This is true, but Aidid also ordered a massacre of U.N. peacekeeping troops. He wasn't declared an enemy because of the theft of food, which was pretty much the cost of doing business, the guys with guns are always the last to starve. He was declared an enemy because he attacked and massacred a patrol of Pakistani U.N. peacekeepers.
And yes, this was not about oil, it was entirely humanitarian. It is sickening that every time the U.S. does something to help the innocent the twisted propagandists crawl out of the woodwork and accuse it of the worst.
This film is a factual account of what happened, it ties in with the interviews of the soldiers I've seen. Not all opinions are equal, some people are just plain wrong, and the people calling this American propaganda, or calling the mission in Somalia American Imperialism are simply wrong. The fact that they disagree with the story doesn't make the movie propagada, it makes them wrong.
The preamble at the beginning really skimps on the politics, this is not a film about the politics of Somalia or about the humanitarian mission turned hunt for Aidid. The film is almost entirely about the events and firefights directly related to the mission to capture Aidid & his top officials. It doesn't glamorize the mission or the US role. People calling this propaganda are the same fools who think a U.N. humanitarian mission in some East African country nobody has any aspirations towards is somehow American imperialism, they are fools, no other word fits them as well. They should get better informed and perhaps even see the movie before passing judgement.
The reason Aidid was declared an enemy was a massacre of Pakistani UN troops, the film even mentions this very briefly in the preamble.
What is most disturbing about this case is the utter lack of any moral compass on the part of the prosecutors in this case. You have a sysadmin who installed software which burned spare cycles and inadvertently raised the phone bill. It's a mistake, accidents happen, to go after him because he didn't have explicit permission is a disgrace. These immature imbeciles can't get over their pique at seeing the costs incurred and go after him like he's some kind of uber hacker. This is the guy THEY hired to run their network. In a situation like this you learn a lesson, you don't rehire the guy, you don't give him a reference then you move on.
When you look at what they inflicted on McOwen and what they TRIED to inflict on him, I want to lock the prosecutors and their co-conspirators up for what is in my opinion a criminal conspiracy to contrive to convict an innocent man. This is a real bonfire of the vanities. You have career prosecutors who were prepared to destroy a life over this, and others supporting that to cover their ass and deny any responsibility.
How these miserable excuses for human beings can sleep at night I don't know. Just one of these prosecutors or middle managers is a thousand times more dangerous than a roomfull of McOwens.
Just following up I saw the post you actually responded to, and I agree the guy's a fool. Typical of what Britain is up against. Don't worry he only makes our point for us, unfortunately there are too many like him.
How much do you think RB started with? There's nothing stopping anyone going from almost nothing to millionaire besides ability and effort. This is not a class war, if you think it is then explain inheritance tax.
Your attitude does more to hold people back that any capital conspiracy. Who do you think you are helping with your tripe? If people on Merseyside et.al. knew they could make their way in the world instead of being spoon fed by the socialist pseudo intellectuals who infest their ranks they'd be a lot better off.
No, they want and need OpenGL on Windows. They just want it to stagnate. What they dearly want is all developers to write to the Direct3D API. This way they get to have their cake and eat it. They can run 'legacy' OpenGL applications and attract applications from other platforms (mainly *nix and mainly professional applications), but applications written to the Windows platform are difficult to port elsewhere and are effectively tied to their operating system.
If work is being copied then there's at least one innocent victim here.
Plagerism happens all the time in these classes and the hardest working & best student is the one who get's copied the most.
I know a 1st class honors graduate who got his degree because he used to take the second class of a set of two. At the start of each class he'd pull the old printouts from the waste paper bin and use that as his starting point. He'd have a complete solution at the start of the exercise which he could then refine.
I'd like to see guys like him get caught, but what about the people he copies from. Unless the professors are going to take the time to investigate this there will be innocent victims. Tenured professors can be heartless and lazy and the administrators in academic beaurocracies would put Rudolf Hess to shame.
If this continues then we need regulations to protect students.
No it didn't happen a long time ago. Microsoft bought a UK company called Rendermorphics for the D3D stuff.
The rest is just rumour, I can name about 6 times SGI was rumoured to be getting bought by someone. The Microsoft one was never credible. The most plausible rumour was when it looked like Sun were going to buy them.
The financial issues are called socialism, not Lagom. It's the same in the UK, but Thatcher fixed some of it. Working class folks still look at a lottery winner as a hero, but it you make a lot of money, especially if you're paid a lot, then you'll be treated like a criminal by some. Of course real criminals like Ronnie Biggs are treated like heroes. If you make it big your only hope is to try and fly a balloon around the world.
In America there's a culture of self improvement and more of a belief that if you have money chances are you earned it. The irony is that in the UK public education is generally better than the USA, but the culture holds some back. There's an entrepreneurial gestalt in most circles in the USA. There are exceptions and forces working against this, but it's America's greatest strength IMHO.
Do not confuse spatial accuity with contrast sensitivity. There is a lot of 'conventional wisdom' extrapolated from facts about human perception which has not been tested experimentally.
The emotive term carpet bombing is used by the media to conjure up images of indescriminate widespread destruction. A single bomber cannot carpet bomb. The expression was coined during WWII when waves of bombers would beging to bomb a target area and over the course of many planes dropping bombs, perhaps over hours, the destructive wave would roll forward like a carpet. It was so predictable that ultimately the first bomber would drop it's bombs short of the target in anticipation that the carpet bombing would eventually roll over the target area guaranteeing it's destruction.
So, longstick is NOT carpet bombing. It is pretty accurate, and supplemented with JDAMS & paveway guided bombs, it is even precise.
So, when you think you're being sophisticated and circumventing US propaganda calling this carpet bombing, you are infact misrepresenting what it is, and propagating a lie.
What is really interesting here is that Russia is releasing this information. It suggests to me that the motivation was domestic politics. Putin is hoping to benefit politically from the announcement, perhaps in the wake of concerns over ABM treaty and arms reductions. It is very interesting that the Russian leadership has to play similar games as US politicians and seek political gain from unveiling secret projects that during the Soviet era would not have been discussed.
Putin is trying to project the image that Russia is still strong and able to take a lead to a domestic audience.
You don't need supersonic missiles to take out drug smugglers.
This is a weapon which threatens enemy battlegroups, or at least it would if the idea of a stealth ship was viable.
Ships can be tracked from space, and the US has researched this. A stealth ship isn't going to be able to conceal it's position from the USA, maybe it'll help confuse a few French missiles right before the US alters it's radar profile permanently.
Nice shot for a home telescope but it's a small fraction of the resolution on the instrument you chose to compare with, and it can't match the capability of the other instruments on the Hubble. It's downright misleading to draw this comparrison.
Saturn is the easiest object to image, you chose it for a reason. How about some of the feinter objects. Come on show us just how incapable your 13 inch telescope really is with a deep field shot.
Babelfish alters web pages all the time for translation purposes. Are you agreeing that babelfish is breeching Copyright of the page authors?
Why can't I write a script which patches a software program for translation purposes, how is that a breech of copyright if it requires the original package?
What is actually happening here is that Infogrames have a revenue recognition problem because they don't know how to run an international publishing company. They're late with a release that fans want, and they are abusing the law and their hard core fan base.
Infogrames can't impose fines. Who do you think they are? They could go to a court and sue, but they are wrong about this. These guys are working on a translation patch for people who have purchased the game. Revenue recognition is Infogrames problem, it's not the law's purpose to help Infogrames manage its subsidiaries. Translations don't breach copyright, have you seen babelfish? These guys are effectively running a human babelfish patch over a legitimately purchased game. Infogrames is just using thuggish legal tactics to bully a small guy who can't afford the legal expenses.
Civ 3 is tedious anyway, I bought it played it once and sold it to a friend who was a Civ fanatic, even he says this version is tedious with flawed gameplay. My advice, forget it and move on, and thing twice before you buy another infogrames game.
Surely the energy stored in a battery is proportional to the volume of electrolyte, so batteries which are excessively thin will not have a long life, and will have to be very 'wide' to make up the volume. The width would have to be disproportionately increased to make up the volume.
What's inhumane is letting Saddam get away with tooling up for another major conflict in the Middle East. The people saying we should give relief to the Iraqi people are the same who said we should stop the Desert Storm on the the road to Basra. You need to be very short sighted to support your position.
You see, there are real consequences to releasing all restrictions on Iraq, and those consequences are extremely unpleasant. This isn't some pristine environment where we can deal with issues in isolation. It is criminally irresponsible to ignore the fact that Saddam has been hell bent on developing weapons of mass destruction and has used such weapons before against his own people. He's using the deaths of his own people to stirr your emotions when he has the power to releive their suffering and wont. Unfortunately people like you selectively pick and choose from the available facts to paint an anti-American picture and play right into Saddam's hands.
On the issue of US arms to Israel, and their constant use in contravention of international law, that depends on how you interpret the situation there. Self defense does not contravene international law. Frankly it's a miracle Israel has survived this long if you look at the attacks against it. You seem to forget that it was US pressure which stopped Israel rolling all the way into Cairo when Egypt and other beligerants attacked it during a holy festival. Just as it was US pressure which forced the UK to stop it's recapture of the nationalized Suez Canal. US policy has never been as one sided as you pretend it has, but Arabs seem to have a conveniently selective memory on these issues. Recent administrations put considerable pressure on Israel to make concessions, which led directly to the recent escallation in violence. The cynical PA thinks it can use it's new found PR skills and bloody slaughter as a political tool to gain territory.
Those workers were mine clearing staff who were living on the air base which got bombed. I don't see that in your post, nor was it easy to find in the news reports which DID get broadcast many times. It's an old trick, pretend that it was covered up by the news when it was all over the place. Do you even watch US news services?
And the US wasn't dropping food into known minefields. This was part of the propaganda that the US media DID put out, one US pres corp reporter was concerned that they might hit a refugee on the head with a food parcel. The next thing they were concerned that refugees might run through mine fields to get the food. Humanitarian agencies were even complaining about the cost of the food drops, this at a time when the Taliban were blocking the roads. The anti-American sentiment was flowing, and over what? Food drops!
Disgusting, you and others were finding any excuse to bash the US, food drops on minefields was just one of the more reprehensible pieces of propaganda.
To this day there's not a single shred of evidence to support this, and you sure haven't seen any, yet you still post the accusation here, amidst any other seditious anti-US diatribe you can scrape up.
Slashdot Mirror
That should be:
for(lat = -90; lat 90; lat++) {
I'll excuse the longitude, although I'd suggest -180 to 180.
This is true, but Aidid also ordered a massacre of U.N. peacekeeping troops. He wasn't declared an enemy because of the theft of food, which was pretty much the cost of doing business, the guys with guns are always the last to starve. He was declared an enemy because he attacked and massacred a patrol of Pakistani U.N. peacekeepers.
And yes, this was not about oil, it was entirely humanitarian. It is sickening that every time the U.S. does something to help the innocent the twisted propagandists crawl out of the woodwork and accuse it of the worst.
This film is a factual account of what happened, it ties in with the interviews of the soldiers I've seen. Not all opinions are equal, some people are just plain wrong, and the people calling this American propaganda, or calling the mission in Somalia American Imperialism are simply wrong. The fact that they disagree with the story doesn't make the movie propagada, it makes them wrong.
The preamble at the beginning really skimps on the politics, this is not a film about the politics of Somalia or about the humanitarian mission turned hunt for Aidid. The film is almost entirely about the events and firefights directly related to the mission to capture Aidid & his top officials. It doesn't glamorize the mission or the US role. People calling this propaganda are the same fools who think a U.N. humanitarian mission in some East African country nobody has any aspirations towards is somehow American imperialism, they are fools, no other word fits them as well. They should get better informed and perhaps even see the movie before passing judgement.
The reason Aidid was declared an enemy was a massacre of Pakistani UN troops, the film even mentions this very briefly in the preamble.
What is most disturbing about this case is the utter lack of any moral compass on the part of the prosecutors in this case. You have a sysadmin who installed software which burned spare cycles and inadvertently raised the phone bill. It's a mistake, accidents happen, to go after him because he didn't have explicit permission is a disgrace. These immature imbeciles can't get over their pique at seeing the costs incurred and go after him like he's some kind of uber hacker. This is the guy THEY hired to run their network. In a situation like this you learn a lesson, you don't rehire the guy, you don't give him a reference then you move on.
When you look at what they inflicted on McOwen and what they TRIED to inflict on him, I want to lock the prosecutors and their co-conspirators up for what is in my opinion a criminal conspiracy to contrive to convict an innocent man. This is a real bonfire of the vanities. You have career prosecutors who were prepared to destroy a life over this, and others supporting that to cover their ass and deny any responsibility.
How these miserable excuses for human beings can sleep at night I don't know. Just one of these prosecutors or middle managers is a thousand times more dangerous than a roomfull of McOwens.
Just following up I saw the post you actually responded to, and I agree the guy's a fool. Typical of what Britain is up against. Don't worry he only makes our point for us, unfortunately there are too many like him.
Fool, just for the record.
How much do you think RB started with? There's nothing stopping anyone going from almost nothing to millionaire besides ability and effort. This is not a class war, if you think it is then explain inheritance tax.
Your attitude does more to hold people back that any capital conspiracy. Who do you think you are helping with your tripe? If people on Merseyside et.al. knew they could make their way in the world instead of being spoon fed by the socialist pseudo intellectuals who infest their ranks they'd be a lot better off.
Your philosophy belongs in the 1800s.
No, they want and need OpenGL on Windows. They just want it to stagnate. What they dearly want is all developers to write to the Direct3D API. This way they get to have their cake and eat it. They can run 'legacy' OpenGL applications and attract applications from other platforms (mainly *nix and mainly professional applications), but applications written to the Windows platform are difficult to port elsewhere and are effectively tied to their operating system.
If work is being copied then there's at least one innocent victim here.
Plagerism happens all the time in these classes and the hardest working & best student is the one who get's copied the most.
I know a 1st class honors graduate who got his degree because he used to take the second class of a set of two. At the start of each class he'd pull the old printouts from the waste paper bin and use that as his starting point. He'd have a complete solution at the start of the exercise which he could then refine.
I'd like to see guys like him get caught, but what about the people he copies from. Unless the professors are going to take the time to investigate this there will be innocent victims. Tenured professors can be heartless and lazy and the administrators in academic beaurocracies would put Rudolf Hess to shame.
If this continues then we need regulations to protect students.
No it didn't happen a long time ago. Microsoft bought a UK company called Rendermorphics for the D3D stuff.
The rest is just rumour, I can name about 6 times SGI was rumoured to be getting bought by someone. The Microsoft one was never credible. The most plausible rumour was when it looked like Sun were going to buy them.
Is this a reply to me? You have quotes around something I did not say. I respect and admire RB.
Good post, here is some related background on Microsoft's suppression of OpenGL.
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/3d.html
The financial issues are called socialism, not Lagom. It's the same in the UK, but Thatcher fixed some of it. Working class folks still look at a lottery winner as a hero, but it you make a lot of money, especially if you're paid a lot, then you'll be treated like a criminal by some. Of course real criminals like Ronnie Biggs are treated like heroes. If you make it big your only hope is to try and fly a balloon around the world.
In America there's a culture of self improvement and more of a belief that if you have money chances are you earned it. The irony is that in the UK public education is generally better than the USA, but the culture holds some back. There's an entrepreneurial gestalt in most circles in the USA. There are exceptions and forces working against this, but it's America's greatest strength IMHO.
Do not confuse spatial accuity with contrast sensitivity. There is a lot of 'conventional wisdom' extrapolated from facts about human perception which has not been tested experimentally.
Carpet bombing is not the same as a longstick.
The emotive term carpet bombing is used by the media to conjure up images of indescriminate widespread destruction. A single bomber cannot carpet bomb. The expression was coined during WWII when waves of bombers would beging to bomb a target area and over the course of many planes dropping bombs, perhaps over hours, the destructive wave would roll forward like a carpet. It was so predictable that ultimately the first bomber would drop it's bombs short of the target in anticipation that the carpet bombing would eventually roll over the target area guaranteeing it's destruction.
So, longstick is NOT carpet bombing. It is pretty accurate, and supplemented with JDAMS & paveway guided bombs, it is even precise.
So, when you think you're being sophisticated and circumventing US propaganda calling this carpet bombing, you are infact misrepresenting what it is, and propagating a lie.
What is really interesting here is that Russia is releasing this information. It suggests to me that the motivation was domestic politics. Putin is hoping to benefit politically from the announcement, perhaps in the wake of concerns over ABM treaty and arms reductions. It is very interesting that the Russian leadership has to play similar games as US politicians and seek political gain from unveiling secret projects that during the Soviet era would not have been discussed.
Putin is trying to project the image that Russia is still strong and able to take a lead to a domestic audience.
You don't need supersonic missiles to take out drug smugglers.
This is a weapon which threatens enemy battlegroups, or at least it would if the idea of a stealth ship was viable.
Ships can be tracked from space, and the US has researched this. A stealth ship isn't going to be able to conceal it's position from the USA, maybe it'll help confuse a few French missiles right before the US alters it's radar profile permanently.
The prototype sailed into San Francisco bay, I'd hardly call that keeping it a secret.
Nice shot for a home telescope but it's a small fraction of the resolution on the instrument you chose to compare with, and it can't match the capability of the other instruments on the Hubble. It's downright misleading to draw this comparrison.
Saturn is the easiest object to image, you chose it for a reason. How about some of the feinter objects. Come on show us just how incapable your 13 inch telescope really is with a deep field shot.
How do they get to this site to read all this sage advice?
Chicken & egg, a web site saying if you can't get online do this.
Oh come on, @home doesn't exactly service the entire country, infact they cherry picked the prime regions.
Babelfish alters web pages all the time for translation purposes. Are you agreeing that babelfish is breeching Copyright of the page authors?
Why can't I write a script which patches a software program for translation purposes, how is that a breech of copyright if it requires the original package?
What is actually happening here is that Infogrames have a revenue recognition problem because they don't know how to run an international publishing company. They're late with a release that fans want, and they are abusing the law and their hard core fan base.
Infogrames can't impose fines. Who do you think they are? They could go to a court and sue, but they are wrong about this. These guys are working on a translation patch for people who have purchased the game. Revenue recognition is Infogrames problem, it's not the law's purpose to help Infogrames manage its subsidiaries. Translations don't breach copyright, have you seen babelfish? These guys are effectively running a human babelfish patch over a legitimately purchased game. Infogrames is just using thuggish legal tactics to bully a small guy who can't afford the legal expenses.
Civ 3 is tedious anyway, I bought it played it once and sold it to a friend who was a Civ fanatic, even he says this version is tedious with flawed gameplay. My advice, forget it and move on, and thing twice before you buy another infogrames game.
Surely the energy stored in a battery is proportional to the volume of electrolyte, so batteries which are excessively thin will not have a long life, and will have to be very 'wide' to make up the volume. The width would have to be disproportionately increased to make up the volume.
What's inhumane is letting Saddam get away with tooling up for another major conflict in the Middle East. The people saying we should give relief to the Iraqi people are the same who said we should stop the Desert Storm on the the road to Basra. You need to be very short sighted to support your position.
You see, there are real consequences to releasing all restrictions on Iraq, and those consequences are extremely unpleasant. This isn't some pristine environment where we can deal with issues in isolation. It is criminally irresponsible to ignore the fact that Saddam has been hell bent on developing weapons of mass destruction and has used such weapons before against his own people. He's using the deaths of his own people to stirr your emotions when he has the power to releive their suffering and wont. Unfortunately people like you selectively pick and choose from the available facts to paint an anti-American picture and play right into Saddam's hands.
On the issue of US arms to Israel, and their constant use in contravention of international law, that depends on how you interpret the situation there. Self defense does not contravene international law. Frankly it's a miracle Israel has survived this long if you look at the attacks against it. You seem to forget that it was US pressure which stopped Israel rolling all the way into Cairo when Egypt and other beligerants attacked it during a holy festival. Just as it was US pressure which forced the UK to stop it's recapture of the nationalized Suez Canal. US policy has never been as one sided as you pretend it has, but Arabs seem to have a conveniently selective memory on these issues. Recent administrations put considerable pressure on Israel to make concessions, which led directly to the recent escallation in violence. The cynical PA thinks it can use it's new found PR skills and bloody slaughter as a political tool to gain territory.
Those workers were mine clearing staff who were living on the air base which got bombed. I don't see that in your post, nor was it easy to find in the news reports which DID get broadcast many times. It's an old trick, pretend that it was covered up by the news when it was all over the place. Do you even watch US news services?
And the US wasn't dropping food into known minefields. This was part of the propaganda that the US media DID put out, one US pres corp reporter was concerned that they might hit a refugee on the head with a food parcel. The next thing they were concerned that refugees might run through mine fields to get the food. Humanitarian agencies were even complaining about the cost of the food drops, this at a time when the Taliban were blocking the roads. The anti-American sentiment was flowing, and over what? Food drops!
Disgusting, you and others were finding any excuse to bash the US, food drops on minefields was just one of the more reprehensible pieces of propaganda.
To this day there's not a single shred of evidence to support this, and you sure haven't seen any, yet you still post the accusation here, amidst any other seditious anti-US diatribe you can scrape up.