck, they'd probably sell it on the black market for a bundle and use something cheaper.
Selling it on the black market to who? If they turn around and sell it to the wrong people and it's used against the west, it would end in nuclear war. The risk simply wouldn't be worth the reward.
The money just isn't there. Money is in the hands of Boris Berezovsky and similar. The motivation isn't there either,
Russia's GDP is about 1.5 trillion. Berezovsky is worth about a billion? The money is there.
why knock these people out at all? It isn't like they were denting the government's popularity, they weren't even scratching it.
I believe they were claiming they had proof the FSB faked a terrorist attack in Chechneya to validate some military action there. [quote]I figure, with elections are only a couple of years away, the oligarchs don't want Putin's nominee beating one of their own.[/quote] Maybe, but what is more likely? That Berezovsky somehow stole the Nuclear material and managed to use it on Litvinenko, or that the FSB did it under the orders of Putin? If Berezovsky hates Putin so much, why kill his detractors? Killing them surely hasn't turned the Russia people against Putin. A lot of articles I read claim that many Russians see Politkovskaya as a traitor anyway.
We've obviously been doing better than Russia and most or all of the other former Soviet republics, and capitalism clearly triumphed over communism, but when it comes to personal freedoms, we're doing to ourselves what we feared the Soviets would do to us. Did we really come out on top?
Maybe you haven't been paying attention to what goes on in Russia lately, but you should look into the stories of Alexander Litvinenko, Anna Politkovskaya, Paul Klebnikov, Artyom Borovik and a few others.
You don't see things like that happening over here. When Keith Oberman is gunned down for criticizing the government, then you can start comparing America to modern day Russia. Americans today don't face anywhere near the type of oppression that people did in Soviet Russia. While outlandish statements like that may earn you mod points here on slashdot, or replies on other fourms, they don't add to meaningful discussion.
A better question in my opinion would be, what would our founding fathers think of such government actions if they were alive today?
You, sir, are wrong.
Or perhaps you are. Let me pick apart the major points of your short troll:
1. How exactly do you know they aren't terrorists? Could is be that you just assume the government is wrong because you dislike their policies? Here in the USA, we used to believe in our country, I guess you don't.
2. Torture, depending on what methods is a reliable way of getting Intel, despite what your left wing friends tell you. If you can tear yourself away from your friends reenforcing your opinion, google up the CIA book on how to effectively interrogate people from back in the 80's and you will see what techniques work and which ones don't. It basically involves mindfucking your prisoner into believing they are torturing themselves, and it's very effective. I could also point you at various techniques the police use on local levels successfully, but I'm sure you don't want to see anything other than what your worldview will support.
While I doubt this insight will do you any good, I hope some of the brighter people on slashdot will go out and read up about this stuff from places other than the Daily Kos and such. There are intelligent arguements against our foreign policy, specifically in Iraq. Making up propaganda like 'TORTURE DOESNT WORK!!!" flies in the face of a lot of evidence to the contrary, and waters down the real debate that should be going on in America, about when our armed forces should be used.
There are effective interrogation techniques that work, and yes the US military uses them.
Did they ever get Multiplayer working with SiN episodes? I pretty much played the original SiN just for the multiplayer, and I was waiting for episodes to have multiplayer support before I would buy it.
The original sin multiplayer, and the expansion pack wages of sin were a great deal of fun. There were a boatload of weapons, like remote controlled rockets and mines, an ion cannon, the standard BFG like nuke gun, and speeder bikes!
World of Warcraft will be long gone by 2010. They would be lucky to have 250,000 subscribers at that point. We've seen 'big name' MMO's fail before, such as star wars galaxies. I'm hoping fallout online will be a hit, I've played it all the way back to wasteland on the Apple2c.