9/11 was the excuse to invade Iraq. I believe it was always Bush's intention to do so at some point. I think he felt the need to be a war-time president (since it's clear from all of his other agendas and flops that he has nothing else to offer).
But invading Iraq was sold 100% as part of the war on terror, when in reality it was a major distraction to the war on terror.
If you have 2 neighbors, Dan and Sam, and Sam's dog bites your daughter, do you go and kill Dan's dog, even though it's the one you dislike more and that howl's every night? No, the disconnect there is clear.
That is no different than Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda attacking on 9/11, and we all but ignore them and invade Iraq instead.
In all reality Iraq posed almost no threat when we invaded. They were so broken down by years of sanctions they couldn't have mounted an effective attack against Kuwait again if they wanted to, let alone the U.S.
Does that mean Sadaam didn't love what Al Qaeda did? No. But if the war in Iraq was really to stop those that were harboring and supporting terrorism, we would have invaded Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or any one of a dozen countries with far stronger and better documented ties to terrorism.
But Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror. Aside from the fact that it has created and inspired far, far more terrorists than it has killed or hampered.
I didn't say that Iran and North Korea ~should~ have nuclear weapons. I believe that they shouldn't (and neither should anyone else).
But the same rules that apply to them should apply to everyone.
It's not just nuclear weapons that are affected. We are telling them they can't have anything nuclear in any way, shape, or form.
Policies should be put in place that govern the safe use of nuclear technology in EVERY country. That way we can tell countries "Play by the rules or not at all" instead of "You can't play, period".
2 & 3. Whether the nukes were needed is a matter of opinion and speculation. Personally I think the evidence says they weren't needed, but that changes nothing and is still just an opionion. There is no reason to discuss these points further. My original statements are still exactly true.
4. The ONLY reason we don't have nuclear bunker busters being used in Iraq right now is because there is still enough collective brain power in congress to keep Bush and his chosen idiots in check. Period. So yes, the checks and balances worked. But that doesn't mean our wanna-be dictator is any less dangerous than Iran's dictator.
However, NONE of what you said explains why the same rules that apply to them shouldn't apply to us. Yes, Iran and North Korea are dangerous now and would be more so with nukes. We are clearly more dangerous with a nuclear aresenal as well.
The fact of that matter is, no country needs nuclear weapons, and almost every country need nuclear power.
It is ludicrous for the U.S. to play Nuclear Police and thumb its nose at the rest of the world when it serves no ones purpose but ours, and in the long run is bad for us, not good.
It would be far better, in every way, for there to be a governing body (yes, it would probably need to run by the U.N., as much as I dislike the U.N.) and for there to be a specific set of guidelines governing the development and use of nuclear energy, and the complete removal from the planet of nuclear weapons.
I think history clearly shows that 9/11 was directly brought about by Al Qaeda and that Iraq and Sadaam had exactly nothing to do with it. I think history also clearly shows Bush and his administration knew this before going to Iraq.
I'm not saying Sadaam didn't have to be removed from power. But saying that has anything to do with 9/11 or was high on the list in the war on terror is just wrong.
I agree with you completely on the point of hypocrasy.
Let's see how the U.S. stacks up to the rest of the world with regard to nukes:
1. The U.S. has more nukes than anyone else on the planet. Check.
2. The U.S. is the only country to ever use nuclear weapons. Check.
3. Not only that, we used them on an entirely civilian population. Check.
4. As recently at 2 years ago the U.S. was still trying to develop nuclear weapons (nuclear bunker busters). Check.
So, given those points, what gives the U.S. any right to tell the rest of the world what they can and can't do with nuclear weapons?
That's not to say that Iran et al should just have free reign to do whatever they want, but every country on the planet should play by the exact same rules when it comes to nuclear technology. Including the U.S.
The nuclear double standard is a breeding ground for hatred and animosity towards the U.S., and we don't need anymore of that these days...
A good indicator for me is that not a single, peer-reviewed and published scientist refutes global warming. About 800 - 900 scientists in the world fall into this category.
Granted not all of them support it (a majority do), but not a single one is putting his reputation on the line saying it's bunk, while many, many are putting their reputation on the line saying it's completely accurate and one of the biggest problems we face as a species.
Unfortunately, we Americans only listen to pundits, not scientists.
Yeah, email has lost much of it's value and almost all of it's reliability.
Using it in business there is no way you can have confidence in it, especially if one of your clients, etc is on AOL. There is nothing worse than emailing an invoice in PDF format and finding out 2 weeks later they never recieved it. Grrrrr.
I don't have the replacement for email, but I welcome it as long as it is an open standard.
I agree that GMail is very well positioned to have the near ideal anti-spam service, but they sure don't have it yet...
That's not to say it's bad, and I certainly haven't been consistent in training it. I'd love it if there was a plugin to Thunderbird allowing the training I do there to pass back the same info to GMail, because I keep it trained to perfection, but it's just too big a pain to log into GMail and mark that many messages as SPAM in that sort of interface.
When / if they add IMAP support that may be much easier, as marking something as spam in Thunderbird should then affect it in GMail.
They will come out with something great, I just don't like the wait.
I have 22,705 emails in my GMail inbox, and 9,925 in the spam box.
I'm not overly impressed with the spam filtering. I have MANY false negatives, and too many false positives.
I'd say I have 25 spams per day get through, about 100 that it filters correctly, and about 1 false positive per week.
But as you can see, I get a lot of email (webmaster for a large ecommerce site).
But, I still use it and like it. I ought to be better about training the spam, but marking the 25 emails as spam that get through is a chore. I use POP3 to read them in Thunderbird, and it catches most of them.
Yeah, except that my Dell laptop pulls 80 watts when idle, and over 110 when doing something like unzipping a file. I tested it with my Kill-A-Watt P3 just a few weeks ago.
$16 a month to run your laptop is pretty steep if you ask me. My next one will definitely be a Centrino or other low power chipset. (I had already decided that, for a variety of reasons).
I know that no one is getting charged 25 center per KW/H, yet, but those same numbers would make a 75 watt lightbulb that is always on cost $15 a month to run.
Time for the whole country to switch to flourescent whereever possible. I'm not just talking about compact flourescents either. I just added a full spectrum flourescent 4' dual bulb fixture to my storage room and love it. It uses less juice than a single 75 watt bulb, puts out way, way more light, and it's perfectly white and bright light. And the bulbs last for 9 years.
I'm not worried about it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I live in a small suburb of a small town. My opinion is that 90% of the deaths will be in big cities. Just my opinion. It's not that I don't feel for those that will be so affected, and I of course may be among them, but worrying won't change anything.
Worry and concern are different things.
What concerns me most is the economic affects, because that is the one aspect that I can prepare for and do something about. I can have a years supply of food, water, soap, medical supplies, etc on hand. I can work to get myself out of debt and to be self-reliant.
But energy spent on worrying about whether or not me or someone I know will die of the bird flu is pointless. Can I stockpile Tamiflu? Probably, but the odds are very, very slim that Tamiflu will effectively treat the strain that reaches the U.S.
I am concerned about the deaths caused by the bird flu, but I refuse to waste energy worrying about it. I'll use that energy to prepare instead.
You are right, it is not a matter of if, but when. And it doesn't have to be a global or even national disaster. I know many people in my church that have lost their jobs or faced a serious illness and couldn't work, and they had a years worth of food, soap, shampoo, etc. on hand.
In New Orleans the local church leaders met about 3 days after the levies broke, and out of the entire New Orleans area there were only 8 LDS families that needed assistance. The rest were able to provide for themselves because they had subscribed to the teachings of preparedness and self-reliance.
Unfortunately, the government teaches just the opposite, giving handounts and creating dependence. The old proverb is right, "Give a man to fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
Granted the strain in Canada was confirmed to be low risk, but the trend of migrating birds spreading the virus is still a serious matter, especially when each strain constantly mutates as it comes in contact with different species already infected with different viruses.
I'm not worried at all about getting the bird flu and dying, or losing a family member or friend to it.
What I am very worried about is the economic consequences to the worlds reaction to it.
The current Bush plan calls for the closing of all interstate and air travel, and the closing of all ports, the moment the bird flu is detected on U.S. soil in a human communicable form.
I don't know about you, but that would have serious consequences for me. No gas at the gas station. No food at the grocery store. You can't just order crap off the internet, because there will be no UPS or FedEx to deliver it.
This map shows how fast the 1918 flu epidemic (not a pandemic) spread. So it is very reasonable to try to stop it's spread, and no president, not even one as stupid as Bush, wants to be remembered as the one who killed off 1.9 million voters.
So, travel restrictions are necessary, but we shouldn't think there will be no consequences. A real outbreak of the bird flu in the U.S. will make Katrina look like a FEMA picnic.
Yes, and I need to look at it more. The documentation was sparse (at least when compared to Smarty, which I'm used to and has excellent documentation), so I wasn't able to rule Liquid out, or decide I liked it enough to install it and learn it.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around Ruby and Rails, and was investigating templating engines to try and decide whether it was worth the time to continue learning Ruby and Rails. I've been doing PHP and Smarty so long that I'm very used to them, so changing isn't trivial.
I've pretty well decided that RoR is worth pursuing, as is Liquid. But before diving in wanted to see if there were some templating systems I'd missed.
I'm interested to hear what the Slashdot community thinks is the best templating system for Ruby on Rails.
I'm a PHP / Smarty developer and have really liked it.
I know there are some great templating systems out there, like Canny (very closely based on Smarty but not made for Rails).
Ideally I'm looking for something that works seamlessly with Rails and is close to Smarty in concept and functionality. Canny for Rails would be perfect. (Or has someone found a way to use Canny with Rails?)
Well, that all depends on whether or not it will run linux...
Because if it does, then any application can be added. If they design it with hacking in mind, then there will be a myriad of uses for them, and economies of scale will drive the cost down, and the value up.
I like GAIM because it stores the history for all of the protocols, and has a built in search feature. I use it all the time.
I wish all the protocols supported offline messages, and more importantly reliable message confirmation, so that you get notified if a specific message didn't go through. I want to send off a message, have it be assigned a unique ID, then have the other client repsond back (in the background), "yep, I got message ###". If your client doesn't get back that message after so many seconds, it lets you know the message didn't go through.
I don't know if you've ever had a CF bulb die prematurely, but I've had plenty of the cheapies die very fast deaths (under 6 months). It should be noted that the area I live in has pretty unstable power, with lots of surges and brownouts. Most equipment is on battery backups, but bulbs of course are not.
In contrast, the nicer bulbs reliably last for years and years.
I don't know either if you've ever experienced the crappy yellow light of normal CF bulbs and the slow start and ramp up (I'm sure you have since you use them) in contrast to the noon-day sun white light of a qood quality full spectrum CF bulb.
The difference is amazing. It also helps if you have someone in your house affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder or depression.
When you factor in the longevity and the added quality of life (subjective, yes, but for me worth it), then the price difference doesn't matter as much to me. You can also save the better bulbs for particular parts of your house such as bedroom, livingroom, and office, but the difference may start to bother you enough that you put the good bulbs everywhere.
All of my cars could be cheap, used Saturns, but it's worth it to me to drive a nicer, more comfortable, safer car that costs 3 times as much. It's personal preference, and everything is relative.
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9/11 was the excuse to invade Iraq. I believe it was always Bush's intention to do so at some point. I think he felt the need to be a war-time president (since it's clear from all of his other agendas and flops that he has nothing else to offer).
But invading Iraq was sold 100% as part of the war on terror, when in reality it was a major distraction to the war on terror.
If you have 2 neighbors, Dan and Sam, and Sam's dog bites your daughter, do you go and kill Dan's dog, even though it's the one you dislike more and that howl's every night? No, the disconnect there is clear.
That is no different than Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda attacking on 9/11, and we all but ignore them and invade Iraq instead.
In all reality Iraq posed almost no threat when we invaded. They were so broken down by years of sanctions they couldn't have mounted an effective attack against Kuwait again if they wanted to, let alone the U.S.
Does that mean Sadaam didn't love what Al Qaeda did? No. But if the war in Iraq was really to stop those that were harboring and supporting terrorism, we would have invaded Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or any one of a dozen countries with far stronger and better documented ties to terrorism.
But Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror. Aside from the fact that it has created and inspired far, far more terrorists than it has killed or hampered.
I didn't say that Iran and North Korea ~should~ have nuclear weapons. I believe that they shouldn't (and neither should anyone else).
But the same rules that apply to them should apply to everyone.
It's not just nuclear weapons that are affected. We are telling them they can't have anything nuclear in any way, shape, or form.
Policies should be put in place that govern the safe use of nuclear technology in EVERY country. That way we can tell countries "Play by the rules or not at all" instead of "You can't play, period".
1. So my initial statement was exactly true.
2 & 3. Whether the nukes were needed is a matter of opinion and speculation. Personally I think the evidence says they weren't needed, but that changes nothing and is still just an opionion. There is no reason to discuss these points further. My original statements are still exactly true.
4. The ONLY reason we don't have nuclear bunker busters being used in Iraq right now is because there is still enough collective brain power in congress to keep Bush and his chosen idiots in check. Period. So yes, the checks and balances worked. But that doesn't mean our wanna-be dictator is any less dangerous than Iran's dictator.
However, NONE of what you said explains why the same rules that apply to them shouldn't apply to us. Yes, Iran and North Korea are dangerous now and would be more so with nukes. We are clearly more dangerous with a nuclear aresenal as well.
The fact of that matter is, no country needs nuclear weapons, and almost every country need nuclear power.
It is ludicrous for the U.S. to play Nuclear Police and thumb its nose at the rest of the world when it serves no ones purpose but ours, and in the long run is bad for us, not good.
It would be far better, in every way, for there to be a governing body (yes, it would probably need to run by the U.N., as much as I dislike the U.N.) and for there to be a specific set of guidelines governing the development and use of nuclear energy, and the complete removal from the planet of nuclear weapons.
Again with the source.
I think history clearly shows that 9/11 was directly brought about by Al Qaeda and that Iraq and Sadaam had exactly nothing to do with it. I think history also clearly shows Bush and his administration knew this before going to Iraq.
I'm not saying Sadaam didn't have to be removed from power. But saying that has anything to do with 9/11 or was high on the list in the war on terror is just wrong.
*cough* 2002 *cough*
That's the problem, check your source... at least according to the US government.
I agree with you completely on the point of hypocrasy.
Let's see how the U.S. stacks up to the rest of the world with regard to nukes:
1. The U.S. has more nukes than anyone else on the planet. Check.
2. The U.S. is the only country to ever use nuclear weapons. Check.
3. Not only that, we used them on an entirely civilian population. Check.
4. As recently at 2 years ago the U.S. was still trying to develop nuclear weapons (nuclear bunker busters). Check.
So, given those points, what gives the U.S. any right to tell the rest of the world what they can and can't do with nuclear weapons?
That's not to say that Iran et al should just have free reign to do whatever they want, but every country on the planet should play by the exact same rules when it comes to nuclear technology. Including the U.S.
The nuclear double standard is a breeding ground for hatred and animosity towards the U.S., and we don't need anymore of that these days...
A good indicator for me is that not a single, peer-reviewed and published scientist refutes global warming. About 800 - 900 scientists in the world fall into this category.
Granted not all of them support it (a majority do), but not a single one is putting his reputation on the line saying it's bunk, while many, many are putting their reputation on the line saying it's completely accurate and one of the biggest problems we face as a species.
Unfortunately, we Americans only listen to pundits, not scientists.
Yeah, email has lost much of it's value and almost all of it's reliability.
Using it in business there is no way you can have confidence in it, especially if one of your clients, etc is on AOL. There is nothing worse than emailing an invoice in PDF format and finding out 2 weeks later they never recieved it. Grrrrr.
I don't have the replacement for email, but I welcome it as long as it is an open standard.
I agree that GMail is very well positioned to have the near ideal anti-spam service, but they sure don't have it yet...
That's not to say it's bad, and I certainly haven't been consistent in training it. I'd love it if there was a plugin to Thunderbird allowing the training I do there to pass back the same info to GMail, because I keep it trained to perfection, but it's just too big a pain to log into GMail and mark that many messages as SPAM in that sort of interface.
When / if they add IMAP support that may be much easier, as marking something as spam in Thunderbird should then affect it in GMail.
They will come out with something great, I just don't like the wait.
I have 22,705 emails in my GMail inbox, and 9,925 in the spam box.
I'm not overly impressed with the spam filtering. I have MANY false negatives, and too many false positives.
I'd say I have 25 spams per day get through, about 100 that it filters correctly, and about 1 false positive per week.
But as you can see, I get a lot of email (webmaster for a large ecommerce site).
But, I still use it and like it. I ought to be better about training the spam, but marking the 25 emails as spam that get through is a chore. I use POP3 to read them in Thunderbird, and it catches most of them.
Yeah, except that my Dell laptop pulls 80 watts when idle, and over 110 when doing something like unzipping a file. I tested it with my Kill-A-Watt P3 just a few weeks ago.
$16 a month to run your laptop is pretty steep if you ask me. My next one will definitely be a Centrino or other low power chipset. (I had already decided that, for a variety of reasons).
I know that no one is getting charged 25 center per KW/H, yet, but those same numbers would make a 75 watt lightbulb that is always on cost $15 a month to run.
Time for the whole country to switch to flourescent whereever possible. I'm not just talking about compact flourescents either. I just added a full spectrum flourescent 4' dual bulb fixture to my storage room and love it. It uses less juice than a single 75 watt bulb, puts out way, way more light, and it's perfectly white and bright light. And the bulbs last for 9 years.
I'm a convert...
Are you referring to Queen Monotone?
I'm not worried about it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I live in a small suburb of a small town. My opinion is that 90% of the deaths will be in big cities. Just my opinion. It's not that I don't feel for those that will be so affected, and I of course may be among them, but worrying won't change anything.
Worry and concern are different things.
What concerns me most is the economic affects, because that is the one aspect that I can prepare for and do something about. I can have a years supply of food, water, soap, medical supplies, etc on hand. I can work to get myself out of debt and to be self-reliant.
But energy spent on worrying about whether or not me or someone I know will die of the bird flu is pointless. Can I stockpile Tamiflu? Probably, but the odds are very, very slim that Tamiflu will effectively treat the strain that reaches the U.S.
I am concerned about the deaths caused by the bird flu, but I refuse to waste energy worrying about it. I'll use that energy to prepare instead.
Having a years supply of food is good counsel, my church has been teaching it since 1936.
You are right, it is not a matter of if, but when. And it doesn't have to be a global or even national disaster. I know many people in my church that have lost their jobs or faced a serious illness and couldn't work, and they had a years worth of food, soap, shampoo, etc. on hand.
In New Orleans the local church leaders met about 3 days after the levies broke, and out of the entire New Orleans area there were only 8 LDS families that needed assistance. The rest were able to provide for themselves because they had subscribed to the teachings of preparedness and self-reliance.
Unfortunately, the government teaches just the opposite, giving handounts and creating dependence. The old proverb is right, "Give a man to fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
You mean like when it arrives in Siberia, where birds migrate to Canada, and then to the U.S.?
Granted the strain in Canada was confirmed to be low risk, but the trend of migrating birds spreading the virus is still a serious matter, especially when each strain constantly mutates as it comes in contact with different species already infected with different viruses.
I'm not worried at all about getting the bird flu and dying, or losing a family member or friend to it.
What I am very worried about is the economic consequences to the worlds reaction to it.
The current Bush plan calls for the closing of all interstate and air travel, and the closing of all ports, the moment the bird flu is detected on U.S. soil in a human communicable form.
I don't know about you, but that would have serious consequences for me. No gas at the gas station. No food at the grocery store. You can't just order crap off the internet, because there will be no UPS or FedEx to deliver it.
This map shows how fast the 1918 flu epidemic (not a pandemic) spread. So it is very reasonable to try to stop it's spread, and no president, not even one as stupid as Bush, wants to be remembered as the one who killed off 1.9 million voters.
So, travel restrictions are necessary, but we shouldn't think there will be no consequences. A real outbreak of the bird flu in the U.S. will make Katrina look like a FEMA picnic.
There is no doubt that Tamiflu is preferred for politcal reasons.
The ONLY way that Tamiflu will lose the government contracts is if Haliburton comes out with a vaccine of their own.
That would be PCIe, ie. PCI Express.
:}
Been away a while?
Yes, and I need to look at it more. The documentation was sparse (at least when compared to Smarty, which I'm used to and has excellent documentation), so I wasn't able to rule Liquid out, or decide I liked it enough to install it and learn it.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around Ruby and Rails, and was investigating templating engines to try and decide whether it was worth the time to continue learning Ruby and Rails. I've been doing PHP and Smarty so long that I'm very used to them, so changing isn't trivial.
I've pretty well decided that RoR is worth pursuing, as is Liquid. But before diving in wanted to see if there were some templating systems I'd missed.
I'm interested to hear what the Slashdot community thinks is the best templating system for Ruby on Rails.
I'm a PHP / Smarty developer and have really liked it.
I know there are some great templating systems out there, like Canny (very closely based on Smarty but not made for Rails).
Ideally I'm looking for something that works seamlessly with Rails and is close to Smarty in concept and functionality. Canny for Rails would be perfect. (Or has someone found a way to use Canny with Rails?)
Well, that all depends on whether or not it will run linux...
Because if it does, then any application can be added. If they design it with hacking in mind, then there will be a myriad of uses for them, and economies of scale will drive the cost down, and the value up.
I like GAIM because it stores the history for all of the protocols, and has a built in search feature. I use it all the time.
I wish all the protocols supported offline messages, and more importantly reliable message confirmation, so that you get notified if a specific message didn't go through. I want to send off a message, have it be assigned a unique ID, then have the other client repsond back (in the background), "yep, I got message ###". If your client doesn't get back that message after so many seconds, it lets you know the message didn't go through.
The newer versions of GAIM have become much more capable and stable.
I almost switched back to Trillian at one point, but now I'm glad I stuck with GAIM.
I don't know if you've ever had a CF bulb die prematurely, but I've had plenty of the cheapies die very fast deaths (under 6 months). It should be noted that the area I live in has pretty unstable power, with lots of surges and brownouts. Most equipment is on battery backups, but bulbs of course are not.
In contrast, the nicer bulbs reliably last for years and years.
I don't know either if you've ever experienced the crappy yellow light of normal CF bulbs and the slow start and ramp up (I'm sure you have since you use them) in contrast to the noon-day sun white light of a qood quality full spectrum CF bulb.
The difference is amazing. It also helps if you have someone in your house affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder or depression.
When you factor in the longevity and the added quality of life (subjective, yes, but for me worth it), then the price difference doesn't matter as much to me. You can also save the better bulbs for particular parts of your house such as bedroom, livingroom, and office, but the difference may start to bother you enough that you put the good bulbs everywhere.
All of my cars could be cheap, used Saturns, but it's worth it to me to drive a nicer, more comfortable, safer car that costs 3 times as much. It's personal preference, and everything is relative.
No one said anything about insisting any products be replaced.
The entire article and discussion is about standards to help future products avoid this problem.