Venture capital is exactly that - capital. It's some for of asset piled up through other activities. When you see guys like Amazon's Jeff Bezos or Virgin's Richard Branson putting millions (billions!) of dollars of their own money into funding the start-up of things like the space-related comapnies they're launching, it's just that. Money. Cash they actually do have, essentially, under their mattresses. There are trillions of dollars of cash waiting in the sidelines, right now, with nowhere compelling enough to invest it. Compelling, in the sense that the investment is likely to not be a total washout and loss for having been made on an obviously bad risk.
Take Solyndra, for example. Hundreds of millions up in smoke (even worse, since so much of it was our tax dollars). People who are betting their own money, rather than tax money, on such ventures lose all of their investment when things like that happen. So they're looking for sensible start-ups with lower risk. Those are very hard to come by. Most investments lose, and a few turn out well - and well enough to make up, for the investor, for all of the ones that were total losses. But guys like Bezos (or Buffet, etc) don't go into debt to fund the start of a new company. And when you or I put a little money into a mutual fund or buy a few shares of stock, we don't do that either. At least, I hope you're not using cash advances on a credit card to invest in stocks!
Let's make them liable for any images that would mislead a customer
False advertising is already illegal. Individuals and businesses are each regularly hauled off to court for BS-ing in one way or another about something they're saying, selling, charging for, etc. Holding their feet to the fire is entire industry and career path.
If you offer a picture of a big, juicy, appetizing Whopper in your ad, you better deliver something that is very close to that when I walk in to your store.
And this has what, exactly, to do with banning the use of Photoshop by Eeeeevil Corporations? I can make the same burger look average or look more appealing just by moving the lights, changing the angle from which I photograph it, and getting the shot in before the lettuce wilts.
The system you so hilariously defend
The use of attractive people and objects in advertisements, which you so hilariously are unable to mentally process as advertising communication, depends on people engaging in critical thinking. I'd hate to be around when you find out that some love letter you received might have been over-selling things just a bit. Or that someone who brushes her hair out before going on a date doesn't look like that every other minute of the day.
The U.S. should outlaw the use of photoshop by corporations in advertising and reporting.
What about businesses that aren't incorporated? Should a dog groomer who uses a photo of the front of her house as part of her promotional web site be allowed to 'shop out the overhead power lines that distract the eye from the otherwise pleasant, relaxing scene? Yes? Great. How about next year, when her accountant convinces her that it will make more sense for her to incorporate her business. Will she have to put the power lines back in, now that the photograph is being used by an Eeeeevil Corporation in its ads?
How about the four college buddies who get together in an Eeeeeevil Corporation and form a landscaping company? Should they be allowed to show a photograph of one of the yards they maintain, but use Photoshop to clone out the pile of dog crap they didn't notice when they took the photo? So, if you're free-lancing by yourself as a landscaper, that would be fine, but an Eeeeevil Corporation of four college guys would be more evil by doing so? Or is it still OK with you, if it's four guys? How about when they join up with 40 other guys, to do more work? Is cloning out the dog crap or the piece of trash in the photo only evil depending on how many people are communicating when they do it? Really?
I suppose you're also opposed to Eeeeeevil Corporations using wide angle lenses, or special lighting, or make up artists? And photographs used by businesses should only be allowed if the photographer never crouches down to improve the perspective distortion, or to favor the light on a foreground object? Only Eeeeevil Corporations would do something like that. Honest, innocent individual humans would never resort to favoring the subjects they photograph through the use of skills and experience and good tools.
And, of course, it's safe to say that you would completely criminalize the use of watercolor paintings, sketches or any other bit of whimsy that lends itself to artistic license and illustrative techniques meant to emphasize, visually, some particular part of a message. Right? I mean, if people start using artists' renderings in ads, it's probably the end of civilization, right?
Except for all of the times when they're not. Venture money comes from all sorts of places. And that money is at risk for the investors who put it on the line. If you buy shares in a start-up, you're risking that money. Very few banks will loan money to a start-up business that isn't already well funded by private (completely at risk) equity.
The people whose kids you are trying to "educate" know full well that you are destroying their culture, and will often react violently to it.
Leaving aside for the moment that educating an ignorant culture that supports people who regularly try to kill you is a form of self defense, the issue at hand (vis-a-vis Afghanistan), is that we're helping people who want to educate themselves, and who have their own teachers who want to teach their own people. And you have a violent insurgency that is seeking to prevent that. The culture that you say we're destroying is trying to educate itself, and another/sub culture kills people within that group for doing so. Local Afghani women want local Afghani girls to be able to read. Taliban insurgents want to kill them for that. We are not destroying those women's culture by saving their lives.
Or one could feed and educate the poor. Just a thought.
We already do that. We could do a lot better at it if we weren't being attacked by the people who don't want us to. The folks who want, for example, to educate the poor in Afghanistan need military protection to avoid having their throats cut. The folks who want to deliver food to starving people in Somalia need military escorts to avoid having the food stolen by the Islamists that use those resources to power militias that are busy slaughtering and starving the people we're trying to help. Get the picture? Without military spending, we wouldn't have had massive aid immediately available overseas when Indonesia got pasted by an enormous tsunami in 2009, and couldn't have secured the aid provided.
As for educating the poor here in the US... what do you recomment? More money, it sounds like? Let's start with DC, shall we? Over $10,000 per year per student, huge numbers of which continue to leave school functionally illiterate, unemployable, and destined to live off the nanny state. Money isn't the problem, culture is the problem. Got any suggestions? Be careful, people who make constructive suggestion in situations like that end up being called racists, not problem solvers.
A sale involves communication with the customer (or in this case, victim, being sold counterfeit goods), involves moving money around, and involves moving goods around. They aren't "selling on the internet," as that's not even possible with physical goods. They are allowing a customer/victim to communicate order and payment info to them across the internet. And then they use the international banking system, which crosses borders and is subject to all sorts of international treaties and arrangements, to actually take the money from the customer/victim. Then they use common carriers or freight companies to move the goods across international borders to deliver the goods, through customs (subject to international agreements and laws) to the person taking deliver of the bogus, fraudulant items.
The sale is consumated when the delivery is made. In the US. The sale also happens to involve financial activity across international boundaries, using the US bankking system. Fraudulently misrepresnting the nature of the transaction is a crime. Delivering counterfeit goods is a crime. Ripping off trademarks has both civil and criminal components to it.
and thus no crime can be committed
Let me guess, you like to rip off entertainment instead of paying the people who make it what they ask for it, and so you come up with uninformed, assinine "explanations" for this sort of thing as cover for your own ripping off of things. Yup, thought so. It's on the internet so it can't be wrong! Obviously your junior high school teachers aren't serving you very well.
Whatever you're arguments are, you can't disregard the fact that Muslims preserved most of the greek and roman texts that we have available today, they held on to knowledge when Europe destroyed itself.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with jihadists wacking people for not being sufficiently similar jihadists, and Muslims from multiple countries sending them cash and weapons to do more of the same. That ain't about preserving ancient not-written-by-Mohammad texts. Not any more.
That's not what he thinks he wants to say, but that's the actual substance of his point. A guy who decides that he will spend his day killing school teachers for teaching girls to read can't help himself from being like that because Eeeeevil Westerners promote Eeeeeevil things like... reading. And do Eeeeeevil things like go after people planting bombs to destroy school buses, and use lethal force when they do so. And do Eeeeeevil things like remove the Taliban from power when they showed their delight in harboring and supporting Al Queda before, during, and after that group's attacks on embassies in Africa, ships in port, and a few thousand people in New York, Pennsylvania, and DC. Yes, that guy who has his day all lined up, with a bullet in mind for a geography teacher for being a teacher is so dumb, so unable to think for himself, so personally directed by Eeeeevil Westerners, that he must - without any recourse at all - knock that schoo teacher to the ground, and blow her brains out.
His post paints exactly that picture. Thousands of people who make the personal day to day decision to be barbarous and to seek out innocents to slaughter, in front of a crowd, because they can't help themselves. Unlike our noble poster, above, who has intelligence and free will and can manage to stop himself from doing the same, they are just poor dumb brutes who can't think like him.
Actually, beyond personal responsibility, that's right
So, what you're saying is that Muslims aren't capable of personal responsibility? That they're just too dumb to act rationally? That someone from that region who used to respect a woman's right to read a book got so angry about western civilization that he now thinks women should be killed for being able to read? Just trying to follow your incredibly condescending, patronizing, racist thinking. Thanks for helping to clarify! Keep it classy.
Muslims weren't always extremists, that happened after Brittian, France and US decided to chop up the Ottoman empire "so it didn't pose a threat". That backfired didn't it?
You're right. When a Taliban enforcer drags a school teacher out into the town square that used to be a soccer field before they banned playing soccer, and shoots her in the head because she has offended Allah by encouraging girls to think, that is definitely the fault of western civilization. No question.
I'm no Christian, but I think it's safe to say that regardless of history, you've got some easy things to compare and contrast today. There are plenty of backwards minded Christians. But they are totally eclipsed - in numbers and actions - by medieval-minded Muslim BS. Plenty of Christians have - historically - killed those who didn't share their flavor of mysticism, because of that difference. That really doesn't happen any more, and no leaders in any numbers or of any consequence within that broad swath of culture either call for or defend religion-based aggression for its own sake. Compared to Islam, which has a very vocal sub-group that rants endlessly about killing peope for not being Muslim or the right flavor of Islamic, and who inspire people who then run out and do exactly that. I'm not seeing large armed Christian movements that burn school teachers alive for teaching girls to read, though I'm seeing large, well-financed Islamist movements that do exactly that, and which are not condemned in any serious way by the wider Muslim community.
It's useful to examine history, but also worth remembering that history isn't what's happening right now. Some cultures have moved past medieval theo-thugocracy, and other cultures are reaching backwards towards it as an ideal, and actually acting on that, killing people every day with that in mind.
I should note that Hilbert space is more often defined as an abstract vector space over the complex numbers equipped with a positive-definite sesquilinear inner product which is moreover Cauchy complete with respect to the induced norm.
I'm glad you noted that, because I was really going to give you some grief if you skipped that part.
I made a good argument and it has not been addressed.
Well, you said some stuff. It wasn't a good argument. I could say that the universe was turtles all the way down, and also say that was a good argument. But neither of those things would be true, either.
Why should he have to ask you any more politely than he already did? Your assertion, to which is responded, was clearly intended as a troll, and he called you on it. Trolls don't get polite.
Only an outside observer sees something moving at the "speed of light"; to the photon itself, no time passes.
Not really. This was a research project, which means the very last part of the photon's trip was through part of academia. Which means it felt like exactly like 12.7 billion years.
So Bush made the conscious decision to prohibit investment in Syria, but Syria's president is responsible for this.
Correct.
And when a man beats his wife, it's her fault for "making him do it," right?
I don't know... is she supplying weapons and cash to terrorist networks? Is she running a Ba'athist dictatorship that took delivery of lots of Saddam Hussein's VX gas stockpiles and uses snipers to kill pro-democracy political protesters on the street? If she is, then yeah, she made him do it.
So, we have to assume you're just clumisly trying to be ironic, or that you're incredibly disingenuous, or that you're badly under-informed and form really poor understandings of the nature of the world. Please do not vote.
I think the point of economic sanctions to ruin a nation's entire economy
No, the point of sanctions is to urge the sensible people in the country to make [Insert Oppressive Dictator or Evil Policy Here] go away, for their own sake and everyone else's... without having to get into armed conflict from the outside. When someone like Saddam Hussein shows his own people that he's perfectly willing to steal their food/medicine relief support for his pet army, and take the oil-for-food cash for use in building more really ugly palaces and to buy missle parts from North Korea, then sanctions start looking rather counterproductive. They really don't work on completely corrupt regimes that have absolutely no problem with starving their own people. See: North Korea.
Of course, NK is getting help from China, so that messes up the recipe. And Syria's getting lots of support from the Dictator's Club For Men, and can rely on places like Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and even Russia to keep them afloat, too.
You need to work on your nouns. Unless you purpose is to sound frantic, but to make sure that nobody actually knows what you're talking about. In which case, good job.
What in the world do you call "peacekeeping efforts"? Iraq? Afganistan? Serbia?
Serbia? Yeah, the Serbs start slaughtering people, and NATO stops it. Peacekeeping.
Afghanistan? Yes. The Taliban slaughter people in order to run the country like a medieval horror show, and as part of their approach to life, harbor and support Al Queda, who use the place to train and launch many terrorist attacks that kill many thousands of people. Stopping the Taliban from doing that, and stopping their efforts to regain local control at the point of a sword (including doing nice things like burning school teachers alive for daring to teach girls to read) - peacekeeping. When you stop someone who is trying to kill someone else for being peaceful, you're peacekeeping.
Iraq? OK, I get it now, you're just a troll. But as a refresher: Saddam invaded Kuwait, murdering his way to that country's coast, and started setting up on the Saudi border to do the same. The peacekeeping part comes in where he was stopped from doing that, and pushed back into Iraq. More peacekeeping: no fly zones enforced to prevent him from slaughtering more people like he did tens of thousands of villagers (using WMDs - remember?). Of course, he never honored the promises he made when he was pushed back out of Kuwait, and continued to shoot at those patroling aircraft and the people on the ground there to keep him from doing more damaage (you know, with his military... using things like the missiles he kept building despite promising not to). Are you following the pattern, here? When you stop someone who has been spending years slaughtering people, that's peacekeeping.
I can't wait for you to explain me what exactly were strikes against Iraq and Afghanistan about.
OK, so you're playing the uninformed troll. Fine.
Afghanistan? It was an attack against the Taliban, who were running (most) of that country at the point of a sword, financed from elsewhere. They (the Taliban) deliberately harbored the group that planned and executed many mass-murder attacks against western targets, including killing hundreds at embassies in Africa, before finally killing thousands in 9/11. The Taliban were given weeks to give up the people directly behind those attacks, and of course they refused. The Taliban was thus removed from power, and we continue to have to use force to prevent their insurgency from regaining power in that country. Of course, you knew all of that.
Iraq? Since it sounds like you're probably still in junior high school, you probably don't remember the part where Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and a large global alliance formed to push his troops back into Iraq, and force him to agree to changing his ways. In short, he never did. He met essentially none of the commitments he made while retreating, continued to attack patroling aircraft, murdered tens of thousands of its own people using WMDs, and did things like use UN food aid money to rebuild military structures, buy missile parts from North Korea, and buy time to obfuscate the disposition of the huge stockpiles of VX gas observed by the UN. Following the attacks on the Taliban, Saddam attempted to boost his regional image with the local Islamists by doing things like televising his cash payments to the families of suicide bombers that attacked in Israel, and so on.
We took down his regime because it never met a single promise made as it withdrew from Kuwait, and it continued to attack, target, murder, and steal from everyone around it. His thug regime's presence in a region much more on edge following the Taliban's deliberate support for attacks against the west and against other regional people and governments that they considered insufficiently hostile to the west... that had to end.
Also, would you consider a missile launch silo as an offensive or defensive system?
It depends on the missile you put in it. And we're offering the Russians unfettered access to see and monitor the completely defensive nature of the systems in question. Of course, you know that, and you're playing dumb in hopes of scoring points with other uninformed people.
How can you be stupid is beyond me.
It's apparent that a lot of things are beyond you.
Slashdot Mirror
Where else does it come from?
Venture capital is exactly that - capital. It's some for of asset piled up through other activities. When you see guys like Amazon's Jeff Bezos or Virgin's Richard Branson putting millions (billions!) of dollars of their own money into funding the start-up of things like the space-related comapnies they're launching, it's just that. Money. Cash they actually do have, essentially, under their mattresses. There are trillions of dollars of cash waiting in the sidelines, right now, with nowhere compelling enough to invest it. Compelling, in the sense that the investment is likely to not be a total washout and loss for having been made on an obviously bad risk.
Take Solyndra, for example. Hundreds of millions up in smoke (even worse, since so much of it was our tax dollars). People who are betting their own money, rather than tax money, on such ventures lose all of their investment when things like that happen. So they're looking for sensible start-ups with lower risk. Those are very hard to come by. Most investments lose, and a few turn out well - and well enough to make up, for the investor, for all of the ones that were total losses. But guys like Bezos (or Buffet, etc) don't go into debt to fund the start of a new company. And when you or I put a little money into a mutual fund or buy a few shares of stock, we don't do that either. At least, I hope you're not using cash advances on a credit card to invest in stocks!
Never been sued, huh? Enjoy the peace and quiet.
No. A sole proprietor lying about his goods or services is just as subject to legal trouble.
Let's make them liable for any images that would mislead a customer
False advertising is already illegal. Individuals and businesses are each regularly hauled off to court for BS-ing in one way or another about something they're saying, selling, charging for, etc. Holding their feet to the fire is entire industry and career path.
If you offer a picture of a big, juicy, appetizing Whopper in your ad, you better deliver something that is very close to that when I walk in to your store.
And this has what, exactly, to do with banning the use of Photoshop by Eeeeevil Corporations? I can make the same burger look average or look more appealing just by moving the lights, changing the angle from which I photograph it, and getting the shot in before the lettuce wilts.
The system you so hilariously defend
The use of attractive people and objects in advertisements, which you so hilariously are unable to mentally process as advertising communication, depends on people engaging in critical thinking. I'd hate to be around when you find out that some love letter you received might have been over-selling things just a bit. Or that someone who brushes her hair out before going on a date doesn't look like that every other minute of the day.
The U.S. should outlaw the use of photoshop by corporations in advertising and reporting.
What about businesses that aren't incorporated? Should a dog groomer who uses a photo of the front of her house as part of her promotional web site be allowed to 'shop out the overhead power lines that distract the eye from the otherwise pleasant, relaxing scene? Yes? Great. How about next year, when her accountant convinces her that it will make more sense for her to incorporate her business. Will she have to put the power lines back in, now that the photograph is being used by an Eeeeevil Corporation in its ads?
How about the four college buddies who get together in an Eeeeeevil Corporation and form a landscaping company? Should they be allowed to show a photograph of one of the yards they maintain, but use Photoshop to clone out the pile of dog crap they didn't notice when they took the photo? So, if you're free-lancing by yourself as a landscaper, that would be fine, but an Eeeeevil Corporation of four college guys would be more evil by doing so? Or is it still OK with you, if it's four guys? How about when they join up with 40 other guys, to do more work? Is cloning out the dog crap or the piece of trash in the photo only evil depending on how many people are communicating when they do it? Really?
I suppose you're also opposed to Eeeeeevil Corporations using wide angle lenses, or special lighting, or make up artists? And photographs used by businesses should only be allowed if the photographer never crouches down to improve the perspective distortion, or to favor the light on a foreground object? Only Eeeeevil Corporations would do something like that. Honest, innocent individual humans would never resort to favoring the subjects they photograph through the use of skills and experience and good tools.
And, of course, it's safe to say that you would completely criminalize the use of watercolor paintings, sketches or any other bit of whimsy that lends itself to artistic license and illustrative techniques meant to emphasize, visually, some particular part of a message. Right? I mean, if people start using artists' renderings in ads, it's probably the end of civilization, right?
Think about this for a minute, OK? Yeeesh.
And into all those places, money come mostly from credit.
This is factually incorrect.
Their creditors are banks
Except for all of the times when they're not. Venture money comes from all sorts of places. And that money is at risk for the investors who put it on the line. If you buy shares in a start-up, you're risking that money. Very few banks will loan money to a start-up business that isn't already well funded by private (completely at risk) equity.
The people whose kids you are trying to "educate" know full well that you are destroying their culture, and will often react violently to it.
Leaving aside for the moment that educating an ignorant culture that supports people who regularly try to kill you is a form of self defense, the issue at hand (vis-a-vis Afghanistan), is that we're helping people who want to educate themselves, and who have their own teachers who want to teach their own people. And you have a violent insurgency that is seeking to prevent that. The culture that you say we're destroying is trying to educate itself, and another/sub culture kills people within that group for doing so. Local Afghani women want local Afghani girls to be able to read. Taliban insurgents want to kill them for that. We are not destroying those women's culture by saving their lives.
Or one could feed and educate the poor. Just a thought.
We already do that. We could do a lot better at it if we weren't being attacked by the people who don't want us to. The folks who want, for example, to educate the poor in Afghanistan need military protection to avoid having their throats cut. The folks who want to deliver food to starving people in Somalia need military escorts to avoid having the food stolen by the Islamists that use those resources to power militias that are busy slaughtering and starving the people we're trying to help. Get the picture? Without military spending, we wouldn't have had massive aid immediately available overseas when Indonesia got pasted by an enormous tsunami in 2009, and couldn't have secured the aid provided.
As for educating the poor here in the US... what do you recomment? More money, it sounds like? Let's start with DC, shall we? Over $10,000 per year per student, huge numbers of which continue to leave school functionally illiterate, unemployable, and destined to live off the nanny state. Money isn't the problem, culture is the problem. Got any suggestions? Be careful, people who make constructive suggestion in situations like that end up being called racists, not problem solvers.
Wrong. They're selling the stuff on the Internet
A sale involves communication with the customer (or in this case, victim, being sold counterfeit goods), involves moving money around, and involves moving goods around. They aren't "selling on the internet," as that's not even possible with physical goods. They are allowing a customer/victim to communicate order and payment info to them across the internet. And then they use the international banking system, which crosses borders and is subject to all sorts of international treaties and arrangements, to actually take the money from the customer/victim. Then they use common carriers or freight companies to move the goods across international borders to deliver the goods, through customs (subject to international agreements and laws) to the person taking deliver of the bogus, fraudulant items.
The sale is consumated when the delivery is made. In the US. The sale also happens to involve financial activity across international boundaries, using the US bankking system. Fraudulently misrepresnting the nature of the transaction is a crime. Delivering counterfeit goods is a crime. Ripping off trademarks has both civil and criminal components to it.
and thus no crime can be committed
Let me guess, you like to rip off entertainment instead of paying the people who make it what they ask for it, and so you come up with uninformed, assinine "explanations" for this sort of thing as cover for your own ripping off of things. Yup, thought so. It's on the internet so it can't be wrong! Obviously your junior high school teachers aren't serving you very well.
Whatever you're arguments are, you can't disregard the fact that Muslims preserved most of the greek and roman texts that we have available today, they held on to knowledge when Europe destroyed itself.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with jihadists wacking people for not being sufficiently similar jihadists, and Muslims from multiple countries sending them cash and weapons to do more of the same. That ain't about preserving ancient not-written-by-Mohammad texts. Not any more.
Was the crime committed on U.S. soil or within U.S. jurisdiction?
Yes. That's where they're selling the stuff.
that's not what he's saying
That's not what he thinks he wants to say, but that's the actual substance of his point. A guy who decides that he will spend his day killing school teachers for teaching girls to read can't help himself from being like that because Eeeeevil Westerners promote Eeeeeevil things like... reading. And do Eeeeeevil things like go after people planting bombs to destroy school buses, and use lethal force when they do so. And do Eeeeeevil things like remove the Taliban from power when they showed their delight in harboring and supporting Al Queda before, during, and after that group's attacks on embassies in Africa, ships in port, and a few thousand people in New York, Pennsylvania, and DC. Yes, that guy who has his day all lined up, with a bullet in mind for a geography teacher for being a teacher is so dumb, so unable to think for himself, so personally directed by Eeeeevil Westerners, that he must - without any recourse at all - knock that schoo teacher to the ground, and blow her brains out.
His post paints exactly that picture. Thousands of people who make the personal day to day decision to be barbarous and to seek out innocents to slaughter, in front of a crowd, because they can't help themselves. Unlike our noble poster, above, who has intelligence and free will and can manage to stop himself from doing the same, they are just poor dumb brutes who can't think like him.
Actually, beyond personal responsibility, that's right
So, what you're saying is that Muslims aren't capable of personal responsibility? That they're just too dumb to act rationally? That someone from that region who used to respect a woman's right to read a book got so angry about western civilization that he now thinks women should be killed for being able to read? Just trying to follow your incredibly condescending, patronizing, racist thinking. Thanks for helping to clarify! Keep it classy.
Muslims weren't always extremists, that happened after Brittian, France and US decided to chop up the Ottoman empire "so it didn't pose a threat". That backfired didn't it?
You're right. When a Taliban enforcer drags a school teacher out into the town square that used to be a soccer field before they banned playing soccer, and shoots her in the head because she has offended Allah by encouraging girls to think, that is definitely the fault of western civilization. No question.
What the hell is wrong with you?
I'm no Christian, but I think it's safe to say that regardless of history, you've got some easy things to compare and contrast today. There are plenty of backwards minded Christians. But they are totally eclipsed - in numbers and actions - by medieval-minded Muslim BS. Plenty of Christians have - historically - killed those who didn't share their flavor of mysticism, because of that difference. That really doesn't happen any more, and no leaders in any numbers or of any consequence within that broad swath of culture either call for or defend religion-based aggression for its own sake. Compared to Islam, which has a very vocal sub-group that rants endlessly about killing peope for not being Muslim or the right flavor of Islamic, and who inspire people who then run out and do exactly that. I'm not seeing large armed Christian movements that burn school teachers alive for teaching girls to read, though I'm seeing large, well-financed Islamist movements that do exactly that, and which are not condemned in any serious way by the wider Muslim community.
It's useful to examine history, but also worth remembering that history isn't what's happening right now. Some cultures have moved past medieval theo-thugocracy, and other cultures are reaching backwards towards it as an ideal, and actually acting on that, killing people every day with that in mind.
I should note that Hilbert space is more often defined as an abstract vector space over the complex numbers equipped with a positive-definite sesquilinear inner product which is moreover Cauchy complete with respect to the induced norm.
I'm glad you noted that, because I was really going to give you some grief if you skipped that part.
I made a good argument and it has not been addressed.
Well, you said some stuff. It wasn't a good argument. I could say that the universe was turtles all the way down, and also say that was a good argument. But neither of those things would be true, either.
Why should he have to ask you any more politely than he already did? Your assertion, to which is responded, was clearly intended as a troll, and he called you on it. Trolls don't get polite.
Only an outside observer sees something moving at the "speed of light"; to the photon itself, no time passes.
Not really. This was a research project, which means the very last part of the photon's trip was through part of academia. Which means it felt like exactly like 12.7 billion years.
So Bush made the conscious decision to prohibit investment in Syria, but Syria's president is responsible for this.
Correct.
And when a man beats his wife, it's her fault for "making him do it," right?
I don't know... is she supplying weapons and cash to terrorist networks? Is she running a Ba'athist dictatorship that took delivery of lots of Saddam Hussein's VX gas stockpiles and uses snipers to kill pro-democracy political protesters on the street? If she is, then yeah, she made him do it.
So, we have to assume you're just clumisly trying to be ironic, or that you're incredibly disingenuous, or that you're badly under-informed and form really poor understandings of the nature of the world. Please do not vote.
I think the point of economic sanctions to ruin a nation's entire economy
No, the point of sanctions is to urge the sensible people in the country to make [Insert Oppressive Dictator or Evil Policy Here] go away, for their own sake and everyone else's ... without having to get into armed conflict from the outside. When someone like Saddam Hussein shows his own people that he's perfectly willing to steal their food/medicine relief support for his pet army, and take the oil-for-food cash for use in building more really ugly palaces and to buy missle parts from North Korea, then sanctions start looking rather counterproductive. They really don't work on completely corrupt regimes that have absolutely no problem with starving their own people. See: North Korea.
Of course, NK is getting help from China, so that messes up the recipe. And Syria's getting lots of support from the Dictator's Club For Men, and can rely on places like Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and even Russia to keep them afloat, too.
You need to work on your nouns. Unless you purpose is to sound frantic, but to make sure that nobody actually knows what you're talking about. In which case, good job.
What in the world do you call "peacekeeping efforts"? Iraq? Afganistan? Serbia?
Serbia? Yeah, the Serbs start slaughtering people, and NATO stops it. Peacekeeping.
... using things like the missiles he kept building despite promising not to). Are you following the pattern, here? When you stop someone who has been spending years slaughtering people, that's peacekeeping.
Afghanistan? Yes. The Taliban slaughter people in order to run the country like a medieval horror show, and as part of their approach to life, harbor and support Al Queda, who use the place to train and launch many terrorist attacks that kill many thousands of people. Stopping the Taliban from doing that, and stopping their efforts to regain local control at the point of a sword (including doing nice things like burning school teachers alive for daring to teach girls to read) - peacekeeping. When you stop someone who is trying to kill someone else for being peaceful, you're peacekeeping.
Iraq? OK, I get it now, you're just a troll. But as a refresher: Saddam invaded Kuwait, murdering his way to that country's coast, and started setting up on the Saudi border to do the same. The peacekeeping part comes in where he was stopped from doing that, and pushed back into Iraq. More peacekeeping: no fly zones enforced to prevent him from slaughtering more people like he did tens of thousands of villagers (using WMDs - remember?). Of course, he never honored the promises he made when he was pushed back out of Kuwait, and continued to shoot at those patroling aircraft and the people on the ground there to keep him from doing more damaage (you know, with his military
Of course, you know this. Troll.
I can't wait for you to explain me what exactly were strikes against Iraq and Afghanistan about.
OK, so you're playing the uninformed troll. Fine.
... that had to end.
Afghanistan? It was an attack against the Taliban, who were running (most) of that country at the point of a sword, financed from elsewhere. They (the Taliban) deliberately harbored the group that planned and executed many mass-murder attacks against western targets, including killing hundreds at embassies in Africa, before finally killing thousands in 9/11. The Taliban were given weeks to give up the people directly behind those attacks, and of course they refused. The Taliban was thus removed from power, and we continue to have to use force to prevent their insurgency from regaining power in that country. Of course, you knew all of that.
Iraq? Since it sounds like you're probably still in junior high school, you probably don't remember the part where Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and a large global alliance formed to push his troops back into Iraq, and force him to agree to changing his ways. In short, he never did. He met essentially none of the commitments he made while retreating, continued to attack patroling aircraft, murdered tens of thousands of its own people using WMDs, and did things like use UN food aid money to rebuild military structures, buy missile parts from North Korea, and buy time to obfuscate the disposition of the huge stockpiles of VX gas observed by the UN. Following the attacks on the Taliban, Saddam attempted to boost his regional image with the local Islamists by doing things like televising his cash payments to the families of suicide bombers that attacked in Israel, and so on.
We took down his regime because it never met a single promise made as it withdrew from Kuwait, and it continued to attack, target, murder, and steal from everyone around it. His thug regime's presence in a region much more on edge following the Taliban's deliberate support for attacks against the west and against other regional people and governments that they considered insufficiently hostile to the west
Also, would you consider a missile launch silo as an offensive or defensive system?
It depends on the missile you put in it. And we're offering the Russians unfettered access to see and monitor the completely defensive nature of the systems in question. Of course, you know that, and you're playing dumb in hopes of scoring points with other uninformed people.
How can you be stupid is beyond me.
It's apparent that a lot of things are beyond you.