1. "Retaining the right" is an ambiguous position - it implies a threat, without making it. This is making a threat.
2. Exactly. Because we all trust Bush, don't we? Especially those of us from other countries, not brainwashed by the execrable US media.
3. When the world trusts and respects (note: != likes) your leader, that's fine. We'll take the odd warning from someone we believe to be essentially sane and reasonable. When your leader appears to be a spoiled, irresponsible, violent, aggressive paranoid fuckwit with invasive policies and delusions of empire, we're less likely to shrug it off and trust everything will be well.
Are you seriously tell me that strengthening a threat to use nuclear weapons at a time of international instability is a clever thing to do? Every time the Bush administration makes a violent or threatening move, the situation worsens. How much worse does it have to get before they realise this simple fact?
Your ex-marine neighbour has the ability to invade your home, beat you to a pulp and snap your neck like a dry twig, but you don't go out and start stocking up on home defence gear and firearms until the note comes through your door telling you if you so much as look at him funny he'll do it at the first opportunity.
This is completely fucking disingenuous, and you know it.
Sure the GPP was a bit over the top, but by seriously suggesting you don't understand where they're coming from you're more stupid than you appear. Sure, the liberals hate Bush and the religious right, but they also hate the terrorists. It's Republicans vs. The Terrorists, and the Democrats are merely stuck in the middle (all too often huddling on the ground in a puddle of urine with their hands over their ears).
The "liberals" think the right are similar to "the terrorists" because they have the same level of vitriol, prefer the same strategy (violence[1]), are motivated by paranoia or religious extremism, happily and easily reject facts (and greater reality) whenever convenient, and are completely incapable of rational, detatched self-analysis or self-questioning.
The right think "the liberals" are similar to "the terrorists" because they see the world in black and white - they literally believe "if you're not with us, you're against us". This is so fucking simple a child can understand it - it's the concept of "compromise" or taking the middle road. It is, however, useful to pretend they don't so they can accuse anyone faintly less extremist than them of being a traitor.
Nevertheless, you can't deny that it's extremely hypocritical to loudly condemn one type of religious fundamentalism (Muslim) for:
Unnecessary violence and invasive aggression Repression of civil liberties Causing civilian deaths Repression of women Possibly researching nuclear weapons
while your own fundamentalist-lead (Christian) leadership and population promotes:
Invasive foreign policies that risk turning the world against you Police-state interior policies (PATRIOT act, etc) Anti-abortion legislation And actively threatening to nuke countries
Even reducing it to your stereotypes:
Any denomination of religious nutter with a nuclear fucking weapon is far more dangerous than any number of "terrorst sympathisers".
Footnotes:
[1] Although not the same tactics, due at least in part to the massive disparity in their material resources.[2]
[2] Reading it back, this sounds like I'm implying that the American Right might use terrorism tactics if it wasn't the overwhelmingly dominant party in the conflict. We can actually empirically test this - when the economy starts slipping, natural disasters deplete their resources, they can't afford (or recruit) a large enough army to continue the conflict and they generally perceive a slipping of their power, what do they do? Start waving the "fuck with us and we'll nuke you" card.
Setting off a nuclear weapon, killing the opposition but also killing hundreds of thousands of civilians... Exactly how is this different from (say) terrorists nuking the Whitehouse? They take out the people they hate, plus hundreds of thousands of civilians. Seriously - what's the difference?
And no, I don't buy into that whole "it's the government, so it's alright". The Taliban were a government, and they weren't "alright". This argument simply devolves into "it's us, so it's alright", and the same argument is used by fanatics, liars and psychopaths the world over.
And don't forget to wait a few years and nuke the cities that will then fill up with evil men who irrationally hate the USA for killing their wives, sons, daughters, parents and housepets!
Seriously, now - cynically using 9/11 for political gain... Iraq... Bleeding the army dry... Fucking the economy... New Orleans... Now seriously trying to restart the world-wide nuclear standoff for the sake of a bit of cock-waving.
Just what does Bush actually have to do before you Americans fucking get rid of him for being an incompetent criminal madman? Inadvertantly show his nipple during the superbowl? Say "shit" in front of a small child?
"the place the fairy tale falls apart is them having the real means to do so, which is generally a prerequisite for the whole 'preemptive' thing."
Mmmmm... just like clear and present danger of WMDs was be required to go into Iraq, right?
I can't believe anyone still falls for bullshit like this.
Not content with invading countries in defiance of international opinion and signally failing to produce one scrap of justification, not content with failing miserably to install a democratic government and leaving some Iraqi citizens actually regretting the USA's involvement, now Bush is itching to re-start the cold war and MAD by posturing and waving his cock-compensating "nukerler" weapons at anyone who might have WMDs? And who decides who has them? Oh yeah, the same fuckwits who hallucinated the WMDs in Iraq.
Unfair? That's how the rest of the world sees Bush and the USA at the moment.
My only question is this: Is Bush actually fucking insane? We've only just finished the public nuclear standoff and MAD bullshit that occupied us for most of the 80s and half the 90s, and now he wants to start it again?
I hate to flame, but just what the fuck is wrong with him?
Well, more that because we take shit apart to find out how it works, we can then put it back together to make better shit. Or at least make more advanced shit without making the same mistakes as the previous generation of shit.
"Give somehting new and unknown to a bunch of apes and the first thing they do is smash it or rip it apart inquisitively."
Yeah, and that's why we're sitting in our ergonomic leather-padded swivel chairs, taking apart complex consumer electronics with cheap mass-produced durable metal alloy tools, in our centrally-heated/air-conditioned house, writing up the experience on our cheap yet powerful computing devices and posting the results half-way around the world (at light-speed, or thereabouts) to be hosted by other computers in a completely different country.
And why other mammals are being hunted for food, or lounging around in a tank at seaworld squeaking stupidly and begging us for fish....
"How about, why can't my *fourteen* year old drive himself to school?"
If you need an explanation for this, you're either trolling, making a joke or need to get your head examined.
We have enough problems on the roads currently with supposedly mature, otherwise-sensible grown adults who drive stupidly, drive drunk, drive without insurance or in unfit vehicles, and your solution is what, to open up driving to people even less mature and sensible?
And that's leaving aside the implications of putting half a ton of speeding metal in the hands of young adolescents, who clinical studies have shown routinely suffer from a measurable loss of co-ordination and judgement during puberty.
I agree that treating someone who's 17 and 11 months the same as someone who's 2 1/2 is stupid, but we don't. Instead (eg, with film certifications) we carefully degrade rights as the age gets younger, to allow for the progressive drop in maturity, experience and responsibility.
Everyone knows a wise-beyond-his-years 17 year-old, and everyone knows a pathetically immature 40 year-old. However, two extreme and discrete data points doesn't constitute a valid basis for a rule which applies to everyone.
We can either lump people into rough groups based on age, and set rules which are fair for the majority of that group, or we can institute a draconian "citizenship examinations" scheme, where everyone has to pass additional specific "maturity" tests to gain rights like freedom of speech and association, voting, licence to drive a vehicle or own a handgun, licence to drink, etc, etc, etc.
Legally, politically, culturally, ethically (who sets the rules? Who defines "maturity"?) and bureaucratically this is clearly a non-starter, so what's your alternative?
It should also be noted that I'm not unsympathetic to your point - I'm only 25, and remember what it was like to be (apparently an unusually mature) 18 quite clearly. I'm also fully aware of how much further I've matured even since then, and the thought of the average 14 year-old I know pissed-up, with a gun, behind the wheel of a car is terrifying.
"Towards that end, we look at how often certain pages get hit (such as help pages, search pages, site maps, the back button, hierarchial links etc) as well as surveys." (My emphasis)
Although the numbers differ (eg, between the two articles), both agree that up to 80% of users use either search primarily or search and navigation links when navigating a web site.
Either way, hits on search pages don't offer a reliable indication of a problem with navigation.
Secondly, user-surveys are actually one of the worst ways to gather information about the site. It's well known in HCI circles that you simply can't trust user-surveys - users are very good at telling you what they think they did (or would do), but extremely poor at reporting what they actually did.
I think this is often because the overwhelming majority of navigation decisions users take are completely subconscious - they themselves aren't aware of why certain links look good, or why they ignore certain sections of the page (eg, because they subconsciously identify them as looking like adverts).
[1] Although hthis second article attempts to verify Jakob Nielson's figures, it appears to have its own problems - namely, confusing "search-dominant users" (who quickly default to searching) with "users who only ever use search functionality". Clearly users will have to click on a few links, merely to get onto and off of the search page(s).
Despite this, all figures I've seen (as well as my own reasearch) indicates that a mixed-search-and-navigation-links strategy is used by around 80% of users.
Firstly, I think you misunderstood - I'm not from the US, and neither do I live there. Referring to Bush as "your (their) leader" was supposed to be a hint.;-)
Secondly, I dont't intend to suggest for a minute that the Founding Fathers were solely reponsible for the present (recent-past?) enviable position of the USA - they merely set up a culture and it's developed since then.
However, I think it's fair to say that if they'd set up a culture that from the word go was as overtly religious fundamentalist, anti-intellectual or corrupted by business interests as the current administration, the USA would never in a million years be anything like as respected or envied as it was.
I'd also question your assertion that it's (even now) primarily a British culture. The Pilgrim Fathers were a very, very tiny minority, with their own religion and political differences. True, the US is technically an offshoot of Britain, but that's very different to "still being just like us";-)
Either way, to bring this back to the context of the original discussion, whether the Founding Fathers merely set up a successful culture that was then wildly lucky, or whether the USA (again, until recently) panned out exactly as the envisioned it, I'll still take their political advice over that of the administration that's managed in less than a decade to undo almost every advantage the USA secured over their 200-year histors[1].
[1] Natural resources? Bush seems intent on making the US more deependant on foreign oil.
Freedom of expression? Of course, but only while clamping down on civil liberties and freedom of speech.
Religious freedom/separation of church and state? Not with the many current fundamentalist christian-influenced initiatives the Republicans keep pushing for.
Dedication to science and rationality over superstition and religion? Creationism/ID - don't even get me started.
Military might? The US army is so poor they can't afford to provide body-armour for many of their troops in Iraq, and they've had to ship many National Guard units over there to shore up the war effort because the popularity of the army (and hence, recruitment rates) have dropped through the floor.
Strong economy? Not with China waiting in the wings, after Bush has finished driving the US economy it into the floor.
Manufacturing base? The majority of US manufacturing is now done overseas, and the US is increasingly sliding into an (inherently fragile) service economy.
Maybe it's because they set up a society and culture which has (sorry, had) become the envy of the world. Importantly, the Founding Fathers' legacy has already endured wars, cultural upheaval and technological innovation the like of which they could never have even dreamed of.
And the current leadership has in less than eight years abused their legacy to the point surveys have shown that your leader is often considered a greater threat to world peace than Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussain?
In any contest between "the Founding Fathers" and "the current administration" you'd have to be a fucking idiot (or unconscionable Pollyanna) to choose the current administration.
Haaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha schools hahahahahahahaha roads hahahahahahahahaha police protection from violent criminals hahahahahahahahaha sewerage disposal hahahahahahahahahahahaha hospitals hahahahahahahahaha need I go on hahahahahaha.....
But seriously, thanks - that was one of the funniest posts in this whole thread.
Tell you what, if you'd rather live without any government intrusion, leave the US. As other posters have noted, there are plenty of anarchist hotspots in the world right now - somalia, regions of iraq, regions of afghanistan, you name it.
Against this smorgasbord of choice, no true anarchist would still be here.
Unless, of course, it's all just a big, trendy, ill-thought-out pose.
Are you posting on a sat-phone from a hand-built fortified bunker high in the Afghan mountains?
Sorry bud, but that's typical thoughtless anarchist bullshit.
"You vote, you accept. Stop voting."
You stop voting, your voice is never heard. The government assumes you don't give a shit, and carries on with whatever it was doing before, or gets even worse.
Vote for someone else, like the opposition leader, or a third-party candidate. Politicians will cheerfully ignore voter apathy (in fact the more corrupt ones bank on it), but the second votes start going to someone else, they have to take notice.
Fuck it, if you can't find anyone else you approve of, run yourself. Or spoil your ballot paper (leaving your name visible) - statistics on spoiled ballots are recorded (certainly here in the UK), and that still gives the administration a kick up the arse, even if not as hard as voting for someone else does.
Whatever you believe, claiming you'll change anything by sitting down and shutting up is Just Fucking Retarded.
I won't disagree that government protection for (for exmaple) companies and corporations is fucking stupid (doesn't it run counter to the whole idea of the free market?). However, you seem to be equating the rise of the welfare state with the erosion of personal responsibility.
While I agree that we need a lot more personal responsibility in the US (and, increasingly, the UK), I think there's a fertile middle ground between bailing out private airlines because they're too fucking incompetent to manage their finances properly and allowing people to die in the streets from starvation.
"That kind of situation breeds personal responsibility, because you know that there is no government-sponsored safety net. Did people die in the streets of hunger? A few, I'm sure. But by trying to do something about those few we have created entire generations that couldn't feed themselves if their lives depended on it."
I call BS here. As a percentage of the population, do you really think less people died of malnutrition- or starvation-related diseases then than are on welfare now?
Given families would routinesly have more kids than they could easily support, simply because so many would die before reaching even adolescence I'd be very, very surprised if you were right.
I mean, if you're right why stop there? Why not abolish all government and live in total anarchy? Sure plenty of people would be killed or maimed in fights to secure access to resources or currency, but the ones that survived would really, really take responsibility for themselves, right?
At some point we have to strike a balance between the childish "I deserve everything I've ever wanted, without any effort" and the downright barbarian "I take what I want and fuck anyone weaker".
Extremes are just that - extreme. There's no point in arguing for one method over another - we should agree on a result we want, and then choose a method to get us there.
I'd submit the ideal result would be "A population who take personal responsibility for themselves, but who aren't in danger of dying if they can't or won't".
Frankly, it ain't easy living on welfare (I've lived on the UK dole before, so I can testify to this first-hand). Living on the microscopic amount you get on the dole is quite enough punishment for the lazy or irresponsible. They don't need to starve in the gutter to make the point.
This is obvious, and well-understood by most intelligent people.
However, deaths due to terrorism (even now) are such a microscopically small percentage of the total that it's either a weak excuse or shortsighted to the point of blindness to restrict the rights of the entire population to counter it.
For example, I did a little research a while back, and did you know that in the UK you're more likely to be hit by lightning than die as a result of terrorism this year? Even after the recent two rounds of tube/bus bombings?
Where are the laws mandating we all wear grounded tinfoil helmets or thick rubber soles on our shoes?
If we aren't prepared to accept controls on car usage, gun ownership (in the US) or something as solveable as modest tax increases to fight poverty, why the hell should we accept controls on something which is (obsessive media fixation aside) pathetically less likely to hurt or kill us?
The only reason is people making a knee-jerk reaction like your own, based solely on the perception of danger, not on the actual danger itself.
Responsible government should take the long view, and attempt to educate the population out of any shortsighted and nanny-state demands they make.
Instead, your current administration (and now, apparently, ours) has merely frightened people even more, and used the situation to push through the whole boatload of privacy- and liberty-infringing laws and regulations they've been collectively wetting themselves over since they first got into power.
Terrorist actions cause deaths that happen in clumps, and this is what makes them scary. If all the car- or gun-related deaths per year happened on the same day, cars and guns would be banned the day after.
Basically, get a fucking grip, and make informed decisions to protect your country's future. Don't make knee-jerk demands and rationalise them into sounding sensible later.
(And apologies - this last bit isn't aimed at you personally, but at everyone who would trade "a little essential liberty for temporary safety". I think we all know what FDR had to say about them...)
Nothing, apart from the next version of IE will default to MSN Search. As will the next version of Windows. And Office, and every other program MS produces where it's remotely applicable.
And 90% of Microsoft users won't/don't know how to/won't be able to change it.
Microsoft's desktop monopoly means they don't have to be the best - they only have to be just barely good enough, and they win the war with the next round of upgrades to their existing products.
"M$ MUST make sure that the services Google and Yahoo provide at present do not work very well with IE. So in this situation if one wants to use Google's virtual Earth, it becomes impossible making this individual resort to Microsoft's offerings."
Virtual Earth is owned by Microsoft. You mean "Google Earth". And Google Earth is a separate application, so it has nothing to do with IE or Firefox. Did you mean Google Maps?
Even then, Google just releases a new version of Google maps that sniffs the new version of IE and offers one which works with it. Google Maps is a web-application, IE is a client-side app. Google can upgrade their end instantly, and all users are upgraded. Microsoft has to produce the "upgrade" for IE, then wait for (or convince) their users to install it - a much slower process.
Basically, you'll never reliably break a web app by changing the browser, since changing the web-app is faster, cheaper and instantly upgrades all users.
"On the other hand, Google could fight back this way: It could create a utility that makes the dependence on IE for most of Microsoft's services irrelevant. I am still looking for a way to remove IE from my Windows box in a sane and neat way."
Not this is an interesting idea. However, it's such a blatantly anti-Microsoft move (with no clear benefit Google could publically admit to) that I don't think Google would get away with releasing it any time in the near future - certainly not until they're convinced they'd win in a gloves-off, no-holds-barred fight with MS.
There are also formidable technical problems to overcome - you're talking about replacing one or more low-level Windows DLLs with some sort of wrapper around Gecko. And *then* rewriting Gecko to support the additional functionality (like ActiveX) which they've often chosen not to support for very good reasons (like the fact that it's insecure or poorly-designed). Not only that, but you'll have to contend with unpublished quirks of the MS code (and we all know what bastards they are for unpublished API calls), and finally reproducing all the bugs in the DLL code, just in case any of the third-party developers have code which relies on the (incorrect) behaviour.
"If Google can create such a utility, I can see most users removing IE. The trouble at present is even after making Firefox the default browser for example, looking at some link in some applications would still "call" IE. I guess this young man called "DVD Jon" can help here."
TBH, this would probably be the easiest part. You'd likely have ot produce a distinct patch for each version of each application (and there are likely many, but patching a few apps to run one browser instead of another is child's play compared to emulating the other browser with 100% accuracy. It's a lot of work, but technically far less demanding.
Congratulations - you've made the very basic error that was specifically indicated in the summary.
Open source (or content) != open protocols.
If they were saying "all software should cost $0.00" you'd have a point. However, they're saying all software (/content) should be accessible using open standards. And, pursuant to that, they're making their pages available using TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML and CSS.
"The key to competing successfully in business is to offer a better value to the customer than they can get somewhere else."
I'd disagree - that may be the key to doing business ethically, or nicely, but as other posters have noted, companies aren't "nice".
For all too many companies these days the key is getting wide adoption using a proprietary standard - that way you don't have to spend time or money producing versions "to do everything the user wants", since they can't go anywhere else - you've got them over a barrel.
In this position it's far easier to plod along at your own pace, insulated from any form of competiton by your designed-in incompatibility an/or ill-thought-out DMCA-style legislation.
Unfortunately, this retards the pace of improvement of the product (all products in the category?), and shits on the customer. Proprietary protocols don't improve the product or the process at all, they just eliminate the user's ability to drive product development, and ensure a nice, safe cash-cow for the owning company.
"If everyone implements open standards, it limits the implementation to the limits of the standard."
Only if done badly. Granted, "new features" may well break "interoperability". However, I think it's good that companies are being encouraged to use open standards, since it's good for interoperability, and so the entire industry.
Legally mandating everyone had to use open standards and nothing but would be the quickest way of killing technological advance dead, or at least slowing it to a crawl. However, I think proprietary standards should be generally viewed as a big black mark against a product - not always necessarily a deal-breaker, but a serious drawback. Nobody would buy a Ford car that was restricted so it could only run on Ford-branded petrol, so why do we tolerate it in the IT industry?
I also think developers should possibly be forced to make the details of proprietary protocols public - that way they're competing on "actual value of their implementation to the consumer", not on gaming the market to achieve vendor lock-in.
"But for a company that leads the field by a large margin, it doesn't make sense to open up to standards and thus open the doors for your customers to leave the barn."
Exactly, which is why it's so important that there's a counter-force to preserve any semblance of customer choice. Choice is good, and competition leads to better products. Vendor lock-in removes most of the motivation to improve the product, which hurts the consumer. The only defence consumers have is to demand interoperability, so they're forced to stop cheating their users and compete fairly.
"Keep them locked in, and keep providing them with superior product."
I'm sorry, but this is a complete non-sequiteur. Vendor lock-in directly leads to worse products - just look at IE[1]. If you have superior products to your competitors there's no need to lock your customers in.
"They will never have the need to switch to another product so long as their needs are met, and they would have a tough time switching anyway as their current data isn't easily transferrable to a new system, no matter how open that new system may be."
Exactly, but people are lazy, and so are companies. Why bother going to the expense of producing a new, better, timely product if all your users are stuck with whatever you deign to give them, whenever you condescend to give it to them? This has been empirically proven so many times it's not even an argument any more.
"I'm of the opinion that companies ought to do what they want with regards to standards. It doesn't matter what package you are using, if the one you are using satisfies your needs. Open standards hardly ever make or break a deal."
I honestly don't know how you arrive at this conclusion, but (and maybe I'm missing something here) your whole argument seems pretty r
Heh, fair play. I should have specified a well-supported and already popular open standard;-)
Obviously technology changes, and some developments take off while others die a lonely death. However, I'd submit that any proprietary standard is tied to the fortunes (and whims) of one company, instead of the marketplace as a whole - this means that if that company dies (or unilaterally decides to deprecate the system (Win98), or makes bad decisions on the technology (ActiveX)) you're screwed.
Personally, I'd always rather trust on something that's sure to be slow and steady to evolve (since everyone has to agree on changes), is generally the best solution (since people adopt it solely on its merits, rather than because the owners spend milions on advertising it), and doesn't unnecessarily yoke my company's fortunes to one single other company.
The way I see it, (unnecessarily) using proprietary protocols gives you all the liability of the owning company, without any tangible benefits.
Indeed. However, the rulers of third-world countries tend to be extremely rich, corrupt, and can often do pretty much whatever they like without worrying about popular opinion or legality.
So, third-world results only matter if you care about the "little people", or have a strong belief in civil liberties or freedom. Rulers of third-world dictatorships have a much easier time of ruling, and likely have a lot more fun, too.
Despite mouthing platitudes to "freedom" (while clamping down on civil liberties and increasing surveillance of the country's own citizens) and "democracy" (while running democratically dubious elections and unfairly disenfranchising large sections of your opponent's voting bloc), I often get the impression Bush would rather be running a third-world dictatorship, albeit as powerful and feared a one as the US is presently.
He's certainly shown himself to be intolerant of questioning or criticism, unconcerned by civil liberties and unusually corrupt, and he's frankly doing a great job of starting to turn the US into a third-world nation - election procedures that started "the United States Banana Republic of America" jokes, serious problems looming for the economy, cronyism and kickbacks everywhere you look...
" From http://homelandresponse.org/full_story.php?WID=139 77 : "Gov. Blanco has complained repeatedly and bitterly behind the scenes that the federal government did not act quickly enough. According to a White House spokesman, she was asked by President George Bush to order the evacuation of New Orleans on Aug. 27, 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina struck. Blanco, for reasons unknown, waited until Aug. 28. After the levees broke and the city began to flood, the White House spokesman says the president asked if she wanted the federal government to take control of the evacuation of New Orleans. Gov. Blanco asked for 24 hours to think about it.""
That's very interesting, and does modify my opinion somewhat. However, the very article you link to also lays some of the blame squarely at Bush's door, going so far as to brand him a "weak leader", and criticises his actions (including appointing an unqualified political appointee to the head of such a vitally important agency).
You're right, and the govenor of NO also clearly deserves to be castigated for her atrocious handling of the situation. However, to be fair, Bush still clearly isn't blameless either.
If your second point is true, it's certainly eye-opening, and forces a drastic re-evaluation of the situation. That said, the mayor of NO's scathing attack on the way FEMA handled the matter indicates otherwise...
However, your first point indicates a complete lack of understanding of the situation. I'm not pissed because people were dying, and not because what water was available was contaminated - both these things are likely unavoidable in a natural disaster like this in a modern city.
I'm pissed because the president put your country in a situation where it was incapable of responding to a natural disaster of this kind (wasting the resources of the army/National Guard, and buggering the economy, for two examples), and stayed on his holiday for two days after it happened. He only had four days left on his vacation, and any leader worth the name would have immediately cut it short, if only to provide much-needed leadership in the crisis.
Bush sat on a stage playing a guitar while New Orleans was flooded - don't tell me he couldn't have made a difference by taking an interest, allowing foreign aid in and actually doing... y'know... anything at all.
That was the first thought that occurred, but since this was an emergency situation the approval, installation and configuring would likely have taken longer than it took the phone company to repair the ADSL connection to our premises.
And our hosting account is too crappy to offer us any kind of control over the server - it's literally "web space", CGI support for perl scripts (which I'm not allowed to use) and nothing else.
I have heard good things about Mono, though - last I heard it lacked full compatability, but was generally a good solution. Chilisoft also produce an app that allows you to run ASP on unix, but I don't know if it supports ASP.NET... as an aside, it looks like it might have been bought out by Sun (web address redirects to a page on Sun's server now).
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1. "Retaining the right" is an ambiguous position - it implies a threat, without making it. This is making a threat.
2. Exactly. Because we all trust Bush, don't we? Especially those of us from other countries, not brainwashed by the execrable US media.
3. When the world trusts and respects (note: != likes) your leader, that's fine. We'll take the odd warning from someone we believe to be essentially sane and reasonable. When your leader appears to be a spoiled, irresponsible, violent, aggressive paranoid fuckwit with invasive policies and delusions of empire, we're less likely to shrug it off and trust everything will be well.
Are you seriously tell me that strengthening a threat to use nuclear weapons at a time of international instability is a clever thing to do? Every time the Bush administration makes a violent or threatening move, the situation worsens. How much worse does it have to get before they realise this simple fact?
Ability != Stated intention
Your ex-marine neighbour has the ability to invade your home, beat you to a pulp and snap your neck like a dry twig, but you don't go out and start stocking up on home defence gear and firearms until the note comes through your door telling you if you so much as look at him funny he'll do it at the first opportunity.
What's so hard for you people to understand?
This is completely fucking disingenuous, and you know it.
Sure the GPP was a bit over the top, but by seriously suggesting you don't understand where they're coming from you're more stupid than you appear. Sure, the liberals hate Bush and the religious right, but they also hate the terrorists. It's Republicans vs. The Terrorists, and the Democrats are merely stuck in the middle (all too often huddling on the ground in a puddle of urine with their hands over their ears).
The "liberals" think the right are similar to "the terrorists" because they have the same level of vitriol, prefer the same strategy (violence[1]), are motivated by paranoia or religious extremism, happily and easily reject facts (and greater reality) whenever convenient, and are completely incapable of rational, detatched self-analysis or self-questioning.
The right think "the liberals" are similar to "the terrorists" because they see the world in black and white - they literally believe "if you're not with us, you're against us". This is so fucking simple a child can understand it - it's the concept of "compromise" or taking the middle road. It is, however, useful to pretend they don't so they can accuse anyone faintly less extremist than them of being a traitor.
Nevertheless, you can't deny that it's extremely hypocritical to loudly condemn one type of religious fundamentalism (Muslim) for:
Unnecessary violence and invasive aggression
Repression of civil liberties
Causing civilian deaths
Repression of women
Possibly researching nuclear weapons
while your own fundamentalist-lead (Christian) leadership and population promotes:
Invasive foreign policies that risk turning the world against you
Police-state interior policies (PATRIOT act, etc)
Anti-abortion legislation
And actively threatening to nuke countries
Even reducing it to your stereotypes:
Any denomination of religious nutter with a nuclear fucking weapon is far more dangerous than any number of "terrorst sympathisers".
Footnotes:
[1] Although not the same tactics, due at least in part to the massive disparity in their material resources.[2]
[2] Reading it back, this sounds like I'm implying that the American Right might use terrorism tactics if it wasn't the overwhelmingly dominant party in the conflict. We can actually empirically test this - when the economy starts slipping, natural disasters deplete their resources, they can't afford (or recruit) a large enough army to continue the conflict and they generally perceive a slipping of their power, what do they do? Start waving the "fuck with us and we'll nuke you" card.
Setting off a nuclear weapon, killing the opposition but also killing hundreds of thousands of civilians... Exactly how is this different from (say) terrorists nuking the Whitehouse? They take out the people they hate, plus hundreds of thousands of civilians. Seriously - what's the difference?
And no, I don't buy into that whole "it's the government, so it's alright". The Taliban were a government, and they weren't "alright". This argument simply devolves into "it's us, so it's alright", and the same argument is used by fanatics, liars and psychopaths the world over.
And don't forget to wait a few years and nuke the cities that will then fill up with evil men who irrationally hate the USA for killing their wives, sons, daughters, parents and housepets!
Seriously, now - cynically using 9/11 for political gain... Iraq... Bleeding the army dry... Fucking the economy... New Orleans... Now seriously trying to restart the world-wide nuclear standoff for the sake of a bit of cock-waving.
Just what does Bush actually have to do before you Americans fucking get rid of him for being an incompetent criminal madman? Inadvertantly show his nipple during the superbowl? Say "shit" in front of a small child?
"the place the fairy tale falls apart is them having the real means to do so, which is generally a prerequisite for the whole 'preemptive' thing."
Mmmmm... just like clear and present danger of WMDs was be required to go into Iraq, right?
I can't believe anyone still falls for bullshit like this.
Not content with invading countries in defiance of international opinion and signally failing to produce one scrap of justification, not content with failing miserably to install a democratic government and leaving some Iraqi citizens actually regretting the USA's involvement, now Bush is itching to re-start the cold war and MAD by posturing and waving his cock-compensating "nukerler" weapons at anyone who might have WMDs? And who decides who has them? Oh yeah, the same fuckwits who hallucinated the WMDs in Iraq.
Unfair? That's how the rest of the world sees Bush and the USA at the moment.
My only question is this: Is Bush actually fucking insane? We've only just finished the public nuclear standoff and MAD bullshit that occupied us for most of the 80s and half the 90s, and now he wants to start it again?
I hate to flame, but just what the fuck is wrong with him?
"Aboot."
;-p
Next question?
Well, more that because we take shit apart to find out how it works, we can then put it back together to make better shit. Or at least make more advanced shit without making the same mistakes as the previous generation of shit.
;-)
Or some shit like that.
"Give somehting new and unknown to a bunch of apes and the first thing they do is smash it or rip it apart inquisitively."
...
Yeah, and that's why we're sitting in our ergonomic leather-padded swivel chairs, taking apart complex consumer electronics with cheap mass-produced durable metal alloy tools, in our centrally-heated/air-conditioned house, writing up the experience on our cheap yet powerful computing devices and posting the results half-way around the world (at light-speed, or thereabouts) to be hosted by other computers in a completely different country.
And why other mammals are being hunted for food, or lounging around in a tank at seaworld squeaking stupidly and begging us for fish.
Well... that and opposable thumbs....
"How about, why can't my *fourteen* year old drive himself to school?"
If you need an explanation for this, you're either trolling, making a joke or need to get your head examined.
We have enough problems on the roads currently with supposedly mature, otherwise-sensible grown adults who drive stupidly, drive drunk, drive without insurance or in unfit vehicles, and your solution is what, to open up driving to people even less mature and sensible?
And that's leaving aside the implications of putting half a ton of speeding metal in the hands of young adolescents, who clinical studies have shown routinely suffer from a measurable loss of co-ordination and judgement during puberty.
I agree that treating someone who's 17 and 11 months the same as someone who's 2 1/2 is stupid, but we don't. Instead (eg, with film certifications) we carefully degrade rights as the age gets younger, to allow for the progressive drop in maturity, experience and responsibility.
Everyone knows a wise-beyond-his-years 17 year-old, and everyone knows a pathetically immature 40 year-old. However, two extreme and discrete data points doesn't constitute a valid basis for a rule which applies to everyone.
We can either lump people into rough groups based on age, and set rules which are fair for the majority of that group, or we can institute a draconian "citizenship examinations" scheme, where everyone has to pass additional specific "maturity" tests to gain rights like freedom of speech and association, voting, licence to drive a vehicle or own a handgun, licence to drink, etc, etc, etc.
Legally, politically, culturally, ethically (who sets the rules? Who defines "maturity"?) and bureaucratically this is clearly a non-starter, so what's your alternative?
It should also be noted that I'm not unsympathetic to your point - I'm only 25, and remember what it was like to be (apparently an unusually mature) 18 quite clearly. I'm also fully aware of how much further I've matured even since then, and the thought of the average 14 year-old I know pissed-up, with a gun, behind the wheel of a car is terrifying.
"Towards that end, we look at how often certain pages get hit (such as help pages, search pages, site maps, the back button, hierarchial links etc) as well as surveys." (My emphasis)
Two important points here - firstly, it's well-known that a large proportion of users are search-dominant, or at least use a mixture of searching and links[1].
Although the numbers differ (eg, between the two articles), both agree that up to 80% of users use either search primarily or search and navigation links when navigating a web site.
Either way, hits on search pages don't offer a reliable indication of a problem with navigation.
Secondly, user-surveys are actually one of the worst ways to gather information about the site. It's well known in HCI circles that you simply can't trust user-surveys - users are very good at telling you what they think they did (or would do), but extremely poor at reporting what they actually did.
I think this is often because the overwhelming majority of navigation decisions users take are completely subconscious - they themselves aren't aware of why certain links look good, or why they ignore certain sections of the page (eg, because they subconsciously identify them as looking like adverts).
[1] Although hthis second article attempts to verify Jakob Nielson's figures, it appears to have its own problems - namely, confusing "search-dominant users" (who quickly default to searching) with "users who only ever use search functionality". Clearly users will have to click on a few links, merely to get onto and off of the search page(s).
Despite this, all figures I've seen (as well as my own reasearch) indicates that a mixed-search-and-navigation-links strategy is used by around 80% of users.
Firstly, I think you misunderstood - I'm not from the US, and neither do I live there. Referring to Bush as "your (their) leader" was supposed to be a hint. ;-)
;-)
;-)
Secondly, I dont't intend to suggest for a minute that the Founding Fathers were solely reponsible for the present (recent-past?) enviable position of the USA - they merely set up a culture and it's developed since then.
However, I think it's fair to say that if they'd set up a culture that from the word go was as overtly religious fundamentalist, anti-intellectual or corrupted by business interests as the current administration, the USA would never in a million years be anything like as respected or envied as it was.
I'd also question your assertion that it's (even now) primarily a British culture. The Pilgrim Fathers were a very, very tiny minority, with their own religion and political differences. True, the US is technically an offshoot of Britain, but that's very different to "still being just like us"
Either way, to bring this back to the context of the original discussion, whether the Founding Fathers merely set up a successful culture that was then wildly lucky, or whether the USA (again, until recently) panned out exactly as the envisioned it, I'll still take their political advice over that of the administration that's managed in less than a decade to undo almost every advantage the USA secured over their 200-year histors[1].
[1] Natural resources? Bush seems intent on making the US more deependant on foreign oil.
Freedom of expression? Of course, but only while clamping down on civil liberties and freedom of speech.
Religious freedom/separation of church and state? Not with the many current fundamentalist christian-influenced initiatives the Republicans keep pushing for.
Dedication to science and rationality over superstition and religion? Creationism/ID - don't even get me started.
Military might? The US army is so poor they can't afford to provide body-armour for many of their troops in Iraq, and they've had to ship many National Guard units over there to shore up the war effort because the popularity of the army (and hence, recruitment rates) have dropped through the floor.
Strong economy? Not with China waiting in the wings, after Bush has finished driving the US economy it into the floor.
Manufacturing base? The majority of US manufacturing is now done overseas, and the US is increasingly sliding into an (inherently fragile) service economy.
I could go on...
Maybe it's because they set up a society and culture which has (sorry, had) become the envy of the world. Importantly, the Founding Fathers' legacy has already endured wars, cultural upheaval and technological innovation the like of which they could never have even dreamed of.
And the current leadership has in less than eight years abused their legacy to the point surveys have shown that your leader is often considered a greater threat to world peace than Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussain?
In any contest between "the Founding Fathers" and "the current administration" you'd have to be a fucking idiot (or unconscionable Pollyanna) to choose the current administration.
That's my position, at least.
Haaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha schools hahahahahahahaha roads hahahahahahahahaha police protection from violent criminals hahahahahahahahaha sewerage disposal hahahahahahahahahahahaha hospitals hahahahahahahahaha need I go on hahahahahaha.....
But seriously, thanks - that was one of the funniest posts in this whole thread.
Tell you what, if you'd rather live without any government intrusion, leave the US. As other posters have noted, there are plenty of anarchist hotspots in the world right now - somalia, regions of iraq, regions of afghanistan, you name it.
Against this smorgasbord of choice, no true anarchist would still be here.
Unless, of course, it's all just a big, trendy, ill-thought-out pose.
Are you posting on a sat-phone from a hand-built fortified bunker high in the Afghan mountains?
Sorry bud, but that's typical thoughtless anarchist bullshit.
"You vote, you accept. Stop voting."
You stop voting, your voice is never heard. The government assumes you don't give a shit, and carries on with whatever it was doing before, or gets even worse.
Vote for someone else, like the opposition leader, or a third-party candidate. Politicians will cheerfully ignore voter apathy (in fact the more corrupt ones bank on it), but the second votes start going to someone else, they have to take notice.
Fuck it, if you can't find anyone else you approve of, run yourself. Or spoil your ballot paper (leaving your name visible) - statistics on spoiled ballots are recorded (certainly here in the UK), and that still gives the administration a kick up the arse, even if not as hard as voting for someone else does.
Whatever you believe, claiming you'll change anything by sitting down and shutting up is Just Fucking Retarded.
I won't disagree that government protection for (for exmaple) companies and corporations is fucking stupid (doesn't it run counter to the whole idea of the free market?). However, you seem to be equating the rise of the welfare state with the erosion of personal responsibility.
While I agree that we need a lot more personal responsibility in the US (and, increasingly, the UK), I think there's a fertile middle ground between bailing out private airlines because they're too fucking incompetent to manage their finances properly and allowing people to die in the streets from starvation.
"That kind of situation breeds personal responsibility, because you know that there is no government-sponsored safety net. Did people die in the streets of hunger? A few, I'm sure. But by trying to do something about those few we have created entire generations that couldn't feed themselves if their lives depended on it."
I call BS here. As a percentage of the population, do you really think less people died of malnutrition- or starvation-related diseases then than are on welfare now?
Given families would routinesly have more kids than they could easily support, simply because so many would die before reaching even adolescence I'd be very, very surprised if you were right.
I mean, if you're right why stop there? Why not abolish all government and live in total anarchy? Sure plenty of people would be killed or maimed in fights to secure access to resources or currency, but the ones that survived would really, really take responsibility for themselves, right?
At some point we have to strike a balance between the childish "I deserve everything I've ever wanted, without any effort" and the downright barbarian "I take what I want and fuck anyone weaker".
Extremes are just that - extreme. There's no point in arguing for one method over another - we should agree on a result we want, and then choose a method to get us there.
I'd submit the ideal result would be "A population who take personal responsibility for themselves, but who aren't in danger of dying if they can't or won't".
Frankly, it ain't easy living on welfare (I've lived on the UK dole before, so I can testify to this first-hand). Living on the microscopic amount you get on the dole is quite enough punishment for the lazy or irresponsible. They don't need to starve in the gutter to make the point.
This is obvious, and well-understood by most intelligent people.
However, deaths due to terrorism (even now) are such a microscopically small percentage of the total that it's either a weak excuse or shortsighted to the point of blindness to restrict the rights of the entire population to counter it.
For example, I did a little research a while back, and did you know that in the UK you're more likely to be hit by lightning than die as a result of terrorism this year? Even after the recent two rounds of tube/bus bombings?
Where are the laws mandating we all wear grounded tinfoil helmets or thick rubber soles on our shoes?
If we aren't prepared to accept controls on car usage, gun ownership (in the US) or something as solveable as modest tax increases to fight poverty, why the hell should we accept controls on something which is (obsessive media fixation aside) pathetically less likely to hurt or kill us?
The only reason is people making a knee-jerk reaction like your own, based solely on the perception of danger, not on the actual danger itself.
Responsible government should take the long view, and attempt to educate the population out of any shortsighted and nanny-state demands they make.
Instead, your current administration (and now, apparently, ours) has merely frightened people even more, and used the situation to push through the whole boatload of privacy- and liberty-infringing laws and regulations they've been collectively wetting themselves over since they first got into power.
Terrorist actions cause deaths that happen in clumps, and this is what makes them scary. If all the car- or gun-related deaths per year happened on the same day, cars and guns would be banned the day after.
Basically, get a fucking grip, and make informed decisions to protect your country's future. Don't make knee-jerk demands and rationalise them into sounding sensible later.
(And apologies - this last bit isn't aimed at you personally, but at everyone who would trade "a little essential liberty for temporary safety". I think we all know what FDR had to say about them...)
Nothing, apart from the next version of IE will default to MSN Search. As will the next version of Windows. And Office, and every other program MS produces where it's remotely applicable.
And 90% of Microsoft users won't/don't know how to/won't be able to change it.
Microsoft's desktop monopoly means they don't have to be the best - they only have to be just barely good enough, and they win the war with the next round of upgrades to their existing products.
"M$ MUST make sure that the services Google and Yahoo provide at present do not work very well with IE. So in this situation if one wants to use Google's virtual Earth, it becomes impossible making this individual resort to Microsoft's offerings."
Virtual Earth is owned by Microsoft. You mean "Google Earth". And Google Earth is a separate application, so it has nothing to do with IE or Firefox. Did you mean Google Maps?
Even then, Google just releases a new version of Google maps that sniffs the new version of IE and offers one which works with it. Google Maps is a web-application, IE is a client-side app. Google can upgrade their end instantly, and all users are upgraded. Microsoft has to produce the "upgrade" for IE, then wait for (or convince) their users to install it - a much slower process.
Basically, you'll never reliably break a web app by changing the browser, since changing the web-app is faster, cheaper and instantly upgrades all users.
"On the other hand, Google could fight back this way: It could create a utility that makes the dependence on IE for most of Microsoft's services irrelevant. I am still looking for a way to remove IE from my Windows box in a sane and neat way."
Not this is an interesting idea. However, it's such a blatantly anti-Microsoft move (with no clear benefit Google could publically admit to) that I don't think Google would get away with releasing it any time in the near future - certainly not until they're convinced they'd win in a gloves-off, no-holds-barred fight with MS.
There are also formidable technical problems to overcome - you're talking about replacing one or more low-level Windows DLLs with some sort of wrapper around Gecko. And *then* rewriting Gecko to support the additional functionality (like ActiveX) which they've often chosen not to support for very good reasons (like the fact that it's insecure or poorly-designed). Not only that, but you'll have to contend with unpublished quirks of the MS code (and we all know what bastards they are for unpublished API calls), and finally reproducing all the bugs in the DLL code, just in case any of the third-party developers have code which relies on the (incorrect) behaviour.
"If Google can create such a utility, I can see most users removing IE. The trouble at present is even after making Firefox the default browser for example, looking at some link in some applications would still "call" IE. I guess this young man called "DVD Jon" can help here."
TBH, this would probably be the easiest part. You'd likely have ot produce a distinct patch for each version of each application (and there are likely many, but patching a few apps to run one browser instead of another is child's play compared to emulating the other browser with 100% accuracy. It's a lot of work, but technically far less demanding.
Congratulations - you've made the very basic error that was specifically indicated in the summary.
Open source (or content) != open protocols.
If they were saying "all software should cost $0.00" you'd have a point. However, they're saying all software (/content) should be accessible using open standards. And, pursuant to that, they're making their pages available using TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML and CSS.
What's your point?
"The key to competing successfully in business is to offer a better value to the customer than they can get somewhere else."
I'd disagree - that may be the key to doing business ethically, or nicely, but as other posters have noted, companies aren't "nice".
For all too many companies these days the key is getting wide adoption using a proprietary standard - that way you don't have to spend time or money producing versions "to do everything the user wants", since they can't go anywhere else - you've got them over a barrel.
In this position it's far easier to plod along at your own pace, insulated from any form of competiton by your designed-in incompatibility an/or ill-thought-out DMCA-style legislation.
Unfortunately, this retards the pace of improvement of the product (all products in the category?), and shits on the customer. Proprietary protocols don't improve the product or the process at all, they just eliminate the user's ability to drive product development, and ensure a nice, safe cash-cow for the owning company.
"If everyone implements open standards, it limits the implementation to the limits of the standard."
Only if done badly. Granted, "new features" may well break "interoperability". However, I think it's good that companies are being encouraged to use open standards, since it's good for interoperability, and so the entire industry.
Legally mandating everyone had to use open standards and nothing but would be the quickest way of killing technological advance dead, or at least slowing it to a crawl. However, I think proprietary standards should be generally viewed as a big black mark against a product - not always necessarily a deal-breaker, but a serious drawback. Nobody would buy a Ford car that was restricted so it could only run on Ford-branded petrol, so why do we tolerate it in the IT industry?
I also think developers should possibly be forced to make the details of proprietary protocols public - that way they're competing on "actual value of their implementation to the consumer", not on gaming the market to achieve vendor lock-in.
"But for a company that leads the field by a large margin, it doesn't make sense to open up to standards and thus open the doors for your customers to leave the barn."
Exactly, which is why it's so important that there's a counter-force to preserve any semblance of customer choice. Choice is good, and competition leads to better products. Vendor lock-in removes most of the motivation to improve the product, which hurts the consumer. The only defence consumers have is to demand interoperability, so they're forced to stop cheating their users and compete fairly.
"Keep them locked in, and keep providing them with superior product."
I'm sorry, but this is a complete non-sequiteur. Vendor lock-in directly leads to worse products - just look at IE[1]. If you have superior products to your competitors there's no need to lock your customers in.
"They will never have the need to switch to another product so long as their needs are met, and they would have a tough time switching anyway as their current data isn't easily transferrable to a new system, no matter how open that new system may be."
Exactly, but people are lazy, and so are companies. Why bother going to the expense of producing a new, better, timely product if all your users are stuck with whatever you deign to give them, whenever you condescend to give it to them? This has been empirically proven so many times it's not even an argument any more.
"I'm of the opinion that companies ought to do what they want with regards to standards. It doesn't matter what package you are using, if the one you are using satisfies your needs. Open standards hardly ever make or break a deal."
I honestly don't know how you arrive at this conclusion, but (and maybe I'm missing something here) your whole argument seems pretty r
Heh, fair play. I should have specified a well-supported and already popular open standard ;-)
Obviously technology changes, and some developments take off while others die a lonely death. However, I'd submit that any proprietary standard is tied to the fortunes (and whims) of one company, instead of the marketplace as a whole - this means that if that company dies (or unilaterally decides to deprecate the system (Win98), or makes bad decisions on the technology (ActiveX)) you're screwed.
Personally, I'd always rather trust on something that's sure to be slow and steady to evolve (since everyone has to agree on changes), is generally the best solution (since people adopt it solely on its merits, rather than because the owners spend milions on advertising it), and doesn't unnecessarily yoke my company's fortunes to one single other company.
The way I see it, (unnecessarily) using proprietary protocols gives you all the liability of the owning company, without any tangible benefits.
Indeed. However, the rulers of third-world countries tend to be extremely rich, corrupt, and can often do pretty much whatever they like without worrying about popular opinion or legality.
So, third-world results only matter if you care about the "little people", or have a strong belief in civil liberties or freedom. Rulers of third-world dictatorships have a much easier time of ruling, and likely have a lot more fun, too.
Despite mouthing platitudes to "freedom" (while clamping down on civil liberties and increasing surveillance of the country's own citizens) and "democracy" (while running democratically dubious elections and unfairly disenfranchising large sections of your opponent's voting bloc), I often get the impression Bush would rather be running a third-world dictatorship, albeit as powerful and feared a one as the US is presently.
He's certainly shown himself to be intolerant of questioning or criticism, unconcerned by civil liberties and unusually corrupt, and he's frankly doing a great job of starting to turn the US into a third-world nation - election procedures that started "the United States Banana Republic of America" jokes, serious problems looming for the economy, cronyism and kickbacks everywhere you look...
" From http://homelandresponse.org/full_story.php?WID=139 77 : "Gov. Blanco has complained repeatedly and bitterly behind the scenes that the federal government did not act quickly enough. According to a White House spokesman, she was asked by President George Bush to order the evacuation of New Orleans on Aug. 27, 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina struck. Blanco, for reasons unknown, waited until Aug. 28. After the levees broke and the city began to flood, the White House spokesman says the president asked if she wanted the federal government to take control of the evacuation of New Orleans. Gov. Blanco asked for 24 hours to think about it.""
That's very interesting, and does modify my opinion somewhat. However, the very article you link to also lays some of the blame squarely at Bush's door, going so far as to brand him a "weak leader", and criticises his actions (including appointing an unqualified political appointee to the head of such a vitally important agency).
You're right, and the govenor of NO also clearly deserves to be castigated for her atrocious handling of the situation. However, to be fair, Bush still clearly isn't blameless either.
If your second point is true, it's certainly eye-opening, and forces a drastic re-evaluation of the situation. That said, the mayor of NO's scathing attack on the way FEMA handled the matter indicates otherwise...
However, your first point indicates a complete lack of understanding of the situation. I'm not pissed because people were dying, and not because what water was available was contaminated - both these things are likely unavoidable in a natural disaster like this in a modern city.
I'm pissed because the president put your country in a situation where it was incapable of responding to a natural disaster of this kind (wasting the resources of the army/National Guard, and buggering the economy, for two examples), and stayed on his holiday for two days after it happened. He only had four days left on his vacation, and any leader worth the name would have immediately cut it short, if only to provide much-needed leadership in the crisis.
Bush sat on a stage playing a guitar while New Orleans was flooded - don't tell me he couldn't have made a difference by taking an interest, allowing foreign aid in and actually doing... y'know... anything at all.
That was the first thought that occurred, but since this was an emergency situation the approval, installation and configuring would likely have taken longer than it took the phone company to repair the ADSL connection to our premises.
And our hosting account is too crappy to offer us any kind of control over the server - it's literally "web space", CGI support for perl scripts (which I'm not allowed to use) and nothing else.
I have heard good things about Mono, though - last I heard it lacked full compatability, but was generally a good solution. Chilisoft also produce an app that allows you to run ASP on unix, but I don't know if it supports ASP.NET... as an aside, it looks like it might have been bought out by Sun (web address redirects to a page on Sun's server now).