You see, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts. And the facts tell the story without any doubt: Obama got his citizens more access to healthcare. Anyone's claims otherwise are utterly without foundation.
It is unfortunate that many gullible people trust the right-wing agitprop that spreads false data and assertions. But we're well into this now, and the facts are well established. Eventually, as public awareness grows, Rush and crew will find something new to lie about. So it goes.
No. You don't get it. I hate ALL US military action, and those who order it, that isn't in a good cause. The good causes I am aware of include both world wars, possibly the actions (war? police? whatever...) in Bosnia, and Bush I's mini-war where he stomped Saddam's little invasion of Kuwait flat. That's about it, though I could perhaps be convinced if I've simply missed something we did right, which is entirely possible. There were many periods in my life where I was too disillusioned with politics to pay much attention at all. I'm still disillusioned, but I have a lot more free time now, so I'm paying pretty good attention at this point, at least compared to other decades in my life.
So here's how it actually works with me. I measure a president by what they did right, *and* what they did wrong. Working backwards:
Obama got his citiizens more access to healthcare. Mad kudos. Long time coming, and even though the congress turned a great single-payer idea into welfare for the middlemen (insurance companies), the bottom line is that many more people now have health care, pre-existing conditions no longer mean you're fucked from step one, kids are covered well into collage age, and the insurance companies are profit-limited by percentage, so it is much more difficult for them to make their money by scamming their customers out of benefits, and much easier to do it by adding policies. On the credit front, consumers have MUCH better conditions due to actions he gets credit for. On that front, they did a lot. Not perfect, but much better. He oversaw, and encouraged, much erosion of the institutionalized hate against gays that none of the presidents before him had the stones to address. He waited until term 2 for political reasons, and I guess I can stomach that, but he is now in the process of overseeing the beginning of the dismantling of the heinous war on personal choice represented by the drug war. He followed through and got us mostly out of Iraq... although I don't think that's going to hold. Afghanistan is still a stain on his presidency; although he didn't start it, he didn't end it, either, and it's a complete fuckpie of absolutely no use to anyone but bomb makers and their cronies. He's had to fight the most disreputable congress in my memory -- the republicans in particular, though I can't say I think much of the democrats either. They're all corrupt as hell, as usual, but they've done little positive and wasted an enormous amount of time on pointless votes about nothing that get nowhere, and that they KNOW will get nowhere. Idiots. But he's been playing chess while they've been playing angry checkers, and he's got my respect for that, too. He has outwitted congress every time by doing either the most correct, or nearly correct, thing in almost every case where they try to stymie him. Which is mostly. His record on constitutional rights is just as bad as Bush's, and I despise that part of his legacy. The PATRIOT act is no more than a long-unwashed shitstain on America's national underwear. Economically, he's got us back up past where Bush's abject mishandling of everything I can think of destroyed the economy, there are more people working today, finally, than just before the Bush-caused economic crash in 2008. Like Clinton, he's in the seat, his administration made it happen, he gets the lion's share of the credit.
Bush II did almost *everything* wrong, and he did his wrong really, really big. So he's right in the top class of my shitlist. I can't think of *anything* Bush II did correctly. If you can, by all means enlighten me, and I'll modify my opinion if that seems called for. I've already laid out most of what and how, so I'll spare ya.
Clinton oversaw the elimination of the federal deficit and also oversaw the strongest economy in recent memory. He was in the seat, and he should, and does, get the credit. He tried to get his citizens healthcare. He failed, but he tried. He went into the Balkans, and in my view, it was called for. Also, in my opinion definitely in his favor,
Yes, Clinton did some stupid violent pounding of Iraq -- bombing -- for about four days. You'll not get me to defend that action -- more abject stupidity from our Dear Leaders, fine, I'm onboard. Idiotic. Didn't result in any useful gains of any kind for anyone but bomb-makers -- and perhaps beer vendors in redneck towns.
That doesn't make Bush II's war, his, though.
Bush II, however...
Nearly five thousand dead American service members (and more of our co-warmakers) plus somewhere between 170 thousand and a million civilians dead (depending on whose survey you take seriously), 1.1 trillion dollars spent, the employment of 80 M1 abrams tanks, 55 M2 bradleys, 20 strykers, 20 M113 APCs, 250 humvees, 500+ mine clearing vehicles, heavy/medium trucks, and trailers, and 10 AAVs, not to mention the aerial and major naval assets... now that's something you might reasonably characterize as someone's war. At least IMHO. Perhaps I just think too small. But in that case, Clinton's actions... irrelevant.
But hey, Mission Accomplished, right? Right? We... were saved from the those highly dangerous aluminum rods coming from southern africa somewhere, shut down all the WMD plants, and destroyed all terrorist threats, you betcha! Plus NOW Iraq is TOTALLY a proud bastion of US Style Democracy!!! And we sure taught the Saudis who funded and comprised the majority of those who executed the entire WTC acts of terror a lesson didn't we! I mean, they'll NEVER Try THAT again!!! Saudi Arabia is rebuilding to this day, right? RIGHT? 'MERKA, BITCHES! Thank JEBUS Geo Bush II saved us from those Highly Dangerous Iraqis!
All that, and Bush II is a truly execrable painter, too. Probably should go back to his coke habit, wave his hands towards jebus some more. The only thing he was ever good at was royally hosing our economy, getting Americans and Iraqis killed to no purpose at all, giving a presidential blow job to the military industrial complex, and grinding our civil rights into the smallest, most meaningless remainder he could possibly manage. Real hero, Bush II.
Found it. This is what I read first, but days ago, that probably sent me off on my trail of errors:
"In September 2007 Russia exploded the largest thermobaric weapon ever made. The weapon's yield was reportedly greater than that of the smallest dial-a-yield nuclear weapons at their lowest settings.[41][42] Russia named this particular ordnance the "Father of All Bombs" in response to the United States developed "Massive Ordnance Air Blast" (MOAB) bomb whose backronym is the "Mother of All Bombs", and which previously held the accolade of the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in history.[43] The bomb contains an about 7 tons charge of a liquid fuel such as ethylene oxide, mixed with an energetic nanoparticle such as aluminium, surrounding a high explosive burster[44] that when detonated created an explosion equivalent to 44 metric tons of TNT."
You are cordially invited to read posts above you in this thread, your argument comes to you pre-destructed by the facts.
That definition is stupid, it doesn't serve any useful purpose other than in allowing the legal system that produced it to tie you up for reasons not even remotely related to mass destruction. Hard to believe they'd want to do that, isn't it??? (cough)
As for wikipedia, it is, and always has been, an amateur effort and you will, of course, get bitten if you depend upon it to do your thinking for you.
11 tons, got it. So did virtually every other respondent before you posted (sometimes it's good to read before you post, just sometimes.:)
No, CW aren't WMD's, because they don't tend to destroy infrastructure at all, and they don't even tend to kill people very effectively if you know they're coming. Which punches very large holes indeed in both "mass" and "destruction." If you you want to go with "can kill large numbers of people" then a knife is a WMD. There's no practical limit to the number of people that can be killed by a single knife. And you can really wreck a lot of infrastructure with a good knife, too.
You need to use your head here. And yes, my head failed me at 11 tons of TNT equivalent, I know, I know. My bad. Still doesn't excuse you for not thinking about what WMD is, and should mean, in the context of actual threats, uses, and effects. Calling chemical weapons in general WMDs is highly dubious at best, and calling any of that crap in the sands of Iraq we've heard about thus far WMD's is simply ridiculous. Although if fear is your goal, then look to the "made in America" labels on the old shells for your daily dose of panic.
Yah, yah, mea culpa, dammit. You're right. Everyone who pointed it out is right. I'm getting old and my brain is really beginning to suck at little things like... the facts.:)
And this is why you shouldn't get your definitions from lawmakers. Just engage your common sense for a moment.
By that definition, injecting someone with a radioactive isotope that will eventually kill them, and only them, no wait, not even kill, just "is dangerous" to them and only them, is a "weapon of mass destruction".
Which is bloody ridiculous. Where's the "mass" in that? You can kill multiple people with a stick of dynamite and that isn't a weapon of mass destruction, so wth?
It makes about as much sense as the authority to regulate interstate commerce being interpreted as the authority to regulate intrastate commerce. Who came up with that again? Oh yeah... same people... congress. Our pet collection of fumbling idiots.
Think about it for long enough to make two or three brain cells stand up. MASS DESTRUCTION. What does that mean? What should it mean? Whatever a sensible answer is, it is not what you quoted, that's for sure. However, that definition is sufficient to allow them to drop the legal world on your head if you even begin to think about doing any number of things they'd prefer you didn't do. And *that* is why it is what it is. Obviously. Not because it actually defines mass destruction. Because it doesn't, in fact it's utterly useless in such a pursuit. It's intellectually insulting, in fact. Not that such a problem ever stopped congress from making bad law, of course.
It does. But that's not a reasonable basis to make decisions from, is it? For that matter, it's a very inaccurate way to disseminate news stories. Which was kind of my point.
Did I say orbit? No? Let me introduce your straw man to M * V squared. Did I say rods? No. Let me introduce your straw man to pre-existing rocky bodies in space. Did I say comet? No.
MOABs are 11 tons yield. Already copped to it. Guy above you gets the credit. You're too slow.:)
Anyone who defines chemical weapons as "WMDs" is doing it wrong. Very wrong.
There are two practical kinds of WMDs at this time: Biological weapons that introduce contagion(s), and nuclear weapons. In the future (probably not that far away), we can also look forward to kinetic energy weapons, IE big rocks coming down very fast from space onto a target area. Cheap, yields below, to, and above nuclear levels (almost arbitrarily above... these will be the primo WMD of the future -- want a hundred gigaton explosive yield? No problem, a KIW is your weapon of choice. Cost, fuel and time, nothing else), totally practical CEP (circular error probable... in other words, they can miss by more than they actually will miss, and they will still totally destroy the target. Even if the "target" was something the size of Texas. Or the asian continent.) And oh, yes, there will be side effects. That's the only thing that introduces practical limits to the yield of a KIW, in fact. If you want to live on the same planet afterwards, you're going to have to limit your ambitions to be known as "the big banger."
Chemical weapons can be defended against, rendered harmless via other chemicals, rendered ineffective via protective devices, and in any device I've ever heard of, are small-area denial weapons more than anything else. The most annoying thing about them is persistence, so a really wide dispersal weapon literally denies the area to anyone not properly suited up until the dispersal can be remediated. That's a very useful trick in warfare, by the way, though somewhat less effective these days what with various non-ground transport being so easily accomplished. Still, if you don't have to worry about ground troops, you can concentrate on the air. The most useful thing about chemical weapons is they inconvenience the heck out of the enemy you deploy them against; infrastructure becomes unusable, required operations in the affected area become enormously cumbersome, food supplies are rendered useless, agriculture is knocked back to the stone age... very much a "reduce enemy capacity to operate / make war" kind of weapon.
Calling Saddam's stuff WMDs is like calling an infantryman an army. (oh wait, we do that, don't we? "army of one" lol)
Sure, they can kill more than one person at once. But so can a conventional dumb bomb, a grenade, a machine gun (in fact, a machine gun, if you really think about it, has almost unlimited killing capacity, given that it is maintained correctly. If a machine gun kills a thousand, and a chemical weapon simply makes people wear funny suits, which one is the WMD? Have we inadvertently redefined "destruction" entirely here?)
And what about FABs like the MOAB? (typically fuel-air bombs, "Massive Ordnance Air Blast / mother of all bombs") You want wide-area destruction and death? Holy crap, they'll give you what you want. MOAB yield is 11 kilotons... the Hiroshima nuke was only ~16 kilotons. And the Russians, bless their competitive little hearts, have come up with a FAB with 44 kiloton yield.
Saddam's crap... those weren't exactly high end chemical weapons anyway. Mustard gas, etc.
Tempest in a teapot. And certainly NO reason to start a war with them. That was a complete bungle/lie/fuckup on the part of the Bush administration.
I guess I just don't see disk space as something to care about WRT scarcity at all. That could definitely be just me - I'm not at all fond of video, although I am of audio recordings and still photos - the amount of available disk space rendered my actual concerns completely irrelevant when drives shot past 20 gigabytes or so. I just don't own that much music, a few hundred CDs at most, and even taking 20 MP DSLR images and editing them losslessly hasn't made much of a dent in my current 1 TB drive. And should it... 1 TB isn't anything these days.
Heck, my silly little Raspberry pi has 32 GB of storage, lol. A $39 linux machine with 32 GB, GPU, 512MB, HDMI, 4 USB, Ethernet... [shakes head]...I paid crazy money for my first 4k RAM board... and hundreds more for the "privilege" of semi-reliably storing my work on cassette tape (SWTPC AC-30 ftw. Still have that thing. Also the 4K RAM board, and the machine it went in, lol -- and it still works!)
So I apologize for missing your joke. I thought you were presenting it as a legitimate reason to drop PPC support, which of course it is not. So mea culpa.:)
Agreed on all points. From my perspective as a developer, however, the walled garden is a serious problem; and the hipster moralizing is as well. So, for me, and I *only* speak for myself, I'm not going to be making any iOS apps under anything even remotely resembling the current circumstances.
And I have to say that my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 3) suits me better. Along with most of the rest of the world, apparently (current market shares are about 84.7% Android, 12.8% iOS, and 2.5% Windows [as of Aug 2014].) And I have certainly taken advantage of the ability to sideload my Android phone many times, something I would not give up to go to iOS.
Apple absolutely has the right to proceed as they see fit. I would never say otherwise. I simply observe it when they proceed poorly, discuss it when I feel it is germane, and act accordingly in my business and personal life to avoid further damage from such actions.
That model was discontinued in Oct 2006. Congratulations, your 8-year-old laptop is out of date. If it was a dog it'd be middle-aged; if it was a hamster its replacement's replacement would be probably be dead.
10.6 came out in the summer of 2009. About two and half years after my brand-new and bloody expensive laptop purchase. 10.6 was busted. It's not been fixed. It's still busted. That's not an "8 year" problem, that's a 3 year problem, at best. So let's not get too carried away with your math. The only thing 8 years has to do with this is the length of time they left broken crap behind them.
Next: You see, that laptop is neither a hamster or a dog. It's an expensive, high-end bit of computing equipment, quite fast, fully capable of running some very advanced, real-time software. The thing is, it's been abandoned by its maker before they ever even made their OS work the way they claimed it did. I am not impressed with the "it's old hardware" line. That's not the problem. The problem is shitty, unsupported OS software.
I know Apple's got some of you convinced that your multi-thousand dollar purchases only have the natural lifespan of a gnat, but that's only because they're inflicting it on you. It's neither a natural or reasonable thing. It's a matter of choice: Apple chooses to abandon your stuff. Yes. They decided you and your undertakings weren't worth it. Always something to remain aware of.
I'll probably end up debugging and hack-fixing the major OS bugs myself, like I did the console message flooding if I can find the time. I don't look forward to it. But I'm also not particularly ready to throw tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardware in a dumpster because Apple's too stinking free of a reasonable set of ethics to do the right thing. Which is, make the advertised functionality of 10.6 actually work properly. And 10.7, and 10.8 and so on. Instead of flying ahead, yelling NEW and SHINY all the way, busted software strewn everywhere behind them.
everyone was waiting for the Core 2 Duo models
No, everyone wasn't. Obviously. Some of us have work to do, you know. We don't sit around waiting. We just expect manufacturers to do the right thing (now, THAT you can take me to task for... in retrospect, particularly in Apple's case, that was waaaay optimistic.)
Hey, but now I know better, and they don't get to sell me any new hardware. At all. That's what happens when you seriously screw your customers. In their own tiny way, the customer will screw you right back. No new spending, bad press, recommendations to not buy Apple.
Good luck with finding a non-Apple replacement that lasts as long...
As long? Bloody thing's been unusable since busted-ass 10.6 came out. That was years ago. In any case, I just buy $500-$600 used Mac Pros off EBay. Apple gets nothing, squat, zip, and I get machines that work with Mavericks, which shows every sign of being the first reasonably high quality OS Apple's ever shipped, or at least, it is once you turn off that app-nap idiocy. No need to go with non-Apple. I just stopped giving them money. Because, fuck them and their happy little trail of busted shit.
I'm not talking about games, though even then, any money you invest in the system that the company decides to throw in the trash is something I'm sensitive to.
And as for that GIG... you *are* aware there are multi-terabyte drives now, right? Right?
Come on. There have been bugfix for both regularly.
Many non-trivial things have been left unfixed. UDP doesn't work right in 10.5 and and 10.6, you can only open one listener to a UDP stream (a pretty grievous error for a BROADCAST network protocol!) 10.5 constantly spews invalid error messages to the console when cron is used (although you can visit my website for a hack-fix... I got *really* tired of that one and patched the OS for those lazy Apple bastards.) The color graphics pipeline in 10.6 leaks memory like a sieve when heavily used (I write realtime stuff that has live spectrum, waterfalls, vector displays, etc.) OSX 10.6 can chew up a gigabyte of memory deep in the pipeline in just a few hours losing track of its own mach message trap activity, and worse, it begins to chew its own (performance) leg off in the process. Mavericks still has the bug, but the memory management is better and it all gets thrown into swap so it's not an immediate problem, as long as you restart the apps once a day or so. Safari is an *awful* memory leaker under 10.6, and yes, I consider it part of the OS. In 10.6 for single core CPUs, the printing system fails to handle the most basic UTF-8 character printing at the console / scripting level. The bug is in the compiled version for that CPU; Apple knows about it (I spoke directly to the fellow who writes the CUPS software) and they won't be fixing it. So, upgrade, right? Wrong. Single core CPUs are not supported by OS upgrades past 10.6. So fuck me, I get to throw away a fairly recent machine because of this bug -- I had to buy a brand new mini to make the software work for the customer for that *single* reason. Low level window messaging gets all screwed up if you try to create widgets outside of Apple's simplistic ones and the entire window messaging system slows to a crawl. The c library's user-home-directory is not properly set in 10.6, and even trying to get it can crash your app.
And yes, I'd be fucking HAPPY to upgrade to Mavericks if I could to fix any/all of these, but (a) I can't just toss my PPC software out the window, and (b) I can't upgrade these machines.
You want me to go on, or are you getting the picture yet?
There is nothing arbitrary about it. IBM acquired Transitive in 2009 and wanted them focused on software. Transitive stopped making the Rosetta application.
Many of Apple's users depended upon that software. Me in particular. I have thousands of dollars invested in PPC software. I can't use it past 10.6. Apple is rich as Croesus. When they decided it was ok to abandon the PPC hardware because they had a path for PPC software, they should have made sure they had what they needed into the future. At this point, they should probably just buy IBM to get it back. But, no, it's "fuck you, users." Assholes.
That's kinda odd. How old is your pro and which bugfix did you desperate need?
My macbook pro is a 17", core-duo. Wherever that puts it. I need the semi-fix that stops the clog of the graphics color correction pipeline that debuted in Mavericks. Without it, I can't use the machine for its intended purpose, which is in-the-field monitoring of RF and RFI issues using SDR hardware. But it can't be upgraded to Mavericks. Which makes it a brick.
I was referring to the IoS app store when I was talking about roadblocks to development. They also make it too difficult to sideload; so I can't make an app for me and others without things expiring and limited distribution and etc. Sorry I was unclear. Both OSX and IoS have some similar problems, but the IoS app store is far worse than the OSX appstore (not that I think very highly of the OSX appstore... I sure wouldn't use it unless forced [as in, Mavericks upgrade, because they stopped using real media.])
I'm not sure what you're looking for to make development more accessible.
This is what I expect WRT IoS: I want to be able to write an app. I want it to be about anything that I want to write, that someone else might want to use.
Including, if I so choose, the raunchiest adult porn you can imagine. I don't need another mother. I already had a mother, she approved of my sexual inclinations when it was relevant, but at this point I'm 58 and no longer require maternal input. Apple's not in the running for the role in any case; that would require that I respect their opinions on the matter, and that isn't happening.
Then I want to be able to put whatever app(s) I write on my website, whatever they might be. I want you to be able to download an app from my site, install it as easily as humanly possible (drag, drop... download and run... etc.) Then, barring bugs, updates, feedback, or friendly chatter, I don't want you to have to ever come back. And likewise, I want similar access to apps others write.
I can do this with OSX. Easily, even trivially. I can even use QT to cross-platform fairly well (as long as I'm willing to write the cross-platform system aspects QT fails to address, like USB, Midi, etc. Which I am.) I can't do it with IoS unless I hack the device, and that means you have to hack yours as well. Not interested. This limits the audience (and me) to intentionally crippled and incompatible devices. So I decline.
Not sure how you interpret buying stuff they already sold to someone else as "supporting them", frankly. Mavericks is free. They get zero additional income from me.
That's support? Save me from such support, please.:)
Seriously, the summary overuses the word "carrying". Can anyone please suggest synonyms?
The supreme court is happy to officially oblige: "NOT carrying"
They also offer equally functional replacements for "keep", "shall not infringe", "shall make no law", "No law shall be passed", and "interstate commerce."
Apple behaves in [the mistaken view that it needs to by your mother].
FTFY.
In my view, the Apple store was so hostile that I never even bothered.
In addition to all the issues pointed out in TFS, there's:
o The rejection of adult content; o The constant breaking of both OSX and IoS WRT earlier (but very recent) hardware o The failure to bugfix both OSX and IoS except for a few bugs in the first few years o The arbitrary dropping of useful capabilities (PPC emulation is the poster child for this)
Plus, they seem to be able to pick the perfect path to annoy the shite out of me:
o My macbook pro... suffering from serious bugs at its current OS... can't be upgraded to the next (not even latest) because they stopped supporting the CPU *and* the OS version o The new Mac Pro is exactly what I would *not* buy. Can't be expanded without desk warts, and so hugely vulnerable to physical mishap o Never released a mid-tower, which is really what I need (but nothing below (or above) an older Mac Pro is properly expandable)
Best I can do is keep buying used earlier Mac Pros and then installing Mavericks on them, while completely ignoring the existence of the app store otherwise.
The sad thing is I really like the OS, and I'd be happy to develop for it if they made development accessible and quit leaving trails of unfixed bugs behind them.
as compared to the other 96.8%, and where that 98.6%
Nope, can't fix stupidity.:) Bloody 2nd-rate neurons. I *told* the Martians I needed my originals back, but nooooo. "These vat-grown ACME neurons will work just fine! Just keep your blood sugar up..."
Slashdot Mirror
I live in America.
The numbers describe the actual situation and that is, the number of uninsured has dropped under the ACA.
You see, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts. And the facts tell the story without any doubt: Obama got his citizens more access to healthcare. Anyone's claims otherwise are utterly without foundation.
It is unfortunate that many gullible people trust the right-wing agitprop that spreads false data and assertions. But we're well into this now, and the facts are well established. Eventually, as public awareness grows, Rush and crew will find something new to lie about. So it goes.
No. You don't get it. I hate ALL US military action, and those who order it, that isn't in a good cause. The good causes I am aware of include both world wars, possibly the actions (war? police? whatever...) in Bosnia, and Bush I's mini-war where he stomped Saddam's little invasion of Kuwait flat. That's about it, though I could perhaps be convinced if I've simply missed something we did right, which is entirely possible. There were many periods in my life where I was too disillusioned with politics to pay much attention at all. I'm still disillusioned, but I have a lot more free time now, so I'm paying pretty good attention at this point, at least compared to other decades in my life.
So here's how it actually works with me. I measure a president by what they did right, *and* what they did wrong. Working backwards:
Obama got his citiizens more access to healthcare. Mad kudos. Long time coming, and even though the congress turned a great single-payer idea into welfare for the middlemen (insurance companies), the bottom line is that many more people now have health care, pre-existing conditions no longer mean you're fucked from step one, kids are covered well into collage age, and the insurance companies are profit-limited by percentage, so it is much more difficult for them to make their money by scamming their customers out of benefits, and much easier to do it by adding policies. On the credit front, consumers have MUCH better conditions due to actions he gets credit for. On that front, they did a lot. Not perfect, but much better. He oversaw, and encouraged, much erosion of the institutionalized hate against gays that none of the presidents before him had the stones to address. He waited until term 2 for political reasons, and I guess I can stomach that, but he is now in the process of overseeing the beginning of the dismantling of the heinous war on personal choice represented by the drug war. He followed through and got us mostly out of Iraq... although I don't think that's going to hold. Afghanistan is still a stain on his presidency; although he didn't start it, he didn't end it, either, and it's a complete fuckpie of absolutely no use to anyone but bomb makers and their cronies. He's had to fight the most disreputable congress in my memory -- the republicans in particular, though I can't say I think much of the democrats either. They're all corrupt as hell, as usual, but they've done little positive and wasted an enormous amount of time on pointless votes about nothing that get nowhere, and that they KNOW will get nowhere. Idiots. But he's been playing chess while they've been playing angry checkers, and he's got my respect for that, too. He has outwitted congress every time by doing either the most correct, or nearly correct, thing in almost every case where they try to stymie him. Which is mostly. His record on constitutional rights is just as bad as Bush's, and I despise that part of his legacy. The PATRIOT act is no more than a long-unwashed shitstain on America's national underwear. Economically, he's got us back up past where Bush's abject mishandling of everything I can think of destroyed the economy, there are more people working today, finally, than just before the Bush-caused economic crash in 2008. Like Clinton, he's in the seat, his administration made it happen, he gets the lion's share of the credit.
Bush II did almost *everything* wrong, and he did his wrong really, really big. So he's right in the top class of my shitlist. I can't think of *anything* Bush II did correctly. If you can, by all means enlighten me, and I'll modify my opinion if that seems called for. I've already laid out most of what and how, so I'll spare ya.
Clinton oversaw the elimination of the federal deficit and also oversaw the strongest economy in recent memory. He was in the seat, and he should, and does, get the credit. He tried to get his citizens healthcare. He failed, but he tried. He went into the Balkans, and in my view, it was called for. Also, in my opinion definitely in his favor,
Yes, Clinton did some stupid violent pounding of Iraq -- bombing -- for about four days. You'll not get me to defend that action -- more abject stupidity from our Dear Leaders, fine, I'm onboard. Idiotic. Didn't result in any useful gains of any kind for anyone but bomb-makers -- and perhaps beer vendors in redneck towns.
That doesn't make Bush II's war, his, though.
Bush II, however...
Nearly five thousand dead American service members (and more of our co-warmakers) plus somewhere between 170 thousand and a million civilians dead (depending on whose survey you take seriously), 1.1 trillion dollars spent, the employment of 80 M1 abrams tanks, 55 M2 bradleys, 20 strykers, 20 M113 APCs, 250 humvees, 500+ mine clearing vehicles, heavy/medium trucks, and trailers, and 10 AAVs, not to mention the aerial and major naval assets... now that's something you might reasonably characterize as someone's war. At least IMHO. Perhaps I just think too small. But in that case, Clinton's actions... irrelevant.
But hey, Mission Accomplished, right? Right? We... were saved from the those highly dangerous aluminum rods coming from southern africa somewhere, shut down all the WMD plants, and destroyed all terrorist threats, you betcha! Plus NOW Iraq is TOTALLY a proud bastion of US Style Democracy!!! And we sure taught the Saudis who funded and comprised the majority of those who executed the entire WTC acts of terror a lesson didn't we! I mean, they'll NEVER Try THAT again!!! Saudi Arabia is rebuilding to this day, right? RIGHT? 'MERKA, BITCHES! Thank JEBUS Geo Bush II saved us from those Highly Dangerous Iraqis!
All that, and Bush II is a truly execrable painter, too. Probably should go back to his coke habit, wave his hands towards jebus some more. The only thing he was ever good at was royally hosing our economy, getting Americans and Iraqis killed to no purpose at all, giving a presidential blow job to the military industrial complex, and grinding our civil rights into the smallest, most meaningless remainder he could possibly manage. Real hero, Bush II.
Found it. This is what I read first, but days ago, that probably sent me off on my trail of errors:
"In September 2007 Russia exploded the largest thermobaric weapon ever made. The weapon's yield was reportedly greater than that of the smallest dial-a-yield nuclear weapons at their lowest settings.[41][42] Russia named this particular ordnance the "Father of All Bombs" in response to the United States developed "Massive Ordnance Air Blast" (MOAB) bomb whose backronym is the "Mother of All Bombs", and which previously held the accolade of the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in history.[43] The bomb contains an about 7 tons charge of a liquid fuel such as ethylene oxide, mixed with an energetic nanoparticle such as aluminium, surrounding a high explosive burster[44] that when detonated created an explosion equivalent to 44 metric tons of TNT."
Blah. Details. Why are they so hard?
You are cordially invited to read posts above you in this thread, your argument comes to you pre-destructed by the facts.
That definition is stupid, it doesn't serve any useful purpose other than in allowing the legal system that produced it to tie you up for reasons not even remotely related to mass destruction. Hard to believe they'd want to do that, isn't it??? (cough)
As for wikipedia, it is, and always has been, an amateur effort and you will, of course, get bitten if you depend upon it to do your thinking for you.
11 tons, got it. So did virtually every other respondent before you posted (sometimes it's good to read before you post, just sometimes. :)
No, CW aren't WMD's, because they don't tend to destroy infrastructure at all, and they don't even tend to kill people very effectively if you know they're coming. Which punches very large holes indeed in both "mass" and "destruction." If you you want to go with "can kill large numbers of people" then a knife is a WMD. There's no practical limit to the number of people that can be killed by a single knife. And you can really wreck a lot of infrastructure with a good knife, too.
You need to use your head here. And yes, my head failed me at 11 tons of TNT equivalent, I know, I know. My bad. Still doesn't excuse you for not thinking about what WMD is, and should mean, in the context of actual threats, uses, and effects. Calling chemical weapons in general WMDs is highly dubious at best, and calling any of that crap in the sands of Iraq we've heard about thus far WMD's is simply ridiculous. Although if fear is your goal, then look to the "made in America" labels on the old shells for your daily dose of panic.
Yah, yah, mea culpa, dammit. You're right. Everyone who pointed it out is right. I'm getting old and my brain is really beginning to suck at little things like... the facts. :)
Sigh.
And this is why you shouldn't get your definitions from lawmakers. Just engage your common sense for a moment.
By that definition, injecting someone with a radioactive isotope that will eventually kill them, and only them, no wait, not even kill, just "is dangerous" to them and only them, is a "weapon of mass destruction".
Which is bloody ridiculous. Where's the "mass" in that? You can kill multiple people with a stick of dynamite and that isn't a weapon of mass destruction, so wth?
It makes about as much sense as the authority to regulate interstate commerce being interpreted as the authority to regulate intrastate commerce. Who came up with that again? Oh yeah... same people... congress. Our pet collection of fumbling idiots.
Think about it for long enough to make two or three brain cells stand up. MASS DESTRUCTION. What does that mean? What should it mean? Whatever a sensible answer is, it is not what you quoted, that's for sure. However, that definition is sufficient to allow them to drop the legal world on your head if you even begin to think about doing any number of things they'd prefer you didn't do. And *that* is why it is what it is. Obviously. Not because it actually defines mass destruction. Because it doesn't, in fact it's utterly useless in such a pursuit. It's intellectually insulting, in fact. Not that such a problem ever stopped congress from making bad law, of course.
It does. But that's not a reasonable basis to make decisions from, is it? For that matter, it's a very inaccurate way to disseminate news stories. Which was kind of my point.
Did I say orbit? No? Let me introduce your straw man to M * V squared. Did I say rods? No. Let me introduce your straw man to pre-existing rocky bodies in space. Did I say comet? No.
MOABs are 11 tons yield. Already copped to it. Guy above you gets the credit. You're too slow. :)
But hey! Thanks for playing!
Exactly right, my bad. Mod 'im up and mod me down. :)
Although eleven tons of TNT *will* ruin your day.
Anyone who defines chemical weapons as "WMDs" is doing it wrong. Very wrong.
There are two practical kinds of WMDs at this time: Biological weapons that introduce contagion(s), and nuclear weapons. In the future (probably not that far away), we can also look forward to kinetic energy weapons, IE big rocks coming down very fast from space onto a target area. Cheap, yields below, to, and above nuclear levels (almost arbitrarily above... these will be the primo WMD of the future -- want a hundred gigaton explosive yield? No problem, a KIW is your weapon of choice. Cost, fuel and time, nothing else), totally practical CEP (circular error probable... in other words, they can miss by more than they actually will miss, and they will still totally destroy the target. Even if the "target" was something the size of Texas. Or the asian continent.) And oh, yes, there will be side effects. That's the only thing that introduces practical limits to the yield of a KIW, in fact. If you want to live on the same planet afterwards, you're going to have to limit your ambitions to be known as "the big banger."
Chemical weapons can be defended against, rendered harmless via other chemicals, rendered ineffective via protective devices, and in any device I've ever heard of, are small-area denial weapons more than anything else. The most annoying thing about them is persistence, so a really wide dispersal weapon literally denies the area to anyone not properly suited up until the dispersal can be remediated. That's a very useful trick in warfare, by the way, though somewhat less effective these days what with various non-ground transport being so easily accomplished. Still, if you don't have to worry about ground troops, you can concentrate on the air. The most useful thing about chemical weapons is they inconvenience the heck out of the enemy you deploy them against; infrastructure becomes unusable, required operations in the affected area become enormously cumbersome, food supplies are rendered useless, agriculture is knocked back to the stone age... very much a "reduce enemy capacity to operate / make war" kind of weapon.
Calling Saddam's stuff WMDs is like calling an infantryman an army. (oh wait, we do that, don't we? "army of one" lol)
Sure, they can kill more than one person at once. But so can a conventional dumb bomb, a grenade, a machine gun (in fact, a machine gun, if you really think about it, has almost unlimited killing capacity, given that it is maintained correctly. If a machine gun kills a thousand, and a chemical weapon simply makes people wear funny suits, which one is the WMD? Have we inadvertently redefined "destruction" entirely here?)
And what about FABs like the MOAB? (typically fuel-air bombs, "Massive Ordnance Air Blast / mother of all bombs") You want wide-area destruction and death? Holy crap, they'll give you what you want. MOAB yield is 11 kilotons... the Hiroshima nuke was only ~16 kilotons. And the Russians, bless their competitive little hearts, have come up with a FAB with 44 kiloton yield.
Saddam's crap... those weren't exactly high end chemical weapons anyway. Mustard gas, etc.
Tempest in a teapot. And certainly NO reason to start a war with them. That was a complete bungle/lie/fuckup on the part of the Bush administration.
I guess I just don't see disk space as something to care about WRT scarcity at all. That could definitely be just me - I'm not at all fond of video, although I am of audio recordings and still photos - the amount of available disk space rendered my actual concerns completely irrelevant when drives shot past 20 gigabytes or so. I just don't own that much music, a few hundred CDs at most, and even taking 20 MP DSLR images and editing them losslessly hasn't made much of a dent in my current 1 TB drive. And should it... 1 TB isn't anything these days.
Heck, my silly little Raspberry pi has 32 GB of storage, lol. A $39 linux machine with 32 GB, GPU, 512MB, HDMI, 4 USB, Ethernet... [shakes head] ...I paid crazy money for my first 4k RAM board... and hundreds more for the "privilege" of semi-reliably storing my work on cassette tape (SWTPC AC-30 ftw. Still have that thing. Also the 4K RAM board, and the machine it went in, lol -- and it still works!)
So I apologize for missing your joke. I thought you were presenting it as a legitimate reason to drop PPC support, which of course it is not. So mea culpa. :)
Agreed on all points. From my perspective as a developer, however, the walled garden is a serious problem; and the hipster moralizing is as well. So, for me, and I *only* speak for myself, I'm not going to be making any iOS apps under anything even remotely resembling the current circumstances.
And I have to say that my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 3) suits me better. Along with most of the rest of the world, apparently (current market shares are about 84.7% Android, 12.8% iOS, and 2.5% Windows [as of Aug 2014].) And I have certainly taken advantage of the ability to sideload my Android phone many times, something I would not give up to go to iOS.
Apple absolutely has the right to proceed as they see fit. I would never say otherwise. I simply observe it when they proceed poorly, discuss it when I feel it is germane, and act accordingly in my business and personal life to avoid further damage from such actions.
10.6 came out in the summer of 2009. About two and half years after my brand-new and bloody expensive laptop purchase. 10.6 was busted. It's not been fixed. It's still busted. That's not an "8 year" problem, that's a 3 year problem, at best. So let's not get too carried away with your math. The only thing 8 years has to do with this is the length of time they left broken crap behind them.
Next: You see, that laptop is neither a hamster or a dog. It's an expensive, high-end bit of computing equipment, quite fast, fully capable of running some very advanced, real-time software. The thing is, it's been abandoned by its maker before they ever even made their OS work the way they claimed it did. I am not impressed with the "it's old hardware" line. That's not the problem. The problem is shitty, unsupported OS software.
I know Apple's got some of you convinced that your multi-thousand dollar purchases only have the natural lifespan of a gnat, but that's only because they're inflicting it on you. It's neither a natural or reasonable thing. It's a matter of choice: Apple chooses to abandon your stuff. Yes. They decided you and your undertakings weren't worth it. Always something to remain aware of.
I'll probably end up debugging and hack-fixing the major OS bugs myself, like I did the console message flooding if I can find the time. I don't look forward to it. But I'm also not particularly ready to throw tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardware in a dumpster because Apple's too stinking free of a reasonable set of ethics to do the right thing. Which is, make the advertised functionality of 10.6 actually work properly. And 10.7, and 10.8 and so on. Instead of flying ahead, yelling NEW and SHINY all the way, busted software strewn everywhere behind them.
No, everyone wasn't. Obviously. Some of us have work to do, you know. We don't sit around waiting. We just expect manufacturers to do the right thing (now, THAT you can take me to task for... in retrospect, particularly in Apple's case, that was waaaay optimistic.)
Hey, but now I know better, and they don't get to sell me any new hardware. At all. That's what happens when you seriously screw your customers. In their own tiny way, the customer will screw you right back. No new spending, bad press, recommendations to not buy Apple.
As long? Bloody thing's been unusable since busted-ass 10.6 came out. That was years ago. In any case, I just buy $500-$600 used Mac Pros off EBay. Apple gets nothing, squat, zip, and I get machines that work with Mavericks, which shows every sign of being the first reasonably high quality OS Apple's ever shipped, or at least, it is once you turn off that app-nap idiocy. No need to go with non-Apple. I just stopped giving them money. Because, fuck them and their happy little trail of busted shit.
Funny. :)
Thumbs up.
No. Lion refuses to install, says the hardware is unsupported.
This is terrible advice. Mavericks works fine from a traditional hard drive on all the machines I have that Mavericks will actually install on.
I'm not talking about games, though even then, any money you invest in the system that the company decides to throw in the trash is something I'm sensitive to.
And as for that GIG... you *are* aware there are multi-terabyte drives now, right? Right?
Many non-trivial things have been left unfixed. UDP doesn't work right in 10.5 and and 10.6, you can only open one listener to a UDP stream (a pretty grievous error for a BROADCAST network protocol!) 10.5 constantly spews invalid error messages to the console when cron is used (although you can visit my website for a hack-fix... I got *really* tired of that one and patched the OS for those lazy Apple bastards.) The color graphics pipeline in 10.6 leaks memory like a sieve when heavily used (I write realtime stuff that has live spectrum, waterfalls, vector displays, etc.) OSX 10.6 can chew up a gigabyte of memory deep in the pipeline in just a few hours losing track of its own mach message trap activity, and worse, it begins to chew its own (performance) leg off in the process. Mavericks still has the bug, but the memory management is better and it all gets thrown into swap so it's not an immediate problem, as long as you restart the apps once a day or so. Safari is an *awful* memory leaker under 10.6, and yes, I consider it part of the OS. In 10.6 for single core CPUs, the printing system fails to handle the most basic UTF-8 character printing at the console / scripting level. The bug is in the compiled version for that CPU; Apple knows about it (I spoke directly to the fellow who writes the CUPS software) and they won't be fixing it. So, upgrade, right? Wrong. Single core CPUs are not supported by OS upgrades past 10.6. So fuck me, I get to throw away a fairly recent machine because of this bug -- I had to buy a brand new mini to make the software work for the customer for that *single* reason. Low level window messaging gets all screwed up if you try to create widgets outside of Apple's simplistic ones and the entire window messaging system slows to a crawl. The c library's user-home-directory is not properly set in 10.6, and even trying to get it can crash your app.
And yes, I'd be fucking HAPPY to upgrade to Mavericks if I could to fix any/all of these, but (a) I can't just toss my PPC software out the window, and (b) I can't upgrade these machines.
You want me to go on, or are you getting the picture yet?
Many of Apple's users depended upon that software. Me in particular. I have thousands of dollars invested in PPC software. I can't use it past 10.6. Apple is rich as Croesus. When they decided it was ok to abandon the PPC hardware because they had a path for PPC software, they should have made sure they had what they needed into the future. At this point, they should probably just buy IBM to get it back. But, no, it's "fuck you, users." Assholes.
My macbook pro is a 17", core-duo. Wherever that puts it. I need the semi-fix that stops the clog of the graphics color correction pipeline that debuted in Mavericks. Without it, I can't use the machine for its intended purpose, which is in-the-field monitoring of RF and RFI issues using SDR hardware. But it can't be upgraded to Mavericks. Which makes it a brick.
I was referring to the IoS app store when I was talking about roadblocks to development. They also make it too difficult to sideload; so I can't make an app for me and others without things expiring and limited distribution and etc. Sorry I was unclear. Both OSX and IoS have some similar problems, but the IoS app store is far worse than the OSX appstore (not that I think very highly of the OSX appstore... I sure wouldn't use it unless forced [as in, Mavericks upgrade, because they stopped using real media.])
This is what I expect WRT IoS: I want to be able to write an app. I want it to be about anything that I want to write, that someone else might want to use.
Including, if I so choose, the raunchiest adult porn you can imagine. I don't need another mother. I already had a mother, she approved of my sexual inclinations when it was relevant, but at this point I'm 58 and no longer require maternal input. Apple's not in the running for the role in any case; that would require that I respect their opinions on the matter, and that isn't happening.
Then I want to be able to put whatever app(s) I write on my website, whatever they might be. I want you to be able to download an app from my site, install it as easily as humanly possible (drag, drop... download and run... etc.) Then, barring bugs, updates, feedback, or friendly chatter, I don't want you to have to ever come back. And likewise, I want similar access to apps others write.
I can do this with OSX. Easily, even trivially. I can even use QT to cross-platform fairly well (as long as I'm willing to write the cross-platform system aspects QT fails to address, like USB, Midi, etc. Which I am.) I can't do it with IoS unless I hack the device, and that means you have to hack yours as well. Not interested. This limits the audience (and me) to intentionally crippled and incompatible devices. So I decline.
Clearer?
Not sure how you interpret buying stuff they already sold to someone else as "supporting them", frankly. Mavericks is free. They get zero additional income from me.
That's support? Save me from such support, please. :)
The supreme court is happy to officially oblige: "NOT carrying"
They also offer equally functional replacements for "keep", "shall not infringe", "shall make no law", "No law shall be passed", and "interstate commerce."
No need to thank me, happy to help you out.
FTFY.
In my view, the Apple store was so hostile that I never even bothered.
In addition to all the issues pointed out in TFS, there's:
o The rejection of adult content;
o The constant breaking of both OSX and IoS WRT earlier (but very recent) hardware
o The failure to bugfix both OSX and IoS except for a few bugs in the first few years
o The arbitrary dropping of useful capabilities (PPC emulation is the poster child for this)
Plus, they seem to be able to pick the perfect path to annoy the shite out of me:
o My macbook pro... suffering from serious bugs at its current OS... can't be upgraded to the next (not even latest) because they stopped supporting the CPU *and* the OS version
o The new Mac Pro is exactly what I would *not* buy. Can't be expanded without desk warts, and so hugely vulnerable to physical mishap
o Never released a mid-tower, which is really what I need (but nothing below (or above) an older Mac Pro is properly expandable)
Best I can do is keep buying used earlier Mac Pros and then installing Mavericks on them, while completely ignoring the existence of the app store otherwise.
The sad thing is I really like the OS, and I'd be happy to develop for it if they made development accessible and quit leaving trails of unfixed bugs behind them.
Nope, can't fix stupidity. :) Bloody 2nd-rate neurons. I *told* the Martians I needed my originals back, but nooooo. "These vat-grown ACME neurons will work just fine! Just keep your blood sugar up..."
No. Lobbyists and the lawyers that drive the lobbying process. Congresscritters seem to be almost uniformly clueless.