Just a small point -- you really don't consider someone a "car driver" if they can't drive in snow? This when the vast majority of humanity never drives in snow, but seems to get along just fine?:\
Yes, though this will have been influenced by where I live (England, in which it's a rare winter that doesn't have one or two snowy days). But I think anyone calling themselves a competent driver should be capable of it (even if they don't do so regularly; a large part of driving is the ability to adapt to conditions).
1960's style kernels? The NT kernel is the finest and most advanced one you'll see on a desktop machine; it was written by, basically, the VMS team hired wholesale after the collapse of DEC. In NT 3.51 it was a true microkernel; things like graphics have since been merged back in for performance, which, while inelegant, is true to the scientific method - if experiment and theory disagree, it is the theory which is wrong. As for 1970's languages,.net/C# needs to be applauded for finding a way to make a modern language interoperate in both directions with traditional ones - which opens the possibility of writing even low-level system libraries in modern languages, something I've never seen any other framework offer. You'll see from my other posts that I'm far from an MS fan, but it's unfair to blame them for the excessive conservatism of the tech industry as a whole.
If a police officer misuses "less-lethal" weaponry, however, someone ends up in the hospital -- or the morgue. His family might have some legal recourse, but that won't ease his suffering or bring him back from the dead.
And may well not end up amounting to much - remember the guy accidentally shot seven times in the head in a London Underground station fairly recently?
And I'd like for the full range of common personal info fields to have standard names, so I could click to fill out the neverending series of personal info forms the Web challenges me with all day, every day.
That is a *very* good idea. I've noticed some of this happening already - my Konqueror has autocompleted my addresses on websites I've never used before, because they use the same field names as sites which I have - but some standard field names would make it really easy.
It's not a case of "every trick of the trade", it's a case of basic functionality. Yes, you can manage without it, but you really shouldn't. Just like if you're not up to driving in the snow, then yes, I will not call you a "car driver", even if you can get away without that ability for most of your everyday driving. Because it's something every competent car driver should be capable of doing.
That sounds fucking crazy to me. Yes, Adobe skipped a version. However, they did so because that version was a transition to a pretty new codebase. I'm not arguing that proprietary Flash is great... it pretty much sucks. However, Adobe isn't in a position to use Flash to create greater lock in for "Adobe OS" or whatever. So Flash is the lesser of two evils in this case (and I mean actual evils, not just metaphorically).
Regardless of the intention, Flash is actually worse for windows lockin, at the moment - it won't work (yes, I've tried the various workarounds, they don't work) on 64-bit linux at all, where it does work on linux it uses 90% processor power just to play a tiny youtube video. Flash on linux is, whatever the intentions behind it, less practical than silverlight on linux.
Wine is a reimplementation of the Win32 software stack. Microsoft's version only works on Windows. So, some enterprising developers used Microsoft's own specifications (when available) to create a clean room reimplementation of Win32 for various platforms. Mono is a reimplementation of the.NET software stack (the successor to Win32). Microsoft's version only works on Windows. So, some enterprising developers used Microsoft's own specifications (when available) to create a clean room reimplementation of.NET for various platforms.
The difference being that.NET is based on public, published standards - it's in the same category as PDF, which most of us, even the strongest of the free software zealots, seem more than happy to use on linux. (Yes, there is patent FUD flying around, but you can do that for any format. (Did you know PDFs often use LZW? If you use them in your linux system, you run the risk of getting sued by unisys!)). The only reasons for being dubious about it are its origin, and while MS's history is not something to be taken lightly, companies can and do change - you use IBM as an example of good use and promotion of open source in your post, where in the '80s people like you would be telling us not to touch anything that came out of IBM with a bargepole.
Now, considering Wine only runs about 10% of Win32 applications well and Mono only runs about 10% of.NET applications well, perhaps you understand why I see similarities in the two.
Bollocks, frankly. I'm surprised when a.NET application doesn't run under Mono, and indeed even for a win32 application under wine. The lock-in factor is actually a lot less severe than with Java, which would seem the main alternative - don't take my word for it, do what I did, take a random sample of java and.net programs from freshmeat, and try running the wine ones in MS.net and Mono, and the Java ones in Sun Java and a non-Sun Java of choice.
Both in theory and in practice,.net is an open standard, and vastly superior to flash in this respect.
Ask them to write a tight, fast paced short story or novella and their minds would explode.
Or they'd do their best thing yet. Alistair Reynolds is a great example of this - most of his books are decent enough, but pretty bloated; then you read diamond dogs/turquoise days and he's fit everything you get out of his 500-page novels and more into a 100-page novella, and he's done it twice, and it's superb. More shorter books would be a great improvement to modern writing; I have to chalk it down to the demise of editors - that and publishers wanting to be able to charge more for the same number of books
You might be different, but when I'm reading a book, or playing a gameboy, or doing something with a mobile phone, it'll be at about 30 degrees, and if it were possible to put my TV at that angle I might. I do think the GP has something there.
Even worse would be if the hard line for becoming abandonware is whether or not the product is still sold by the publisher. Then they would not only be locked into perpetually providing support, but also keeping the old product available for sale to compete with the newer versions.
Why would that be worse? If people still want Win2K, MS can still make their money selling it. And if people don't want Win2K, they can stop selling it without losing anything. And it's a big win for customers, who know they'll always be able to get the version they want, one way or another.
The British Prime Minister stood up in parliament and said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to launch within 45 minutes, which was false and, based on what has since emerged, almost certainly a deliberate lie at some level in the government.
Absolute prohibitions only work if you can be absolutely certain that nobody has them or will use them. At this point in history and probably forever, you can't. Reality vs. Idealism.
The way I'd set it up, nukes are prohibited, but as soon as one country uses a nuke, it then becomes legitimate for other countries to use them against it; this is the way the rules of war usually work (e.g. spies who are captured while disguised in uniforms of the other side are shot, and this is *not* a war crime). And of course countries (or ideally an international body, but I doubt we'd be able to convince enough nations for that to work) would keep a stock of nukes to enforce it.
In WW2, it was less clear-cut. The military junta controlling Japan was training children to fight with pointy sticks. Can you imagine the loss of life if the allies had to invade?
I'm never convinced the sticks thing would have any real effect - in my experience people are generally people everywhere you go, regardless of which culture, and when it comes down to it, the majority of people won't resist an invasion if it doesn't get in the way of them or their lives. As to the loss of life: huge, but not at the wiping-out-of-humanity level that a nuclear war will be. Did the use of nuclear weapons save lives in the short term? Undoubtedly. But whether it's worth it in the long run is less clear.
Once could argue Japan was better off being nuked, since they didn't even surrender after the first bomb - it took Nagasaki to convince them.
The scientists who constructed the bomb wanted to show Japanese diplomats a test firing. Pointless idealism perhaps, but one feels it would have been worth a try - IIRC there was enough fissile material for six bombs, more than enough to have used them the same way as happened in real life if it failed. As to surrender, it's worth remembering that the sticking point in pre-A-bomb negotiations was the Emperor retaining his position, and yet in the eventual settlement he did.
I do agree that Nukes should never, ever be used again. Even if some joker detonates one in New York, the best option is to invade and occupy rather than subject the civilian population to instant death for the decisions of a dictatorship.
I'm less convinced on that one; countries have to be treated as a unit to a certain extent, the people are responsible for their actions, and a nuke as a response to a nuke is reasonable, though far from ideal. (But certainly any nuclear "first strike" should be regarded as a war crime).
How much uranium can be extracted from 550 tons of yellow cake?
Plenty (I assume, I don't actually know), but not much in 45 minutes.
The death toll prior to invasion? Who would that include? What about the potential numbers if he HAD a nuke? Is a body count even valid? What about the decades of repression suffered by the Iraqi people?
Count an average of the numbers being killed per year under Saddam, I guess, and multiply the number who would have been killed by a nuke by the probability he actually had one based on the evidence at the time. And yes, a body count is a very crude measure, and freedom for many is certainly worth the death of a few, but we're already at the point where it's impractical to actually count things. I don't have an elaborate Kantian calculus of how good or bad an effect is, I'm mostly going with my gut feel on this; I don't think the benefits in freedom were worth the cost in lives.
While I am running the risk of justifying Bush's "preemptive war" theories, I can't help but think about the ongoing debate about Hiroshima/Nagasaki - Was that worth it?
As you can probably guess, I mostly think no (on the grounds that it's better off for humanity in the long run if we have an absolute prohibition on the use of nukes in war, under any circumstances), although it's a lot less clear-cut given that the wholescale bombing of civilian cities was already going on at that stage of WW2.
BTW this has been an interesting discussion and I appreciate the effort on your part.
You can't! They're already dead! Which they wouldn't be if they had done it right instead of screw around for years.
Compare the death tolls pre- and post-invasion.
Re: WMD ready to launch - when Powell ruined his career for Bush, the claim was that they could quickly produce them.
I followed my own country more closely than the US; the british PM stood up in parliament and said "We know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction he can launch within 45 minutes."
Even Powell admits it was wrong, but I don't think he's gone so far as to say he was deliberately deceived, has he? Just curious.
It was being made pretty clear by the BBC's investigation before that was derailled by the suicide (or alleged suicide) of one of the people involved.
What wasn't true? Are you seriously saying Saddam wasn't dangerous and unstable?
No, but the claims made about weapons of mass destruction weren't true. And regardless of how unstable Saddam was, the case to the public for war was not made on the basis of that; it was made on the basis of claims about weapons of mass destruction which have turned out to be entirely false.
It wasn't bad enough? How bad is bad enough? It WAS bad enough.
Again, compare the death tolls. The invasion has got rid of Saddam, but the cost in human life has been so high that we're worse off than if we hadn't invaded.
If a machine is repurposed, as in, taken out and used for something else, then it's trivial to change the hostname while doing so.
No, it's not at all trivial; believe me, I've done it. The machine's canonical hostname tends to find its way into all sorts of places, and you'll be finding random small things have broken for months afterwards.
And if you're just adding a service to the box, it's pretty trivial to point a CNAME record to the same address.
So now your users are using multiple hostnames to access the machine, one of which behaves subtly differently from all the others (e.g. you spend hours looking for hr-ntp-1 in the logs, because you can usually find the right machine that way, until you remember hr-ntp-1 is actually hr-fileserver-3). Which is not a good situation; far better to have all the user-accessible names be CNAMEd, and then you get consistent behaviour from everything.
you do NOT want the possibility for someone with authority over you and a degree of technical prowess to discover your disdain for them or your lack of professionalism.
Or you could just be professional about it. Obviously "pointyhairedboss" is not a good hostname, but there's nothing objectionable in using cartoon characters, star trek ships, greek gods or any of the other common suggestions; if one particular one causes trouble ("Eros"), there's no problem just leaving it out.
And, I should note, I intentionally stated "hr-web-1" and "hr-web-2" in the original post, as this leaves hr-web available in the event that they're doing load balancing or some other shared role task. You're still able to string as many machines on the back as you want, and use a single address for access.
That's fine for the web stuff where you know ahead of time you'll need more than one, but there are many cases where you would think there's no way you're ever going to need more than one machine for a given service and then two years later you do. I suppose you can avoid that by numbering in all cases, but that feels a bit clunky.
If you MUST use a 'nickname' to refer to a machine, make them comply with a naming convention involving purpose/role/location: no proper names, so as to aid in identification (ie, finding "it-w2k8-153" in logs is much more useful than finding "lothar" in logs, when you're not immediately aware of network topography - and it makes it much easier to identify systems on the network which shouldn't be there, or doing specific things they shouldn't be doing.)
Every piece of information you might put in a name could change, and sure, you can put effort into keeping all the names up to date, but it's not the correct place to keep that information. Also, a scheme like that makes it a lot easier for an attacker to set a hostname that fits in, and it won't be as easily noticed because they're all just meaningless letters and numbers to a human taking a quick glance.
The machine's hostname is not a reliable or effective place to keep any piece of information about the machine or its role. All you can aim for is something which will be unique, make it obvious that it's a computer, and human-readable/memorable.
Tell that to those Croats. Oops! You can't! They're already dead!
Right back at you; tell your side to all the dead civilians in Iraq.
Nobody ever said he had nukes, but an active nuke program which he DID have and has been well documented. Along with chemical weapons. And attacking pretty much all of the neighboring countries. And constantly targeting coalition planes in the no-fly zone with AA radar. And stealing all the oil-for-food money. What else was there?
Ok, it wasn't nukes, it was "weapons of mass destruction", which was just a way to make the public think nukes without actually saying it. But in any case, the claim *was* made, and it was made repeatedly, that we *knew* Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to launch. And he didn't.
Bush used the excuse that Saddam was too dangerous & unstable to allow him to even have a chance at making a nuke or even a big dirty bomb. Why did he need to do that? Because international opinion is a fleeting, fickle thing and nobody was keeping score on him.
Which is all well and good if what Bush had been saying was true. But it wasn't.
What if they're right? France, Germany, Russia and China all opposed the war in large part because they had significant business interests in Iraq. It's not like their hands were clean. Hell, the Chinese sold advanced AA systems to Iraq DURING the no-fly enforcement. France and Germany had oil and industrial interests, the Russians sold them thousands of tanks and were owed money. Notice how 3 of the 5 permanent members of the UN security council are on that list? They were all perfectly happy leaving the US and Britain holding the bag on that one. What's the point of holding out for an international agreement when you know you'll never get one?
The US had large business interests in going to war; no-one's hands are entirely clean here. I believe that international agreement *would* have happened if it got bad enough; it happened in the previous gulf war, and in the other examples I gave.
Heroes is right. Hans was the person I strove to emulate; I saw a lot of myself in him. I don't want to think he's killed someone, because what does that say about me? Can I have my little piece of irrationality, for a little while?
1.short answer: Yes, having a costitution written By John Adams and Thomas Jefferson helps a bit. In my country, I am subjected by the media to a cult worship of the Italian constitution. So far, from the end of WWII, the average government has lasted a year and a half vs. the Five years written in said constitution, and debt is 105% of gdp. Hooray. By the way,do you imply that Soviet Russia had been unlucky in their elections? maybe we should have encouraged more candidate diversity, but kamikazes were a bit thin on the ground those days.
No, Soviet Russia has also been lucky, in that however good or bad you think their leaders were, none have been crazy enough to start a nuclear war, which is the part that matters here. My point is that, well as it may have worked so far, if world security relies on the US constitution and citizens preventing them ever electing a madman, we're doomed to failure in the long run. Because it only takes one to destroy humanity.
Re: Kosovo = Multilateral my shiny white ass. That crap dragged on for years because none of the euros wanted to shit in their own back yard. What finally fixed it? American pressure to cut throught the bullshit and American FA-18's bombing the living shit out of the serbs until they cried uncle.
That's a time when it had to end in war; if the world went to war every time the US said so, there would have been many more similar conflicts. The diplomatic "bullshit" is actually a good way of distinguishing between when a war is the right solution and when it is not. Were things made worse by going to war too late in Kosovo? Perhaps, but there was a lot less damage there than has been done by going to war too early in Iraq.
Re:Saddam - It's been documented that Saddam HAD a nuclear weapons program and he actually used Chemical weapons vs Iran AND the Kurds in his own country. He also did everything he could to maintain the illusion that the weapons were still available. Who's fault is it if we believed him.
If the rest of the world had been taken in I'd agree with you. But they weren't; it was pretty clear to anyone who was looking that Saddam did not have nuclear weapons, and the amount of massaging of the evidence that was going on and has since been uncovered makes it pretty clear that your and my (Brit here) governments weren't really taken in either; they knew full well Saddam didn't have nukes, and deliberately deceived the public.
Besides, the question isn't whether Bush had justification, but what IS justification? Or perhaps what is enough justification? Some people will never be convinced, which to me is more dangerous than being too quick on the trigger.
And I'm saying enough is when there is broad international agreement; yes, you will never get 100% support, but you need more than just two countries.
the US has been the ONLY nuclear power for about four years, , but as far as I recall no US president talked liberally about "pushing an entire population into the sea", as many arab leaders have done
So the US has a right to possess nuclear weapons because they've been lucky in who they've elected so far?
I do have to remind you that you sleep at night in a house without a moat because the policemen in your country carry submachine guns. do they scare you? are you clamoring against their insistence to control the amount and type of similar weapons on sale?
The police have external checks and balances to prevent the abuse of their power. The US does not.
While China can and does do very nasty things within its own borders, the trouble it causes is restricted to there. Who's the check on the USs human rights abuses?
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Just a small point -- you really don't consider someone a "car driver" if they can't drive in snow? This when the vast majority of humanity never drives in snow, but seems to get along just fine? :\
Yes, though this will have been influenced by where I live (England, in which it's a rare winter that doesn't have one or two snowy days). But I think anyone calling themselves a competent driver should be capable of it (even if they don't do so regularly; a large part of driving is the ability to adapt to conditions).
1960's style kernels? The NT kernel is the finest and most advanced one you'll see on a desktop machine; it was written by, basically, the VMS team hired wholesale after the collapse of DEC. In NT 3.51 it was a true microkernel; things like graphics have since been merged back in for performance, which, while inelegant, is true to the scientific method - if experiment and theory disagree, it is the theory which is wrong. As for 1970's languages, .net/C# needs to be applauded for finding a way to make a modern language interoperate in both directions with traditional ones - which opens the possibility of writing even low-level system libraries in modern languages, something I've never seen any other framework offer. You'll see from my other posts that I'm far from an MS fan, but it's unfair to blame them for the excessive conservatism of the tech industry as a whole.
And may well not end up amounting to much - remember the guy accidentally shot seven times in the head in a London Underground station fairly recently?
That is a *very* good idea. I've noticed some of this happening already - my Konqueror has autocompleted my addresses on websites I've never used before, because they use the same field names as sites which I have - but some standard field names would make it really easy.
It's not a case of "every trick of the trade", it's a case of basic functionality. Yes, you can manage without it, but you really shouldn't. Just like if you're not up to driving in the snow, then yes, I will not call you a "car driver", even if you can get away without that ability for most of your everyday driving. Because it's something every competent car driver should be capable of doing.
That sounds fucking crazy to me. Yes, Adobe skipped a version. However, they did so because that version was a transition to a pretty new codebase. I'm not arguing that proprietary Flash is great... it pretty much sucks. However, Adobe isn't in a position to use Flash to create greater lock in for "Adobe OS" or whatever. So Flash is the lesser of two evils in this case (and I mean actual evils, not just metaphorically).
Regardless of the intention, Flash is actually worse for windows lockin, at the moment - it won't work (yes, I've tried the various workarounds, they don't work) on 64-bit linux at all, where it does work on linux it uses 90% processor power just to play a tiny youtube video. Flash on linux is, whatever the intentions behind it, less practical than silverlight on linux.
Wine is a reimplementation of the Win32 software stack. Microsoft's version only works on Windows. So, some enterprising developers used Microsoft's own specifications (when available) to create a clean room reimplementation of Win32 for various platforms. .NET software stack (the successor to Win32). Microsoft's version only works on Windows. So, some enterprising developers used Microsoft's own specifications (when available) to create a clean room reimplementation of .NET for various platforms.
Mono is a reimplementation of the
The difference being that .NET is based on public, published standards - it's in the same category as PDF, which most of us, even the strongest of the free software zealots, seem more than happy to use on linux. (Yes, there is patent FUD flying around, but you can do that for any format. (Did you know PDFs often use LZW? If you use them in your linux system, you run the risk of getting sued by unisys!)). The only reasons for being dubious about it are its origin, and while MS's history is not something to be taken lightly, companies can and do change - you use IBM as an example of good use and promotion of open source in your post, where in the '80s people like you would be telling us not to touch anything that came out of IBM with a bargepole.
Now, considering Wine only runs about 10% of Win32 applications well and Mono only runs about 10% of .NET applications well, perhaps you understand why I see similarities in the two.
Bollocks, frankly. I'm surprised when a .NET application doesn't run under Mono, and indeed even for a win32 application under wine. The lock-in factor is actually a lot less severe than with Java, which would seem the main alternative - don't take my word for it, do what I did, take a random sample of java and .net programs from freshmeat, and try running the wine ones in MS.net and Mono, and the Java ones in Sun Java and a non-Sun Java of choice.
Both in theory and in practice, .net is an open standard, and vastly superior to flash in this respect.
Or they'd do their best thing yet. Alistair Reynolds is a great example of this - most of his books are decent enough, but pretty bloated; then you read diamond dogs/turquoise days and he's fit everything you get out of his 500-page novels and more into a 100-page novella, and he's done it twice, and it's superb. More shorter books would be a great improvement to modern writing; I have to chalk it down to the demise of editors - that and publishers wanting to be able to charge more for the same number of books
You might be different, but when I'm reading a book, or playing a gameboy, or doing something with a mobile phone, it'll be at about 30 degrees, and if it were possible to put my TV at that angle I might. I do think the GP has something there.
So what you're saying is, Netcraft is dying, BSD confirms it?
If that were the way it works, even without such a law you would eventually reach the point where no-one wanted to buy the new version.
Software companies would need to break or remove functionality from their software before releasing it, simply to stay afloat
Or they could price their product at a sustainable level. There's no entitlement to keep making minor upgrades and raking in cash for them.
Firefox? Enjoy losing all your memory.
You're right; 4chan has the right attitude towards anonymous posters/posters using names.
Even worse would be if the hard line for becoming abandonware is whether or not the product is still sold by the publisher. Then they would not only be locked into perpetually providing support, but also keeping the old product available for sale to compete with the newer versions.
Why would that be worse? If people still want Win2K, MS can still make their money selling it. And if people don't want Win2K, they can stop selling it without losing anything. And it's a big win for customers, who know they'll always be able to get the version they want, one way or another.
The British Prime Minister stood up in parliament and said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to launch within 45 minutes, which was false and, based on what has since emerged, almost certainly a deliberate lie at some level in the government.
Absolute prohibitions only work if you can be absolutely certain that nobody has them or will use them. At this point in history and probably forever, you can't. Reality vs. Idealism.
The way I'd set it up, nukes are prohibited, but as soon as one country uses a nuke, it then becomes legitimate for other countries to use them against it; this is the way the rules of war usually work (e.g. spies who are captured while disguised in uniforms of the other side are shot, and this is *not* a war crime). And of course countries (or ideally an international body, but I doubt we'd be able to convince enough nations for that to work) would keep a stock of nukes to enforce it.
In WW2, it was less clear-cut. The military junta controlling Japan was training children to fight with pointy sticks. Can you imagine the loss of life if the allies had to invade?
I'm never convinced the sticks thing would have any real effect - in my experience people are generally people everywhere you go, regardless of which culture, and when it comes down to it, the majority of people won't resist an invasion if it doesn't get in the way of them or their lives. As to the loss of life: huge, but not at the wiping-out-of-humanity level that a nuclear war will be. Did the use of nuclear weapons save lives in the short term? Undoubtedly. But whether it's worth it in the long run is less clear.
Once could argue Japan was better off being nuked, since they didn't even surrender after the first bomb - it took Nagasaki to convince them.
The scientists who constructed the bomb wanted to show Japanese diplomats a test firing. Pointless idealism perhaps, but one feels it would have been worth a try - IIRC there was enough fissile material for six bombs, more than enough to have used them the same way as happened in real life if it failed. As to surrender, it's worth remembering that the sticking point in pre-A-bomb negotiations was the Emperor retaining his position, and yet in the eventual settlement he did.
I do agree that Nukes should never, ever be used again. Even if some joker detonates one in New York, the best option is to invade and occupy rather than subject the civilian population to instant death for the decisions of a dictatorship.
I'm less convinced on that one; countries have to be treated as a unit to a certain extent, the people are responsible for their actions, and a nuke as a response to a nuke is reasonable, though far from ideal. (But certainly any nuclear "first strike" should be regarded as a war crime).
Plenty (I assume, I don't actually know), but not much in 45 minutes.
The death toll prior to invasion? Who would that include? What about the potential numbers if he HAD a nuke? Is a body count even valid? What about the decades of repression suffered by the Iraqi people?
Count an average of the numbers being killed per year under Saddam, I guess, and multiply the number who would have been killed by a nuke by the probability he actually had one based on the evidence at the time. And yes, a body count is a very crude measure, and freedom for many is certainly worth the death of a few, but we're already at the point where it's impractical to actually count things. I don't have an elaborate Kantian calculus of how good or bad an effect is, I'm mostly going with my gut feel on this; I don't think the benefits in freedom were worth the cost in lives.
While I am running the risk of justifying Bush's "preemptive war" theories, I can't help but think about the ongoing debate about Hiroshima/Nagasaki - Was that worth it?
As you can probably guess, I mostly think no (on the grounds that it's better off for humanity in the long run if we have an absolute prohibition on the use of nukes in war, under any circumstances), although it's a lot less clear-cut given that the wholescale bombing of civilian cities was already going on at that stage of WW2.
BTW this has been an interesting discussion and I appreciate the effort on your part.
Heh, thanks, same to you.
Compare the death tolls pre- and post-invasion.
Re: WMD ready to launch - when Powell ruined his career for Bush, the claim was that they could quickly produce them.
I followed my own country more closely than the US; the british PM stood up in parliament and said "We know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction he can launch within 45 minutes."
Even Powell admits it was wrong, but I don't think he's gone so far as to say he was deliberately deceived, has he? Just curious.
It was being made pretty clear by the BBC's investigation before that was derailled by the suicide (or alleged suicide) of one of the people involved.
What wasn't true? Are you seriously saying Saddam wasn't dangerous and unstable?
No, but the claims made about weapons of mass destruction weren't true. And regardless of how unstable Saddam was, the case to the public for war was not made on the basis of that; it was made on the basis of claims about weapons of mass destruction which have turned out to be entirely false.
It wasn't bad enough? How bad is bad enough? It WAS bad enough.
Again, compare the death tolls. The invasion has got rid of Saddam, but the cost in human life has been so high that we're worse off than if we hadn't invaded.
No, it's not at all trivial; believe me, I've done it. The machine's canonical hostname tends to find its way into all sorts of places, and you'll be finding random small things have broken for months afterwards.
And if you're just adding a service to the box, it's pretty trivial to point a CNAME record to the same address.
So now your users are using multiple hostnames to access the machine, one of which behaves subtly differently from all the others (e.g. you spend hours looking for hr-ntp-1 in the logs, because you can usually find the right machine that way, until you remember hr-ntp-1 is actually hr-fileserver-3). Which is not a good situation; far better to have all the user-accessible names be CNAMEd, and then you get consistent behaviour from everything.
you do NOT want the possibility for someone with authority over you and a degree of technical prowess to discover your disdain for them or your lack of professionalism.
Or you could just be professional about it. Obviously "pointyhairedboss" is not a good hostname, but there's nothing objectionable in using cartoon characters, star trek ships, greek gods or any of the other common suggestions; if one particular one causes trouble ("Eros"), there's no problem just leaving it out.
And, I should note, I intentionally stated "hr-web-1" and "hr-web-2" in the original post, as this leaves hr-web available in the event that they're doing load balancing or some other shared role task. You're still able to string as many machines on the back as you want, and use a single address for access.
That's fine for the web stuff where you know ahead of time you'll need more than one, but there are many cases where you would think there's no way you're ever going to need more than one machine for a given service and then two years later you do. I suppose you can avoid that by numbering in all cases, but that feels a bit clunky.
If you MUST use a 'nickname' to refer to a machine, make them comply with a naming convention involving purpose/role/location: no proper names, so as to aid in identification (ie, finding "it-w2k8-153" in logs is much more useful than finding "lothar" in logs, when you're not immediately aware of network topography - and it makes it much easier to identify systems on the network which shouldn't be there, or doing specific things they shouldn't be doing.)
Every piece of information you might put in a name could change, and sure, you can put effort into keeping all the names up to date, but it's not the correct place to keep that information. Also, a scheme like that makes it a lot easier for an attacker to set a hostname that fits in, and it won't be as easily noticed because they're all just meaningless letters and numbers to a human taking a quick glance.
The machine's hostname is not a reliable or effective place to keep any piece of information about the machine or its role. All you can aim for is something which will be unique, make it obvious that it's a computer, and human-readable/memorable.
Right back at you; tell your side to all the dead civilians in Iraq.
Nobody ever said he had nukes, but an active nuke program which he DID have and has been well documented. Along with chemical weapons. And attacking pretty much all of the neighboring countries. And constantly targeting coalition planes in the no-fly zone with AA radar. And stealing all the oil-for-food money. What else was there?
Ok, it wasn't nukes, it was "weapons of mass destruction", which was just a way to make the public think nukes without actually saying it. But in any case, the claim *was* made, and it was made repeatedly, that we *knew* Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to launch. And he didn't.
Bush used the excuse that Saddam was too dangerous & unstable to allow him to even have a chance at making a nuke or even a big dirty bomb. Why did he need to do that? Because international opinion is a fleeting, fickle thing and nobody was keeping score on him.
Which is all well and good if what Bush had been saying was true. But it wasn't.
What if they're right? France, Germany, Russia and China all opposed the war in large part because they had significant business interests in Iraq. It's not like their hands were clean. Hell, the Chinese sold advanced AA systems to Iraq DURING the no-fly enforcement. France and Germany had oil and industrial interests, the Russians sold them thousands of tanks and were owed money. Notice how 3 of the 5 permanent members of the UN security council are on that list? They were all perfectly happy leaving the US and Britain holding the bag on that one. What's the point of holding out for an international agreement when you know you'll never get one?
The US had large business interests in going to war; no-one's hands are entirely clean here. I believe that international agreement *would* have happened if it got bad enough; it happened in the previous gulf war, and in the other examples I gave.
Heroes is right. Hans was the person I strove to emulate; I saw a lot of myself in him. I don't want to think he's killed someone, because what does that say about me? Can I have my little piece of irrationality, for a little while?
I can beleive he would still use it.
No, Soviet Russia has also been lucky, in that however good or bad you think their leaders were, none have been crazy enough to start a nuclear war, which is the part that matters here. My point is that, well as it may have worked so far, if world security relies on the US constitution and citizens preventing them ever electing a madman, we're doomed to failure in the long run. Because it only takes one to destroy humanity.
That's a time when it had to end in war; if the world went to war every time the US said so, there would have been many more similar conflicts. The diplomatic "bullshit" is actually a good way of distinguishing between when a war is the right solution and when it is not. Were things made worse by going to war too late in Kosovo? Perhaps, but there was a lot less damage there than has been done by going to war too early in Iraq.
Re:Saddam - It's been documented that Saddam HAD a nuclear weapons program and he actually used Chemical weapons vs Iran AND the Kurds in his own country. He also did everything he could to maintain the illusion that the weapons were still available. Who's fault is it if we believed him.
If the rest of the world had been taken in I'd agree with you. But they weren't; it was pretty clear to anyone who was looking that Saddam did not have nuclear weapons, and the amount of massaging of the evidence that was going on and has since been uncovered makes it pretty clear that your and my (Brit here) governments weren't really taken in either; they knew full well Saddam didn't have nukes, and deliberately deceived the public.
Besides, the question isn't whether Bush had justification, but what IS justification? Or perhaps what is enough justification? Some people will never be convinced, which to me is more dangerous than being too quick on the trigger.
And I'm saying enough is when there is broad international agreement; yes, you will never get 100% support, but you need more than just two countries.
I don't support Bush, the war, or anything, but I'd say that entirely true.
So the US has a right to possess nuclear weapons because they've been lucky in who they've elected so far?
I do have to remind you that you sleep at night in a house without a moat because the policemen in your country carry submachine guns. do they scare you? are you clamoring against their insistence to control the amount and type of similar weapons on sale?
The police have external checks and balances to prevent the abuse of their power. The US does not.
While China can and does do very nasty things within its own borders, the trouble it causes is restricted to there. Who's the check on the USs human rights abuses?