Well, if there was something between your ears besides several pounds of earwax maybe you'd know enough to understand that it's impossible to prove a negative.
You can't prove that there are no WMD. What we rely on instead is parsimony, the simplest explanation which fits the facts. In this case, the simplest explanation is that Saddam was telling the truth when he said he had no WMD. Assuming a WMD program means assuming that (a) none of the technicians have come forward, (b) none of the bureacrats involved have confessed, (c) neither Saddam nor any of his inner circle have confessed, (d) American intelligence hasn't been able to use satellite imaging, Geiger counters, captured documents, interrogations of defectors and captured Baathists etc. to determine where the WMD are, despite massive political pressure from Washington to do so. It's just not plausible. Last I heard the US has given up even looking- not even Bush seems to still believe that they were there. So yeah, a substantial WMD program might exist. Also, Saddam Hussein might have bred fire-breathing dragons to turn loose against his enemies. But I seriously doubt it.
Please, if you still think there really were significant stockpiles of WMD then you're living in a fantasy world. Probably spend all day dressed up in a Star Trek uniform as well, dreaming of one day losing your virginity.
The other thing is that this may have been anything but accidental. Supposedly the Chinese were broadcasting transmissions to Serbian troops and Clinton decided to put a stop to it.
Yeah. And all the people who knew where the WMD were, they were all buried along with the WMD, just like the pirates did it, so they could tell no tales. Maybe we'll find a map made by Saddam with a big "X" on it. And we'll find that under that X there's a system of caves guarded by elaborate puzzles and booby traps, just like in "Goonies". And that's where the WMD will be.
Dumbass.
You can hide a bomb, but you can't hide an entire program, along with the paperwork (everything in Iraq was heavily documented), the people who did the work on the weapons, and the people who administered the programs, and the people who ordered the programs to be created. We've had Saddam Hussein and other top Baath party members in captivity for over a year now, and nobody has decided to rat out the program in exchange for a nicer cell or an early release?
What the coward fails to recognize is the reason that Bush is accountable is that as the President he is in a unique position. He has more access to more intelligence than anyone else, he has the power to distribute that intelligence so as to alter the debate, and he has the power to alter the manner in which intelligence is gathered.
Bush did not use his unique ability to gather intelligence to come up with an accurate picture.
For instance, after 9/11, Bush decided to set up a special unit whose only purpose was to look for connections between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. In other words, he was looking for excuses. If all you do is look for evidence that backs up your theory, and never look for evidence that contradicts it, of course you can create an argument for your theory, no matter whether it's right or wrong. That's the kind of climate the CIA was operating under with George W. Bush: it was very clear what types of information they were interested in (evidence for WMD to justify an invasion), and very clear what they weren't interested in (negative evidence). So of course they got a biased picture, and downplayed any doubt, and then fed this bias to the rest of the United States.
Another issue is Hans Blix. Hans Blix has said that after inspecting Iraq, he was pretty darn sure that there really wasn't a substantial weapons program. How did he know? Simple. He followed up the CIA leads and they were all dead ends, and realized these guys were full of shit. If Bush had really wanted the truth, he could have just asked Blix and gotten it.
Just because spam has increased in the period since can-spam was passed doesn't mean that can-spam's responsible for it.
Any more than an increase in global temperature following the Can-Spam Act must mean that the law is causing global warming. Looking at the graph, spam rapidly increases after Can-Spam goes into effect, but it was rapidly increasing anyway. You can't pick out any effect of the law one way or the other.
If Apple is really the brains of the industry--if its products are so much better than Microsoft's or Dell's or IBM's or Hewlett-Packard's--then why is the company so damned small?... The father of the PC--and, remember, the industry's number-one vendor in 1980--has since sunk to a lowly ninth, behind competitors Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, just for starters. Sadly, Apple is also behind such no-namers as Acer (seventh) and Legend (eighth). So much for innovation and creativity.
Is Apple a success? Depends on how you measure it. In terms of market share for boxes and OSes, they're pretty much a failure.
In terms of changing the world with the Apple II, then the Mac, putting style into computers, creating the iPod, launching iTunes... well, yes you can (correctly) point out that they weren't exactly first with these things. The Altair was the first home computer, Xerox did a lot of the GUI innovation, Apple wasn't the first to make a high-capacity MP3 player. But Apple has been revolutionary in doing more to take these technologies mainstream than anyone else. In those terms, they're a success. Apple is a success at making incredible products that people feel very emotional about (love AND hate, speaking as someone who got into computers through the Apple IIe). Microsoft is an insanely great money-making machine, Apple has a legacy of creating insanely great (sometimes just insane) machines and software.
So who would you rather be? Gates, with enough money to buy Bolivia? Or Jobs, who has less money (still more than you could ever use) and a legacy of cool innovation?
What I'm talking about is the western model liberal arts education. I'm not against people reading Moby Dick, but the argument is that the priorities need to be on the basics, stuff like primary school and widespread literacy before you worry about producing literature majors. Shit, there's not even enough jobs out there for all the humanities majors that the US puts out, there certainly isn't a big need for them in the poorest countries in the world. Pure education for educations sake is great, but when people don't have enough to eat it shouldn't be high on the list.
The type of education I would advocate would be practical stuff: technical courses that would teach people to use lathes and mills to manufacture equipment, for instance. A lathe would be a hell of a lot more useful than a computer. The level of technical know-how is so low in Madagascar, for instance, that the Malagasy can't even make wheels that are round. So people need to be taught how to make better wheels, hoes, machetes, that kind of thing. Then the guy selling it makes money and the guy using it is more efficient. Roads don't need to be high tech, most are currently dirt paths that turn into morasses when it rains. If 1000 guys were hired to quarry stone and lay it down on these roads, it would feed 1000 families and let other people transport goods between communities, and allow tourists in to the national parks in the rainy season, where they could stimulate the economy. And you don't need everyone to be full-fledged doctors, just people trained in enough medicine to set bones, sew up cuts, treat people with drugs, administer vaccinations and soforth.
The thing is that many of the places I saw were still in the Iron Age. Bringing them to the Digital Age strikes me as overly ambitious. It's great if it'll work, but it might be faster, cheaper, and more effective to focus on bringing things to the level of the Industrial Revolution. As for who does it, that's a difficult question to answer. On the one hand it sounds awfully condescending to go around saying that the Westerners should save the poor little Africans. On the other, the people I saw seemed far too focused on getting enough to get by, to really worry about their neighbors. Maybe caring about people you don't even know is something of a luxury good. One of the curious things in history is that many of the people who have advocated most strongly for the poor haven't been poor themselves. Che Guevera came from a well-to-do Argentine family, Fidel Castro was a landowner's son, Ghandi was the son of a minister. Bill Gates has set up the world's largest charitable organization, and besides being filthy rich himself, comes from well-to-do parents.
The government wants people to give up their rights, either voluntarily or through attrition. "Terrorism" is today what "Communism" was in the 50's. Smarten up, kids. You'll be living in a corporate controlled country when you grow up.
Sounds like the words of a sneaky, low-down al-Qaeda loving terrorist sympathizer to me. Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a terrorist organization?
You need to think a little more clearly on this. They have visibility but if I drop you in the middle of Africa with a 12-pack of Coke and Google T-shirt guess which brand the natives are going to recognize?M
Yeah, I love the part about how IKEA is the leading brand in the "Europe and Africa" region. I can just so picture a bunch of Sudanese refugees wandering through the various room setups and saying, "Wow, I love how everything is so stylish. And I could totally use one of those closet organizers. Assuming I had a closet. Or a house."
Hey brandchannel.com: I just conducted a poll of slashdot readers (sample size = me) and think you guys are a bunch of freakin' idiots.
"The mothers are going to walk right up to that computer and say, 'My children are dying, what can you do?' They're not going to sit there and like, browse eBay."
Sounds about right. Speaking as someone who travelled through Madagascar for three months, all I can say is that you simply cannot understand it until you have been there and been there long enough to completely blow your prejudices, preconceptions and most of your hope out of the water.
Development needs to start with the basics. They don't need computers and they don't need college. They need roads, they need medical care, they need clean drinking water, they need immunizations, they need family planning, they need assistance with sustainable farming techniques and they need primary education. I'll concede that computers can be part of the overall strategy but they'd be pretty low on my list of priorities. And it's not going to be any use at all until you've got (a) power, (b) literacy, and (c) a phone line, and many places I saw lacked some or all of those things.
I don't believe in god, but I find the best argument for Christianity is people who just keep their beliefs to themselves and live Jesus' teachings about being accepting and treating other people like you'd want to be treated.
For some crazy reason, this works a lot better at getting people to think seriously about faith than "you don't believe the exact same thing I do, and I am right, so you're burning in Hell for all eternity".
On the other hand, I suspect militant atheism just encourages the fundamentalist types, by giving them proof that agnostics and athiests really do hate Baby Jesus.
The gospels - while containing some interesting wisdom teachings from poor ol' Jeshua ben Joseph - aren't any sort of evidence for the supernatural. Any more than the Koran, the Dhamapada, the Vedas, the collected Greek myths, or the front page of the Weekly World News...
So one of these dark matter clouds may pass through the solar system every few thousand years? Have they taken the next step and hypothesized that such an event could account for major climate changes? Like the event that killed off the dinosaurs?
It'd be interesting if these things could be tied to mass extinctions, but these occur much more rarely than every few thousand years. And unless these clouds can account for high levels of iridium, shocked quartz, melt glass, and a hundred-mile impact crater in Mexico, it's not terribly likely they account for the dinosaur extinction.
Of course, that won't stop ridiculous hippie and religious activists from breaking out the torches and pitchforks because THE SCIENTISTS ARE RAPING MOTHER NATURE AND BABY JESUS WITH THEIR UNNATURAL AND THEREFORE MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE EXPERIMENTS
Speaching of which, would the anti-abortionists be pro or con for the termination of these chimeras after a few days in the petri dish?
Spray on suits?!?! We are just begging for horrible things to happen to these people by pressing clothes to the limits of physics
If by "horrible", you mean "life threatening", then I don't know about that. But if by "horrible" you mean, "the utter agony upon removal of the suit when every single hair on your body is ripped out one by one", then yes, I agree completely.
The tin foil manufacturers are part of the conspiracy! They've been putting these tiny RFIDs inside every square foot of tin foil for, like years now man... you stand out like a neon signs on their scanners. That's why I make my OWN tin foil out of pop cans by melting down the cans and hammering it into thin sheets.
they simply would not win and that their money is better-spent on some different campaign.
Like maybe a military campaign? I can almost picture Gates rubbing his hands together in Redmond and going, "Sure, I'll let you win this round, Europe" before launching his full-scale invasion of Europe.
Of course, the winter assault on Moscow will be his undoing.
In other news, 80% of the population consider themselves "above average" drivers.
I once heard a study which claimed that the people who had the most accurate self-perception were depressed people. So does having an accurate perception of oneself make one depressed or vice versa? It made a lot of sense, though. The world sucks a lot of the time, and maybe the only way you can deal with it is to go through life thinking things are better than they really are.
Fortunately, I don't have to worry about that, because I have excellent internet skills, I'm a great driver, and I'm irresistable to the chicks.
However, what it isn't is a simple browser for general public to use day to day.
I tried Opera for all of about five minutes; I found the interface overwhelming, confusing and hideous so I figured, screw this. That might not win me points with geeks but I think that's something the techies often forget: the user just wants an efficient, useful, and reasonably pleasant experience using the product. I suspect that 5% of the features of a software product see 95% of the consumer's use. It's nice to have those other features available if you need them,but having to deal with them most of the time makes for a lousy user experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if there was something between your ears besides several pounds of earwax maybe you'd know enough to understand that it's impossible to prove a negative.
You can't prove that there are no WMD. What we rely on instead is parsimony, the simplest explanation which fits the facts. In this case, the simplest explanation is that Saddam was telling the truth when he said he had no WMD. Assuming a WMD program means assuming that (a) none of the technicians have come forward, (b) none of the bureacrats involved have confessed, (c) neither Saddam nor any of his inner circle have confessed, (d) American intelligence hasn't been able to use satellite imaging, Geiger counters, captured documents, interrogations of defectors and captured Baathists etc. to determine where the WMD are, despite massive political pressure from Washington to do so. It's just not plausible. Last I heard the US has given up even looking- not even Bush seems to still believe that they were there. So yeah, a substantial WMD program might exist. Also, Saddam Hussein might have bred fire-breathing dragons to turn loose against his enemies. But I seriously doubt it.
Please, if you still think there really were significant stockpiles of WMD then you're living in a fantasy world. Probably spend all day dressed up in a Star Trek uniform as well, dreaming of one day losing your virginity.
Goddamn conservative pinhead pricks.
The other thing is that this may have been anything but accidental. Supposedly the Chinese were broadcasting transmissions to Serbian troops and Clinton decided to put a stop to it.
Dumbass.
You can hide a bomb, but you can't hide an entire program, along with the paperwork (everything in Iraq was heavily documented), the people who did the work on the weapons, and the people who administered the programs, and the people who ordered the programs to be created. We've had Saddam Hussein and other top Baath party members in captivity for over a year now, and nobody has decided to rat out the program in exchange for a nicer cell or an early release?
For instance, after 9/11, Bush decided to set up a special unit whose only purpose was to look for connections between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. In other words, he was looking for excuses. If all you do is look for evidence that backs up your theory, and never look for evidence that contradicts it, of course you can create an argument for your theory, no matter whether it's right or wrong. That's the kind of climate the CIA was operating under with George W. Bush: it was very clear what types of information they were interested in (evidence for WMD to justify an invasion), and very clear what they weren't interested in (negative evidence). So of course they got a biased picture, and downplayed any doubt, and then fed this bias to the rest of the United States.
Another issue is Hans Blix. Hans Blix has said that after inspecting Iraq, he was pretty darn sure that there really wasn't a substantial weapons program. How did he know? Simple. He followed up the CIA leads and they were all dead ends, and realized these guys were full of shit. If Bush had really wanted the truth, he could have just asked Blix and gotten it.
Any more than an increase in global temperature following the Can-Spam Act must mean that the law is causing global warming. Looking at the graph, spam rapidly increases after Can-Spam goes into effect, but it was rapidly increasing anyway. You can't pick out any effect of the law one way or the other.
Is Apple a success? Depends on how you measure it. In terms of market share for boxes and OSes, they're pretty much a failure.
In terms of changing the world with the Apple II, then the Mac, putting style into computers, creating the iPod, launching iTunes... well, yes you can (correctly) point out that they weren't exactly first with these things. The Altair was the first home computer, Xerox did a lot of the GUI innovation, Apple wasn't the first to make a high-capacity MP3 player. But Apple has been revolutionary in doing more to take these technologies mainstream than anyone else. In those terms, they're a success. Apple is a success at making incredible products that people feel very emotional about (love AND hate, speaking as someone who got into computers through the Apple IIe). Microsoft is an insanely great money-making machine, Apple has a legacy of creating insanely great (sometimes just insane) machines and software.
So who would you rather be? Gates, with enough money to buy Bolivia? Or Jobs, who has less money (still more than you could ever use) and a legacy of cool innovation?
The type of education I would advocate would be practical stuff: technical courses that would teach people to use lathes and mills to manufacture equipment, for instance. A lathe would be a hell of a lot more useful than a computer. The level of technical know-how is so low in Madagascar, for instance, that the Malagasy can't even make wheels that are round. So people need to be taught how to make better wheels, hoes, machetes, that kind of thing. Then the guy selling it makes money and the guy using it is more efficient. Roads don't need to be high tech, most are currently dirt paths that turn into morasses when it rains. If 1000 guys were hired to quarry stone and lay it down on these roads, it would feed 1000 families and let other people transport goods between communities, and allow tourists in to the national parks in the rainy season, where they could stimulate the economy. And you don't need everyone to be full-fledged doctors, just people trained in enough medicine to set bones, sew up cuts, treat people with drugs, administer vaccinations and soforth.
The thing is that many of the places I saw were still in the Iron Age. Bringing them to the Digital Age strikes me as overly ambitious. It's great if it'll work, but it might be faster, cheaper, and more effective to focus on bringing things to the level of the Industrial Revolution. As for who does it, that's a difficult question to answer. On the one hand it sounds awfully condescending to go around saying that the Westerners should save the poor little Africans. On the other, the people I saw seemed far too focused on getting enough to get by, to really worry about their neighbors. Maybe caring about people you don't even know is something of a luxury good. One of the curious things in history is that many of the people who have advocated most strongly for the poor haven't been poor themselves. Che Guevera came from a well-to-do Argentine family, Fidel Castro was a landowner's son, Ghandi was the son of a minister. Bill Gates has set up the world's largest charitable organization, and besides being filthy rich himself, comes from well-to-do parents.
Sounds like the words of a sneaky, low-down al-Qaeda loving terrorist sympathizer to me. Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a terrorist organization?
-1% milk, half gallon
-soup base, one pkg.
-onions, 1 lb.
-potatoes, five lb. bag
-sausage, 1 lb.
-eggs, one dozen
-pure, unspeakable evil, 1 pkg.
Yeah, I love the part about how IKEA is the leading brand in the "Europe and Africa" region. I can just so picture a bunch of Sudanese refugees wandering through the various room setups and saying, "Wow, I love how everything is so stylish. And I could totally use one of those closet organizers. Assuming I had a closet. Or a house."
Hey brandchannel.com: I just conducted a poll of slashdot readers (sample size = me) and think you guys are a bunch of freakin' idiots.
Sounds about right. Speaking as someone who travelled through Madagascar for three months, all I can say is that you simply cannot understand it until you have been there and been there long enough to completely blow your prejudices, preconceptions and most of your hope out of the water.
Development needs to start with the basics. They don't need computers and they don't need college. They need roads, they need medical care, they need clean drinking water, they need immunizations, they need family planning, they need assistance with sustainable farming techniques and they need primary education. I'll concede that computers can be part of the overall strategy but they'd be pretty low on my list of priorities. And it's not going to be any use at all until you've got (a) power, (b) literacy, and (c) a phone line, and many places I saw lacked some or all of those things.
For some crazy reason, this works a lot better at getting people to think seriously about faith than "you don't believe the exact same thing I do, and I am right, so you're burning in Hell for all eternity". On the other hand, I suspect militant atheism just encourages the fundamentalist types, by giving them proof that agnostics and athiests really do hate Baby Jesus.
You big fat freakin' liar. Bat Boy is REAL!
It'd be interesting if these things could be tied to mass extinctions, but these occur much more rarely than every few thousand years. And unless these clouds can account for high levels of iridium, shocked quartz, melt glass, and a hundred-mile impact crater in Mexico, it's not terribly likely they account for the dinosaur extinction.
Speaching of which, would the anti-abortionists be pro or con for the termination of these chimeras after a few days in the petri dish?
If by "horrible", you mean "life threatening", then I don't know about that. But if by "horrible" you mean, "the utter agony upon removal of the suit when every single hair on your body is ripped out one by one", then yes, I agree completely.
Paranoia is my only friend: everyone else is out to get me.
The tin foil manufacturers are part of the conspiracy! They've been putting these tiny RFIDs inside every square foot of tin foil for, like years now man... you stand out like a neon signs on their scanners. That's why I make my OWN tin foil out of pop cans by melting down the cans and hammering it into thin sheets.
Like maybe a military campaign? I can almost picture Gates rubbing his hands together in Redmond and going, "Sure, I'll let you win this round, Europe" before launching his full-scale invasion of Europe.
Of course, the winter assault on Moscow will be his undoing.
I once heard a study which claimed that the people who had the most accurate self-perception were depressed people. So does having an accurate perception of oneself make one depressed or vice versa? It made a lot of sense, though. The world sucks a lot of the time, and maybe the only way you can deal with it is to go through life thinking things are better than they really are.
Fortunately, I don't have to worry about that, because I have excellent internet skills, I'm a great driver, and I'm irresistable to the chicks.
thank god for Prozac!
Is that a word?
Yeah! For example, Linux.
[ducks and runs for cover]
I tried Opera for all of about five minutes; I found the interface overwhelming, confusing and hideous so I figured, screw this. That might not win me points with geeks but I think that's something the techies often forget: the user just wants an efficient, useful, and reasonably pleasant experience using the product. I suspect that 5% of the features of a software product see 95% of the consumer's use. It's nice to have those other features available if you need them,but having to deal with them most of the time makes for a lousy user experience.
Whoa, shit- you worship a zombie god?