An interesting article on how both sides are using propaganda against the other:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/international/ mi ddleeast/17psyops.html
Both sides want to send "messages" to the other soldiers to demoralise them:
"But in this war, the insurgents respond in kind. In one town near Falluja, a bag with hundreds of leaflets in it was left near a damaged tank, where Americans were bound to find it as they recovered the vehicle, said Staff Sgt. Randall Weeks of the Army's First Cavalry Division, who reviewed hundreds of propaganda DVD's, tapes and written materials during the past year in Al Anbar Province, where Falluja is situated.
"Who will benefit from your death?" one of the leaflets said in handwritten English. "George Bush and his oil cronies."
"Who will benefit from your death?" said another leaflet. "Your wife and her new boyfriend.""
Forgot to mention. Other famous texts such as Sun Tzu's War Manual survived the burning of the books as well. Other older books are known to have survived as well as they are quoted in later histories though they did not manage to survive intact to modern times. Many texts managed to survive the burning of the books. If you read later Chinese histories, they talk extensively about such and such ruler doing such and such during Shang and Zhou or during the Warring states times. The burning of the books wasn't totally catastrophic.
Re:Weren't Chinese history's destroyed?
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The First Emperor burnt all the books in the 3rd century BC that was true, but a good deal of the Confucian texts survived thanks to the habit of Chinese scholars of memorising things word for word. The thing is we are not dealing here with historical texts though but *mythological stories* which would have survived any burning of the books as it is generally passed down by oral tradition. For example, mythological stories of the Shang and Hsia dynasties certainly survived the burning of the books. A lot of (real) history dealing with the Zhou and Shang also survived the burning of the books. It was a big set-back but it was hardly something that would have negated mythological stories of a lost civilisation.
As far as I know, there are no stories of any "lost" civilisation in Chinese mythology. There are certainly stories of visitors from foreign lands - I can think of stories about Indians (esp. with the spread of Buddhism. E.g. Shaolin's Dharma was an Indian. Journey to the West was about a trip to India) and stories about Japan (when the ruler priestess Himiko sent envoys to the Chinese emperor during the 3rd century AD). There's even vague references to Romans. There was even contact with Persia. But no "lost" civilisations besides the mythological Chinese dynasties which were located in Chinese proper.
I'd advised reading the novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and compare them to the very comprehensive historical records of the era. It is very easy to see how real history can be distorted to add magic and mythological things where none existed before. The author of the novel didn't just make it up. Things just got more and more exaggerated in oral history over the centuries. He simply wrote down events based on the history books as well as adding many of the exaggerated stories which had developed by his time. Historians call this the "story cycle" and one of the beauties of this era is that histories of the era are comprehensive enough over a period of time it is possible to see how certain story cycles develop, culiminating in what it written in the novel.
For example, the Shu-Han general, Guan Yu died at the hands of the Wu general Lu Meng. Now Lu Meng died of illness shortly afterwards. This is certified history. In the *novel* however, Lu Meng dies due to the manifestation of the ghost of Guan Yu in vengeance for his death. At the seminal Battle of Chibi, Zhou Yu's fire attacks are so effective against Cao Cao's navy because of an unseasonable SE wind. It is possible that Zhuge Liang was a bit of a meteorologist and predicted it. In the novel, this turned into Zhuge Liang *calling* the SE wind in a mystical Taoist ceremony lasting many days, thus cementing his reputation as one of China's great magicians. According to historical records, the great warlord, the "young wolf cub" Sun Ce of Wu died of an arrow after an ambush. In the novel he got an arrow in the ambush but was recovering but died because he executed a Taoist sage. Sun Jian, Sun Ce's father finds the missing royal seal in a well in the ruins of the capital. Now this is mentioned in history and seems a pretty likely event. However in the novel it is mentioned that he was attracted to the location because of a great glowing light and that the perfectly preserved body of a maid was found in the well with the seal.
In history, the general Wei Yan was denounced as a traitor after Zhuge Liang's death (though I suspect that there is some politics going on here). The novel has Zhuge Liang denouncing Wei Yan as a possible traitor *for absolutely and totally no good reason and something which is totally out of character for him* when they first meet. Since this incident is also not mentioned in historical records and seems so out of place even in the novel it seems obvious it was inserted later on to make Zhuge Liang seem wise beyond the ken of mortal men (wow, by one look he can predict the "rebellion" of a general decades later. A general who Zhuge Liang made great use and gave a lot of responsibility to and made one of his right-hand men and trusted a lot and...). I think people can see the trend here...
No Chinese myths of lost civilisations
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In Chinese mythology, there is a story of a great flood. The tale is very different from the Noah story though. Also given the nature of the story I suspect that this is due to a great flooding of the Yellow River rather related to the tales of a great flood in Asia Minor and Europe. But I can't remember any tales of a lost civilisation that disappeared beneath the waves. There are the mythological 5 emperors who were advanced in wisdom, technology, helped the Chinese people, etc. but they were very firmly based in China. I guess this means that Atlantis if it exists can't be around the Asian region then?
Chinese dragons control the element of water. It is believed possible for fish under certain exceptional circumstances to become dragons. There are no Chinese fire-breathing dragons. Chinese dragons are also not evil (though they aren't necessarily good - more like a force of Heaven which can be benevolent but also wreck destruction depending on whim. Who can understand Heaven really?), whilst Western dragons are usually portrayed as evil.
They asked for death certificates. Not all the time because they were afraid to offend too many people by seeming to imply that they were lying but enough to ascertain that the people were being reasonably honest. Of course it would include militants. Most of the dead were women and children and I doubt they were militants.
I don't think 100 000 is too unreasonable. Most of the deaths are due to aerial bombing in *crowded urban areas* with *large population densities*. I'm sorry, there is no way you can avoid killing large numbers of civlians in collateral damage. If someone dropped a huge bomb off in a crowded street in the middle of New York to get a terrorist, do you seriously think that large numbers of innocent people aren't going to get hurt in the blast even if they are not the targets? 1/3 of the deaths in the Sunni areas in the survey were attributed to Fallujah alone (these were taken out to avoid skewing the survey) which has been the subject of a massive bombing blitz. If you want to see what the effects of aerial bombing in large urban centres just look at WW2 - the Blitz on London, US firebombing of Tokyo and the attacks on Dresden. The fact that more haven't died IS due to American restraint compared to the WW2 examples.
Forgot to mention. While they took out Fallujah in the statistics, they included a few Kurdish areas where the death-rate not surprisingly actually decreased. If anything they were being extremely conservative in their estimate. People believe that if they left out the Kurdish areas, and just did the Sunni areas alone and the Shi'ite areas alone, the death-rate in Sunni and Shi'ite areas would be much higher than that quoted.
In conclusion: they were being *conservative* in their estimate.
The polling method took *out* their statistics for Fallujah when calculating the increased death rate.
All areas were chosen randomly.
The exact same polling method was used by international agencies, governments etc. to obtain the war deaths amongst civilians in Kosovo and Bosnia. It is an accepted method.
All descriptions I've seen have described 100 000 *additional* deaths to the pre-war death-rate. They asked people the cause of death as well. They found that the leading cause of death pre-war were things like heart attacks. Post war it was violence esp. aerial bombing.
You obviously have only seen Fox news and not say actually read how they did the survey.
I agree with you. I just wanted to point out that outsourcing is not only possible, but with this administration it is also very likely (though given their track record, I'd doubt that they'd be able to do it very competently...). I got the idea from the jokes people were making about India and China that they had the idea that outsourcing these types of jobs was not very likely.
A lot of people have made comments about the possibility of this being outsourced. While most of the comments are meant to be funny, I think it is definitely possible that it could be outsourced. Remember that the philosophy of Bush and Rumsfeld et al. is that the US army should be *small* and practically every function of the US army that doesn't involve holding a gun and shooting should be outsourced (mainly to private US companies like Halliburton). Actually, considering that even some US government staff in Iraq are guarded by private guards, even holding a gun and shooting is outsourced to some degree. I've read articles that said that in the first Gulf War something like 1 in 100 of the people working for the US army were private contractors, but in the second Gulf War, something like 1 in 10 are from private (US) companies. As events in Iraq show, even things like interrogation of prisoners is conducted by private contractors.
Of course a major problem with this is that you can't order engineers from a private company to go out under fire to fix a bridge/power plant etc. while you can with army engineers. The other major problem is who will punish private contractors who say torture prisoners or accidentally (or even deliberately) kill or injure civilians. If they are in the army they could be investigated and court-martialed, but I think for private contractors it is much murkier. I think the general rule is that they are under the rules of the local government, but well, in a lot of these places, local government is hardly existent or very corrupt.
That's totally wrong. For quantum teleportation to work you STILL need to be able to pass information from A to B say via a wire or other classical information route. What teleportation does that say a fax does not is it is supposed to make a *perfect* (well theoretically anyway) copy of the information. What is teleported is NOT the photon or the atom but information on the quantum state of the atom or photon which is reproduced in an atom or photon at the other end. I've heard quantum teleportation described as a "perfect fax machine". Regardless, the atom/photon does NOT suddenly disappear from A and appear at B.
"The movie Polar Express will open Wednesday and could create a film genre somewhere between animation and live action. Made almost exclusively with a method called performance capture, which drops digitized human actors into a computer-animated world. The technique has been used in some video games and, to a limited extent, in earlier movies. Warner Bros. says The Polar Express is the first feature made solely with the process."
Which was exactly what America did when most of the IP was coming from the "Old World". Back in those days, English authors were up in arms about the blatent and widespread piracy of English books in America because of lax IP laws and enforcement. It was only after America started producing stuff on its own that it became an IP Nazi. India et al. are only doing to America what America did to the Old World when it was still young and developing.
Maybe the guy was just remembering the famous story of what happened 2000 years ago with the meteorite that landed during the First Emperor's time. Someone scrawled on it a curse to the First Emperor hoping that he'd die soon and in retaliation the Emperor ordered everyone in the village to be executed. So maybe the guy was thinking, "Well considering what happened *last* time something from space landed in someone's home and they criticised the government in response, maybe I'll just some inane comment about good luck instead..."
Whether or not Iran is influencing the elections, this idea is very very wrong. The biggest problem any politician elected will be credibility, to be more exact, they need to be seen to be independent of the US. Even *rumours* of CIA interference in elections will derail the reputation of anyone elected. As academic Juan Cole writes, if it is wide-spread opinion that the US rigged the elections (esp. through the CIA bogeyman), it does not mean only failure of democracy in Iraq but in the entire Middle East:
"The first is to point out that this sort of behavior by the Bush administration fatally undermines the ideal of democracy in the Middle East. If Muslims think that "democracy" is a stalking horse for CIA control of their country, then they will flee the system and prefer independent-minded strongmen that denounce the US. The constitutional monarchies established in the Middle East by the British were similarly undermined in the popular imagination by the impression they gave of being mere British puppets. This was true of the Wafd Party in Egypt in the 1940s and early 1950s, which the Free Officers overthrew in 1952 in the name of national indepencence. It was also true in Iraq, where in 1958 popular mobs dragged the corpse of the pro-British Prime Minister Nuri al-Said through the streets and finished off the British-installed monarchy."
No this is nothing about the US army being stupid. The fact that you don't get what I was implying means YOU are stupid though. The basic point is, if you are a tyrant, if you have a strong military that can cause a lot of damage then the US (or anyone else really) is a lot less likely to invade you then if it can walk in their taking hardly any damages. This is a basic truism in any conflict. However the fact that Iraq was invaded for WMD and being a "threat" and N. Korea not shows to tyrants that if you HAVE WMD (and the US is absolutely sure that you do) and it is aimed at a US ally ready to cause damage and you have a big army that can cause the US and its allies lots of damage then the US will not invade. So in the minds of tyrants throughout the world, what Iraq SHOULD have done is gone for nukes single-mindedly, and build up its military and stationed it on the Kuwait border with missiles and artillery aimed at the major cities. Ditto with Tel-Aviv. Basically it tells tryants "Build up your forces and build those nukes and chemical weapons and you are safe". Don't build them and you will die.
What the US has done with Iraq is to make military buildups and WMDs its primary reason for invading i.e. "pre-emptive war". The US has not left any room for subtlety or maneouver. It is black and white issue as presented by Bush who has dismissed all ideas of diplomacy and negotiation or shades of grey. The idea of this is to make a show of strength to the world saying "The US will destroy you if you do this". Basically the US is flexing its muscles to the world. However while it took out the weakest kid on the block when presented with a real fight i.e. N. Korea it has backed down and right now to the gang leaders on the block it looks like a pussy that is too scared to fight as long as they carry a gun or knife openly.
I think it would be mistake for the US to invade N. Korea. However its problem is it has built up too much expectations for itself. It is the guy who flexes his muscles and roars "I am the strongest. Challenge me and I will smash you to pieces. I will never back down. I know no fear." If you then back down after saying something like this (for whatever reason) you obtain an enormous loss of credibility in carrying out your threats. And because the US seems to be only willing to attack the weak it shows to the rest of the kids in the neighbourhood that as long as they have guns and carry them openly the big strong guy won't dare touch them, but if they don't have them he will smash them. That is he will only attack the weak. Hence the solution is not to be weak. I disagree with the war on Iraq make no bones about it, and I agree that the US is in a no-win situation in Korea, but I think that the US has brought this no-win situation on itself with all its "You are with us or against us" i.e. black and white bluster. Basically the US has made threats it should have known that it could never carry out. Iraq got smashed, but N. Korea has called the bluff successfully. Now N. Korea will be used as the example throughout the world on how to stop the US invading.
What this shows is quite simple. If you are an evil dictator who doesn't want to be invaded what you should do is *get* nuclear weapons and be able to threaten your neighbours with destruction.
Iraq: no nuclear weapons, very weak conventional army, not really a military threat to any of its neighbours, including US allies - result: invasion. N Korea: nukes, strong conventional army that can wipe out Seoul in hours: no invasion.
The lesson therefore for evil dictators is NOT to disarm - in fact get those nukes as quickly as possible! Then no-one will dare invade you. Oh and build up your conventional army and station it right at the border of your nearest neighbour that is most important to the US. Basically if you look weak the US will invade. If you look strong (nukes, big army, chemical weapons etc.) then the US will not invade. Fairly simple.
Here is the google cache of the All About Romance newsletter (it seems to have disappeared from the site) which is a newsletter about romance novels and give a good idea about how specifically people are being affected:
"PayPal can be used to buy and sell pre-1980s issues of Playboy, Playgirl, and Penthouse. On eBay, these can be categorized as "Collectibles" rather than as "Mature Audiences.""
"Books classified as "romantica" - ie. books about people falling in love and making love are not allowed - but who is to say what is romantica and what is just hot romance? Print romances seem to get a pass. Readers can go onto eBay and find print erotic romances such as those published by Kensington's Brava line. They can also find books far more explicit than erotic romance novels for sale, and their PayPal payments will be accepted. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, one of Anne Rice's BDSM novels, is one obvious example of this."
"According to Brenna Lyons, when the new policy went into effect, many people noticed that the adult content guidelines were vague. For that reason, many publishers of sensual and erotic books asked PayPal to check out their sites. PayPals adult content guidelines are open to interpretation and so changes can be made. PayPal did, in fact, assure the publishers that their sites were acceptable.
Early in 2004, almost a year after the announcement of the new policy, PayPal began freezing the accounts of publishers, writers, and even readers of erotic romance. Brenna herself knows of four publishers, five self-published authors, and two review sites that had their accounts frozen by PayPal.
What happened to warrant such drastic action? PayPal was investigating them for violations of their Terms of Service (TOS). When an account is under investigation it can be frozen for up to 180 days.
Though those under investigation often disagree, Amanda Pires says that the investigation is "not an invasive process." PayPal doesn't contact the vendor until they've decided it's violating the Acceptable Use policy. They will, however, investigate sites on the basis of a single complaint. According to Amanda, this is because PayPal "encourages people to let them know because the Internet is so large." She adds, though, that while a single complaint is enough to start an investigation, that single complaint isn't enough to get PayPal to take action against a vendor. As part of this investigative process, PayPal staff review both the sites and the content. In the case of an electronic publisher, they might ask for downloads of the books. In a case like that, the process could take longer because they have to evaluate books rather than just evaluating a web site.
The evaluation process involves trying to determine "whether or not the sexual content is a small or insignificant part of the book." Ms. Pires adds, "We allow PayPal to be used to sell a book, not based on length or number of loves scenes, but on the topic or intent of the book. If the sexual scenes or content is part of the story line but not the primary purpose of the book, then PayPal can be used to sell the book." Staff members performing this evaluation must decide whether the books adhere to the Acceptable Use policy. When performing these evaluations, the staff members "try to be as fair as possible."
Many authors and publishers of erotic romances who have been investigated disagree that PayPal treated people in their industry fairly. According to Brenna Lyons, no warning was given to small publishers and self-published authors that they were about to be investigate. Their PayPal accounts were suddenly frozen. "Just wake up one morning and have your account frozen. If you happened to have most of your working capital in there, you were screwed. Pardon the frank language. Here's the cute part. When they started going after the big boys, they gave them
Why don't they just hire a better admin? I keep on hearing about the high rate of IT unemployment and how many talented people are out of work. How on earth does someone so incompetent keep his job when it is essentially an employer's market out there? For home users and even small business offices (where the boss or random employee who looks like he might know more than average about computers ends up taking care of everything), well yes, ease of install and use is important, but surely anyone deserving of the title "sys admin" shouldn't need any "dumbing down".
Many people are concentrating on the threat to iTunes. However another important aspect of this is MS once again screwing over its partners, in this case, companies that licensed technology from MS to run wma based online stores. iTunes has enough name cachet and differentiation (and the most popular player iPod) so it might survive the MS monopoly abusing onslaught, but other wma based online stores are going to get slaughtered. It will be a similar situation to Telstra broadband competitors in Australia. Teltra used to be the government owned monopoly for decades. Hence they own the vast majority of the legacy backbone. They compete with Telstra but also rely on buying their backbone from Telstra. This means tactics like recently how Telstra lowered the price of their cheapest broadband *below* the wholesale price they were selling it to their competitors. And we know that MS is just as bad or even worse in terms of sleazy monopoly abusing tactics than Telstra. Also there is evidence to suggest that Telstra does things like telling people broadband is available in their suburb, but only if they are inquiring about their products. If it is a competitor's, Telstra's report comes back negative. (The guy who published this then had his broadband from Telstra revoked because it was a "mistake"). So wma online stores will be competiting with the company that provides the "backbone" AND the software vital to their survival. Not a good position and we know what MS is like.
Also none of the wma online stores have the features that iTunes at least has to differentiate it from the MS store. They don't use different software. Their software and any prominance to any particular online store is supplied by their biggest direct competitor! What store do they think Windows media player will give prominance to. And they know perfectly well MS' business practice history esp. with regards to bundling e.g. Netscape. Any popular hardware player that plays theres will play MS's. Even the name of the format "Windows Media Audio" suggests that it is a MS product and lots of people have the idea that MS products work best with other MS products.
Basically they are screwed. Their biggest competitor controls their fundamental technology and the way their customers use it AND has a reputation for ruthlessly abusing their monopoly powers. They might as well just close up shop now and be done with it. Only MS and iTunes will survive. But this is what you get for trusting MS I suppose...I wouldn't be surprised if MS only co-operated with the other stores long enough to get the required intelligence on how to run an online store as they've done it before and I can't see MS ever having any ideas about wanting to share a market with any competitors. Sharing is not part of the MS vision.
A bit off-topic, but wasn't Janus a common symbol fo r duplicity and untrustworthiness in past (and post-Roman) times, as he had a face looking both ways (the saying "two-faced")? So isn't naming a DRM product Janus like naming an airline "Icarius"? Sure he had wings and could fly but...OTOH some would argue that being DRM and MS, Janus is an entirely appropriate name...
I keep on hearing about how *insert big computer company*'s customer support is crap, but this doesn't seem to be affecting their profits any. Does bad customer support really affect the bysiness they get? If say Dell's customer support is crap, don't the customers just whine until their nearest geek friend/relative do the work for them free? The average buyer of computers relies on price and big numbers on the box (the MHz myth) and the ooh-shiny factor in terms of making purchasing decisions. Customer support is hardly ever considered (ditto with things like security for software purchases...). If the consumers don't care, why should the companies? If consumers want good customer support they should be willing to pay for it by making it part of their purchasing decisions eg. two identical systems from two computers, one with good customer support, one with not-so-good but the other one is cheaper, the vast majority of people will go for the cheaper one.
If customers don't vote with their wallets then why should Dell/Sony/HP et al. care about good customer support (from the POV of a business)? The idea of good customer support is to build loyalty but the average computer buyer doesn't consider support important at all when buying stuff as they will just get their nearest geek to fix it for them and they don't want to pay the extra money for good support as they want it as cheap as possible. Then from a financial POV to the business, it's just an annoying expense they have to have that doesn't add anything to the bottom line (since customers don't seem to be deserting them in droves or making purchasing decisions based on customer support reputation) and so it makes sense (from a financial POV) to do it as cheaply as possible even if it is crap.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting article on how both sides are using propaganda against the other:
/ mi ddleeast/17psyops.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/international
Both sides want to send "messages" to the other soldiers to demoralise them:
"But in this war, the insurgents respond in kind. In one town near Falluja, a bag with hundreds of leaflets in it was left near a damaged tank, where Americans were bound to find it as they recovered the vehicle, said Staff Sgt. Randall Weeks of the Army's First Cavalry Division, who reviewed hundreds of propaganda DVD's, tapes and written materials during the past year in Al Anbar Province, where Falluja is situated.
"Who will benefit from your death?" one of the leaflets said in handwritten English. "George Bush and his oil cronies."
"Who will benefit from your death?" said another leaflet. "Your wife and her new boyfriend.""
Forgot to mention. Other famous texts such as Sun Tzu's War Manual survived the burning of the books as well. Other older books are known to have survived as well as they are quoted in later histories though they did not manage to survive intact to modern times. Many texts managed to survive the burning of the books. If you read later Chinese histories, they talk extensively about such and such ruler doing such and such during Shang and Zhou or during the Warring states times. The burning of the books wasn't totally catastrophic.
The First Emperor burnt all the books in the 3rd century BC that was true, but a good deal of the Confucian texts survived thanks to the habit of Chinese scholars of memorising things word for word. The thing is we are not dealing here with historical texts though but *mythological stories* which would have survived any burning of the books as it is generally passed down by oral tradition. For example, mythological stories of the Shang and Hsia dynasties certainly survived the burning of the books. A lot of (real) history dealing with the Zhou and Shang also survived the burning of the books. It was a big set-back but it was hardly something that would have negated mythological stories of a lost civilisation.
As far as I know, there are no stories of any "lost" civilisation in Chinese mythology. There are certainly stories of visitors from foreign lands - I can think of stories about Indians (esp. with the spread of Buddhism. E.g. Shaolin's Dharma was an Indian. Journey to the West was about a trip to India) and stories about Japan (when the ruler priestess Himiko sent envoys to the Chinese emperor during the 3rd century AD). There's even vague references to Romans. There was even contact with Persia. But no "lost" civilisations besides the mythological Chinese dynasties which were located in Chinese proper.
I'd advised reading the novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and compare them to the very comprehensive historical records of the era. It is very easy to see how real history can be distorted to add magic and mythological things where none existed before. The author of the novel didn't just make it up. Things just got more and more exaggerated in oral history over the centuries. He simply wrote down events based on the history books as well as adding many of the exaggerated stories which had developed by his time. Historians call this the "story cycle" and one of the beauties of this era is that histories of the era are comprehensive enough over a period of time it is possible to see how certain story cycles develop, culiminating in what it written in the novel.
For example, the Shu-Han general, Guan Yu died at the hands of the Wu general Lu Meng. Now Lu Meng died of illness shortly afterwards. This is certified history. In the *novel* however, Lu Meng dies due to the manifestation of the ghost of Guan Yu in vengeance for his death. At the seminal Battle of Chibi, Zhou Yu's fire attacks are so effective against Cao Cao's navy because of an unseasonable SE wind. It is possible that Zhuge Liang was a bit of a meteorologist and predicted it. In the novel, this turned into Zhuge Liang *calling* the SE wind in a mystical Taoist ceremony lasting many days, thus cementing his reputation as one of China's great magicians. According to historical records, the great warlord, the "young wolf cub" Sun Ce of Wu died of an arrow after an ambush. In the novel he got an arrow in the ambush but was recovering but died because he executed a Taoist sage. Sun Jian, Sun Ce's father finds the missing royal seal in a well in the ruins of the capital. Now this is mentioned in history and seems a pretty likely event. However in the novel it is mentioned that he was attracted to the location because of a great glowing light and that the perfectly preserved body of a maid was found in the well with the seal.
In history, the general Wei Yan was denounced as a traitor after Zhuge Liang's death (though I suspect that there is some politics going on here). The novel has Zhuge Liang denouncing Wei Yan as a possible traitor *for absolutely and totally no good reason and something which is totally out of character for him* when they first meet. Since this incident is also not mentioned in historical records and seems so out of place even in the novel it seems obvious it was inserted later on to make Zhuge Liang seem wise beyond the ken of mortal men (wow, by one look he can predict the "rebellion" of a general decades later. A general who Zhuge Liang made great use and gave a lot of responsibility to and made one of his right-hand men and trusted a lot and...). I think people can see the trend here...
In Chinese mythology, there is a story of a great flood. The tale is very different from the Noah story though. Also given the nature of the story I suspect that this is due to a great flooding of the Yellow River rather related to the tales of a great flood in Asia Minor and Europe. But I can't remember any tales of a lost civilisation that disappeared beneath the waves. There are the mythological 5 emperors who were advanced in wisdom, technology, helped the Chinese people, etc. but they were very firmly based in China. I guess this means that Atlantis if it exists can't be around the Asian region then?
Chinese dragons control the element of water. It is believed possible for fish under certain exceptional circumstances to become dragons. There are no Chinese fire-breathing dragons. Chinese dragons are also not evil (though they aren't necessarily good - more like a force of Heaven which can be benevolent but also wreck destruction depending on whim. Who can understand Heaven really?), whilst Western dragons are usually portrayed as evil.
They asked for death certificates. Not all the time because they were afraid to offend too many people by seeming to imply that they were lying but enough to ascertain that the people were being reasonably honest. Of course it would include militants. Most of the dead were women and children and I doubt they were militants. I don't think 100 000 is too unreasonable. Most of the deaths are due to aerial bombing in *crowded urban areas* with *large population densities*. I'm sorry, there is no way you can avoid killing large numbers of civlians in collateral damage. If someone dropped a huge bomb off in a crowded street in the middle of New York to get a terrorist, do you seriously think that large numbers of innocent people aren't going to get hurt in the blast even if they are not the targets? 1/3 of the deaths in the Sunni areas in the survey were attributed to Fallujah alone (these were taken out to avoid skewing the survey) which has been the subject of a massive bombing blitz. If you want to see what the effects of aerial bombing in large urban centres just look at WW2 - the Blitz on London, US firebombing of Tokyo and the attacks on Dresden. The fact that more haven't died IS due to American restraint compared to the WW2 examples.
Forgot to mention. While they took out Fallujah in the statistics, they included a few Kurdish areas where the death-rate not surprisingly actually decreased. If anything they were being extremely conservative in their estimate. People believe that if they left out the Kurdish areas, and just did the Sunni areas alone and the Shi'ite areas alone, the death-rate in Sunni and Shi'ite areas would be much higher than that quoted.
In conclusion: they were being *conservative* in their estimate.
The polling method took *out* their statistics for Fallujah when calculating the increased death rate.
All areas were chosen randomly.
The exact same polling method was used by international agencies, governments etc. to obtain the war deaths amongst civilians in Kosovo and Bosnia. It is an accepted method.
All descriptions I've seen have described 100 000 *additional* deaths to the pre-war death-rate. They asked people the cause of death as well. They found that the leading cause of death pre-war were things like heart attacks. Post war it was violence esp. aerial bombing.
You obviously have only seen Fox news and not say actually read how they did the survey.
I agree with you. I just wanted to point out that outsourcing is not only possible, but with this administration it is also very likely (though given their track record, I'd doubt that they'd be able to do it very competently...). I got the idea from the jokes people were making about India and China that they had the idea that outsourcing these types of jobs was not very likely.
A lot of people have made comments about the possibility of this being outsourced. While most of the comments are meant to be funny, I think it is definitely possible that it could be outsourced. Remember that the philosophy of Bush and Rumsfeld et al. is that the US army should be *small* and practically every function of the US army that doesn't involve holding a gun and shooting should be outsourced (mainly to private US companies like Halliburton). Actually, considering that even some US government staff in Iraq are guarded by private guards, even holding a gun and shooting is outsourced to some degree. I've read articles that said that in the first Gulf War something like 1 in 100 of the people working for the US army were private contractors, but in the second Gulf War, something like 1 in 10 are from private (US) companies. As events in Iraq show, even things like interrogation of prisoners is conducted by private contractors.
Of course a major problem with this is that you can't order engineers from a private company to go out under fire to fix a bridge/power plant etc. while you can with army engineers. The other major problem is who will punish private contractors who say torture prisoners or accidentally (or even deliberately) kill or injure civilians. If they are in the army they could be investigated and court-martialed, but I think for private contractors it is much murkier. I think the general rule is that they are under the rules of the local government, but well, in a lot of these places, local government is hardly existent or very corrupt.
That's totally wrong. For quantum teleportation to work you STILL need to be able to pass information from A to B say via a wire or other classical information route. What teleportation does that say a fax does not is it is supposed to make a *perfect* (well theoretically anyway) copy of the information. What is teleported is NOT the photon or the atom but information on the quantum state of the atom or photon which is reproduced in an atom or photon at the other end. I've heard quantum teleportation described as a "perfect fax machine". Regardless, the atom/photon does NOT suddenly disappear from A and appear at B.
"The movie Polar Express will open Wednesday and could create a film genre somewhere between animation and live action. Made almost exclusively with a method called performance capture, which drops digitized human actors into a computer-animated world. The technique has been used in some video games and, to a limited extent, in earlier movies. Warner Bros. says The Polar Express is the first feature made solely with the process."
...is it a good movie?
Which was exactly what America did when most of the IP was coming from the "Old World". Back in those days, English authors were up in arms about the blatent and widespread piracy of English books in America because of lax IP laws and enforcement. It was only after America started producing stuff on its own that it became an IP Nazi. India et al. are only doing to America what America did to the Old World when it was still young and developing.
Maybe the guy was just remembering the famous story of what happened 2000 years ago with the meteorite that landed during the First Emperor's time. Someone scrawled on it a curse to the First Emperor hoping that he'd die soon and in retaliation the Emperor ordered everyone in the village to be executed. So maybe the guy was thinking, "Well considering what happened *last* time something from space landed in someone's home and they criticised the government in response, maybe I'll just some inane comment about good luck instead..."
On a related note - the CIA had plans "to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections." before it was stopped by Nancy Pelosi:
1 ,1 101041004-702122,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,917
Whether or not Iran is influencing the elections, this idea is very very wrong. The biggest problem any politician elected will be credibility, to be more exact, they need to be seen to be independent of the US. Even *rumours* of CIA interference in elections will derail the reputation of anyone elected. As academic Juan Cole writes, if it is wide-spread opinion that the US rigged the elections (esp. through the CIA bogeyman), it does not mean only failure of democracy in Iraq but in the entire Middle East:
"The first is to point out that this sort of behavior by the Bush administration fatally undermines the ideal of democracy in the Middle East. If Muslims think that "democracy" is a stalking horse for CIA control of their country, then they will flee the system and prefer independent-minded strongmen that denounce the US. The constitutional monarchies established in the Middle East by the British were similarly undermined in the popular imagination by the impression they gave of being mere British puppets. This was true of the Wafd Party in Egypt in the 1940s and early 1950s, which the Free Officers overthrew in 1952 in the name of national indepencence. It was also true in Iraq, where in 1958 popular mobs dragged the corpse of the pro-British Prime Minister Nuri al-Said through the streets and finished off the British-installed monarchy."
http://www.juancole.com/
No this is nothing about the US army being stupid. The fact that you don't get what I was implying means YOU are stupid though. The basic point is, if you are a tyrant, if you have a strong military that can cause a lot of damage then the US (or anyone else really) is a lot less likely to invade you then if it can walk in their taking hardly any damages. This is a basic truism in any conflict. However the fact that Iraq was invaded for WMD and being a "threat" and N. Korea not shows to tyrants that if you HAVE WMD (and the US is absolutely sure that you do) and it is aimed at a US ally ready to cause damage and you have a big army that can cause the US and its allies lots of damage then the US will not invade. So in the minds of tyrants throughout the world, what Iraq SHOULD have done is gone for nukes single-mindedly, and build up its military and stationed it on the Kuwait border with missiles and artillery aimed at the major cities. Ditto with Tel-Aviv. Basically it tells tryants "Build up your forces and build those nukes and chemical weapons and you are safe". Don't build them and you will die.
What the US has done with Iraq is to make military buildups and WMDs its primary reason for invading i.e. "pre-emptive war". The US has not left any room for subtlety or maneouver. It is black and white issue as presented by Bush who has dismissed all ideas of diplomacy and negotiation or shades of grey. The idea of this is to make a show of strength to the world saying "The US will destroy you if you do this". Basically the US is flexing its muscles to the world. However while it took out the weakest kid on the block when presented with a real fight i.e. N. Korea it has backed down and right now to the gang leaders on the block it looks like a pussy that is too scared to fight as long as they carry a gun or knife openly.
I think it would be mistake for the US to invade N. Korea. However its problem is it has built up too much expectations for itself. It is the guy who flexes his muscles and roars "I am the strongest. Challenge me and I will smash you to pieces. I will never back down. I know no fear." If you then back down after saying something like this (for whatever reason) you obtain an enormous loss of credibility in carrying out your threats. And because the US seems to be only willing to attack the weak it shows to the rest of the kids in the neighbourhood that as long as they have guns and carry them openly the big strong guy won't dare touch them, but if they don't have them he will smash them. That is he will only attack the weak. Hence the solution is not to be weak. I disagree with the war on Iraq make no bones about it, and I agree that the US is in a no-win situation in Korea, but I think that the US has brought this no-win situation on itself with all its "You are with us or against us" i.e. black and white bluster. Basically the US has made threats it should have known that it could never carry out. Iraq got smashed, but N. Korea has called the bluff successfully. Now N. Korea will be used as the example throughout the world on how to stop the US invading.
What this shows is quite simple. If you are an evil dictator who doesn't want to be invaded what you should do is *get* nuclear weapons and be able to threaten your neighbours with destruction.
Iraq: no nuclear weapons, very weak conventional army, not really a military threat to any of its neighbours, including US allies - result: invasion.
N Korea: nukes, strong conventional army that can wipe out Seoul in hours: no invasion.
The lesson therefore for evil dictators is NOT to disarm - in fact get those nukes as quickly as possible! Then no-one will dare invade you. Oh and build up your conventional army and station it right at the border of your nearest neighbour that is most important to the US. Basically if you look weak the US will invade. If you look strong (nukes, big army, chemical weapons etc.) then the US will not invade. Fairly simple.
Here is the google cache of the All About Romance newsletter (it seems to have disappeared from the site) which is a newsletter about romance novels and give a good idea about how specifically people are being affected:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:lfrekzaQLGAJ: ww w.likesbooks.com/184.html+&hl=en
Some interesting quotes:
"PayPal can be used to buy and sell pre-1980s issues of Playboy, Playgirl, and Penthouse. On eBay, these can be categorized as "Collectibles" rather than as "Mature Audiences.""
"Books classified as "romantica" - ie. books about people falling in love and making love are not allowed - but who is to say what is romantica and what is just hot romance? Print romances seem to get a pass. Readers can go onto eBay and find print erotic romances such as those published by Kensington's Brava line. They can also find books far more explicit than erotic romance novels for sale, and their PayPal payments will be accepted. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, one of Anne Rice's BDSM novels, is one obvious example of this."
"According to Brenna Lyons, when the new policy went into effect, many people noticed that the adult content guidelines were vague. For that reason, many publishers of sensual and erotic books asked PayPal to check out their sites. PayPals adult content guidelines are open to interpretation and so changes can be made. PayPal did, in fact, assure the publishers that their sites were acceptable.
Early in 2004, almost a year after the announcement of the new policy, PayPal began freezing the accounts of publishers, writers, and even readers of erotic romance. Brenna herself knows of four publishers, five self-published authors, and two review sites that had their accounts frozen by PayPal.
What happened to warrant such drastic action? PayPal was investigating them for violations of their Terms of Service (TOS). When an account is under investigation it can be frozen for up to 180 days.
Though those under investigation often disagree, Amanda Pires says that the investigation is "not an invasive process." PayPal doesn't contact the vendor until they've decided it's violating the Acceptable Use policy. They will, however, investigate sites on the basis of a single complaint. According to Amanda, this is because PayPal "encourages people to let them know because the Internet is so large." She adds, though, that while a single complaint is enough to start an investigation, that single complaint isn't enough to get PayPal to take action against a vendor. As part of this investigative process, PayPal staff review both the sites and the content. In the case of an electronic publisher, they might ask for downloads of the books. In a case like that, the process could take longer because they have to evaluate books rather than just evaluating a web site.
The evaluation process involves trying to determine "whether or not the sexual content is a small or insignificant part of the book." Ms. Pires adds, "We allow PayPal to be used to sell a book, not based on length or number of loves scenes, but on the topic or intent of the book. If the sexual scenes or content is part of the story line but not the primary purpose of the book, then PayPal can be used to sell the book." Staff members performing this evaluation must decide whether the books adhere to the Acceptable Use policy. When performing these evaluations, the staff members "try to be as fair as possible."
Many authors and publishers of erotic romances who have been investigated disagree that PayPal treated people in their industry fairly. According to Brenna Lyons, no warning was given to small publishers and self-published authors that they were about to be investigate. Their PayPal accounts were suddenly frozen. "Just wake up one morning and have your account frozen. If you happened to have most of your working capital in there, you were screwed. Pardon the frank language. Here's the cute part. When they started going after the big boys, they gave them
Then why was TNG so popular amongst the non-geek crowd (probably more than the original Star Trek)? There was a lot of social commentary in TNG.
Why don't they just hire a better admin? I keep on hearing about the high rate of IT unemployment and how many talented people are out of work. How on earth does someone so incompetent keep his job when it is essentially an employer's market out there? For home users and even small business offices (where the boss or random employee who looks like he might know more than average about computers ends up taking care of everything), well yes, ease of install and use is important, but surely anyone deserving of the title "sys admin" shouldn't need any "dumbing down".
Many people are concentrating on the threat to iTunes. However another important aspect of this is MS once again screwing over its partners, in this case, companies that licensed technology from MS to run wma based online stores. iTunes has enough name cachet and differentiation (and the most popular player iPod) so it might survive the MS monopoly abusing onslaught, but other wma based online stores are going to get slaughtered. It will be a similar situation to Telstra broadband competitors in Australia. Teltra used to be the government owned monopoly for decades. Hence they own the vast majority of the legacy backbone. They compete with Telstra but also rely on buying their backbone from Telstra. This means tactics like recently how Telstra lowered the price of their cheapest broadband *below* the wholesale price they were selling it to their competitors. And we know that MS is just as bad or even worse in terms of sleazy monopoly abusing tactics than Telstra. Also there is evidence to suggest that Telstra does things like telling people broadband is available in their suburb, but only if they are inquiring about their products. If it is a competitor's, Telstra's report comes back negative. (The guy who published this then had his broadband from Telstra revoked because it was a "mistake"). So wma online stores will be competiting with the company that provides the "backbone" AND the software vital to their survival. Not a good position and we know what MS is like.
Also none of the wma online stores have the features that iTunes at least has to differentiate it from the MS store. They don't use different software. Their software and any prominance to any particular online store is supplied by their biggest direct competitor! What store do they think Windows media player will give prominance to. And they know perfectly well MS' business practice history esp. with regards to bundling e.g. Netscape. Any popular hardware player that plays theres will play MS's. Even the name of the format "Windows Media Audio" suggests that it is a MS product and lots of people have the idea that MS products work best with other MS products.
Basically they are screwed. Their biggest competitor controls their fundamental technology and the way their customers use it AND has a reputation for ruthlessly abusing their monopoly powers. They might as well just close up shop now and be done with it. Only MS and iTunes will survive. But this is what you get for trusting MS I suppose...I wouldn't be surprised if MS only co-operated with the other stores long enough to get the required intelligence on how to run an online store as they've done it before and I can't see MS ever having any ideas about wanting to share a market with any competitors. Sharing is not part of the MS vision.
I realise this. That is why I put "post-Roman times" in my original post.
A bit off-topic, but wasn't Janus a common symbol fo r duplicity and untrustworthiness in past (and post-Roman) times, as he had a face looking both ways (the saying "two-faced")? So isn't naming a DRM product Janus like naming an airline "Icarius"? Sure he had wings and could fly but...OTOH some would argue that being DRM and MS, Janus is an entirely appropriate name...
I keep on hearing about how *insert big computer company*'s customer support is crap, but this doesn't seem to be affecting their profits any. Does bad customer support really affect the bysiness they get? If say Dell's customer support is crap, don't the customers just whine until their nearest geek friend/relative do the work for them free? The average buyer of computers relies on price and big numbers on the box (the MHz myth) and the ooh-shiny factor in terms of making purchasing decisions. Customer support is hardly ever considered (ditto with things like security for software purchases...). If the consumers don't care, why should the companies? If consumers want good customer support they should be willing to pay for it by making it part of their purchasing decisions eg. two identical systems from two computers, one with good customer support, one with not-so-good but the other one is cheaper, the vast majority of people will go for the cheaper one.
If customers don't vote with their wallets then why should Dell/Sony/HP et al. care about good customer support (from the POV of a business)? The idea of good customer support is to build loyalty but the average computer buyer doesn't consider support important at all when buying stuff as they will just get their nearest geek to fix it for them and they don't want to pay the extra money for good support as they want it as cheap as possible. Then from a financial POV to the business, it's just an annoying expense they have to have that doesn't add anything to the bottom line (since customers don't seem to be deserting them in droves or making purchasing decisions based on customer support reputation) and so it makes sense (from a financial POV) to do it as cheaply as possible even if it is crap.