> My 2cents is that everyone who pulls music or video off kaza without a legal license to have a copy is a "leech".
When I buy a recodable CD, hell, when I buy a harddisk, I pay a levy that gets distributed to the movie/recordign industry and friends as compensation for me making a private copy of copyrighted material.
I pay that levy regardless of how I am going to use the disk or CD (or DVD for that matter)
The day the movie and recording industry stop stealign my money in this way, I'll start considering your point of view. Right now however I feel I have every right to compensate the money that they are stealing from me. THat said, few interestign artists publish through the companies that the RIAA represents, nasty RIAA, means I cannot even get soem fair compensation from them.
Following that reasoning, I suggest just commiting suicide... You can do somethign abotu beign alive and all those nasty consequences, so you beign alive is obviously voluntarily.
> That isn't the legality of it though, and as long as these laws are in place to protect IP and digital, or any other form of property for that matter, we have civic obligation to respect those laws or face the penalties associated with violating them.
Sorry to say but that is utter and complete bullshit.
You have the civic obligation to protest and fight unfair laws, not respect them. Ever wondered why civil disobedience is a recognized form of protest? Ever wondered why the 2nd amandment to the US constitution actually attempts to counterbalance the government by allowing the creation of armed groups outside government control?
Your 'we must obey the government and law regardless what' is the exact excuse that has been used by many many people in Nazi Germany, want to have more examples of why it is utterly wrong and dangerous to think like that?
> prying eyes of those trying to protect their legal property
This is a slight misrepresentation, the works are NOT their property, never have been, and never will be. An idea, nor the expression of an idea can ever eb property.
What they do have is exclusive distribution rights. Note that those are RIGHTS, not PROPERTY.
Those rights are granted in behalf of the society by the government. Now, due to cluelessness of politicians, the music and even more so movie industries have been able to hijack copyright law. Don't be surprised if society no longer supports the grantign of those exclusive rights as a result, the RIAA, MPAA and all their friends only have themselves to blame for that due to: 1. hijacking copyright law as mentioned. 2. refusing to deal with the wishes of their customers 3. trying to get rid of fair use.
The balance tipped completely to the side of the movie and recording industries and that needs a correction before they can go around screaming about how people dont comply.
Well, if you want to make this stick, putting up a banner on the kazaa or whatever port explicitly denying anyone workign for or on behalf of the recording industry or law enforcement, together with a somewhat trivial acess protection might just be enough, provided you also share somethign to which you own the copyright, so you can actually claim a DMCA infringement (they circumvented an access control mechanism in order to access copyrighted material without permission)
Indeed, the lobby group migth be misguided, but they are doign what they are supposed to do. It is politicians not looking beyond the rants of the RIAA and friends that is to blame here, they are the ones that should be looking at the balance of things.
They haev been declared a monopoly by the US and EU legal systems, and having 90% of the desktop market makes them a monopoly in any definition of that word, what makes you believe they aren't? And what would define a monopoly in your strange world then? Not leveraging it? It has been proven in court that they do. Again, what makes you think they don't?
And I was not saying that it would be enough to advertise creatively and get people to know your product, I was arguing that that IS NOT ENOUGH. Starting to wonder if you actually read what people write...
You have to have a product that is utterly superior and that offers a feature the consumer can't do without.
No matter how creative your advertising, as long as the $0 piece of junk MS bundles with Windows is sufficient for most users, you have NO CHANCE. Bundling such things with Windows directly destroys the market for competition and is leveraging the Windows monopoly. You may not like that, but it is how the law defines it.
Now please read carefully and go read the laws regarding fair competitiona and publications about their history if you want a deeper insight into why exactly the kind of behavior that MS is employign is hurting customers and society as a whole, history has a long list of precedents. Untill that or untill you actually put some thought into the matter I guess I am better off stopping my replies.
> Users choose to use the proprietary formats if they want the special features they provide
That is not true. Most users do not consiously choose to use any specific format, they use whatever the default is in a piece of software and are highly unaware of the consequences, and why should they.
> Creating a very useful file format is part of the design of the software, and part of Microsoft's profit seeking goal orientation.
It is only usefull for locking your customers into your software, it is not usefull as a design goal for any other reasons. Developing a flexible, extendible and open format is in the direct interest of the consumer however. Such a format does in no way stop functional innovation, it allows compatability BY DEFAULT.
And of course it is part of their proffit seeking, but that doesn't make it anywhere valid. Robbery is in the interest of the proffit seekign goals of some criminal organistations, does that make it valid?
Also, MS supports open formats because they have to in order to let people communicate at all. If it were upto them, they wouldn't support those.
Fact is that it hurts both the consumer and the competition, and because of the fact that MS has a monopoly position, they are not allowed to do that by law.
> Windows Media format is patented and proprietary, as is GIF and Quicktime.
Yeah, but Unisys/IBM are not leveraging a monopoly in another market in order to force everyoen into using gif, and nor is Apple trying to do that with regards to Quicktime. Besides, as a private user I can license the patents from Unisys/IBM if I want to play with my own gif software and publish the resulting pictures, they do not force me to use their software for it. (the lock-in issue)
This may be very hard to understand, but the behavior and having a monopoly themselves can be fully legal, but the combination is illegal.
> What is the negative effect of the market dominance acheived by Microsoft?
In this specific case it is that they have shown over and over to use such a dominance to force evryone to use their proprietary formats.
That means that if they get their way, in a little while you wont have any choice with regards to what platform you use for watching video, regardless of it beign streamed onlien video, or a DVD you rented.
This creation of a lock-in has always resulted in forced upgrades to create a continues money stream for whoever managed to create the lock-in (note that MS is not unique in trying this)
The end result? the consumer gets no choice and less quality while being forced to pay more. That in my world is directly hurting consumers.
If you want any proof of such things, I suggest you look at MS Office and their forced upgrades and the fact that it basicly tries to explicitly exclude any other platforms.
They are however trying to kill the competition in this field in the same way as in previous fields.
They make something that is just good enough and ensure the consumer gets it without seeing that they pay for it.
The only way to compete with that is by making a vastly superior product with unique features that make a big difference for the consumer.
Just making a better media player and selling it for a fair price? you may want to pay for it, just like I am someone who is willing to buy music. Sadly enough most people will not pay for something better if they can get something that seems good enough for no obvious cost.
That indeed threatens the currently existign competitors in this area, and prevents new competitors from entering this area.
This would not be a problem if MS did not have a monopoly, just remember that the rules change when you have one, and that that is one of the very few things that protects society from the power of mega corporations. Upholding that is important beyond the products and specific company we are talking about here.
> a freedom, it should be noted, that was granted by an author's voluntary decision not to register his work.
One can as easily reason that first of all, in the old situation, many people would not obtain a copyright simply due to lack of knowledge, means for registration etc.
In the new system an author can still take the voluntary decision to keep a work free by explicitly putting it in the public domain.
The FAQ argues that this makes life more difficult for people trying to preserve things in the digital domain, but that is soemthign that I believe can be addressed by fair use. The FAQ also claims that the new system does nothing to protect authors, but that is not true, it makes that authors can do waht they are best at, creating works.
The term of copyright, the unfair limitation of user rights, and fair use are the issues, not automatic copyright.
> Sorry but my ISP, I, and many others disagree with you. We have the right to block email from any source we wish and many have decided that spam is enough of a problem that it justifies this step.
Except for the fact that your proposed solution solves very little and causes major inconvenience.
In other words, it is a bad solution.
Why?
Now you know that whatever the mailserver suggests its hostname is, actually resolves to its IP. It fails to verify in any way if that machien should actually be deliverign mail, and if the mail it delivers should be delivered by that specific server.
So, you ensure that people match the configured hostname with the one from a reverse lookup, and they can still spam you just as easily.
The one thing that does help is adding a specific record type for outgoing smtp servers to the DNS spec and verifying machines against that.
That verification can be done by taking the ip of the conencting server and comparing it to the forward lookups of any outgoign mailservers as reported by dns.
This actually addresses part of the header forging and does make it a lot more difficult to send spam, unlike what you suggest.
No linux distribution should leverage its monopoly (???) to try to monopolize the multimedia market. That does not mean it cannot include a media player.
MS tries to monopolize the application space step by step by means of including things in their OS instead of by open and fair competition with others.
That said, I believe the solution is in forcing MS to support open standards and to publish their file formats. That way they can have their monopoly but only by virtue of having the better product.
My friend, you are mistaken. France and the UK had guaranteed that they would protect the integrity of Poland, and did declare war as a result of the Polish attack.
When the German attack in the west is said to be withotu declaration of war, that concerns Belgium and the Netherlands. France and Germany were strictly spoken already at war.
So yes, they should have attacked, but its very doubtfull that it would have mattered much.
In 1940 the French still had a bigger army then Germany, with better weapons. They were clueless with regards to properly employing their army. Had they tried to March on Berlin, I give them very little chance to have reached it despite Germany being busy with Poland at that time. The simple reason was that Germany was a few decades ahead in military thinking and despite lacking manpower and material, had a much better idea about how to use their army, oh, and it was trained a lot better.
It did take the allies soem 2 years to catchup.
Should they have attacked? yes, they (among others) had guaranteed the integrity of Poland. But it would have taken a lot mroe then that to have gotten a different outcome by the end of 1940.
Had they done something in 1936 or thereabout, it could have gone differently. The problem is that few knew what was going on, and only some suspected it, and suspicion is seldom enough to act violently, you are going to make waay more innocent victims then you prevent that way.
> And if France had done something during the Sitzkrieg instead of sitting around and waiting to be attacked then they wouldn't have needed our intervention in the first place.
THey mostly suffered from bad strategical decisions and wrong employment of their equipment, not so much from how defensive/offensive they were.
Part of their problem was the strict neutrality of Belgium, and part of the defense plan would be to basicly overtake Belgium at the first sign of a German attack on France (which would come through Belgium for sure).
They never counted on the speed and power of a well deployed motorized and armoured invader.
That had nothing whatsoever to do with being pasive, defensive or whatever other claims are often amde, but with leaders havign their minds set on strategies from decades ago. Their biggest failure undoubtedly the wrong deployment of tanks (as part of their infantery instead of in highly mobile tank units) and insuffisient airpower for absolute air superiority, and last but not least, failign to motivate their army to actually fight.
Regardless, the French didn't last long, and one could argue that in relative terms, Poland, THe Netherlands and Belgium put up a lot more of a fight.
Arguing however that that defeat underlines the validity of the offensive policy of the current USA government is based on gross misrepresentation of history.
> Hint: Innocent people die in war. Why aren't you pointing out the women and children killed by the > North Vietnamese themselves
Because 2 wrongs don't make a right. The USA claims it considers itself better then others when it comes to things like liberty, human rights and so on. There is ONE WAY ONLY to convince peopel of that, KEEP TO IT.
What the vietnamese did is simply not an argument in that whatsoever.
> or the women and children killed by the French when they tried to reconquer Indo-China after WW2.
I am not very aware of what the French did, but the country I am from myself (the Netherlands) has a not so nice bit of history itself there (trying to keep Indonesia within our kingdom).
The thing is this. When I was at elementary school, I learned about that. I learned also that what my country did there was morally wrong.
That is a view supported by a majority of peopel that live here.
The problem is that when you point out to an American that they have been involved in such things as well as a response to their claim of moral high ground, a large majority to my experience will defend itself by marginalizing it and throwing acusations back.
That is not a way to discuss anything really. I wonder, do schools overthere give classes in things like debating?
Most people would argue that if you did not achieve the goals of a war, you lost.
Fact: Despite overwhelming military power, the USA was still kicked out of Vietnam and failed to prevent it from becoming Communistic.
Fact: No united Korea despite initial military victory.
Will we see the same in Iraq? I think few peopel doubted that Saddam would fall if the USA put itself to it. Bringing stability and buildign a viable country? I think they better start looking at and learning from the lessons the USSR learned in Afghanistan if they are hoping to win that one at least.
I was against the war because it was started on false arguments and with disregard for international law. That said, it is a good thing that Saddam is gone, but only if Iraq can be turned into a viable place to live for its population. The USA alone is simply not able to do that, it will need the neighbours of Iraq first of all, and will need the support from the rest of the world for it to succeed. How wise it would be to transfer the whole thing to the U.N.
Pulling out now would be the worst possible thign to do.
Maybe if President Bush and his people would actually have provided sound reasoning instead of playing on the emotions of people, responses might have been different, and he wouldn't have looked like a liar. Its sad because there were enough good reasons to do something about Iraq, just not the ones provided by the Bush administration. A small problem also is that the issues that did apply in case of Iraq can be applied to other countries as well.
The problem is that it seems people are reasoning that the goal justifies the means when the USA does something, but not when for example terrorists do something. Lets be very clear, it never does when you blatently disregard the side effects of the means because you have a decent chance on creating a bigger problem then you tried to solve.
Slashdot Mirror
> My 2cents is that everyone who pulls music or video off kaza without a legal license to have a copy is a "leech".
When I buy a recodable CD, hell, when I buy a harddisk, I pay a levy that gets distributed to the movie/recordign industry and friends as compensation for me making a private copy of copyrighted material.
I pay that levy regardless of how I am going to use the disk or CD (or DVD for that matter)
The day the movie and recording industry stop stealign my money in this way, I'll start considering your point of view. Right now however I feel I have every right to compensate the money that they are stealing from me.
THat said, few interestign artists publish through the companies that the RIAA represents, nasty RIAA, means I cannot even get soem fair compensation from them.
Following that reasoning, I suggest just commiting suicide... You can do somethign abotu beign alive and all those nasty consequences, so you beign alive is obviously voluntarily.
> That isn't the legality of it though, and as long as these laws are in place to protect IP and digital, or any other form of property for that matter, we have civic obligation to respect those laws or face the penalties associated with violating them.
Sorry to say but that is utter and complete bullshit.
You have the civic obligation to protest and fight unfair laws, not respect them. Ever wondered why civil disobedience is a recognized form of protest? Ever wondered why the 2nd amandment to the US constitution actually attempts to counterbalance the government by allowing the creation of armed groups outside government control?
Your 'we must obey the government and law regardless what' is the exact excuse that has been used by many many people in Nazi Germany, want to have more examples of why it is utterly wrong and dangerous to think like that?
> prying eyes of those trying to protect their legal property
This is a slight misrepresentation, the works are NOT their property, never have been, and never will be. An idea, nor the expression of an idea can ever eb property.
What they do have is exclusive distribution rights. Note that those are RIGHTS, not PROPERTY.
Those rights are granted in behalf of the society by the government.
Now, due to cluelessness of politicians, the music and even more so movie industries have been able to hijack copyright law. Don't be surprised if society no longer supports the grantign of those exclusive rights as a result, the RIAA, MPAA and all their friends only have themselves to blame for that due to:
1. hijacking copyright law as mentioned.
2. refusing to deal with the wishes of their customers
3. trying to get rid of fair use.
The balance tipped completely to the side of the movie and recording industries and that needs a correction before they can go around screaming about how people dont comply.
Well, if you want to make this stick, putting up a banner on the kazaa or whatever port explicitly denying anyone workign for or on behalf of the recording industry or law enforcement, together with a somewhat trivial acess protection might just be enough, provided you also share somethign to which you own the copyright, so you can actually claim a DMCA infringement (they circumvented an access control mechanism in order to access copyrighted material without permission)
Just a bit of encryption won't be enough really.
So the RIAA is planning to screw the lives of some more students now? You can really tell they are acting in the interest of society as a whole ;P
What a bunch of morons.
Indeed, the lobby group migth be misguided, but they are doign what they are supposed to do. It is politicians not looking beyond the rants of the RIAA and friends that is to blame here, they are the ones that should be looking at the balance of things.
They haev been declared a monopoly by the US and EU legal systems, and having 90% of the desktop market makes them a monopoly in any definition of that word, what makes you believe they aren't? And what would define a monopoly in your strange world then?
Not leveraging it? It has been proven in court that they do. Again, what makes you think they don't?
And I was not saying that it would be enough to advertise creatively and get people to know your product, I was arguing that that IS NOT ENOUGH. Starting to wonder if you actually read what people write...
You have to have a product that is utterly superior and that offers a feature the consumer can't do without.
No matter how creative your advertising, as long as the $0 piece of junk MS bundles with Windows is sufficient for most users, you have NO CHANCE.
Bundling such things with Windows directly destroys the market for competition and is leveraging the Windows monopoly. You may not like that, but it is how the law defines it.
Now please read carefully and go read the laws regarding fair competitiona and publications about their history if you want a deeper insight into why exactly the kind of behavior that MS is employign is hurting customers and society as a whole, history has a long list of precedents.
Untill that or untill you actually put some thought into the matter I guess I am better off stopping my replies.
> Users choose to use the proprietary formats if they want the special features they provide
That is not true. Most users do not consiously choose to use any specific format, they use whatever the default is in a piece of software and are highly unaware of the consequences, and why should they.
> Creating a very useful file format is part of the design of the software, and part of Microsoft's profit seeking goal orientation.
It is only usefull for locking your customers into your software, it is not usefull as a design goal for any other reasons. Developing a flexible, extendible and open format is in the direct interest of the consumer however.
Such a format does in no way stop functional innovation, it allows compatability BY DEFAULT.
And of course it is part of their proffit seeking, but that doesn't make it anywhere valid.
Robbery is in the interest of the proffit seekign goals of some criminal organistations, does that make it valid?
Also, MS supports open formats because they have to in order to let people communicate at all. If it were upto them, they wouldn't support those.
Fact is that it hurts both the consumer and the competition, and because of the fact that MS has a monopoly position, they are not allowed to do that by law.
> Windows Media format is patented and proprietary, as is GIF and Quicktime.
Yeah, but Unisys/IBM are not leveraging a monopoly in another market in order to force everyoen into using gif, and nor is Apple trying to do that with regards to Quicktime. Besides, as a private user I can license the patents from Unisys/IBM if I want to play with my own gif software and publish the resulting pictures, they do not force me to use their software for it. (the lock-in issue)
This may be very hard to understand, but the behavior and having a monopoly themselves can be fully legal, but the combination is illegal.
> What is the negative effect of the market dominance acheived by Microsoft?
In this specific case it is that they have shown over and over to use such a dominance to force evryone to use their proprietary formats.
That means that if they get their way, in a little while you wont have any choice with regards to what platform you use for watching video, regardless of it beign streamed onlien video, or a DVD you rented.
This creation of a lock-in has always resulted in forced upgrades to create a continues money stream for whoever managed to create the lock-in (note that MS is not unique in trying this)
The end result? the consumer gets no choice and less quality while being forced to pay more.
That in my world is directly hurting consumers.
If you want any proof of such things, I suggest you look at MS Office and their forced upgrades and the fact that it basicly tries to explicitly exclude any other platforms.
There is soem competition still right now.
They are however trying to kill the competition in this field in the same way as in previous fields.
They make something that is just good enough and ensure the consumer gets it without seeing that they pay for it.
The only way to compete with that is by making a vastly superior product with unique features that make a big difference for the consumer.
Just making a better media player and selling it for a fair price? you may want to pay for it, just like I am someone who is willing to buy music. Sadly enough most people will not pay for something better if they can get something that seems good enough for no obvious cost.
That indeed threatens the currently existign competitors in this area, and prevents new competitors from entering this area.
This would not be a problem if MS did not have a monopoly, just remember that the rules change when you have one, and that that is one of the very few things that protects society from the power of mega corporations.
Upholding that is important beyond the products and specific company we are talking about here.
From the FAQ:
> a freedom, it should be noted, that was granted by an author's voluntary decision not to register his work.
One can as easily reason that first of all, in the old situation, many people would not obtain a copyright simply due to lack of knowledge, means for registration etc.
In the new system an author can still take the voluntary decision to keep a work free by explicitly putting it in the public domain.
The FAQ argues that this makes life more difficult for people trying to preserve things in the digital domain, but that is soemthign that I believe can be addressed by fair use. The FAQ also claims that the new system does nothing to protect authors, but that is not true, it makes that authors can do waht they are best at, creating works.
The term of copyright, the unfair limitation of user rights, and fair use are the issues, not automatic copyright.
> Sorry but my ISP, I, and many others disagree with you. We have the right to block email from any source we wish and many have decided that spam is enough of a problem that it justifies this step.
Except for the fact that your proposed solution solves very little and causes major inconvenience.
In other words, it is a bad solution.
Why?
Now you know that whatever the mailserver suggests its hostname is, actually resolves to its IP.
It fails to verify in any way if that machien should actually be deliverign mail, and if the mail it delivers should be delivered by that specific server.
So, you ensure that people match the configured hostname with the one from a reverse lookup, and they can still spam you just as easily.
The one thing that does help is adding a specific record type for outgoing smtp servers to the DNS spec and verifying machines against that.
That verification can be done by taking the ip of the conencting server and comparing it to the forward lookups of any outgoign mailservers as reported by dns.
This actually addresses part of the header forging and does make it a lot more difficult to send spam, unlike what you suggest.
Hehehe, sadly enough thats exactly what I meant.
The problem is that with no competition, the incentive for improvement will be gone.
The consumer is hurt by not getting as good a product as could be for the money after a while.
Oh, and nothing from MS costs $0. Their proffit margin on Windows just got a tiny little bit less absurd.
No linux distribution should leverage its monopoly (???) to try to monopolize the multimedia market. That does not mean it cannot include a media player.
MS tries to monopolize the application space step by step by means of including things in their OS instead of by open and fair competition with others.
That said, I believe the solution is in forcing MS to support open standards and to publish their file formats. That way they can have their monopoly but only by virtue of having the better product.
They are guilty of using their monopoly position in one market to gain dominance in other markets, unfairly competing by means of bundling.
That is illegal in the EU.
My friend, you are mistaken. France and the UK had guaranteed that they would protect the integrity of Poland, and did declare war as a result of the Polish attack.
When the German attack in the west is said to be withotu declaration of war, that concerns Belgium and the Netherlands. France and Germany were strictly spoken already at war.
So yes, they should have attacked, but its very doubtfull that it would have mattered much.
> You don't a war by having a great
A war, incidentely also agains germany, just some 25 years earlier tought them that that is exactly how you win a war.
Lesson: You can learn from the past, and in ways it repeats itself, just not in the way YOU think.
In 1940 the French still had a bigger army then Germany, with better weapons.
They were clueless with regards to properly employing their army. Had they tried to March on Berlin, I give them very little chance to have reached it despite Germany being busy with Poland at that time. The simple reason was that Germany was a few decades ahead in military thinking and despite lacking manpower and material, had a much better idea about how to use their army, oh, and it was trained a lot better.
It did take the allies soem 2 years to catchup.
Should they have attacked? yes, they (among others) had guaranteed the integrity of Poland. But it would have taken a lot mroe then that to have gotten a different outcome by the end of 1940.
Had they done something in 1936 or thereabout, it could have gone differently. The problem is that few knew what was going on, and only some suspected it, and suspicion is seldom enough to act violently, you are going to make waay more innocent victims then you prevent that way.
> And if France had done something during the Sitzkrieg instead of sitting around and waiting to be attacked then they wouldn't have needed our intervention in the first place.
THey mostly suffered from bad strategical decisions and wrong employment of their equipment, not so much from how defensive/offensive they were.
Part of their problem was the strict neutrality of Belgium, and part of the defense plan would be to basicly overtake Belgium at the first sign of a German attack on France (which would come through Belgium for sure).
They never counted on the speed and power of a well deployed motorized and armoured invader.
That had nothing whatsoever to do with being pasive, defensive or whatever other claims are often amde, but with leaders havign their minds set on strategies from decades ago. Their biggest failure undoubtedly the wrong deployment of tanks (as part of their infantery instead of in highly mobile tank units) and insuffisient airpower for absolute air superiority, and last but not least, failign to motivate their army to actually fight.
Regardless, the French didn't last long, and one could argue that in relative terms, Poland, THe Netherlands and Belgium put up a lot more of a fight.
Arguing however that that defeat underlines the validity of the offensive policy of the current USA government is based on gross misrepresentation of history.
> Hint: Innocent people die in war. Why aren't you pointing out the women and children killed by the
> North Vietnamese themselves
Because 2 wrongs don't make a right. The USA claims it considers itself better then others when it comes to things like liberty, human rights and so on. There is ONE WAY ONLY to convince peopel of that, KEEP TO IT.
What the vietnamese did is simply not an argument in that whatsoever.
> or the women and children killed by the French when they tried to reconquer Indo-China after WW2.
I am not very aware of what the French did, but the country I am from myself (the Netherlands) has a not so nice bit of history itself there (trying to keep Indonesia within our kingdom).
The thing is this. When I was at elementary school, I learned about that. I learned also that what my country did there was morally wrong.
That is a view supported by a majority of peopel that live here.
The problem is that when you point out to an American that they have been involved in such things as well as a response to their claim of moral high ground, a large majority to my experience will defend itself by marginalizing it and throwing acusations back.
That is not a way to discuss anything really. I wonder, do schools overthere give classes in things like debating?
Most people would argue that if you did not achieve the goals of a war, you lost.
Fact: Despite overwhelming military power, the USA was still kicked out of Vietnam and failed to prevent it from becoming Communistic.
Fact: No united Korea despite initial military victory.
Will we see the same in Iraq? I think few peopel doubted that Saddam would fall if the USA put itself to it. Bringing stability and buildign a viable country? I think they better start looking at and learning from the lessons the USSR learned in Afghanistan if they are hoping to win that one at least.
I was against the war because it was started on false arguments and with disregard for international law. That said, it is a good thing that Saddam is gone, but only if Iraq can be turned into a viable place to live for its population. The USA alone is simply not able to do that, it will need the neighbours of Iraq first of all, and will need the support from the rest of the world for it to succeed. How wise it would be to transfer the whole thing to the U.N.
Pulling out now would be the worst possible thign to do.
> Umm, fuck you. Let me state that clearly so you don't misunderstand me .....
> We aren't a warlike people
Haha hahhahahaha
That sounds so convincing alltogether.
I hope you are not representative for the average American.
The post that you replied to was stupid, agreed, but you really believe acting stupid is a way to respond to that?
Maybe if President Bush and his people would actually have provided sound reasoning instead of playing on the emotions of people, responses might have been different, and he wouldn't have looked like a liar. Its sad because there were enough good reasons to do something about Iraq, just not the ones provided by the Bush administration. A small problem also is that the issues that did apply in case of Iraq can be applied to other countries as well.
The problem is that it seems people are reasoning that the goal justifies the means when the USA does something, but not when for example terrorists do something. Lets be very clear, it never does when you blatently disregard the side effects of the means because you have a decent chance on creating a bigger problem then you tried to solve.