Your comprehension apparently turns off as soon as inconvenient information is encountered, you stopped quoting before this (big surprise there!):
The U.S. government has been criticized for allowing Pakistan to channel a disproportionate amount of its funding to controversial Afghan resistance leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,[18] who Pakistani officials believed was "their man".[19] Hekmatyar has been criticized for killing other mujahideen and attacking civilian populations, including shelling Kabul with American-supplied weapons, causing 2,000 casualties. Hekmatyar was said to be friendly with Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda, who was running an operation for assisting "Afghan Arab" volunteers fighting in Afghanistan, called Maktab al-Khadamat. Alarmed by his behavior, Pakistan leader General Zia warned Hekmatyar, "It was Pakistan that made him an Afghan leader and it is Pakistan who can equally destroy him if he continues to misbehave."[20]
In the late 1980s, Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, concerned about the growing strength of the Islamist movement, told President George H. W. Bush, "You are creating a Frankenstein."[21]
The U.S. says that all of its funds went to native Afghan rebels and denies that any of its funds were used to supply Osama bin Laden or foreign Arab mujahideen. It is estimated that 35,000 foreign Muslims from 43 Islamic countries participated in the war.[22][23][24][25]
The US denying underhanded doings of course being the very apex of credibility.
Now you can either show that you're a decent person and apologize for lying
So far you have shown yourself to being quite a liar, but decency was not in evidence.
or you can fuck off.
You wish.
I don't care which avenue you chose; since you decided to decline my earlier offer - instead deciding to act like an ignorant deuchebag - I'm done with you either way. Ta ta!
Yes I did decline to let you get away with your smug stupidity, but you are always free to run away at any time.
The US may not have been the _chief_ sugar-daddy and arms supplier to Al Qaeda throughout 1980s,
Odds are very high that they were. The Stinger missile program alone is estimated to have been anywhere between 500 to as high as 2000 missiles, each at over $200k a pop new. When the USSR withdrew, the CIA attempted to buy back the remaining missiles, estimated at about 300, for $183,300 each adding up to $55 million or so, which points to the original number being closer to 2000 then 500, the Mujahideen having shot a lot of them. And this was just one program.
Seeing as how your very first sentence is a complete lie, I see no reason to wade through the rest of your comment.
If you're honestly mistaken instead of intentionally deceitful, I suggest you do a bit of research and then come back here and post an apology and a detailed explanation of why you were wrong. Under those circumstances I would be willing to continue our discussion.
Now this is a classic case of Projection! Accuse your opponent of the very thing you are doing and then try to escape pretending that somehow defending your lies is beneath your oh-so-high-moral-standards!
Speaking of detailed explanations however... oh but you probably meant this whiny quote form the US government "The United States wanted to be able to deny that the CIA was funding the Afghan war, so its support was funneled through Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). ISI in turn made the decisions about which Afghan factions to arm and train, tending to favor the most Islamist and pro-Pakistan. The Afghan Arabs generally fought alongside those factions, which is how the charge arose that they were creatures of the CIA." - oh so everything is now so wonderfully clear! You did not hand the brown envelopes directly to Bin Laden, you had a middle man! Therefore you soooo absolutely absolved of any culpability, yes Siree! After all if one hires a middle-man, one is automatically innocent of anything that middle-man might have done in one's name... unless of course you are not an American! Then all the rules change, naturally.
For one, your friend was widely known to have already bombed property of cgunner, and your friend even quite happily took credit for those acts.
That in itself means nothing, a lot of outspoken ideologues would proudly take credit for anything someone else has done and which they even remotely attribute as being influenced by their own pontificating, its just their egocentric nature. Just take a look at any typical US politician!
Furthermore, your pontificating bore of a friend talked a very good game of c6gunner being the enemy of all of his friends, and deserved to die a hellish death.
Again, if mere words=action, 2/3 of global populace is on the list to be bombed into oblivion by the USA, for having wished someone gruesomely dead at one time or another.
Complete with instructions on how said death should, could or might happen. In other words - the only thing missing here was a video confession to orchestrating, organizing and bank-rolling the bombing, which would only come a few years after c6gunner set off the bomb in your house.
See above. Taking credit for famous events is what pontificating radical ideologues do. If Bin Laden had not done so (his claim being vastly bolstered by the very fact that USA wanted him so badly) some other (or most likely several!) radical would. You would then proceed to bomb and invade whatever place they happened to be at.
This by the way is the main reason why confessions do not have great weight in most enlightened judicial systems - they are just not very reliable.
So really, the evidence was there, you just decided that you were looking for something that you knew didn't exist and therefore couldn't be provided.
The only thing in "evidence" you've presented so far is that Bin Laden is a hostile to US interests radical. Famous one and full of himself, true, but one of very many. Nothing beyond that.
At that point, I'm entirely supportive of the fact that c6gunner is actually going after you, since you seem to be providing shelter despite knowing better.
And so your failure would be complete and I would be quite justified to blow your brains out. A fact of which the Taliban is making its utter most.
Your first mistake is assuming that operations against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan started in 2001. The rest of your argument is rendered moot by that mistake. The US has been operating in Afghanistan since the 90's, as a response to earlier Al Qaeda attacks. The 2001 invasion was just the final commitment in a much longer campaign.
Oh I see, so in addition to being the chief sugar-daddy and arms supplier to Al Qaeda throughout 1980s, the USA then proceeded to meddle directly and covertly in Afghanistan as soon as their "allies" won and the USSR withdrew, showing itself utterly duplicitous and untrustworthy to the locals... and this is improving your case how exactly?
That, of course, hinges on how you define "victory". If all we care about is maintaining majority control over the country and preventing it from being used as a staging area for further attacks
against the west, then we've already won.
By that token the Nazis "won" WWII in 1942... I mean they occupied and held a lot of territory at the time, "preventing it from being used as a staging area by the Allies", no?
Under any other reasonable definition we... we haven't achieved all of the goals we've set for ourselves, but the odds of eventually meeting them are pretty much 100%.
Yes, the time-honoured way of getting your ass handed to you: "fail to declare coherent, logical and testable goals, bloviate endlessly about 'progress' and 'democracy' and whatever other abstract and nebulous feel-good concept you can come up with, declare 'victory' and skedaddle home holding your bruised posterior, having met 'your goals' 110%! - whatever those 'goals' morphed into in the end in order to be met 110%". You did not seriously think you are the first would-be conqueror to come up with this?
The opposite forces have no chance of achieving a military victory - the best that they can hope for is that we get bored and go home.
You have an interesting way of defining "boredom", apparently measured in trillions of dollars, thousands of wounded, dead and maimed on your side and many more on theirs...
And yes, all the defenders have to do is to do what they always have done... to outlast the latest Empire until it crawls back whence it came from. They have an ample precedent for that, although you are of course the Super-extra-specially-exceptional Empire, the American One, so everything will be oh-so-super-specially-extra-exceptionally different for you, despite no substantial changes in the general conditions of the whole affair. Just because America is oh-so-Speeeecial!
As long as we're willing to stay, we can't lose
Which is pretty much a guaranteed loss for the USA as the "will to stay" (translated to real-life measurements of mayhem and treasury) is far, far, lower than "their" will to outlast you - they are after all fighting for their homes, their "way of life" (as they see it) and their religion (and "zealot" is too kind a word to describe most of them) - and all that on top of their vastly disproportionately lower cost of warfare!
Unfortunately, it seems likely that we will decide to leave, largely due to opinions such as yours.
No, you will leave because that is the only thing you can do. The alternative is "total war" and utter bankruptcy of the US Empire. None of the previous empires left because of nay-sayers either, they left because staying further meant Imperial Collapse (and some, like the USSR, waited a tad too long). No amount of Rah-Rah cheer leading will change basic realities of Afghanistan and the logistics of foreign conquests.
I find that truly depressing. Seems like people didn't learn a damn thing from the American mistakes in the 80's.
If your friend shoots one of my family members and then goes and hides in your house, I'm not picking a fight with you when I come to drag him out. If you decide to get in my way, that's your problem.
Well, its a fine demagoguery you got there, but the actual reality was that the Taliban demanded to see evidence of Bin Laden's responsibility before handing him over (remember that Bin Laden is just a "spiritual leader" - read: "pontificating bore that talks hell of a lot but hasn't actually done much directly" as opposed to other, more hands-on operatives who worked out of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and, in the case of the 9/11 crew, Germany) and the USA flatly refused. Following which the USA invaded declaring any and all comers as "unlawful combatants" with no rights of any kind.
So to keep your analogy straight, you have a case of my friend showing up at my house saying that you are gunning for him, following which you show up with a box of explosives and demand that I hand him over or else "because he did me wrong!". And when I say "hold on for a sec, what proof exactly do you have?" you say "I don't have to explain myself to a non-human like you, far beneath my superior Manifest Destiny self! What I say goes or else! You got 10 minutes to comply!" and then set the bomb off 5 minutes later, killing my wife and maiming my kids, following which you get the biker gang down the street to help you rummage through and "govern" the wreckage. And so now you have two mortal enemies instead of one and not exactly what could be called a "moral high ground".
This is how the Afghanistan mis-adventure is seen by "the other side" and it is of little wonder that the fight will likely go on indefinitely, Taliban having quite a bit (and growing by many accounts) of local support and very able to present itself as the victims of a belligerent, arrogant, foreign, religiously-motivated, supremacist aggressor, victims who will defend their ancestral homeland, their religion and their "way of life" against that aggressor to the bitter end.
I'd say the odds of "victory" in Afghanistan for the USA are pretty much on the same level as those of all the previous Empires... not entirely zero but any Vegas slot machine looks like a guaranteed retirement plan by comparison.
This is merely a presentation/technical problem. One can design a system whereby even though data is travelling through and being stored by nodes, at no point in time that data by itself can be used to reconstruct "child porn", "intellectual property", "bomb plans" (or in fact anything meaningful at all). One has to specifically instruct one's node to obtain the complete set from other nodes to be able to even tell what the contents is (outside of completely independent process of labelling, search and indexing).
In this way no one can whine that his/her computer is "being used to store child porn without permission" and so the excuse is gone. This in fact is one of critical flaws in Freenet's design that such a claim cannot be made - the node stores encrypted chunks of whatever files are there and theoretically it is possible to reconstruct sufficiently meaningful parts of movies or images from them on their own without other nodes being needed, Freenet's design was not intended to guarantee that no reconstruction of any kind is possible of the contents not specifically requested by the node's operator.
But this is solvable in a number of ways and it is only a matter of time when a system with this and many other needed features will appear. More draconian the political Witch Hunts, faster it will happen.
Well, the point of such a thing would be that it is not possible to ban/detect without also banning any and all VPN, HTTPS, TLS and other "legit" Internet traffic. A properly designed successor to BitTorrent, Gnutella, Usenet, Freenet and Tor would by definition require banning of the whole Internet to stop it.
Not that the villains known as politicians and "lawmakers" won't eventually try that too, this whole actual (as opposed to being-paid-pompous-lip-service-to-but-in-practice-next-to-impossible) "freedom of information" basic-element-of-democracy thing has been a thorn in their sides from the get go. They and similarly interested big-media and big "entertainment" mega-corps would like their control of the narrative back, thank you very much, even if it somehow involves our dead bodies as one of the steps to get there. And the sooner we get to the ammo-boxes stage of the "boxes-of-change" sequence the more likely things will be decided one way or the other for better or worse, this of course amongst many other pending outrages and societal devolutions that have been galloping ahead of late heading in the same general direction of utter tyrannical dystopia or general bloodshed.
If xenserver had better resource management then I think vmware would be on its way out of my lab.
Actually, take a look at the built-in linux KVM which is getting seriously competitive in some environments. If combined with an HA-NAS solution and some custom scripts it can get quite useful in large scale deployments (as long as you do not expect pretty GUI management tools). The only serious technical weakness versus VmWare ESX is at this point lack of VMotion (which is a bit of a solution looking for a problem in many real-life scenarios anyway, given that server failures where the VM still keeps running sufficiently to be spirited away alive to another host are as about as numerous as hen's teeth).
So if you are not into some performance-fiendish-disk-io-and-cpu situations (at which point you shouldn't be really virtualizing these porkers anyway) then KVM + HA-NAS might be the trick. KVM is also capable of reading vmdk files so you can cheat using the VMWare Converter just like you would with ESX hosts, just make sure not to install VMWare tools during conversion...
Search the net, people are doing wacky things with KVM already and soon the commercial guys will be fighting an uphill battle... which is all for the better, IMHO.
Even Remote Desktop was faster than VMWare Server 1.x's Client.
On a remote connection RDP will always be faster than a virtual remote console, mainly because RDP can optimize transfers based on Windows GDI API calls while a universal console has no such luxury and has to treat the entire screen as one monolithic item. Having said that, the post-1.x "web" interface crap is far slower then 1.x even accessed locally due to idiotic technology choices.
No it isn't. Its the same dog-awful crap that they use in the Virtual Infrastructure Client and Virtual Center used with the ESX deployments. Sloooow, cumbersome, crashing, useless crap. Orders of magnitude more pain than the old 1.x interface. One of the main reasons (in addition to exorbitant costs, total mess with license management, constant wholesale re-branding of every component with every major release - Virtual "Sphere" anyone? - and the Virtual Center Linux non-support, etc, etc) why we are in the process of ditching VmWare at most of my clients.
Well, to be fair, those artists are the ones who signed the contracts.
In which they had no choice, which is by design of the middle men who until very recently controlled not only all the means of distribution but also all the means of promotion (and which they still influence greatly). And that control, not any lost sales, is why the scum is becoming so aggressive in attacking democracy and personal liberties - they simply have no other way to regain it from the citizenry to which they lost it thanks to technological progress.
The last thing that the "intellectual property" scam-artists want is for the consumer to actually have choices that involve a direct link to an artist, for that would mean the end of "sign-all-your-art-away-for-peanuts-or-live-in-obscurity" "choice" being the only thing on the table for the artists.
Same shit happened to pretty much all of my clients. I've been insisting that people keep all of their licensing info registered so that they have an easy off-site access point in addition to their regular documentation backups, to keep it "safe" and quick to get at - and after all where better then the very vendor who insists on all that activation and serial number crap, surely they will appreciate their customer's efforts! Even if it is a truly vile de-facto monopolist vendor such as Microsoft... but then again I guess not.
Naturally, half of them lost their own copies and so now any and all changes involving license codes are pretty much foobar until Microsoft finds its ass-hole again, utilizing the provided flood lights, both of its hands, the hands of 32-part-time contractors, a radar-ass-hole-finder, an ass-hole-finding map and an "Idiot's Guide To Telling Your Ass-hole Apart From a Hole In the Ground". Hopefully sometime before 2012 rolls around.
On the other hand it has served as perfect example to point to when demonstrating the dangers of "licensing" combined with single-vendor-dependency, irrespective of how "popular" and "gigantic" that vendor is, to pointy-haired management.
Also, people seem to always forget that the original purpose (however flawed) of copyright was ostensibly to protect the authors from.... the publishers, distributors and all sorts of assorted middle-men, since at that time those were the only people (and I use the term loosely) who had access to equipment capable of mass duplication of works of art.
Fast forward 200 years or so and you have the artists back in the dog-house and the assorted middle-men controlling everything. Which only encourages them to bray louder about being robbed by "copyright violators" while stiffing the artists at every opportunity... a grand monument to the power of corruption of laws and societies by shameless, vicious, malignant greed.
Incidentally this behaviour, of preemptively and rabidly accusing everyone else in sight of the very crimes one is committing himself, is very common amongst various villains in all walks of villainy, such as career politics for example.
I just think that this is just a sign of how meaningless sex has become
Sex is a natural biological function, practised by most animals, including primates, for hundreds of millions of years. People fucked long before "civilization", along with its religious wackos and moralizing prudes, came along.
and now people are acting like dogs in heat, trying to mate with anything that moves.
See above. Then on the other hand, in Victorian England they covered leg tables lest their nakedness induce indecent thoughts....
We need no great standing army to defend our nation. If every man and woman who has reached the age of majority was required, as in at least one country I can think of, to keep in their home a fully automatic military weapon, then any invading force would be met with resistance the likes of which our standing army with its tanks and planes and bombs could not match.
While I do agree with many of your sentiments, technology has rendered the citizen-militia / obscenely-funded-military balance untenable. Other nations can muster weapons of such power that assault rifles become a laughable response. Your assumption that an invader has to occupy - and therefore engage in the kind of warfare which USA is waging in Iraq - is false (also note that even though Iraqis had a lot of AK-47s in pretty much every house, their "liberation" was crammed down their throats despite of that, with millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed). I case of vast riches hoarded by a population armed only with anti-personnel weapons, a nation-state enemy has only to employ a sufficiently powerful WMD system with reasonably short lived post-effects. Then there are also issues of naval blockades etc.
So clearly something beyond the home-kept assault rifles and RPGs is required.
Oh please. Our system is "working" just fine. 95% of American's get plenty to eat (too much, including me). We get fresh clean water at a moments notice - even the poorest among us can get free clean
water. We can even manage jobs for 30+ million illegal immigrants.
Unfortunately this is a completely wrong measuring stick. By this metrics, one could claim that Roman Empire was "working" just peachy (just as long as you were not a slave or somehow crossed the rich and important), as any and every medieval tin-pot kingdom (just as long as you were nobility), all the way to Nazi Germany (as long as you were Arian and did not oppose the Fascists), Soviet Union (as long as you were not a dissident)... and the USA (as long as you were not a slave, a Native and as long as there is enough foreigners to get fleeced/invaded/robbed to keep your show going).
In fact every despotic nation in history could claim the same you do at one time or another (usually at the apex of pillaging conquests of other nations, be it military or economic), that people in it had "plenty to eat". As a matter of fact, Iran and China can make the same claim today - clean water and food are available to pretty much everyone in both.
I did read his comment, which was full of outright lies. Lies like claiming that crack cocaine was eliminated due to introduction of ever more draconian laws, which is utterly laughable to anyone with even passing knowledge of the US drug scene. "Recreational drug" consumption has been steadily growing all throughout the "War on Drugs" and shows no signs of slowing down, although some morons have mis-interpreted decline in use of older types of drugs which were being replaced by newer, more potent or more fashionable ones as a "victory" resulting from their brain-dead "demand reduction" campaigns.
She had previously mentioned a gateway theory, ie. that less access to child porn results in fewer child molesters,
This "theory" has pretty similar validity to that of the "phlogiston theory".
If it were true, images of all kinds would promote all sorts of other behaviours. Vanilla porn would cause wide-spread rape. Images of murder, warfare, terrorism etc (all which appear hourly on TV and are watched by hundreds of millions of people) would lead to daily rampages of thousands of axe wielding murderers running through the streets of any country with large cable TV reach like, say, Canada. Murderers competing with thousands of bomb-totting terrorists, followed shortly by whole armies of home-grown para-military-militias fighting each other... and on and on.
The truth is much simpler: as someone pointed out on this thread, "fighting" child molestation is a sure-fire short-cut to political power as mentioning it has the apparent effect of completely disabling higher brain functions in majority of the populace, and its no different than any other drummed-up bogeyman of the days past used for this purpose by truly evil charlatans, like fifth-column Communists, witches, demonic possession etc and so on.
She pointed out that the ample psychological harm caused by kid rape is compounded by the victim's awareness that depictions of the act are being spread and "enjoyed." What's your take on this?
Total bullshit. Children age and become adults and the simple fact is that human brain's facilities for facial recognition are insufficient to maintain recognition without any other circumstantial links (research shows that we recognize our old acquaintances based on other cues such as a series of contextual memories across time). This is why police has to use computers to "age" photos of children gone missing for more than a few years - people simply cannot recognize them. And if you cannot be recognized, any claims of "compounded harm" are simply a result of suggestions of the "holy warriors" and "therapists" whose business is to ensure that any and all claims are suitably exaggerated, logic and empirical evidence be damned.
If you make possession of it painfully illegal then that *will* cut down on production of it because demand for it will be reduced.
Really? How is that "War on Drugs" working out for you? I hear USA has the highest percentage per capita of jailed individuals in the world, many in for-profit private prisons and most for drug-related offences. I assume drugs are therefore next to impossible to obtain there, no?
This is precisely such moronic "logic" as you have presented, main purpose of which is diversion of money and power to the "holy crusaders", elimination of civil liberties to enable the witch-hunters to operate "efficiently"... and creation of ever-more-profitable and violent black market, which is used to justify this spiral of insanity.
Err, we were talking about the books, not the game itself (which by the way I do not play as it is a rather mediocre PC FPS and excites only the console crowd). Not that the books are any better, I gave up half-way through the 1st one after it became apparent that it was glorifying Nazi-style "ends justify the means" ideology...
Actually I was talking about the sci-fi books giving the background story to the Halo games wherein the SPARTAN cyborg program was explained, which is what the GP poster was referring to, not the actual Sparta of antiquity.
Sure thing! All you need is to be young enough, living under a fascist government hell-bent on kidnapping and torturing kids, some botched medical experiments with 80% failure rate ending up in horrible, slow, painful death (your odds are not so good here) and bingo! You get to serve the said fascist outfit against a band of religious wackos, in the contest to see which bad guy wins.
On the side note, it is an interesting social commentary that a game where brain-washed product of a Dr. Mendele-wannabe serving fascist lunatics is the "hero" would be a Microsoft best seller...
Slashdot Mirror
Your comprehension apparently turns off as soon as inconvenient information is encountered, you stopped quoting before this (big surprise there!):
The US denying underhanded doings of course being the very apex of credibility.
So far you have shown yourself to being quite a liar, but decency was not in evidence.
You wish.
Yes I did decline to let you get away with your smug stupidity, but you are always free to run away at any time.
Odds are very high that they were. The Stinger missile program alone is estimated to have been anywhere between 500 to as high as 2000 missiles, each at over $200k a pop new. When the USSR withdrew, the CIA attempted to buy back the remaining missiles, estimated at about 300, for $183,300 each adding up to $55 million or so, which points to the original number being closer to 2000 then 500, the Mujahideen having shot a lot of them. And this was just one program.
Now this is a classic case of Projection! Accuse your opponent of the very thing you are doing and then try to escape pretending that somehow defending your lies is beneath your oh-so-high-moral-standards!
Speaking of detailed explanations however... oh but you probably meant this whiny quote form the US government "The United States wanted to be able to deny that the CIA was funding the Afghan war, so its support was funneled through Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). ISI in turn made the decisions about which Afghan factions to arm and train, tending to favor the most Islamist and pro-Pakistan. The Afghan Arabs generally fought alongside those factions, which is how the charge arose that they were creatures of the CIA." - oh so everything is now so wonderfully clear! You did not hand the brown envelopes directly to Bin Laden, you had a middle man! Therefore you soooo absolutely absolved of any culpability, yes Siree! After all if one hires a middle-man, one is automatically innocent of anything that middle-man might have done in one's name ... unless of course you are not an American! Then all the rules change, naturally.
That in itself means nothing, a lot of outspoken ideologues would proudly take credit for anything someone else has done and which they even remotely attribute as being influenced by their own pontificating, its just their egocentric nature. Just take a look at any typical US politician!
Again, if mere words=action, 2/3 of global populace is on the list to be bombed into oblivion by the USA, for having wished someone gruesomely dead at one time or another.
See above. Taking credit for famous events is what pontificating radical ideologues do. If Bin Laden had not done so (his claim being vastly bolstered by the very fact that USA wanted him so badly) some other (or most likely several!) radical would. You would then proceed to bomb and invade whatever place they happened to be at.
This by the way is the main reason why confessions do not have great weight in most enlightened judicial systems - they are just not very reliable.
The only thing in "evidence" you've presented so far is that Bin Laden is a hostile to US interests radical. Famous one and full of himself, true, but one of very many. Nothing beyond that.
And so your failure would be complete and I would be quite justified to blow your brains out. A fact of which the Taliban is making its utter most.
Oh I see, so in addition to being the chief sugar-daddy and arms supplier to Al Qaeda throughout 1980s, the USA then proceeded to meddle directly and covertly in Afghanistan as soon as their "allies" won and the USSR withdrew, showing itself utterly duplicitous and untrustworthy to the locals ... and this is improving your case how exactly?
By that token the Nazis "won" WWII in 1942 ... I mean they occupied and held a lot of territory at the time, "preventing it from being used as a staging area by the Allies", no?
Yes, the time-honoured way of getting your ass handed to you: "fail to declare coherent, logical and testable goals, bloviate endlessly about 'progress' and 'democracy' and whatever other abstract and nebulous feel-good concept you can come up with, declare 'victory' and skedaddle home holding your bruised posterior, having met 'your goals' 110%! - whatever those 'goals' morphed into in the end in order to be met 110%". You did not seriously think you are the first would-be conqueror to come up with this?
You have an interesting way of defining "boredom", apparently measured in trillions of dollars, thousands of wounded, dead and maimed on your side and many more on theirs...
And yes, all the defenders have to do is to do what they always have done ... to outlast the latest Empire until it crawls back whence it came from. They have an ample precedent for that, although you are of course the Super-extra-specially-exceptional Empire, the American One, so everything will be oh-so-super-specially-extra-exceptionally different for you, despite no substantial changes in the general conditions of the whole affair. Just because America is oh-so-Speeeecial!
Which is pretty much a guaranteed loss for the USA as the "will to stay" (translated to real-life measurements of mayhem and treasury) is far, far, lower than "their" will to outlast you - they are after all fighting for their homes, their "way of life" (as they see it) and their religion (and "zealot" is too kind a word to describe most of them) - and all that on top of their vastly disproportionately lower cost of warfare!
No, you will leave because that is the only thing you can do. The alternative is "total war" and utter bankruptcy of the US Empire. None of the previous empires left because of nay-sayers either, they left because staying further meant Imperial Collapse (and some, like the USSR, waited a tad too long). No amount of Rah-Rah cheer leading will change basic realities of Afghanistan and the logistics of foreign conquests.
Well, its a fine demagoguery you got there, but the actual reality was that the Taliban demanded to see evidence of Bin Laden's responsibility before handing him over (remember that Bin Laden is just a "spiritual leader" - read: "pontificating bore that talks hell of a lot but hasn't actually done much directly" as opposed to other, more hands-on operatives who worked out of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and, in the case of the 9/11 crew, Germany) and the USA flatly refused. Following which the USA invaded declaring any and all comers as "unlawful combatants" with no rights of any kind.
So to keep your analogy straight, you have a case of my friend showing up at my house saying that you are gunning for him, following which you show up with a box of explosives and demand that I hand him over or else "because he did me wrong!". And when I say "hold on for a sec, what proof exactly do you have?" you say "I don't have to explain myself to a non-human like you, far beneath my superior Manifest Destiny self! What I say goes or else! You got 10 minutes to comply!" and then set the bomb off 5 minutes later, killing my wife and maiming my kids, following which you get the biker gang down the street to help you rummage through and "govern" the wreckage. And so now you have two mortal enemies instead of one and not exactly what could be called a "moral high ground".
This is how the Afghanistan mis-adventure is seen by "the other side" and it is of little wonder that the fight will likely go on indefinitely, Taliban having quite a bit (and growing by many accounts) of local support and very able to present itself as the victims of a belligerent, arrogant, foreign, religiously-motivated, supremacist aggressor, victims who will defend their ancestral homeland, their religion and their "way of life" against that aggressor to the bitter end.
I'd say the odds of "victory" in Afghanistan for the USA are pretty much on the same level as those of all the previous Empires ... not entirely zero but any Vegas slot machine looks like a guaranteed retirement plan by comparison.
This is merely a presentation/technical problem. One can design a system whereby even though data is travelling through and being stored by nodes, at no point in time that data by itself can be used to reconstruct "child porn", "intellectual property", "bomb plans" (or in fact anything meaningful at all). One has to specifically instruct one's node to obtain the complete set from other nodes to be able to even tell what the contents is (outside of completely independent process of labelling, search and indexing).
In this way no one can whine that his/her computer is "being used to store child porn without permission" and so the excuse is gone. This in fact is one of critical flaws in Freenet's design that such a claim cannot be made - the node stores encrypted chunks of whatever files are there and theoretically it is possible to reconstruct sufficiently meaningful parts of movies or images from them on their own without other nodes being needed, Freenet's design was not intended to guarantee that no reconstruction of any kind is possible of the contents not specifically requested by the node's operator.
But this is solvable in a number of ways and it is only a matter of time when a system with this and many other needed features will appear. More draconian the political Witch Hunts, faster it will happen.
Well, the point of such a thing would be that it is not possible to ban/detect without also banning any and all VPN, HTTPS, TLS and other "legit" Internet traffic. A properly designed successor to BitTorrent, Gnutella, Usenet, Freenet and Tor would by definition require banning of the whole Internet to stop it.
Not that the villains known as politicians and "lawmakers" won't eventually try that too, this whole actual (as opposed to being-paid-pompous-lip-service-to-but-in-practice-next-to-impossible) "freedom of information" basic-element-of-democracy thing has been a thorn in their sides from the get go. They and similarly interested big-media and big "entertainment" mega-corps would like their control of the narrative back, thank you very much, even if it somehow involves our dead bodies as one of the steps to get there. And the sooner we get to the ammo-boxes stage of the "boxes-of-change" sequence the more likely things will be decided one way or the other for better or worse, this of course amongst many other pending outrages and societal devolutions that have been galloping ahead of late heading in the same general direction of utter tyrannical dystopia or general bloodshed.
Actually, take a look at the built-in linux KVM which is getting seriously competitive in some environments. If combined with an HA-NAS solution and some custom scripts it can get quite useful in large scale deployments (as long as you do not expect pretty GUI management tools). The only serious technical weakness versus VmWare ESX is at this point lack of VMotion (which is a bit of a solution looking for a problem in many real-life scenarios anyway, given that server failures where the VM still keeps running sufficiently to be spirited away alive to another host are as about as numerous as hen's teeth).
So if you are not into some performance-fiendish-disk-io-and-cpu situations (at which point you shouldn't be really virtualizing these porkers anyway) then KVM + HA-NAS might be the trick. KVM is also capable of reading vmdk files so you can cheat using the VMWare Converter just like you would with ESX hosts, just make sure not to install VMWare tools during conversion...
Search the net, people are doing wacky things with KVM already and soon the commercial guys will be fighting an uphill battle ... which is all for the better, IMHO.
No, but the alternative is not to get published at all. For an artists it is to cease being an artist. An artistic suicide option, if you will.
On a remote connection RDP will always be faster than a virtual remote console, mainly because RDP can optimize transfers based on Windows GDI API calls while a universal console has no such luxury and has to treat the entire screen as one monolithic item. Having said that, the post-1.x "web" interface crap is far slower then 1.x even accessed locally due to idiotic technology choices.
No it isn't. Its the same dog-awful crap that they use in the Virtual Infrastructure Client and Virtual Center used with the ESX deployments. Sloooow, cumbersome, crashing, useless crap. Orders of magnitude more pain than the old 1.x interface. One of the main reasons (in addition to exorbitant costs, total mess with license management, constant wholesale re-branding of every component with every major release - Virtual "Sphere" anyone? - and the Virtual Center Linux non-support, etc, etc) why we are in the process of ditching VmWare at most of my clients.
In which they had no choice, which is by design of the middle men who until very recently controlled not only all the means of distribution but also all the means of promotion (and which they still influence greatly). And that control, not any lost sales, is why the scum is becoming so aggressive in attacking democracy and personal liberties - they simply have no other way to regain it from the citizenry to which they lost it thanks to technological progress.
The last thing that the "intellectual property" scam-artists want is for the consumer to actually have choices that involve a direct link to an artist, for that would mean the end of "sign-all-your-art-away-for-peanuts-or-live-in-obscurity" "choice" being the only thing on the table for the artists.
Same shit happened to pretty much all of my clients. I've been insisting that people keep all of their licensing info registered so that they have an easy off-site access point in addition to their regular documentation backups, to keep it "safe" and quick to get at - and after all where better then the very vendor who insists on all that activation and serial number crap, surely they will appreciate their customer's efforts! Even if it is a truly vile de-facto monopolist vendor such as Microsoft ... but then again I guess not.
Naturally, half of them lost their own copies and so now any and all changes involving license codes are pretty much foobar until Microsoft finds its ass-hole again, utilizing the provided flood lights, both of its hands, the hands of 32-part-time contractors, a radar-ass-hole-finder, an ass-hole-finding map and an "Idiot's Guide To Telling Your Ass-hole Apart From a Hole In the Ground". Hopefully sometime before 2012 rolls around.
On the other hand it has served as perfect example to point to when demonstrating the dangers of "licensing" combined with single-vendor-dependency, irrespective of how "popular" and "gigantic" that vendor is, to pointy-haired management.
Also, people seem to always forget that the original purpose (however flawed) of copyright was ostensibly to protect the authors from .... the publishers, distributors and all sorts of assorted middle-men, since at that time those were the only people (and I use the term loosely) who had access to equipment capable of mass duplication of works of art.
Fast forward 200 years or so and you have the artists back in the dog-house and the assorted middle-men controlling everything. Which only encourages them to bray louder about being robbed by "copyright violators" while stiffing the artists at every opportunity ... a grand monument to the power of corruption of laws and societies by shameless, vicious, malignant greed.
Incidentally this behaviour, of preemptively and rabidly accusing everyone else in sight of the very crimes one is committing himself, is very common amongst various villains in all walks of villainy, such as career politics for example.
Yes, you are.
Sex is a natural biological function, practised by most animals, including primates, for hundreds of millions of years. People fucked long before "civilization", along with its religious wackos and moralizing prudes, came along.
See above. Then on the other hand, in Victorian England they covered leg tables lest their nakedness induce indecent thoughts ....
While I do agree with many of your sentiments, technology has rendered the citizen-militia / obscenely-funded-military balance untenable. Other nations can muster weapons of such power that assault rifles become a laughable response. Your assumption that an invader has to occupy - and therefore engage in the kind of warfare which USA is waging in Iraq - is false (also note that even though Iraqis had a lot of AK-47s in pretty much every house, their "liberation" was crammed down their throats despite of that, with millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed). I case of vast riches hoarded by a population armed only with anti-personnel weapons, a nation-state enemy has only to employ a sufficiently powerful WMD system with reasonably short lived post-effects. Then there are also issues of naval blockades etc.
So clearly something beyond the home-kept assault rifles and RPGs is required.
Unfortunately this is a completely wrong measuring stick. By this metrics, one could claim that Roman Empire was "working" just peachy (just as long as you were not a slave or somehow crossed the rich and important), as any and every medieval tin-pot kingdom (just as long as you were nobility), all the way to Nazi Germany (as long as you were Arian and did not oppose the Fascists), Soviet Union (as long as you were not a dissident) ... and the USA (as long as you were not a slave, a Native and as long as there is enough foreigners to get fleeced/invaded/robbed to keep your show going).
In fact every despotic nation in history could claim the same you do at one time or another (usually at the apex of pillaging conquests of other nations, be it military or economic), that people in it had "plenty to eat". As a matter of fact, Iran and China can make the same claim today - clean water and food are available to pretty much everyone in both.
I did read his comment, which was full of outright lies. Lies like claiming that crack cocaine was eliminated due to introduction of ever more draconian laws, which is utterly laughable to anyone with even passing knowledge of the US drug scene. "Recreational drug" consumption has been steadily growing all throughout the "War on Drugs" and shows no signs of slowing down, although some morons have mis-interpreted decline in use of older types of drugs which were being replaced by newer, more potent or more fashionable ones as a "victory" resulting from their brain-dead "demand reduction" campaigns.
This "theory" has pretty similar validity to that of the "phlogiston theory".
If it were true, images of all kinds would promote all sorts of other behaviours. Vanilla porn would cause wide-spread rape. Images of murder, warfare, terrorism etc (all which appear hourly on TV and are watched by hundreds of millions of people) would lead to daily rampages of thousands of axe wielding murderers running through the streets of any country with large cable TV reach like, say, Canada. Murderers competing with thousands of bomb-totting terrorists, followed shortly by whole armies of home-grown para-military-militias fighting each other ... and on and on.
The truth is much simpler: as someone pointed out on this thread, "fighting" child molestation is a sure-fire short-cut to political power as mentioning it has the apparent effect of completely disabling higher brain functions in majority of the populace, and its no different than any other drummed-up bogeyman of the days past used for this purpose by truly evil charlatans, like fifth-column Communists, witches, demonic possession etc and so on.
Total bullshit. Children age and become adults and the simple fact is that human brain's facilities for facial recognition are insufficient to maintain recognition without any other circumstantial links (research shows that we recognize our old acquaintances based on other cues such as a series of contextual memories across time). This is why police has to use computers to "age" photos of children gone missing for more than a few years - people simply cannot recognize them. And if you cannot be recognized, any claims of "compounded harm" are simply a result of suggestions of the "holy warriors" and "therapists" whose business is to ensure that any and all claims are suitably exaggerated, logic and empirical evidence be damned.
Really? How is that "War on Drugs" working out for you? I hear USA has the highest percentage per capita of jailed individuals in the world, many in for-profit private prisons and most for drug-related offences. I assume drugs are therefore next to impossible to obtain there, no?
This is precisely such moronic "logic" as you have presented, main purpose of which is diversion of money and power to the "holy crusaders", elimination of civil liberties to enable the witch-hunters to operate "efficiently" ... and creation of ever-more-profitable and violent black market, which is used to justify this spiral of insanity.
Err, we were talking about the books, not the game itself (which by the way I do not play as it is a rather mediocre PC FPS and excites only the console crowd). Not that the books are any better, I gave up half-way through the 1st one after it became apparent that it was glorifying Nazi-style "ends justify the means" ideology ...
Actually I was talking about the sci-fi books giving the background story to the Halo games wherein the SPARTAN cyborg program was explained, which is what the GP poster was referring to, not the actual Sparta of antiquity.
Sure thing! All you need is to be young enough, living under a fascist government hell-bent on kidnapping and torturing kids, some botched medical experiments with 80% failure rate ending up in horrible, slow, painful death (your odds are not so good here) and bingo! You get to serve the said fascist outfit against a band of religious wackos, in the contest to see which bad guy wins.
On the side note, it is an interesting social commentary that a game where brain-washed product of a Dr. Mendele-wannabe serving fascist lunatics is the "hero" would be a Microsoft best seller...
A non sequitur and an ad hominem? Thank you for conceding the argument in such a decisive and ... err, concise manner.