You may not like things dynamic or with javascript but the blind or visually impaired can't use images or spelling out things like "dot". I bet many of those who have trouble seeing would say "Please, please, please, do not use images or spell out symboles" and whereas you have the ability turn javascript off and on they don't have the ability to their vision off and on.
Hrm, for those who actually have to use an alternative browser (ie, lynx and a braile reader or screenreader) won't like the images, but spelling things out should be quite fine really.
However, for those people javascript is really not going to work whatsoever.
Myself being visually impaired, I'd prefer people to stay away from captchas. Yeah, I can decipher them, but it takes a lot of efford usually. spelling things out would not hinder me, and since I can use a 'normal' browser, whatever dynamic stuff you think up with javascript might just work for me (if my browser doesn't block your script of course)
But I guess none of the visually impaired will be commenting on slashdot due to the Captcha required to post
Well, let me just show you wrong on that one, I'm visually impaired, and obviously I just posted.. That said, the captchas on Slashdot don't bother me first of all due to karma being good enough.
Captchas are annoying mostly because they take me a lot more time to decipher then it takes for someone who isn't visually impaired, but as long as there is something like an audio alternative, it is workable.
I have no idea how hiding fields with css will work out for those who need a screenreader or such, I can use a standard browser just with somewhat bigger fonts, so for me it shouldn't matter.
That may well be the case, but there is no way to know: where in history has a society existed without a government?.
Are you serious here?
Ever heard about Afghanistan? Somalia?
Yes, there is a way to know, virtually all historical examples of such states show that it turns into what you call 'warlordism' or something extremely close to it. If you are not aware of such historical examples then please delve a bit into history, there are really plenty of those.
In any case, given that the behavior of government and warlords is to create artificial, political barriers, the question you must then ask yourself is this: what is the difference between government and a warlord?
'Warlordism' is a way to govern a territory, sure. Its problems are pretty clear, and the alternative is to organize a much better form of government, one that is in some way responsible to the people it tries to govern.
Bottomline, yeah, it would be way cool if people were generally well behaved and would not take advantage of others, but since that is not the case, any system that assumes those things will fail. Any system that actually takes those things into account has a chance on not failing. Sadly enough such systems do require a certain level of rules (regulation) and force in order to work at all.
So it is not a question of how to get rid of government, it is a question of how to limit the bad effects of government while getting most out of its good effects.
On another note, another thing that your original argument completely ignores is that many borders on the planet follow naturally imposed seperations between different people who speak different languages. Naturally imposed because those borders follow the habitats of those groups, and usually are along rivers, mountain ranges and other such 'natural borders'. There is absolutely no reason to assume that having no governments would remove those borders, and there is thousands of years of evidence suggesting that those groups will maintain and defend those borders. Hence, arguing that governments create nations and borders seems wrong, rather, groups of people maintain territories, which results in borders. When the level of organisation of such a group grows, such territories will develop some form of government, and eventually develop into nations.
Heaven forbid we blame the scalpers... or the people willing to buy a PS3 at a premium from the scalpers.
Why should we blame the scalpers for making a buck from the mismatch between demand and supply? As a matter of fact, it helps out two groups of people, those with no money but enough time to queue up, and those with no time, but enough money to pay for it (and an insane urge to have a PS3 now).
Why blame Sony? for trying to give the impression that demand for their console is simply insane while reality is that their supply is insanely low.
If they could have helped it or not is actually simply irrelevant. Its their market, and its their financial succes depending on it, if they want to screw it up, thats their problem also.
and it REALLY shows how anti-Sony these boards are with people actually claiming that it is
Ah, and that is somehow a surprise?
They messed up quite seriously with their drm rootkit and their proprietary memory sticks and such crap, and now their brand name is tainted. Too fucking bad for them, they better deal with it.
Nice rant, now come back when you understand a little bit more about human behavior.
The problem with what you saying is that the logic is indeed correct but based on false assumptions.
Biggest false assumption is that without government there will be noone 'forcing' borders and tarrifs and what not onto you, and that is actually true for many of the things you blame on 'government interference'. I am not saying that governments do not interfer, but you are dead wrong to believe that if they'd stop their interference, that it would not be replaced by something that is likely even more interfering.
Hmm, XP is actually pretty responsive on my late 90s dual pII 333 with 512mb ram. Usable? that would mean I have an actual use for XP, which I don't, but it was definitely usable for some mail and web browsing and even office (2k) seemed pretty workable. Of course any cpu/gpu intensive gaming is out of the question
The current type of War in Iraq is a type of war NO ARMY has ever fought. There was some urban fighting in WWII but it wasn't full of IEDs, everyone looking the same, religous sectarian wars, etc.
The place and technology were different, but I believe there are some strong similarities to Vietnam, specifically the 'everyone looks the same' part, and the fact that in both cases conventional battles were easy to win, but didn't do anything to bring actual victory closer. Both are basicly an asymetrical war. There have been more of those also, so while every war situation is unique, I'd argue that other armies as well as the US army have fought a similar type of war before. Usually conventional armies using conventional strategies fare quite badly in such wars also.
Agreed. I think Rummy hoped the Iraq people would have stood up and participated sooner than they have.
Sooner?
If this all was about the Iraqi people, then the invasion was some decade late. By the time it came Saddam had dealt with those most likely to organize change and were standing up against him after the first gulf war.
Not to mention that few people outside the USA think much of the 'new American century' kind of thinking and the resulting policies, which isn't anywhere new or surprising, so with regards to Iraqi participation, the current US administration could have realized they were going to face difficulties there.
Many, including you, argue that there were not enough 'boots on the ground', and I agree, that is a very substantial part of the problem. Dealing with an uncooperative population is a situation you are extremely likely to encounter, and when you invade a country that used its very substantial (in size, not in actual fighting power) army for internal control, you know that you will have to have a presence on basicly every street corner as soon as you start occupation to have the slightest chance on stabilizing the place. This is no news, it was not news before the Iraq invasion either, and many who commented on there not being enough troops are keeping those kinds of things in mind. From what I understand there were prominent and experienced people in the army talking about needing 800k men, which sounds somewhat reasonable tho still on the low side.
Oh, and all in all, the USA is very good at winning conventional battles, but that is not going to bring you victory in an asymetric war, or in other words, the USA won the battle against the army of Iraq, but for now the outcome of the war is undecided, and history does not suggest a favorable outcome.
You've obviously never ran a small business so you have no fucking clue whatsoever.
Maybe gp doesn't, but I do, and I also happen to be visually impaired (not blind, but bad enough to never be able to drive a car, not be able to read any signs that I can't get close to etc)
Adding ADA compatible facilities and also making sure you're compliant costs money that most small companies don't have to spend. Given that it's to cater to a SMALLER market segment it's not good business sense to do it.
It costs money in quite some cases, but this is to expand your market, not to cater to a smaller market.
And why should disabled people not expect to be 100% independent? Because majority rules. Sorry dude.
What you just described is tirany by the majority, not a democratic society. You may not have noticed, but the system in the USA has all kinds of provisions to try to prevent exactly that. Actually taking into account the needs of minorities, upto individuals, is a fundamental part of the system.
Why should I expect to not be 100% dependent? because there is no reason why I should be. I am actually in a situation where I am not much more dependent on others then I would be without being visually impaired. That is for a substantial part a consequence of my own choices, and it is first of all my own responsibility to see to this. That said, I am hindered by many things that would not have costed money to prevent, will cost little to fix, and mostly happen out of ignorance, not because of it costing money. I don't see anything wrong with getting people to put a little thought into this, if needed by means of the law.
Not to mention that when as many disabled people as possible can be as independent as reasonably possible, the outcome for society as a whole is surely better from a social point of view, and it is quite likely cheaper on the whole as well.
Why should I cripple my business so you can read my literature?
Expanding your potential market is not in itself crippling your business.
You do have a point that it may not be worth it financially when you have to do things like install ramps, elevators etc, it may not fit into your specific building for cosmetical or whatever other reasons, and you can quite rightfully ask how far this should go anyway.
Hence I don't think that there should be laws forcing this onto companies, rather, those who do try to be accessable to disabled people should get the possible cost compensated in the form of tax breaks for example.
You don't have a right to be my customer.
No, but depending on where exactly you live, you might not be allowed to discriminate against me based on disability.
You have a right to employment,
Again this depends on local law, this is different from state to state in the USA, and even more different between countries..
and to that end I'd have to at least accept the resumes of disabled folk. But i don't have to cater to the whims of every nancy out there with a problem.
Making sure you do not create obstacles for disabled people out of ignorace is not catering to the whims of everyone out there with a problem, it is being a decent human who tries to better the society he lives in. Being forced to incure cost for the sake of a better society however is not a good thing (because of the forced part of it), encouragement to do a bit extra in the form of compensation however seems like a worthwhile idea to me.
Not that catering is bad. I think if a company has the means and market it should attempt to go all ADA compliant. I think it's a good thing to get ramps, lifts, braille/etc. I just don't think it's a good idea to FORCE it upon people.
This I completely agree with, and since for all I can tell this was your real point also, maybe do yourself the favor to slow down a bit before posting such rants as the one in front of it, you have a reasonable and well defendable point of view I believe, but much of your post is going to prevent people from seeing that because it rather makes you look unreasonable and extremist.
Because #3 has not occurred, then that is pretty much the same as Congress passing a resolution for war.
Implicit vs explicit approval. It makes a big difference. If congress does not officially document its actions and decisions, there is no way for people to verify if they are doing their job as representatives. For this simple reason alone explicit approval of war powers is already an absolute must, I am sure there are people better educated in the workings of this system that can point out some other possibly more relevant reasons still why it really does matter.
There is inherently no difference than formally declaring war and letting the war happen anyway. The entire point of the law for the formal declaration of war is to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening. The fact that it happened anyway means that formally declaring war is pointless and unnecessary. Therefore we can be at war without declaring it.
Uh, this does not compute.
A law is made to prevent a situation This law is ignored and said situation occurs
How does the occurance of that situation make the law useless? Really, it is those who ignored the law who made it useless.
But the idea that there weren't any WMDs was nowhere near the top of the list of arguments.
It definitely was, maybe not in the USA, but seeing how much efford the USA put into trying to convince the rest of the world that there were in fact WMDs still there and that Iraq was developing and producing them, there was definitely debate about if they had WMDs.
UN inspectors left Iraq just before Clinont had the place bombed in 1998. He did that because Saddam wasn't letting the inspectors do their work.
He bombed the place a number of times, and was actually quite effective in reducing any possible remaining production capacity for WMDs.
Saddam didn't let those inspectors back in unti Bush threatened to invade the place and actually started building up forces in Kuwait. Even then, there were still indications that Saddam was playing shell games. He'd been uncooperative with the UN inspectors for years. In South Africa, when they chose to give up nuclear ambitions, the UN inspectors had no problems verifying that they'd done so. That's because South Africa was not trying to maintain a nuke program and wanted everyone to know that. Iraq under Saddam was a completely different story. He resisted the inspections the whole time. Unlike South Africa, there was no evidence that Saddam had made a good faith effort to get rid of his nuke program. Basically, even though the inspectors could not prove it, it looked like he was lying.
'It looked like' does not make for any kind of evidence, it at best is cause for some level of suspicion. It does not make for the kind of solid argument one needs before plunging a few milion people into war, not to mention that I believe the weapons inspectors who were actually there do not agree with the suggestion that this meant Iraq did have secret WMDs.
The difference between Iraq and South Africa is pretty obvious, the later actively wanted to give up on their nuclear program, Iraq did not want that at all, but was forced to. It is a surprise to you that there is a clear difference in behavior as a result?
At any rate, of course Iraq did want powerfull weapons, they had some violent maniac in charge. That doesn't mean however that that maniac was able to produce and keep such weapons in any practical form ever since the early 90s.
One can make many arguments about how evil Saddam was, about his lies, attrocities and all, and it is not too difficult to make a decent argument for invasion based on those. Because of the outcome of the first gulf war, the sanctions that followed, and bombardmends during the 90s, Iraq simply did not have the capacity to produce WMDs on any scale beyond tiny amounts for research, their old stock got partially destroyed, and what was left basicly expired, and those things were actually known by the late 90s.
People who are angry at how this has turned out have lots of good arguments to choose from. The "WMD was a lie" argument just ain't one of those.
Fabricated evidence about obtaining uranium, misrepresented satelite pictures, knowingly ignoring anything contradictionary to the desired outcome.. Sorry but for all I care this comes down to lies. That Iraq at some point in time did have usable WMDs does not change that in any way, neither does the fact that some remains of those old WMDs were found after GW2. If you want to use WMDs as pretext to invasion, there has to be a real and inminent threat of attack on you, and there was no such thing in the decade before that invasion, neither was there such a thing during the invasion itself.
I believe it is a genuinely good service to remove such a dictator,
Generally spoken, yes..
it should be done as often as possible.
Nice idea, but let me give you a better starting point, stop helping them to power to begin with.
Currently the USA has a long history of helping such people to power when it comes in handy, and disposing of those that become too much of a burden. Removing dictators to give democracy a chance is not entering the picture here at all.
Next, there is a very long string of historical events telling that if such a change doesn't come from within the country itself, it usually (but not always) fails.
If the people themselves under that dictator then continually everyday fuck each other over under a "damned if we'll let a western power come out of this looking good" mentality or useless religious differences then you still blame the person knocking the dictator out of power and trying to hold things to order as best as possible?
If you can predict with a very high level of certainty that you cannot stabilize the country after removing a dictator, and you still go ahead then you are indeed guilty of turning a bad situation into an even worse one.
This does in no way remove the responsibility of the people of Iraq and the insurgants there, but neither does their behavior remove the responsibility of those in charge of the invasion.
You invade, you occupy, you are responsible. Don't like it? how about not doing it then?
How good then that you are reiterating fiction instead.
but there were years and years of sanctions that amounted to a state of war that were justified by the universal (or nearly) belief that the Saddam regime would use WMD again.
1. Iraq invaded Kuwait over a decade ago now. This is what caused the sanctions. No sanctions were put in place after it had become clear that Iraq had used poison gas during the Iran-Iraq war or against its own population, rather, the technology and raw materials were provided in part by western countries because well, Saddam was so usefull against 'evil' Iran. So no, the sanctions were not put in place due to anything WMD related.
2. During the uprising which followed after the first gulf war, we looked on how Saddam again murdered part of his own population, without any new actions, sanctions or whatever being put in place.
3. By 2000, Iraq had no production capacity for WMDs to speak of. I'm pretty sure they were doing research into them still, but production was by that time virtually impossible, sanctions saw to that, as did the attacks on any remaining facilities that could be used for production during the 90s.
4. After the first gulf war ended, the conditions on Iraq required them giving up their WMDs and put limits on things like missile technology.
5. Most of the world, even traditional close allies of the USA were extremely suspicious about this invasion, and very few if any of the governments involved could count on popular support for participating in this adventure. If you believe otherwise, you should really question your source of information on this.
The sanctions did not amount to a state of war, they were the consequence of a previous war. Iraq did not have any usable WMDs by 2000, and we never cared about the Iraqi population during the many years of Saddam's rule, rather we helped him act against them, untill the moment the USA wanted to invade Iraq and it came in handy to use his attacks on them as yet another excuse.
So yes, the by then unusable remainders of old (pre 1991) WMDs were found. You can make the argument that this is still in violation of the post GW1 conditions, but to claim an inminent danger of attack with those weapons is silly beyond belief, and that was clear months before the invasion. It is one of the reasons why Collin Powel had to give this 'smoking gun' presentation at the UN, people were simply not believing the case being made, and he didn't manage to convince people.
Now don't get me wrong, Saddam was a seriously bad guy, and removing him from power is a good thing. Too bad there was no workable plan for what to do after that. That said, the motiviations that were used for invasion are at best welcome coincidents, but more usually wild guesses, looking for plausable causes, and outright lies.
The us did not concede that there were not WMD, again - they were there, they were used vs the Kurds and more stockpiles of nerve gas were found. This was reported in the NY Times, this is not speculation.
No, it is not speculation, it is misrepresentation of information at its best.
Depending on what you consider right, it was right.
Lets put the question a bit differently, were there independently verifiable and legally sound reasons to invade Iraq at that specific moment?
It was right because the climate in the US still allowed the Executive branch to do pretty much whatever it wanted under the guise of protecting us from terrorists. Right because the press, caught up in the wave of patriotism, was happy to copy and paste anything served up to them by the feds right on to their front pages, retractions and apologies about shoddy fact checking and shirking journalistic duty to be printed a couple years down the road on the back page. Most of the US and quite a few abroad were united by an honest and worthwhile desire to combat terrorism and the time was right to exploit that. I'd say that, considering the amount of money made off the whole thing, that is an excellent return on investment.
That all has nothing to do with 'right' and everything with convenient. With regards to 'quite a few abroad' being united by an honest and worthwhile desire to combat terrorism, that might be true, but has absolutely nothing to do with Iraq, virtually noone outside the USA believes this invasion had anything to do with fighting terrorism, and if anything, the invasion resulted in fracturing that union. For some specific people this invasion brought in a lot of money maybe, I seriously hope they get caught and their money is given back to whom it really belongs. Maybe it is 'smart' from a certain point of view, but making an argument that it is somehow 'right' is ridiculous.
Re:Grunts Killed by People in Authority
on
Rumsfeld Stepping Down
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
not to mention nearly half a trillion US dollars from the treasury - er, I mean, from Chinese bankers.
Yep, thats a seldom talked about and rather thought provoking detail.
Yes, the lose was predictable, but Rummsfeld leaving before the election would have made it worse. It is kind of an admission that there is a problem.
I believe the counter argument is that most people were already saying there is a problem, and by not admitting it, the Republican party only made things worse. Admitting the problem is a first step towards solving it.
I think that if he had stepped down before the election, it would have been catastrophic for the Republicans running.
It was catastrophic for quite a few of them anyway..
That is indeed quite likely. It is also likely to be a quick move to undermine initiatives from a democrat ruled congress. You are going to say you want a change of policy? well, we already have the person in charge replaced, so just wait and see the new policy..
I find it kind of sad. I have no personal liking for Rumsfeld, and I do believe he is in part responsible for the current situation for the US army in Iraq, but he is far from alone in that, and I'm not so sure that his (forced?) resignation is going to serve anything.
Hmm, have been looking somewhat closer, and it does in fact store the actual data in an sql database, not in ldap. It does retrieve rules and other configuration information from ldap. Somehow I thought it stored the bayes data there as well.
As a sidenote, the average size of the bayes data for our users seems to be around 5mb split over 3 'files', so it is by far not as bad as your dspam experience would suggest, but it is at least 20x larger then what is advisable, and it would perform badly with many users.
>Unless by adding a few statements to local.cf, you mean add weight to the Bayes tests, I don't think the bayes support in SA is very useful. I don't remember the scoring off hand, but I think it is only like +1.5 even for 99% certainty.
Indeed enabling it and setting some more usefull scores for it are the changes needed in local.cf, you can even do this on a per user basis in their user_prefs
Enough to push a few edge cases over the threshold, but not very significant when most spam scores 10+ from all the other rules.
I tend to set 99% certainty to exactly match the spam tresshold, whith 0% certainty reducing the score with approx half of the spam tresshold.
On one of the mailservers I maintain, we process approx 250k messages/day, where about 157 out of every 10000 messages are not spam. Usually there is 1 spam message that gets through, and there are no known false positives. bayes seems to be relevant for approx 8% of the messages (messages that without bayes would score below the tresshold but are correctly detected as spam now, as well as messages that would end up just over the tresshold if it wasn't for bayes). The difference between missing 1 out of every 9843 spam messages or having some 800 out of 10000 messages that are either wrongly marked as spam, or are spam that stays undetected, is rather substantial
Matter of fact is, I also do maintain my own sa rules, in a corperate environment using an external 'rules du jour' concept for something like email is not acceptable, it is too big of an unknown factor on what is considered by the company to be an important information channel.
Also, it is a server wide/shared bayes dictionary (at least when set up with amavisd).
I use spamass-milter. amavisd is nice if you want an integrated virus and spam scanner/blocker, but it does not provide me a fraction of the flexibility that I need. Yes, I do use amavisd, but purely for running virus scans with different scanners (for that it is really good). What I miss for example is the possibility to change the order of spam and virus scanning.
spamd and spamc (used in the background by spamass-milter) can pass user and domain name if so desired, and you can use this to retrieve per-user settings for sa, including the bayes database.
Those can be stored in a variety of ways, including as simple files in the filesystem on the machine where spamd runs, in ldap (which is what we use since we already need it for many other things anyway), or an sql database.
Group dictionaries are not nearly as effective as personal dictionaries. To have a truely effective bayes filter, you need to maintain a dictionary for each and every user. And THAT is some pretty big resources. When I was using DSPAM, i had to dedicate a database server just for the user dictionaries. Big pain in the ass.
Aha? I have not looked at dspam for quite some time, but for the setup and scale I have described here, we don't need a dedicated database server, just a few extra attributes in ldap. If you don't have ldap, files on the local filesystem should work for most smallish setups, but you may of course want to put it in a database for other reasons still if you already have one anyway.
At any rate, thanks for your replies, I can somewhat imagine that for my situation this is easier to do then for someone who isn't already spending quite a bit of time on smtp servers anyway.
Oh, and yes, as you might have gathered from me using spamass-milter, I am using sendmail, not postfix. milter support being the big historical reason for that, but as I understand, postfix is catching up in this area, so maybe this will actually be a legacy 'argument' someday. I hope so, whereas sendmail is inmensely usefull for someone like me (it is a sortof swiss army knife for handling mail), it is complete overkill in many cases, and as a result over complicated and difficult to configure and run securely for many whom didn't make smtp servers an important part of their job.
unless you are developing SA rules or reporting to public blacklists. The default Spamassassin rules alone are pretty good. Add in SARE and some other public rules sets and you don't even need learning. I used to use bayesian learning but found that it was much more maintenance than it was worth. Quite the opposite of what I originally thought. I thought maintaining SA rules would be a pain, but it is actually simpler than managing huge dictionaries.
A bayes filter only works when you have enough good data to feed it with. If you can automate that, a bayes filter makes for an excelent addition to the other spam detection methods that spam assassin offers. Automating the learning part means very little maintenance also. At any rate, spamassassin supports bayes as you probably know, making good use of it does not depend or conflict with whatever spamassassin rulesets you happen to use as long as you do add a few statements to your local.cf file, in other words, it is on top of, not instead of.
I never really understood why people go out of their way to create, delete, and otherwise hassle with "spam" accounts or dummy accounts when you can just have one address with good spam filtering. It just seems like a lot of unnecessary work. I run a Spamassassin gateway that catches nearly all SPAM (80% of all email is blocked). I don't have to worry about keeping my address secret. I use it all over the place. Forums, online transactions, and even Usenet. I see almost no spam. How could some convoluted account manipulation scheme be better?
By using such 'spam' accounts to trap spam and feed it to your spam filter for learning?
Slashdot Mirror
You may not like things dynamic or with javascript but the blind or visually impaired can't use images or spelling out things like "dot". I bet many of those who have trouble seeing would say "Please, please, please, do not use images or spell out symboles" and whereas you have the ability turn javascript off and on they don't have the ability to their vision off and on.
Hrm, for those who actually have to use an alternative browser (ie, lynx and a braile reader or screenreader) won't like the images, but spelling things out should be quite fine really.
However, for those people javascript is really not going to work whatsoever.
Myself being visually impaired, I'd prefer people to stay away from captchas. Yeah, I can decipher them, but it takes a lot of efford usually. spelling things out would not hinder me, and since I can use a 'normal' browser, whatever dynamic stuff you think up with javascript might just work for me (if my browser doesn't block your script of course)
But I guess none of the visually impaired will be commenting on slashdot due to the Captcha required to post
Well, let me just show you wrong on that one, I'm visually impaired, and obviously I just posted.. That said, the captchas on Slashdot don't bother me first of all due to karma being good enough.
Captchas are annoying mostly because they take me a lot more time to decipher then it takes for someone who isn't visually impaired, but as long as there is something like an audio alternative, it is workable.
I have no idea how hiding fields with css will work out for those who need a screenreader or such, I can use a standard browser just with somewhat bigger fonts, so for me it shouldn't matter.
That may well be the case, but there is no way to know: where in history has a society existed without a government?.
Are you serious here?
Ever heard about Afghanistan? Somalia?
Yes, there is a way to know, virtually all historical examples of such states show that it turns into what you call 'warlordism' or something extremely close to it. If you are not aware of such historical examples then please delve a bit into history, there are really plenty of those.
In any case, given that the behavior of government and warlords is to create artificial, political barriers, the question you must then ask yourself is this: what is the difference between government and a warlord?
'Warlordism' is a way to govern a territory, sure. Its problems are pretty clear, and the alternative is to organize a much better form of government, one that is in some way responsible to the people it tries to govern.
Bottomline, yeah, it would be way cool if people were generally well behaved and would not take advantage of others, but since that is not the case, any system that assumes those things will fail. Any system that actually takes those things into account has a chance on not failing. Sadly enough such systems do require a certain level of rules (regulation) and force in order to work at all.
So it is not a question of how to get rid of government, it is a question of how to limit the bad effects of government while getting most out of its good effects.
On another note, another thing that your original argument completely ignores is that many borders on the planet follow naturally imposed seperations between different people who speak different languages. Naturally imposed because those borders follow the habitats of those groups, and usually are along rivers, mountain ranges and other such 'natural borders'. There is absolutely no reason to assume that having no governments would remove those borders, and there is thousands of years of evidence suggesting that those groups will maintain and defend those borders. Hence, arguing that governments create nations and borders seems wrong, rather, groups of people maintain territories, which results in borders. When the level of organisation of such a group grows, such territories will develop some form of government, and eventually develop into nations.
Heaven forbid we blame the scalpers... or the people willing to buy a PS3 at a premium from the scalpers.
Why should we blame the scalpers for making a buck from the mismatch between demand and supply? As a matter of fact, it helps out two groups of people, those with no money but enough time to queue up, and those with no time, but enough money to pay for it (and an insane urge to have a PS3 now).
Why blame Sony? for trying to give the impression that demand for their console is simply insane while reality is that their supply is insanely low.
This is not Sony's fault in the least,
If they could have helped it or not is actually simply irrelevant. Its their market, and its their financial succes depending on it, if they want to screw it up, thats their problem also.
and it REALLY shows how anti-Sony these boards are with people actually claiming that it is
Ah, and that is somehow a surprise?
They messed up quite seriously with their drm rootkit and their proprietary memory sticks and such crap, and now their brand name is tainted. Too fucking bad for them, they better deal with it.
Nice rant, now come back when you understand a little bit more about human behavior.
The problem with what you saying is that the logic is indeed correct but based on false assumptions.
Biggest false assumption is that without government there will be noone 'forcing' borders and tarrifs and what not onto you, and that is actually true for many of the things you blame on 'government interference'. I am not saying that governments do not interfer, but you are dead wrong to believe that if they'd stop their interference, that it would not be replaced by something that is likely even more interfering.
This is not a job, more like offering them a free sandwich.
Since they actually have to do something for the money I guess it is obvious why your statement is simply stupid?
Hmm, XP is actually pretty responsive on my late 90s dual pII 333 with 512mb ram. Usable? that would mean I have an actual use for XP, which I don't, but it was definitely usable for some mail and web browsing and even office (2k) seemed pretty workable. Of course any cpu/gpu intensive gaming is out of the question
Hmmm, your post was a reply to this post no? If so you probably found a bug in the /. code.
Anyway, I suppose you are right.
The current type of War in Iraq is a type of war NO ARMY has ever fought. There was some urban fighting in WWII but it wasn't full of IEDs, everyone looking the same, religous sectarian wars, etc.
The place and technology were different, but I believe there are some strong similarities to Vietnam, specifically the 'everyone looks the same' part, and the fact that in both cases conventional battles were easy to win, but didn't do anything to bring actual victory closer. Both are basicly an asymetrical war. There have been more of those also, so while every war situation is unique, I'd argue that other armies as well as the US army have fought a similar type of war before. Usually conventional armies using conventional strategies fare quite badly in such wars also.
Agreed. I think Rummy hoped the Iraq people would have stood up and participated sooner than they have.
Sooner?
If this all was about the Iraqi people, then the invasion was some decade late. By the time it came Saddam had dealt with those most likely to organize change and were standing up against him after the first gulf war.
Not to mention that few people outside the USA think much of the 'new American century' kind of thinking and the resulting policies, which isn't anywhere new or surprising, so with regards to Iraqi participation, the current US administration could have realized they were going to face difficulties there.
Many, including you, argue that there were not enough 'boots on the ground', and I agree, that is a very substantial part of the problem. Dealing with an uncooperative population is a situation you are extremely likely to encounter, and when you invade a country that used its very substantial (in size, not in actual fighting power) army for internal control, you know that you will have to have a presence on basicly every street corner as soon as you start occupation to have the slightest chance on stabilizing the place. This is no news, it was not news before the Iraq invasion either, and many who commented on there not being enough troops are keeping those kinds of things in mind. From what I understand there were prominent and experienced people in the army talking about needing 800k men, which sounds somewhat reasonable tho still on the low side.
Oh, and all in all, the USA is very good at winning conventional battles, but that is not going to bring you victory in an asymetric war, or in other words, the USA won the battle against the army of Iraq, but for now the outcome of the war is undecided, and history does not suggest a favorable outcome.
You've obviously never ran a small business so you have no fucking clue whatsoever.
Maybe gp doesn't, but I do, and I also happen to be visually impaired (not blind, but bad enough to never be able to drive a car, not be able to read any signs that I can't get close to etc)
Adding ADA compatible facilities and also making sure you're compliant costs money that most small companies don't have to spend. Given that it's to cater to a SMALLER market segment it's not good business sense to do it.
It costs money in quite some cases, but this is to expand your market, not to cater to a smaller market.
And why should disabled people not expect to be 100% independent? Because majority rules. Sorry dude.
What you just described is tirany by the majority, not a democratic society. You may not have noticed, but the system in the USA has all kinds of provisions to try to prevent exactly that. Actually taking into account the needs of minorities, upto individuals, is a fundamental part of the system.
Why should I expect to not be 100% dependent? because there is no reason why I should be. I am actually in a situation where I am not much more dependent on others then I would be without being visually impaired. That is for a substantial part a consequence of my own choices, and it is first of all my own responsibility to see to this. That said, I am hindered by many things that would not have costed money to prevent, will cost little to fix, and mostly happen out of ignorance, not because of it costing money. I don't see anything wrong with getting people to put a little thought into this, if needed by means of the law.
Not to mention that when as many disabled people as possible can be as independent as reasonably possible, the outcome for society as a whole is surely better from a social point of view, and it is quite likely cheaper on the whole as well.
Why should I cripple my business so you can read my literature?
Expanding your potential market is not in itself crippling your business.
You do have a point that it may not be worth it financially when you have to do things like install ramps, elevators etc, it may not fit into your specific building for cosmetical or whatever other reasons, and you can quite rightfully ask how far this should go anyway.
Hence I don't think that there should be laws forcing this onto companies, rather, those who do try to be accessable to disabled people should get the possible cost compensated in the form of tax breaks for example.
You don't have a right to be my customer.
No, but depending on where exactly you live, you might not be allowed to discriminate against me based on disability.
You have a right to employment,
Again this depends on local law, this is different from state to state in the USA, and even more different between countries..
and to that end I'd have to at least accept the resumes of disabled folk. But i don't have to cater to the whims of every nancy out there with a problem.
Making sure you do not create obstacles for disabled people out of ignorace is not catering to the whims of everyone out there with a problem, it is being a decent human who tries to better the society he lives in. Being forced to incure cost for the sake of a better society however is not a good thing (because of the forced part of it), encouragement to do a bit extra in the form of compensation however seems like a worthwhile idea to me.
Not that catering is bad. I think if a company has the means and market it should attempt to go all ADA compliant. I think it's a good thing to get ramps, lifts, braille/etc. I just don't think it's a good idea to FORCE it upon people.
This I completely agree with, and since for all I can tell this was your real point also, maybe do yourself the favor to slow down a bit before posting such rants as the one in front of it, you have a reasonable and well defendable point of view I believe, but much of your post is going to prevent people from seeing that because it rather makes you look unreasonable and extremist.
Because #3 has not occurred, then that is pretty much the same as Congress passing a resolution for war.
Implicit vs explicit approval. It makes a big difference. If congress does not officially document its actions and decisions, there is no way for people to verify if they are doing their job as representatives. For this simple reason alone explicit approval of war powers is already an absolute must, I am sure there are people better educated in the workings of this system that can point out some other possibly more relevant reasons still why it really does matter.
There is inherently no difference than formally declaring war and letting the war happen anyway. The entire point of the law for the formal declaration of war is to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening. The fact that it happened anyway means that formally declaring war is pointless and unnecessary. Therefore we can be at war without declaring it.
Uh, this does not compute.
A law is made to prevent a situation
This law is ignored and said situation occurs
How does the occurance of that situation make the law useless? Really, it is those who ignored the law who made it useless.
But the idea that there weren't any WMDs was nowhere near the top of the list of arguments.
It definitely was, maybe not in the USA, but seeing how much efford the USA put into trying to convince the rest of the world that there were in fact WMDs still there and that Iraq was developing and producing them, there was definitely debate about if they had WMDs.
UN inspectors left Iraq just before Clinont had the place bombed in 1998. He did that because Saddam wasn't letting the inspectors do their work.
He bombed the place a number of times, and was actually quite effective in reducing any possible remaining production capacity for WMDs.
Saddam didn't let those inspectors back in unti Bush threatened to invade the place and actually started building up forces in Kuwait. Even then, there were still indications that Saddam was playing shell games. He'd been uncooperative with the UN inspectors for years. In South Africa, when they chose to give up nuclear ambitions, the UN inspectors had no problems verifying that they'd done so. That's because South Africa was not trying to maintain a nuke program and wanted everyone to know that. Iraq under Saddam was a completely different story. He resisted the inspections the whole time. Unlike South Africa, there was no evidence that Saddam had made a good faith effort to get rid of his nuke program. Basically, even though the inspectors could not prove it, it looked like he was lying.
'It looked like' does not make for any kind of evidence, it at best is cause for some level of suspicion. It does not make for the kind of solid argument one needs before plunging a few milion people into war, not to mention that I believe the weapons inspectors who were actually there do not agree with the suggestion that this meant Iraq did have secret WMDs.
The difference between Iraq and South Africa is pretty obvious, the later actively wanted to give up on their nuclear program, Iraq did not want that at all, but was forced to. It is a surprise to you that there is a clear difference in behavior as a result?
At any rate, of course Iraq did want powerfull weapons, they had some violent maniac in charge. That doesn't mean however that that maniac was able to produce and keep such weapons in any practical form ever since the early 90s.
One can make many arguments about how evil Saddam was, about his lies, attrocities and all, and it is not too difficult to make a decent argument for invasion based on those. Because of the outcome of the first gulf war, the sanctions that followed, and bombardmends during the 90s, Iraq simply did not have the capacity to produce WMDs on any scale beyond tiny amounts for research, their old stock got partially destroyed, and what was left basicly expired, and those things were actually known by the late 90s.
People who are angry at how this has turned out have lots of good arguments to choose from. The "WMD was a lie" argument just ain't one of those.
Fabricated evidence about obtaining uranium, misrepresented satelite pictures, knowingly ignoring anything contradictionary to the desired outcome.. Sorry but for all I care this comes down to lies. That Iraq at some point in time did have usable WMDs does not change that in any way, neither does the fact that some remains of those old WMDs were found after GW2. If you want to use WMDs as pretext to invasion, there has to be a real and inminent threat of attack on you, and there was no such thing in the decade before that invasion, neither was there such a thing during the invasion itself.
I believe it is a genuinely good service to remove such a dictator,
Generally spoken, yes..
it should be done as often as possible.
Nice idea, but let me give you a better starting point, stop helping them to power to begin with.
Currently the USA has a long history of helping such people to power when it comes in handy, and disposing of those that become too much of a burden. Removing dictators to give democracy a chance is not entering the picture here at all.
Next, there is a very long string of historical events telling that if such a change doesn't come from within the country itself, it usually (but not always) fails.
If the people themselves under that dictator then continually everyday fuck each other over under a "damned if we'll let a western power come out of this looking good" mentality or useless religious differences then you still blame the person knocking the dictator out of power and trying to hold things to order as best as possible?
If you can predict with a very high level of certainty that you cannot stabilize the country after removing a dictator, and you still go ahead then you are indeed guilty of turning a bad situation into an even worse one.
This does in no way remove the responsibility of the people of Iraq and the insurgants there, but neither does their behavior remove the responsibility of those in charge of the invasion.
You invade, you occupy, you are responsible. Don't like it? how about not doing it then?
I hate to reiterate facts, here,
How good then that you are reiterating fiction instead.
but there were years and years of sanctions that amounted to a state of war that were justified by the universal (or nearly) belief that the Saddam regime would use WMD again.
1. Iraq invaded Kuwait over a decade ago now. This is what caused the sanctions. No sanctions were put in place after it had become clear that Iraq had used poison gas during the Iran-Iraq war or against its own population, rather, the technology and raw materials were provided in part by western countries because well, Saddam was so usefull against 'evil' Iran. So no, the sanctions were not put in place due to anything WMD related.
2. During the uprising which followed after the first gulf war, we looked on how Saddam again murdered part of his own population, without any new actions, sanctions or whatever being put in place.
3. By 2000, Iraq had no production capacity for WMDs to speak of. I'm pretty sure they were doing research into them still, but production was by that time virtually impossible, sanctions saw to that, as did the attacks on any remaining facilities that could be used for production during the 90s.
4. After the first gulf war ended, the conditions on Iraq required them giving up their WMDs and put limits on things like missile technology.
5. Most of the world, even traditional close allies of the USA were extremely suspicious about this invasion, and very few if any of the governments involved could count on popular support for participating in this adventure. If you believe otherwise, you should really question your source of information on this.
The sanctions did not amount to a state of war, they were the consequence of a previous war. Iraq did not have any usable WMDs by 2000, and we never cared about the Iraqi population during the many years of Saddam's rule, rather we helped him act against them, untill the moment the USA wanted to invade Iraq and it came in handy to use his attacks on them as yet another excuse.
So yes, the by then unusable remainders of old (pre 1991) WMDs were found. You can make the argument that this is still in violation of the post GW1 conditions, but to claim an inminent danger of attack with those weapons is silly beyond belief, and that was clear months before the invasion. It is one of the reasons why Collin Powel had to give this 'smoking gun' presentation at the UN, people were simply not believing the case being made, and he didn't manage to convince people.
Now don't get me wrong, Saddam was a seriously bad guy, and removing him from power is a good thing. Too bad there was no workable plan for what to do after that. That said, the motiviations that were used for invasion are at best welcome coincidents, but more usually wild guesses, looking for plausable causes, and outright lies.
The us did not concede that there were not WMD, again - they were there, they were used vs the Kurds and more stockpiles of nerve gas were found. This was reported in the NY Times, this is not speculation.
No, it is not speculation, it is misrepresentation of information at its best.
Unfortunately, Vietnam is an unwelcome memory, so it is often forgotten including the lessons that could be learned from it.
Depending on what you consider right, it was right.
Lets put the question a bit differently, were there independently verifiable and legally sound reasons to invade Iraq at that specific moment?
It was right because the climate in the US still allowed the Executive branch to do pretty much whatever it wanted under the guise of protecting us from terrorists. Right because the press, caught up in the wave of patriotism, was happy to copy and paste anything served up to them by the feds right on to their front pages, retractions and apologies about shoddy fact checking and shirking journalistic duty to be printed a couple years down the road on the back page. Most of the US and quite a few abroad were united by an honest and worthwhile desire to combat terrorism and the time was right to exploit that. I'd say that, considering the amount of money made off the whole thing, that is an excellent return on investment.
That all has nothing to do with 'right' and everything with convenient.
With regards to 'quite a few abroad' being united by an honest and worthwhile desire to combat terrorism, that might be true, but has absolutely nothing to do with Iraq, virtually noone outside the USA believes this invasion had anything to do with fighting terrorism, and if anything, the invasion resulted in fracturing that union. For some specific people this invasion brought in a lot of money maybe, I seriously hope they get caught and their money is given back to whom it really belongs. Maybe it is 'smart' from a certain point of view, but making an argument that it is somehow 'right' is ridiculous.
not to mention nearly half a trillion US dollars from the treasury - er, I mean, from Chinese bankers.
Yep, thats a seldom talked about and rather thought provoking detail.
Yes, the lose was predictable, but Rummsfeld leaving before the election would have made it worse. It is kind of an admission that there is a problem.
I believe the counter argument is that most people were already saying there is a problem, and by not admitting it, the Republican party only made things worse. Admitting the problem is a first step towards solving it.
I think that if he had stepped down before the election, it would have been catastrophic for the Republicans running.
It was catastrophic for quite a few of them anyway..
He's being scapegoated.
That is indeed quite likely. It is also likely to be a quick move to undermine initiatives from a democrat ruled congress. You are going to say you want a change of policy? well, we already have the person in charge replaced, so just wait and see the new policy..
I find it kind of sad. I have no personal liking for Rumsfeld, and I do believe he is in part responsible for the current situation for the US army in Iraq, but he is far from alone in that, and I'm not so sure that his (forced?) resignation is going to serve anything.
In LDAP? Are you serious?
Hmm, have been looking somewhat closer, and it does in fact store the actual data in an sql database, not in ldap. It does retrieve rules and other configuration information from ldap. Somehow I thought it stored the bayes data there as well.
As a sidenote, the average size of the bayes data for our users seems to be around 5mb split over 3 'files', so it is by far not as bad as your dspam experience would suggest, but it is at least 20x larger then what is advisable, and it would perform badly with many users.
>Unless by adding a few statements to local.cf, you mean add weight to the Bayes tests, I don't think the bayes support in SA is very useful. I don't remember the scoring off hand, but I think it is only like +1.5 even for 99% certainty.
Indeed enabling it and setting some more usefull scores for it are the changes needed in local.cf, you can even do this on a per user basis in their user_prefs
Enough to push a few edge cases over the threshold, but not very significant when most spam scores 10+ from all the other rules.
I tend to set 99% certainty to exactly match the spam tresshold, whith 0% certainty reducing the score with approx half of the spam tresshold.
On one of the mailservers I maintain, we process approx 250k messages/day, where about 157 out of every 10000 messages are not spam. Usually there is 1 spam message that gets through, and there are no known false positives. bayes seems to be relevant for approx 8% of the messages (messages that without bayes would score below the tresshold but are correctly detected as spam now, as well as messages that would end up just over the tresshold if it wasn't for bayes). The difference between missing 1 out of every 9843 spam messages or having some 800 out of 10000 messages that are either wrongly marked as spam, or are spam that stays undetected, is rather substantial
Matter of fact is, I also do maintain my own sa rules, in a corperate environment using an external 'rules du jour' concept for something like email is not acceptable, it is too big of an unknown factor on what is considered by the company to be an important information channel.
Also, it is a server wide/shared bayes dictionary (at least when set up with amavisd).
I use spamass-milter. amavisd is nice if you want an integrated virus and spam scanner/blocker, but it does not provide me a fraction of the flexibility that I need. Yes, I do use amavisd, but purely for running virus scans with different scanners (for that it is really good). What I miss for example is the possibility to change the order of spam and virus scanning.
spamd and spamc (used in the background by spamass-milter) can pass user and domain name if so desired, and you can use this to retrieve per-user settings for sa, including the bayes database.
Those can be stored in a variety of ways, including as simple files in the filesystem on the machine where spamd runs, in ldap (which is what we use since we already need it for many other things anyway), or an sql database.
Group dictionaries are not nearly as effective as personal dictionaries. To have a truely effective bayes filter, you need to maintain a dictionary for each and every user. And THAT is some pretty big resources. When I was using DSPAM, i had to dedicate a database server just for the user dictionaries. Big pain in the ass.
Aha? I have not looked at dspam for quite some time, but for the setup and scale I have described here, we don't need a dedicated database server, just a few extra attributes in ldap. If you don't have ldap, files on the local filesystem should work for most smallish setups, but you may of course want to put it in a database for other reasons still if you already have one anyway.
At any rate, thanks for your replies, I can somewhat imagine that for my situation this is easier to do then for someone who isn't already spending quite a bit of time on smtp servers anyway.
Oh, and yes, as you might have gathered from me using spamass-milter, I am using sendmail, not postfix. milter support being the big historical reason for that, but as I understand, postfix is catching up in this area, so maybe this will actually be a legacy 'argument' someday. I hope so, whereas sendmail is inmensely usefull for someone like me (it is a sortof swiss army knife for handling mail), it is complete overkill in many cases, and as a result over complicated and difficult to configure and run securely for many whom didn't make smtp servers an important part of their job.
unless you are developing SA rules or reporting to public blacklists. The default Spamassassin rules alone are pretty good. Add in SARE and some other public rules sets and you don't even need learning. I used to use bayesian learning but found that it was much more maintenance than it was worth. Quite the opposite of what I originally thought. I thought maintaining SA rules would be a pain, but it is actually simpler than managing huge dictionaries.
A bayes filter only works when you have enough good data to feed it with. If you can automate that, a bayes filter makes for an excelent addition to the other spam detection methods that spam assassin offers. Automating the learning part means very little maintenance also. At any rate, spamassassin supports bayes as you probably know, making good use of it does not depend or conflict with whatever spamassassin rulesets you happen to use as long as you do add a few statements to your local.cf file, in other words, it is on top of, not instead of.
I never really understood why people go out of their way to create, delete, and otherwise hassle with "spam" accounts or dummy accounts when you can just have one address with good spam filtering. It just seems like a lot of unnecessary work. I run a Spamassassin gateway that catches nearly all SPAM (80% of all email is blocked). I don't have to worry about keeping my address secret. I use it all over the place. Forums, online transactions, and even Usenet. I see almost no spam. How could some convoluted account manipulation scheme be better?
By using such 'spam' accounts to trap spam and feed it to your spam filter for learning?