Why would someone have to learn more about computers to use linux than to use OSx or Windows? They are all on equal footing for someone with no experience with computers. They are going to need to learn about the keyboard, the mouse, the power switch, etc. How many people have not been able to use their PDA or cell phone because they dont understand how they work? Some use windows, some use linux, some use palm or other OS's. None of them use OSX yet people somehow have been able to figure them out. The OS matters the least as far as that goes. Usability matters at the application level, not the OS level. An open source OS provides them availability to thousands of free applications, something OSX and Windows can't offer.
What a totally open source platform, especially the OS provides is the ability to go beyond simply using the device for communication. Then can look at the source code to learn how to develop programs and drivers of their own. They can change programs to suit their need. It gives them more freedom to experiment and learn which is, after all, the point of giving them to students. I assume there will be some failsafe ways to restore the OS should tinkering screw something up. Using a propriety OS like OSX or Windows would be like giving them a printing press where all the letters are set and can't be changed.
I thought that the beta for XP had the linux tcp stack and when that was pointed out, they switched to the BSD stack. Prior to that I think it was the public domain AT&T stack but I could be wrong.
So you have 6 employees watching each of the monitors when you could only have one? The danger of one person with 6 keyboards, besides fatigue, is typing the wrong thing on the wrong keyboard.
Anyone installing a large number of computers should use something like unattended which could even install XP headless after the first box goes through the install flawlessly. For virus scans and the like, they should have a report at the end or they are pretty much worthless. Some even have audio alerts when they are finished.
I've seen them at CompUSA lately and at a reasonable price. Not reasonable for what they are but reasonable for what people charge for them. Don't pay anything more than $50 and you may be able to find them as low as $20.
20A 240V to the bench broken down into several banches with their own circuit breakers is useful so you aren't running to the panel in the dark some late night.
Don't forget to mention that all the programs and drivers are on one CD and you only need to reboot once even after installing patches and upgrades. CD swaps, floppies, reboots, bad drivers, missing drivers... It's enough to drive you insane.
I've set up unattended to install XP off the network automatically and even that is often more work than a linux install. It usually bombs out on a driver issues, some hardware driver that isn;t included and windows doesn't like where you placed it even though it's the proper place. $oem$\$1\drivers or something like that. I always have to hand edit the path to the driver in unattended.txt.
I'll let others belittle your other reasons but it's obvious with reason 4 that you don't understand not only linux permissions but security in general. You can give every user root access through groups or suid and sgid. The problem with this approach is it makes things less secure, not more secure. Users, and even admins, are a little to a lot less careful with their user accounts than they would be with the root account. That said, it would make things as easy and as easy to exploit as windows.
Also, sometimes a program can be exploited to give a shell account as the user who ran the program which is the reason to not run programs as root if you can help it. If that user was already a root equivalent, the exploiter would have full access just as he would on a windows box. If the user was not root equivalent, the exploited would be just as limited as the user and would still have to crack root access.
When it comes to logs, there is a log entry every time someone uses su or sudo to gain root access. There are also logs of failed password attempts and other such activities. You can also have all these logged to a central log server instantly so if root access is ever gained and logs altered, you would have a valid log on a remote box.
With windows, I must admit I'm pretty ignorant, but I don't see anywhere where windows logs anything other than bootup let alone user activities. I would not doubt if every keystroke is logged and sent to Redmond but any other logs must be buried somewhere.
As for sharing files using windows ACL, it does make things easier but it also is how worms like code red were able to exploit IIS and other programs.
"Shares are no longer Everyone: Full Control, but rather Everyone: Read. This was changed as a direct consequence of the Nimda worm that wrote its payload to network shares on other computers."
If you can insert a program and make it runnable by an admin user, you can gain entry into a system. This is a common trick used to change the admin password if it's forgotten.
I would like to see ACL for linux in some limited way but it would have to be done securely, not haphazardly like in windows. In the mean time, one can always set up ACL on a samba server or simply send the file to the person or secure it with a password and host it on a web/ftp site. There are hundreds of ways to get around this problem.
" Society didn't do that. A small group of sociopaths did. Sociopathy is a mental disease. Society is not the cause of sociopathic behavir."
Bringing up Mathew Sheppard or some other case in the US is not an endorsment of what goes on in Iran. I think the person who brought up Sheppard wanted to point out that a whole society is being condemed because of a few choice stories. The US has it's own choice stories too, as does any nation. Confucius says, he who has mop handle up that Haitian man's ass should pull it out before becoming indignant over what happened in some other country.
The rest of the world thinks our leader is socialpathic for ordering indiscriminant dropping of bombs on countries that have not done anything to us. To them, and me, it is every bit as bad, or worse, than the occational execution of a teenage girl in Iran. A 16 year old girl stoned, hanged or beheaded is every bit as dead as one being blown to bits.
More to the point, if this country were to follow the teachings of some of our very own christian leaders today, we would be doing the same sort of things that are going on in Iran. When religious ideas are challanged, some of the religious followers get more extreme. When the government is using this religion as a method of control, at the very least, it looks the other way or justifies extreme actions. This is what happened with the Taliban and in Iran. It's what our socialpathic leader may have caused in Iraq and is certainly what he wants for us here.
I talked to God too and he says he's sorry he missed with the hand granade, the bicycles and the pretzels.
"We have one aging Sun box, for example. You'd think it'd be cheap to maintain, but the guys who runs it gets an annual salary as much as twice the Windows guys. When that box goes down (and it does -- hard sometimes), it costs more to bring it back up thanks to that guy's salary."
If the unix guy is on salary, why would it cost more for him to actually do what he was hired to do? It should cost the same for him to sit there and watch the server or do something when it crashes. I do agree if your sun server goes down and you have no backup system, it will cost you more in downtime and perhaps hardware. Since it's Sun, it would cost more than a windows box to replace, perhaps.
As for his salary being twice that of the windows admins, you are right, they are more expensive. That is supply and demand. Most windows admins are cheaper because anyone can reinstall windows. Top notch windows admins likely cost almost as much as unix admins, I assume. It's just cheaper to reinstall than to actually figure out what went wrong to prevent it again because you need 5 or more admins for every 100 windows boxes. I'm sure your unix admin could easily handle the 3 windows servers if they were converted to linux.
That is a very good assessment except you would have to hire someone to get exactly what you need with windows too. In that case you have to either hire a company to rewrite their existing code for you or hire a group that can program what you want from scratch. Both would take a lot more time and money than if you could hire one programmer to make changes to an existing open source project. The programmer would have the whole project community to help him, provided the changes are put back into the project of course.
I think you are trying to make the point that once your customers realize how flexable linux is, they order more work from you to make things exactly like they want instead of settling for what comes out of the box.
I like the idea of cookie poisoning also. Instead of just putting in random text, put in data that would corrupt any valid data. If a project like that makes enough data worthless, the cookies will stop. The idea could be exported to spyware too.
The heating of the sea is one of the effects, not the cause. So far no one has come up with a credible natureal explaination of what is causing the land, air and sea to warm up. There is a very credible explaination that humans have caused this by releasing carbon in the form of CO2 and CH4, carbom which has been kept out of the natureal cycles for millions of years.
Much like we reversed the growing hole in the ozone layer, if we cut down on the release of CO2, we may slow, stop or reverse the global warming. I agree more studies are needed to find out the best way to use our resources to do something about global warming.
More studies doesn't mean deny that the problem exists. More studies doesn't mean fire or otherwise discredit and silence scientists who publish articles on the problem. More studies doesn't mean cut funding to research of the problem. More studies doesn't mean sit on your hands and do nothing and hope the problem goes away. Maybe Bush just wants to study how he can make money off global warming before he acts.
"You mean the efforts we thought were farther along, in Saddam's pursuit thereof? That would be "we thought" as in, we and the intelligence agencies of a dozen other countries (including France, Germany, Russia, and so on)."
No, I think he means Saddam's WMD programs that both Powell and Rice said no longer posed a threat in 2001. I think he means the WMD that the UN inspectors said were destroyed in 1991. I think he means the nuclear material that was known about and secured by the IAEA, at least until the occupation by US forces which allowed much of it to vanish.
The lie that other countries shared the Bush administration's fears of WMD has fallen out of favor. The current lie is that we wanted to bring them peace and happiness and the freedom to buy big macs. Check your inbox for current talking points, will you?
"What we have in America currently is essentially socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us."
You call it socialism put when the prefered party gets the social benefits, it's closer to communism. At least communism as practiced by Stalin, Lenin and Hitler. When you add that to the capitalism for those not in the party, it's called fascism. I trust you knew that, I'm pointing this out for others.
Sorry, I've not only seen no such demonstration, I've heard quite a lot of information to the contrary, not least from people who work in the same organization as the woman in question (I live in the DC area - unless you're a complete basement dweller, it's hard not to make at least some friends in that arena).
And washington DC is that last place I would expect someone to lie to me. Your happen to have all the inside information that is on the Rove talking points. I wont stoop so low as to pretend I have inside information but I will point out the fallacy oh yours.
Lie 1: Plame was working under cover, not a simple analyst. That makes her covert and the CIA have said that her identity as a CIA agent was not know and was not suppose to be revealed.
Lie 2: She was an agent and does not have the authority to send ambassadors off on missions for the government. She may have reccomended him but someone with authority would have to send him. I wont pretend to know who that was but I know it wasn't her. He has only said he was sent by the CIA in response to questions Dick Cheney had about the issue. If he didn't mention her, perhaps because it was clasified she was in the CIA.
Lie 3: His mission was clear. It was already widely reported by the IAEA that the documents were bogus and he was sent there to verify that because there seemed to be 2 sets of documents. He came back and reported his findings to the CIA that the documents needed 3 signatures to be valid which they did not.
Lie 4: Claiming he is partisan is silly concidering he was first hired by George H. W. Bush rehired by Clinton and rehired yet again by George W. Bush and had not been politially critical of any of them. He only spoke out when Bush gave the state of the union address and stated that Saddam had tried to buy yellow cake from Niger. He knew this was not true and he knew that the administration knew it was not true. He did what I would expect of any American and point out we are being misled. He political views are a red herring especially since none of us have any idea what they were up until he broke the story of Bush's propaganda. He is no doubt anti-Bush now after seeing the way the truth is disregarded and his wife was put in danger.
Lie 5: None of us know what was said between Rove and the various reporters, unless someone has tapes. Pretending to know what was said is stupid. Rove said he didn't know the agent's name until he was told by the reporters, All the reporters except Novak said they didn't know until he told them. Novak hasn't said what he testified to as how he found out and who he told but judging by his actions, he's on the edge about something. Even if Rove didn't mention any names, it is illegal to cause someone to find out, as in giving enough information so they can find out on their own. If I were to say Maria Shriver's husband was a CIA agent, we all can find out who that is. If I knew it were true, I would be in trouble right now. By purposely not giving her name but saying his wife works for the CIA implies he knew it was true and was trying to split hairs to try and stay barely legal.
As for the rest of your rant, "Blame Clinton, Kerry, actors, and the liberal media" only gets you so far. Bush is a great guy (greater than Churchill, if you believe Ari Fleischer) but all his failures are because Clinton got a blow job? Come on, Bush has been a failure all his life. If he wasn't in the Bush family, he'd be on Jerry Springer.
First, stopping the soviets was used as an excuse to get involved in a lot of places we had no business in. Not to mention, the people we propped up to protect against the so called evil soviets were worse than the socialists we overthrew. But since you do want a current example, Pakistan (we are supporting a dictator who overthrew a democratic government).
Second, sometimes it's wise to pull out of a never ending situation rather than waste years, resources and lives on it. Things were not going to change in Lebenon with us there but we would always have been a target.
The same is now true for Iraq. They are going to have to fight out their battles themselves and as long as we are there, we will be a thorn to any government that allows us to stay. Our troops are not making the place more secure, and even more US troops will not make it more secure.
Look at Israel. I couldn't find their standing army numbers but by estimate, they have at least 500,000. All eligable men and women are required to serve 1 month a year in the reserves. I found the total eligable and divided by 12 to get 200,000. Another 100,000 a year reach military age where they are required to serve 3 years so that is another 300,000.
In their 50 years of existance and with at least 4 times the troops as us in Iraq, they have been unable to quell the insurgency in their own borders. They even employ much more drastic measures than our army. What hope do we have at stopping the insurgency in Iraq? Slim to none even if we plan everything right. With Bush, every plan has been wrong or too late. It's time to back out and let them decide their own future.
If they go along a path that does become a threat to us or neighbors (A real threat, not just Bush propaganda), Something can be done about it then with the support and help of the countries around it.
I'll have to be honest, I couldn't make heads or tails from that graph without any context. I looked for an explaination on the rest of the web site and couldn't find where it came from.
I will say this, carbon cycles do occure and the ability of the oceans to absorb carbon is well known. While we have been producing CO2 and CH4 for 150 years and longer,
I think the difference here is an increased rate of CO2 release, releasing CO2 from sources where it (at least the carbon) has been locked up for thousands of years, and upsetting the cycles that remove the CO2.
Where we use to burn wood, oil and coal in homes and factories, we now burn it in homes, factories, power plants, and cars.
Where we once used wood which would have rotted and released CO2 and CH4 anyway, we now use much more coal and oil which has carbon which has been locked up out of the natural cycles for millions of years.
Where we once chopped down enough trees to build a house and stock our fires often using dead wood that would have rotted anyway, we now clearcut and burn millions square miles of forest a year which eliminates those trees from the part of the cycle that reduces CO2 in the air.
"What? Of course the climate changes! I don't think anyone ever denied this. The important question isn't even if humans affect change, because we do."
Well now there you go again, to quote a famous president, trying to rewrite history. The neocons have long denied that global warming is happening. The Bush administration is still doing it.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6341451/
Now I'm going to to go googling for past quotes by the administration and many other neocons regarding the denial of global warming because I dont have the time and you have access to google too. That is if you really believe what you have stated.
I am pretty much in agreement with the rest of your post. I do think we can slow it down, maybe even reverse it but that will take time. In the mean time we need to decide what to expect and what to do about the changes coming up.
Also to those who claim there have been warm periods before and it is caused by natural cycle of things. There are explanations for the warming periods in the past such as increased volcanic activity, meteors, etc. In this case there are no such explanations while increased human caused CO2 release does explain at least part of it. Deforstation also interrupts the cycle of removing C02 as well as adding CO2 into the air from rotting or burning vegetation. The exposure of long frozen peat may add even more CO2. While those are part of a natural process, it comes into play because of man made causes which started them.
If it were only in Western Siberia and wasn't thousands of years of glacier I would agree with you. These patterns are repeated all over the globe, hence the name global warming.
Of course the national geographic and those others could also be part of the liberal conspiracy to make republicans look foolish by heating up remote places on earth making it seem like the earth is warming. Maybe that is who is buying up all the oil.
We scientists (I'm not really a scientist, I just play one on the internets) are glad you finally stopped denying that the climate is changing. What convinced you, the volumes of evidence or the latest poll results of your constituents?
BTW, how is that whole neocon "world is round is just a theory" thing coming? They teaching "world is flat" along side "world is round" in public schools yet?
But the people who are saying it's conjecture that humans are causing global warming are the same ones that for 40 years have denied that global warming even exists. Now that they are forces to admit the world is warming, they say it's a normal pattern. Quite frankly, I'll believe the scientists who have studied it for 40 years rather than the talking heads who have denied it without consideration.
Of course the earth was warmer before. The earth was molten at one time, perhaps even in a gaseous state much like the sun. Are you saying we shouldn't worry about global warming until we reach 6,000C? It's not the earth we are worried about, it's us.
Our fearless leader has the solution for this. We can change daylight savings time so that summer last 11 months, problem solved. We wont see the effects for another 3000 years but then gas prices will begin to lower and the economy will go on the right track.
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Why would someone have to learn more about computers to use linux than to use OSx or Windows? They are all on equal footing for someone with no experience with computers. They are going to need to learn about the keyboard, the mouse, the power switch, etc. How many people have not been able to use their PDA or cell phone because they dont understand how they work? Some use windows, some use linux, some use palm or other OS's. None of them use OSX yet people somehow have been able to figure them out. The OS matters the least as far as that goes. Usability matters at the application level, not the OS level. An open source OS provides them availability to thousands of free applications, something OSX and Windows can't offer.
What a totally open source platform, especially the OS provides is the ability to go beyond simply using the device for communication. Then can look at the source code to learn how to develop programs and drivers of their own. They can change programs to suit their need. It gives them more freedom to experiment and learn which is, after all, the point of giving them to students. I assume there will be some failsafe ways to restore the OS should tinkering screw something up. Using a propriety OS like OSX or Windows would be like giving them a printing press where all the letters are set and can't be changed.
I thought that the beta for XP had the linux tcp stack and when that was pointed out, they switched to the BSD stack. Prior to that I think it was the public domain AT&T stack but I could be wrong.
So you have 6 employees watching each of the monitors when you could only have one? The danger of one person with 6 keyboards, besides fatigue, is typing the wrong thing on the wrong keyboard.
Anyone installing a large number of computers should use something like unattended which could even install XP headless after the first box goes through the install flawlessly. For virus scans and the like, they should have a report at the end or they are pretty much worthless. Some even have audio alerts when they are finished.
I've seen them at CompUSA lately and at a reasonable price. Not reasonable for what they are but reasonable for what people charge for them. Don't pay anything more than $50 and you may be able to find them as low as $20.
20A 240V to the bench broken down into several banches with their own circuit breakers is useful so you aren't running to the panel in the dark some late night.
Don't forget to mention that all the programs and drivers are on one CD and you only need to reboot once even after installing patches and upgrades. CD swaps, floppies, reboots, bad drivers, missing drivers... It's enough to drive you insane.
I've set up unattended to install XP off the network automatically and even that is often more work than a linux install. It usually bombs out on a driver issues, some hardware driver that isn;t included and windows doesn't like where you placed it even though it's the proper place. $oem$\$1\drivers or something like that. I always have to hand edit the path to the driver in unattended.txt.
I'll let others belittle your other reasons but it's obvious with reason 4 that you don't understand not only linux permissions but security in general. You can give every user root access through groups or suid and sgid. The problem with this approach is it makes things less secure, not more secure. Users, and even admins, are a little to a lot less careful with their user accounts than they would be with the root account. That said, it would make things as easy and as easy to exploit as windows.
= /library/en-us/dncode/html/secure06122003.asp
Also, sometimes a program can be exploited to give a shell account as the user who ran the program which is the reason to not run programs as root if you can help it. If that user was already a root equivalent, the exploiter would have full access just as he would on a windows box. If the user was not root equivalent, the exploited would be just as limited as the user and would still have to crack root access.
When it comes to logs, there is a log entry every time someone uses su or sudo to gain root access. There are also logs of failed password attempts and other such activities. You can also have all these logged to a central log server instantly so if root access is ever gained and logs altered, you would have a valid log on a remote box.
With windows, I must admit I'm pretty ignorant, but I don't see anywhere where windows logs anything other than bootup let alone user activities. I would not doubt if every keystroke is logged and sent to Redmond but any other logs must be buried somewhere.
As for sharing files using windows ACL, it does make things easier but it also is how worms like code red were able to exploit IIS and other programs.
"Shares are no longer Everyone: Full Control, but rather Everyone: Read. This was changed as a direct consequence of the Nimda worm that wrote its payload to network shares on other computers."
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
If you can insert a program and make it runnable by an admin user, you can gain entry into a system. This is a common trick used to change the admin password if it's forgotten.
I would like to see ACL for linux in some limited way but it would have to be done securely, not haphazardly like in windows. In the mean time, one can always set up ACL on a samba server or simply send the file to the person or secure it with a password and host it on a web/ftp site. There are hundreds of ways to get around this problem.
If electricity is made up of electrons then morality is made up of morons.
" Society didn't do that. A small group of sociopaths did. Sociopathy is a mental disease. Society is not the cause of sociopathic behavir."
Bringing up Mathew Sheppard or some other case in the US is not an endorsment of what goes on in Iran. I think the person who brought up Sheppard wanted to point out that a whole society is being condemed because of a few choice stories. The US has it's own choice stories too, as does any nation. Confucius says, he who has mop handle up that Haitian man's ass should pull it out before becoming indignant over what happened in some other country.
The rest of the world thinks our leader is socialpathic for ordering indiscriminant dropping of bombs on countries that have not done anything to us. To them, and me, it is every bit as bad, or worse, than the occational execution of a teenage girl in Iran. A 16 year old girl stoned, hanged or beheaded is every bit as dead as one being blown to bits.
More to the point, if this country were to follow the teachings of some of our very own christian leaders today, we would be doing the same sort of things that are going on in Iran. When religious ideas are challanged, some of the religious followers get more extreme. When the government is using this religion as a method of control, at the very least, it looks the other way or justifies extreme actions. This is what happened with the Taliban and in Iran. It's what our socialpathic leader may have caused in Iraq and is certainly what he wants for us here.
I talked to God too and he says he's sorry he missed with the hand granade, the bicycles and the pretzels.
"We have one aging Sun box, for example. You'd think it'd be cheap to maintain, but the guys who runs it gets an annual salary as much as twice the Windows guys. When that box goes down (and it does -- hard sometimes), it costs more to bring it back up thanks to that guy's salary."
If the unix guy is on salary, why would it cost more for him to actually do what he was hired to do? It should cost the same for him to sit there and watch the server or do something when it crashes. I do agree if your sun server goes down and you have no backup system, it will cost you more in downtime and perhaps hardware. Since it's Sun, it would cost more than a windows box to replace, perhaps.
As for his salary being twice that of the windows admins, you are right, they are more expensive. That is supply and demand. Most windows admins are cheaper because anyone can reinstall windows. Top notch windows admins likely cost almost as much as unix admins, I assume. It's just cheaper to reinstall than to actually figure out what went wrong to prevent it again because you need 5 or more admins for every 100 windows boxes. I'm sure your unix admin could easily handle the 3 windows servers if they were converted to linux.
That is a very good assessment except you would have to hire someone to get exactly what you need with windows too. In that case you have to either hire a company to rewrite their existing code for you or hire a group that can program what you want from scratch. Both would take a lot more time and money than if you could hire one programmer to make changes to an existing open source project. The programmer would have the whole project community to help him, provided the changes are put back into the project of course.
I think you are trying to make the point that once your customers realize how flexable linux is, they order more work from you to make things exactly like they want instead of settling for what comes out of the box.
I like the idea of cookie poisoning also. Instead of just putting in random text, put in data that would corrupt any valid data. If a project like that makes enough data worthless, the cookies will stop. The idea could be exported to spyware too.
The heating of the sea is one of the effects, not the cause. So far no one has come up with a credible natureal explaination of what is causing the land, air and sea to warm up. There is a very credible explaination that humans have caused this by releasing carbon in the form of CO2 and CH4, carbom which has been kept out of the natureal cycles for millions of years.
Much like we reversed the growing hole in the ozone layer, if we cut down on the release of CO2, we may slow, stop or reverse the global warming. I agree more studies are needed to find out the best way to use our resources to do something about global warming.
More studies doesn't mean deny that the problem exists. More studies doesn't mean fire or otherwise discredit and silence scientists who publish articles on the problem. More studies doesn't mean cut funding to research of the problem. More studies doesn't mean sit on your hands and do nothing and hope the problem goes away. Maybe Bush just wants to study how he can make money off global warming before he acts.
"You mean the efforts we thought were farther along, in Saddam's pursuit thereof? That would be "we thought" as in, we and the intelligence agencies of a dozen other countries (including France, Germany, Russia, and so on)."
No, I think he means Saddam's WMD programs that both Powell and Rice said no longer posed a threat in 2001. I think he means the WMD that the UN inspectors said were destroyed in 1991. I think he means the nuclear material that was known about and secured by the IAEA, at least until the occupation by US forces which allowed much of it to vanish.
The lie that other countries shared the Bush administration's fears of WMD has fallen out of favor. The current lie is that we wanted to bring them peace and happiness and the freedom to buy big macs. Check your inbox for current talking points, will you?
"What we have in America currently is essentially socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us."
You call it socialism put when the prefered party gets the social benefits, it's closer to communism. At least communism as practiced by Stalin, Lenin and Hitler. When you add that to the capitalism for those not in the party, it's called fascism. I trust you knew that, I'm pointing this out for others.
Bah, stupid me, clicked submit instead of preview.
Sorry, I've not only seen no such demonstration, I've heard quite a lot of information to the contrary, not least from people who work in the same organization as the woman in question (I live in the DC area - unless you're a complete basement dweller, it's hard not to make at least some friends in that arena).
And washington DC is that last place I would expect someone to lie to me. Your happen to have all the inside information that is on the Rove talking points. I wont stoop so low as to pretend I have inside information but I will point out the fallacy oh yours.
Lie 1: Plame was working under cover, not a simple analyst. That makes her covert and the CIA have said that her identity as a CIA agent was not know and was not suppose to be revealed.
Lie 2: She was an agent and does not have the authority to send ambassadors off on missions for the government. She may have reccomended him but someone with authority would have to send him. I wont pretend to know who that was but I know it wasn't her. He has only said he was sent by the CIA in response to questions Dick Cheney had about the issue. If he didn't mention her, perhaps because it was clasified she was in the CIA.
Lie 3: His mission was clear. It was already widely reported by the IAEA that the documents were bogus and he was sent there to verify that because there seemed to be 2 sets of documents. He came back and reported his findings to the CIA that the documents needed 3 signatures to be valid which they did not.
Lie 4: Claiming he is partisan is silly concidering he was first hired by George H. W. Bush rehired by Clinton and rehired yet again by George W. Bush and had not been politially critical of any of them. He only spoke out when Bush gave the state of the union address and stated that Saddam had tried to buy yellow cake from Niger. He knew this was not true and he knew that the administration knew it was not true. He did what I would expect of any American and point out we are being misled. He political views are a red herring especially since none of us have any idea what they were up until he broke the story of Bush's propaganda. He is no doubt anti-Bush now after seeing the way the truth is disregarded and his wife was put in danger.
Lie 5: None of us know what was said between Rove and the various reporters, unless someone has tapes. Pretending to know what was said is stupid. Rove said he didn't know the agent's name until he was told by the reporters, All the reporters except Novak said they didn't know until he told them. Novak hasn't said what he testified to as how he found out and who he told but judging by his actions, he's on the edge about something. Even if Rove didn't mention any names, it is illegal to cause someone to find out, as in giving enough information so they can find out on their own. If I were to say Maria Shriver's husband was a CIA agent, we all can find out who that is. If I knew it were true, I would be in trouble right now. By purposely not giving her name but saying his wife works for the CIA implies he knew it was true and was trying to split hairs to try and stay barely legal.
As for the rest of your rant, "Blame Clinton, Kerry, actors, and the liberal media" only gets you so far. Bush is a great guy (greater than Churchill, if you believe Ari Fleischer) but all his failures are because Clinton got a blow job? Come on, Bush has been a failure all his life. If he wasn't in the Bush family, he'd be on Jerry Springer.
First, stopping the soviets was used as an excuse to get involved in a lot of places we had no business in. Not to mention, the people we propped up to protect against the so called evil soviets were worse than the socialists we overthrew. But since you do want a current example, Pakistan (we are supporting a dictator who overthrew a democratic government).
Second, sometimes it's wise to pull out of a never ending situation rather than waste years, resources and lives on it. Things were not going to change in Lebenon with us there but we would always have been a target.
The same is now true for Iraq. They are going to have to fight out their battles themselves and as long as we are there, we will be a thorn to any government that allows us to stay. Our troops are not making the place more secure, and even more US troops will not make it more secure.
Look at Israel. I couldn't find their standing army numbers but by estimate, they have at least 500,000. All eligable men and women are required to serve 1 month a year in the reserves. I found the total eligable and divided by 12 to get 200,000. Another 100,000 a year reach military age where they are required to serve 3 years so that is another 300,000.
In their 50 years of existance and with at least 4 times the troops as us in Iraq, they have been unable to quell the insurgency in their own borders. They even employ much more drastic measures than our army. What hope do we have at stopping the insurgency in Iraq? Slim to none even if we plan everything right. With Bush, every plan has been wrong or too late. It's time to back out and let them decide their own future.
If they go along a path that does become a threat to us or neighbors (A real threat, not just Bush propaganda), Something can be done about it then with the support and help of the countries around it.
I'll have to be honest, I couldn't make heads or tails from that graph without any context. I looked for an explaination on the rest of the web site and couldn't find where it came from.
I will say this, carbon cycles do occure and the ability of the oceans to absorb carbon is well known. While we have been producing CO2 and CH4 for 150 years and longer,
I think the difference here is an increased rate of CO2 release, releasing CO2 from sources where it (at least the carbon) has been locked up for thousands of years, and upsetting the cycles that remove the CO2.
Where we use to burn wood, oil and coal in homes and factories, we now burn it in homes, factories, power plants, and cars.
Where we once used wood which would have rotted and released CO2 and CH4 anyway, we now use much more coal and oil which has carbon which has been locked up out of the natural cycles for millions of years.
Where we once chopped down enough trees to build a house and stock our fires often using dead wood that would have rotted anyway, we now clearcut and burn millions square miles of forest a year which eliminates those trees from the part of the cycle that reduces CO2 in the air.
"What? Of course the climate changes! I don't think anyone ever denied this. The important question isn't even if humans affect change, because we do." Well now there you go again, to quote a famous president, trying to rewrite history. The neocons have long denied that global warming is happening. The Bush administration is still doing it. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6341451/ Now I'm going to to go googling for past quotes by the administration and many other neocons regarding the denial of global warming because I dont have the time and you have access to google too. That is if you really believe what you have stated. I am pretty much in agreement with the rest of your post. I do think we can slow it down, maybe even reverse it but that will take time. In the mean time we need to decide what to expect and what to do about the changes coming up. Also to those who claim there have been warm periods before and it is caused by natural cycle of things. There are explanations for the warming periods in the past such as increased volcanic activity, meteors, etc. In this case there are no such explanations while increased human caused CO2 release does explain at least part of it. Deforstation also interrupts the cycle of removing C02 as well as adding CO2 into the air from rotting or burning vegetation. The exposure of long frozen peat may add even more CO2. While those are part of a natural process, it comes into play because of man made causes which started them.
If it were only in Western Siberia and wasn't thousands of years of glacier I would agree with you. These patterns are repeated all over the globe, hence the name global warming.
t art=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox&rls =org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial
http://www.google.com/search?q=glaciers+melting&s
Of course the national geographic and those others could also be part of the liberal conspiracy to make republicans look foolish by heating up remote places on earth making it seem like the earth is warming. Maybe that is who is buying up all the oil.
We scientists (I'm not really a scientist, I just play one on the internets) are glad you finally stopped denying that the climate is changing. What convinced you, the volumes of evidence or the latest poll results of your constituents? BTW, how is that whole neocon "world is round is just a theory" thing coming? They teaching "world is flat" along side "world is round" in public schools yet?
But the people who are saying it's conjecture that humans are causing global warming are the same ones that for 40 years have denied that global warming even exists. Now that they are forces to admit the world is warming, they say it's a normal pattern. Quite frankly, I'll believe the scientists who have studied it for 40 years rather than the talking heads who have denied it without consideration.
Of course the earth was warmer before. The earth was molten at one time, perhaps even in a gaseous state much like the sun. Are you saying we shouldn't worry about global warming until we reach 6,000C? It's not the earth we are worried about, it's us.
Our fearless leader has the solution for this. We can change daylight savings time so that summer last 11 months, problem solved. We wont see the effects for another 3000 years but then gas prices will begin to lower and the economy will go on the right track.