Now, while I support the weakening of software patents in general, by this logic, would that mean that MS's patents don't apply to those that use pirated copies of Windows?
That's a stupid question. If you are a pirate, why would you even care about the patents?
The real question this brings up is if someone pirates this same overseas master disk and distributes those copies, doesn't it follow that MS has no recourse, that the only ones being infringed are the overseas distrbutors and not MS?
And the answer is OF COURSE NOT, do not expect the law to follow common sense or have any sort of internal consistency. If it did, who would employ all the lawyers?
Understand I'm rather a moderate as far as fair use rights go. I don't feel legaly the user should be given carteblanche to copy everything they own an unlimited number of times.
What a perfect example of how successful the MAFIAA's publicity campaign has been when people who think they should be able to do whatever they want with whatever they've purchased are considered the "extremists" and the ones who favor the reach of corporate control into their own living room consider themselves "moderate."
I don't feel that DVD-video should be treated much differently than software, where the law permits one backup of a given disk.
2 that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful
thus indicating that multiple archival copies are allowed.
I use it on my swap and/home partitions on my laptop, but when doing heavy writing to the disk, the whole machine locks up for 1 or 2 seconds at a time - no mouse movement, no sound, no cursor - then it resumes. These freezes occur every 10 seconds or so as data gets flushed out to the disk.
From the dm-crypt faq: Q: My system hangs for some time in regular intervals when writing to encrypted disks. A: You are probably using Linux 2.6.4. Du to the introduction of kthread pdflush is running at nice level -10, which means that the kernels treats dm-crypt writes as a real time task and doesn't allow scheduling. Solution: Switch to 2.6.5 or later or renice pdflush manually.
He also opposed the "clean DVD" proposal which would've seen sanitised versions of films -- a dangerous idea, if there ever was one.
If you are refering to Clearplay and the variations on that theme from other companies then you don't really know what you are talking about. Ultimately all of these censoring systems are about the people who buy a DVD being able to watch it in whatever fashion they feel like. Valenti was entirely consistent in his anti-consumer approach with his attempts to kill off Clearplay,et al -- extending corporate ownership of culture from the store shelves to within people's living rooms.
I'm pretty sure that my anti-censorship views are more extreme than yours, but what people do in the privacy of their own home with the products they have purchased is their own business and hollywood should have no say in it - technicalities of copyright law not withstanding.
so, you're all dancing arround his grave because he didn't want you to enjoy your movies the way you see fit? Grow up. Seriously.
No. We are all dancing around his grave because he was the loudest and most effective voice advocating complete corporate ownership of culture - an idea that ought to be abhorrent to anyone with even a single creative bone in their body. Furthermore he was one of the prime orchestrators of the 1998 Copyright Extension Act which amounted to the absolute largest theft from the public domain in recent history.
Valenti was a dinosaur of protectionism who worked tirelessly to hold the country back in the pre-internet era, seeking to do with legal means what could not be done with technical means. Instead of encouraging Hollywood to embrace new technologies and develop new business models incorporating them he pushed to outlaw them - trying to make the vcr illegal with his boston strangler quote is one example of just how far he was willing to go to distort the truth to repress technology. Regardless of one's beliefs about copyright and culture, he was no friend to nerds.
The best thing that can be said about his passing is that if we are lucky, his death will mark the end of the era of the copyright dinosaurs and the beginning of one in which creative artists are directly compensated and society stops paying enormous taxes to distributors whom have set themselves of up as tolltakers without providing any significant value in return.
The way that SSD oems deal with the management of write endurance internally within their products varies but they all have the common theme of scoring how many times a block of memory has been written to, and then reallocating physical blocks to logical blocks dynamically and transparently to spread the laod across the whole disk. In a well designed flash SSD you would have to write to the whole disk the endurance number of cycles to be in danger.
For this illustrative calculation I'm going to pick the following parameters:- Configuration -- a single flash SSD. (Using more disks in an array could increase the operating life.) Write endurance rating -- 2 million cycles. (The typical range today for flash SSDs is from 1 to 5 million. The technology trend has been for this to get better.) Sustained write speed -- 80M bytes / sec (That's the fastest for a flash SSD available today and assumes that the data is being written in big DMA blocks.) Capacity -- 64G bytes (Actually single flash SSDs are available with 160G capacity in 2.5" form factor from Adtron and 155G in a 3.5" form factor from BiTMICRO Networks. The bigger the capacity - the longer the operating life - in the write endurance context.)
To get that very high speed the process will have to write big blocks (which also simplifies the calculation).
We assume perfect wear levelling which means we need to fill the disk 2 million times to get to the write endurance limit.
2 million (write endurance) x 64G (capacity) divided by 80M bytes / sec gives the endurance limited life in seconds.
That's a meaningless number - which needs to be divided by seconds in an hour, hours in a day etc etc to give...
The end result of 51 years for the absolute worst case possible.
I think most atheists base their conviction on reason rather than irrational beliefs
What "conviction" is this that you speak of?
Real athiests are no more 'convinced' of the absence of religion than they are 'convinced' of the absence of beauty pageants for sauerkraut and peanut-butter sandwiches. We just don't care.
At the risk of taking a Karma-hit, might I suggest that many IT persons are overpaid (including me)? Turning out thousands of line of average code isn't that hard.
You aren't the first to try and argue that software engineers are slackards and deserve to be paid less. The point is irrelevant, the claim is that supply is insufficient and by the basic laws of economics, if supply is insufficient to satisfy demand, price goes up. Since price has been going down, then supply most not be insufficient, ex post facto ergo dim sum.
Oh, please. Hotjobs.com shows that the average salary for an entry level programmer in my hometown (Pittsburgh) is $55,000. No matter how you slice it, that's alot of freakin' money.
And if you look at the historical data, you'll see that entry level programmers were getting $54,400 5 years ago. After inflation, that means they are paid less today than they were 5 years ago. That's what the OP was taking about - if demand is up why are salaries down?
If you knew this then why did you ask for references and then suggest they don't exist outside some dittohead's blog?
You said, "we have several former Iraqi generals claiing the WMDs they had were shuttled to Syria." You stated the people making the claims HAD THE WMDS THEMSELVES. I called you on it, all you cited were people who had not been Iraqi generals for over a decade, who had no direct connection to this suppossed smuggling out of the country. Not one of them said, "I did it" or "I ordered it" or even, "I've got proof." It's pure dittohead blog material, nothing more.
Second, Bush stated there was no WMD programs.
What part of, "we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't" do you see has denying the existence of PROGRAMS? You seem to be the one with the reading comprehension problem. Not sure the relevance of your claim anyway since you seem to want to contradict it in your next statement.
. But in the same press article you quoted from, just befor ethe part were your quote
It says no such thing before the part I quoted, just more fear mongering meant to scare people without making any verifiable claims -- "imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who would -- who had relations with Zarqawi." We know for a fact 2 of the 3 'hints' are total bullshit - Hussein never paid a dime to the families of palestinian suicide bombers and had nothing to do with Zarqawi. There is absolutely no reason to believe he had "programs" either.
When Bush goes on to say, "he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction." that is no more significant than if he had said that Sadam had the capacity to build a line of sporty convertibles with attractive cloth drop-tops. Just more vague intimations. We all know about the baloney "dual use" aluminmum pipes that really weren't "dual use." Sadam had nothing and was building nothing - the closest thing to evidence that he might have been building something - the report of Iraq acquiring uranium in Niger was out and out forged.
Tell me were I said anything was true about the WMDs. Tell me were I stated the WMDs were the reason I supported going into Iraq.
You said , "not to mention we have several former Iraqi generals claiing the WMDs they had were shuttled to Syria" -- just because you preface it with a denial doesn't mean you weren't citing it, otherwise WHY DID YOU MENTION IT IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Further on you said, "9/11 never would have happened if we didn't look like a bunch of pussies to them." etc, etc Which is just out and out stupid. Do you seriously believe that al-qaeda is now going to hold back from attacking? Now that they've had so much opportunity to learn our military tactics, to practice fighting a guerilla war against our troops? The reason al-qaeda didn't expect the magnitude of the US's response to 9/11 wasn't because they thought we were "pussies" its because that level of response was bin Laden's fucking wet dream.
After 9/11 we had the support of the world, after Iraq we have the sympathy of no one and have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars without any useful return on investment. That's hardly something to be proud of.
I'm amazed that people like you still exist. but sadly it is the truth about people today. Try looking the information up and being current with it before jumping into some bashing. It is not my job to educate you, it is your job to come to play after you have done your homework.
Lol, did you think those claims were new to me? I've heard them before and just like claims that the WTC was taken down with explosive charges, they are barely one step up the scale from utterly bogus.
All of the claims are hearsay - not one single person has stepped up and said either, "I did it" or "I ordered it" or even, "I've got proof." What you've got is a bunch of guys who have been out of the loop since circa 1990 or never even in the loop. Its like a big FOAF story.
Georges Sadas - Imprisoned in 1991 and then "ex-communicated" from the regime. Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti - Defected in 1991 Lt General Moshe Yaalon, et al - Israeli politicians Nizar Nayuf - Syrian "reporter" - actually a founder of a pro-democracy group imprisoned for 9 years until 2001
Lots of these FOAF claims have been floating around for years with no coroborating evidence - and plenty of contradictory evidence as the rest of the wikipedia article you linked to provides. If you think that this paltry evidence constitutes "being in the loop" you are deluded.
No matter what kind of hand waving you might come up with to try to explain away the FOAF nature of these reports, the one thing about all of them that does not pass the laugh test is that Bush and Co have not produced a shred of supporting evidence. Finding something, anything, would be a huge public relations victory for them, it might even be enough to put a republican in the oval office next term. Yet not only have they shown us nothing, they have publicly admitted that there is nothing and have made said admissions LONG AFTER these hearsay reports were made public. Presumably the reports were followed up on and found to be spurious.
so, no, he did not accidentally download some kiddie porn unattended. they guy ADMITTED to possession of the illegal files. he was trying to get off (no pun intended) on a technicality.
Do you think it literally said "kiddie porn" or did it say something like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.kids and the court was given a non-technical translation? Note also that the ruling doesn't say if that folder contained any files, just that the folder existed. That's easily within the realm of possibility, as a porn hound, the guy probably set his newsreader to download everything in the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* hierarchy, not really paying attention to the details.
With 4,000 CDs, that's over 2.75TB, that's a gargantuan number of images. Even if he had been collecting for ten years, starting back in 1994 that would be an average of 1 CD per day, every day of the year.
This part of the ruling, at the very end, is really where the problem is:
Accordingly, there is sufficient evidence in the record to demonstrate that Perez either intended to possess prepubescent and sadistic/masochistic images or had reckless disregard for his possession of them.
The judge even admits the possibility that Perez had no malicious intent, but still tries to stretch the circumstances to fit the crime. I absolutely disagree that it would require "reckless disregard" - as the numbers cited in the ruling show, it is much more likely that he would have had to have superhuman focus to weed out all the questionable images that he had downloaded.
Nice conjecture I have an "I'm willing to bet" for you: I bet you have no way to back that up that assertion.
Go download a week's worth of posts to a.b.p.e and look at what you end up with.
So what about him sending an instant message to a New York woman. Sent over Yahoo's network, the IM contained a sexually explicit picture of a minor Your saying he just happened to have a lot of porn CD's that had a few pictured of Child porn and some one else used his open WAP to send the IM?
There are a couple of plausible explanations -- Somebody who knew he was a porn-hound knew he had an open wap and sent it, knowing that the chances of the cops digging up *something* would be pretty high. Or perhaps his system was infected with a virus that was responsible for the IM - after all, haven't we heard about how super-secretive the kiddie-porn crews are, why would this guy randomly send out a bunch of pictures to someone he didn't know? That's like begging to get arrested, totally not in character for the stereotypical kiddie porn consumer.
By the way, from the ruling, he had approximately 4,000 discs and only "thousands" of images of child pornography. Considering that an average size of 100K (an educated guess) each disc can hold more than 7,000 jpegs. If there were 9,999 such images, that's still less than 0.004% of the total collection, EASILY so far in the noise that he may have never even seen the illegal images.
Well guess what It doesn't matter if it was one picture or 100 pictures. He had at least one on the CD's and having one is enough to convict.
Yeah, and that's the problem with the law. If he didn't even know he had the images, it sure doesn't seem fair. After all, the point of the law is try to reduce demand - its like convicting a guy for posession of cocaine because one of the $20 bills in his wallet had residue on it because a previous owner used it to snort a few lines.
FWIW, Wine is in the midst of massive DirectX / Direct3D development. Seems like every week there are new DirectX check ins. I would not be surprised to see them pull off DirectX-10 support sometime this year.
they found additional evidence including a stack of DVDs with child porn images on them (and think HOW MANY images are needed to fill more than one DVD).
Yes, lets think about that for a second and evaluate it with a little critical thinking.
First, the article says CDs not DVDs, so that reduces the amount to only ~700MB per disc. That's still a lot, especially for a "stack." What are the chances that every single image was kiddie porn? Seems like a stretch to me. I'm willing to bet that most pictures were of adults and there were a few questionable pictures mixed in.
The guy could easily have just downloaded a couple of days worth of alt.binaries.pictures.erotica without screening them too carefully. Who knows, he may even be completely legal, he just can't prove it because some of the pictures have 30 year old asian chicks wearing pig-tails and catholic school uniforms, making them look like pre-teens and without the official documents on file from the photo-shoot, he can't prove otherwise.
Sure, maybe the guy's CDs were loaded with the nasty stuff with 5-year olds and such. But we sure can't tell from the article and there are plenty of examples of over-blown prosecutions in the past. Just look at the major dragnet in the UK that caught up hundreds of innocents, causing too many of the verifiably innocent to commit suicide. The stigma of these cases cause rationality to go out the window.
Just what the hell does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Bad foreign policy, brinksmanship, losing wars. None of those are reasons for the USA to initiate an attack against them. Sounds to me like you are just doing another variation on, "They are bat-shit insane so its ok to attack them."
I supported going into Iraq for several reasons outside the WMDs. Well not to mention we have several former Iraqi generals claiing the WMDs they had were shuttled to Syria in small aircraft and trucks and there is radar confirming some activity in the area at the supposed times it happened.
There is not. Bush himself has said there were no WMDs. If you want to make claims like that - name the generals and cite your references. I expect you will not because they don't exist outside of some dittohead's blog.
Plus the bit where he mentions not caring about Iran being cleansed by fire, yeah.
Thanks for confirming your ignorance. You've just proven that you do not apply any critical analysis to the propaganda about Iran, because that whole hullabaloo about "wiping israel off the map" was total crap - that's an American idiom with no counterpart in Farsi. It was a deliberate misinterpretation used to make the exact same justifications for bombing Iran as you are making today. If you want informed people to take your claims seriously you need to do your homework a little better than that.
If you don't want to believe his stated intent, fine - but you have to at least realize there is a chance he means what he says, and a few million lives hang in the balance.
But is there a chance that he means what Bush et al say he says? You don't lack for credulity, do you?
I'm sure there were people like you back during the cuban missile crisis as well.
And I'm sure there were people like you back during the days of the Iraq invasion to stop WMDs, waaaay to many of you. If you have to go back to the pre-neocon days to come up with an example of an actual threat, you are not being particularly relevant. Today's world is a whole lot different from 45 years ago, for one thing our leaders this time around are a lot less trustworthy.
Yes except that in the case of Iran we have some pretty virulent speeches by its leader telling us exactly what he'd love to do with a nuclear weapon.
You mean like the one where he says that Iran will wipe Israel off the map and for which people like Bolton are calling for him to be charged with inciting genocide in the world court?
Slashdot Mirror
The real question this brings up is if someone pirates this same overseas master disk and distributes those copies, doesn't it follow that MS has no recourse, that the only ones being infringed are the overseas distrbutors and not MS?
And the answer is OF COURSE NOT, do not expect the law to follow common sense or have any sort of internal consistency. If it did, who would employ all the lawyers?
- 2 that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful
thus indicating that multiple archival copies are allowed.Q: My system hangs for some time in regular intervals when writing to encrypted disks.
A: You are probably using Linux 2.6.4. Du to the introduction of kthread pdflush is running at nice level -10, which means that the kernels treats dm-crypt writes as a real time task and doesn't allow scheduling.
Solution: Switch to 2.6.5 or later or renice pdflush manually.
I'm pretty sure that my anti-censorship views are more extreme than yours, but what people do in the privacy of their own home with the products they have purchased is their own business and hollywood should have no say in it - technicalities of copyright law not withstanding.
Valenti was a dinosaur of protectionism who worked tirelessly to hold the country back in the pre-internet era, seeking to do with legal means what could not be done with technical means. Instead of encouraging Hollywood to embrace new technologies and develop new business models incorporating them he pushed to outlaw them - trying to make the vcr illegal with his boston strangler quote is one example of just how far he was willing to go to distort the truth to repress technology. Regardless of one's beliefs about copyright and culture, he was no friend to nerds.
The best thing that can be said about his passing is that if we are lucky, his death will mark the end of the era of the copyright dinosaurs and the beginning of one in which creative artists are directly compensated and society stops paying enormous taxes to distributors whom have set themselves of up as tolltakers without providing any significant value in return.
We always called them 'clits' where I come from.
The way that SSD oems deal with the management of write endurance internally within their products varies but they all have the common theme of scoring how many times a block of memory has been written to, and then reallocating physical blocks to logical blocks dynamically and transparently to spread the laod across the whole disk. In a well designed flash SSD you would have to write to the whole disk the endurance number of cycles to be in danger.
For this illustrative calculation I'm going to pick the following parameters:-
Configuration -- a single flash SSD. (Using more disks in an array could increase the operating life.)
Write endurance rating -- 2 million cycles. (The typical range today for flash SSDs is from 1 to 5 million. The technology trend has been for this to get better.)
Sustained write speed -- 80M bytes / sec (That's the fastest for a flash SSD available today and assumes that the data is being written in big DMA blocks.)
Capacity -- 64G bytes (Actually single flash SSDs are available with 160G capacity in 2.5" form factor from Adtron and 155G in a 3.5" form factor from BiTMICRO Networks. The bigger the capacity - the longer the operating life - in the write endurance context.)
To get that very high speed the process will have to write big blocks (which also simplifies the calculation).
We assume perfect wear levelling which means we need to fill the disk 2 million times to get to the write endurance limit.
2 million (write endurance) x 64G (capacity) divided by 80M bytes / sec gives the endurance limited life in seconds.
That's a meaningless number - which needs to be divided by seconds in an hour, hours in a day etc etc to give...
The end result of 51 years for the absolute worst case possible.
My source is the .sig I've seen on someone else's posts here at slashdot. Where *HE* got the quote from, I have no idea.
I think most atheists base their conviction on reason rather than irrational beliefs
What "conviction" is this that you speak of?
Real athiests are no more 'convinced' of the absence of religion than they are 'convinced' of the absence of beauty pageants for sauerkraut and peanut-butter sandwiches. We just don't care.
Atheists believe a universal negative.
...Great faith is required to not believe in God.
Do you believe in pink elephants? No?
Then obviously you have GREAT FAITH that there are no pink elephants.
You have a pretty freaking weird religion there you pink elephant denier.
Hardly. Atheism is as much a religion as not collecting stamps is a hobby.
At the risk of taking a Karma-hit, might I suggest that many IT persons are overpaid (including me)? Turning out thousands of line of average code isn't that hard.
You aren't the first to try and argue that software engineers are slackards and deserve to be paid less. The point is irrelevant, the claim is that supply is insufficient and by the basic laws of economics, if supply is insufficient to satisfy demand, price goes up. Since price has been going down, then supply most not be insufficient, ex post facto ergo dim sum.
When Bush goes on to say, "he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction." that is no more significant than if he had said that Sadam had the capacity to build a line of sporty convertibles with attractive cloth drop-tops. Just more vague intimations. We all know about the baloney "dual use" aluminmum pipes that really weren't "dual use." Sadam had nothing and was building nothing - the closest thing to evidence that he might have been building something - the report of Iraq acquiring uranium in Niger was out and out forged.You said , "not to mention we have several former Iraqi generals claiing the WMDs they had were shuttled to Syria" -- just because you preface it with a denial doesn't mean you weren't citing it, otherwise WHY DID YOU MENTION IT IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Further on you said, "9/11 never would have happened if we didn't look like a bunch of pussies to them." etc, etc Which is just out and out stupid. Do you seriously believe that al-qaeda is now going to hold back from attacking? Now that they've had so much opportunity to learn our military tactics, to practice fighting a guerilla war against our troops? The reason al-qaeda didn't expect the magnitude of the US's response to 9/11 wasn't because they thought we were "pussies" its because that level of response was bin Laden's fucking wet dream.
After 9/11 we had the support of the world, after Iraq we have the sympathy of no one and have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars without any useful return on investment. That's hardly something to be proud of.
All of the claims are hearsay - not one single person has stepped up and said either, "I did it" or "I ordered it" or even, "I've got proof." What you've got is a bunch of guys who have been out of the loop since circa 1990 or never even in the loop. Its like a big FOAF story.
Georges Sadas - Imprisoned in 1991 and then "ex-communicated" from the regime.
Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti - Defected in 1991
Lt General Moshe Yaalon, et al - Israeli politicians
Nizar Nayuf - Syrian "reporter" - actually a founder of a pro-democracy group imprisoned for 9 years until 2001
Lots of these FOAF claims have been floating around for years with no coroborating evidence - and plenty of contradictory evidence as the rest of the wikipedia article you linked to provides. If you think that this paltry evidence constitutes "being in the loop" you are deluded.
No matter what kind of hand waving you might come up with to try to explain away the FOAF nature of these reports, the one thing about all of them that does not pass the laugh test is that Bush and Co have not produced a shred of supporting evidence. Finding something, anything, would be a huge public relations victory for them, it might even be enough to put a republican in the oval office next term. Yet not only have they shown us nothing, they have publicly admitted that there is nothing and have made said admissions LONG AFTER these hearsay reports were made public. Presumably the reports were followed up on and found to be spurious.
With 4,000 CDs, that's over 2.75TB, that's a gargantuan number of images. Even if he had been collecting for ten years, starting back in 1994 that would be an average of 1 CD per day, every day of the year.
This part of the ruling, at the very end, is really where the problem is:The judge even admits the possibility that Perez had no malicious intent, but still tries to stretch the circumstances to fit the crime. I absolutely disagree that it would require "reckless disregard" - as the numbers cited in the ruling show, it is much more likely that he would have had to have superhuman focus to weed out all the questionable images that he had downloaded.
By the way, from the ruling, he had approximately 4,000 discs and only "thousands" of images of child pornography. Considering that an average size of 100K (an educated guess) each disc can hold more than 7,000 jpegs. If there were 9,999 such images, that's still less than 0.004% of the total collection, EASILY so far in the noise that he may have never even seen the illegal images.Yeah, and that's the problem with the law. If he didn't even know he had the images, it sure doesn't seem fair. After all, the point of the law is try to reduce demand - its like convicting a guy for posession of cocaine because one of the $20 bills in his wallet had residue on it because a previous owner used it to snort a few lines.
FWIW, Wine is in the midst of massive DirectX / Direct3D development. Seems like every week there are new DirectX check ins. I would not be surprised to see them pull off DirectX-10 support sometime this year.
First, the article says CDs not DVDs, so that reduces the amount to only ~700MB per disc. That's still a lot, especially for a "stack." What are the chances that every single image was kiddie porn? Seems like a stretch to me. I'm willing to bet that most pictures were of adults and there were a few questionable pictures mixed in.
The guy could easily have just downloaded a couple of days worth of alt.binaries.pictures.erotica without screening them too carefully. Who knows, he may even be completely legal, he just can't prove it because some of the pictures have 30 year old asian chicks wearing pig-tails and catholic school uniforms, making them look like pre-teens and without the official documents on file from the photo-shoot, he can't prove otherwise.
Sure, maybe the guy's CDs were loaded with the nasty stuff with 5-year olds and such. But we sure can't tell from the article and there are plenty of examples of over-blown prosecutions in the past. Just look at the major dragnet in the UK that caught up hundreds of innocents, causing too many of the verifiably innocent to commit suicide. The stigma of these cases cause rationality to go out the window.
Just what the hell does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Bad foreign policy, brinksmanship, losing wars. None of those are reasons for the USA to initiate an attack against them. Sounds to me like you are just doing another variation on, "They are bat-shit insane so its ok to attack them."