it's pretty damned clear that there was some part family pride (the son finishing what many thought the father ought to have)
Well, if it was, it was a defiant son. Nobody has ever written as good a response to the "why not overthrow Saddam" as George H. W. Bush did back in the 90s. His reasons were sound then and they were sound in 2003 when his dumb-ass son decided to go against his fathers advice and kill a large number of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. It is fairly well known that Daddy Bush despises the cronies who was behind the war in Iraq and that he was strongly opposed to it all the way. Daddy Bush has a brain you see, and he uses it.
Overestimation of our intelligence ability maybe, probably some cherry picking and exaggeration, but not lying. If they were truly lying, then they would have simply planted a bunch (more... some were actually found)
BZZZT! Wrong. There is no way they could have planted WMDs in Iraq without being found out. This is based on the reality that in order for them to do so they would have had to involve too many people. With that many people involved, you will have a leak. Guaranteed. If they could have planted WMDs they would have done it to avoid the embarrassment that ensued. Why didn't they?
Never in our history has a more arrogant and self-righteous bunch of nut-cases run our government. Their sense of entitlement surpasses that of a five year old only-child from a rich family. In reality, they didn't give a shit about the fact that there were no WMDs there. And frankly, neither did the US population. Long after it was clear that there was no WMDs in Iraq the US population supported the war. In fact, well after the fiasco of the WMDs became clear, more than 70% of the US population thought that there was a link between terrorists (of the kind that his us on 9/11) and Iraq. In reality there never was, and even today the link is tenuous at best. The vast majority of the Iraqi insurgency is run by Iraqis and for Iraqis, and no, fighting an illegal occupation is not, and has never been terrorism.
Also, I'm curious. Do you really not care about all the mass graves and rape rooms found all over Iraq? Why does a true tyrant who really did fill mass graves and gas women and children not bother nearly half as much you as much as Bush?
Man, you have to stop drinking the cool aid. Really. You are mixing and matching grossly here. Not that that is a surprise, the Bush administration has done so for a long time.
Now, to what you are talking about. The gassing of one part of the Iraqi population and the mass graves which contained another part of the Iraqi population. These two are not related. You knew that right? Let us take the first one. Gassing.
In the late 70s and 80s Saddam did indeed gass Kurds and probably also Iranians. The total number is not extremely high but it is too high. One would be too high. Why did he do it? Well, he was at war with Iran and the Kurds in the north were always a problem. Where did he get the gass from? He got it from Germany. Why did the Germans sell him the gas? Because the US government couldn't be directly involved. That is why the US government went to the Germans and asked them to sell Saddam the gas. In other words, Saddam killed those people with our blessing and our assistance.
Now, to the mass graves. They are from the Shiite uprising in the early 90s. It was what you could call a civil war. After we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait the Shiites tried to take power through an armed uprising. We encouraged them, told them we'd help them and promptly abandoned them. Not that it mattered all that much.
In a civil war people die. In the US civil war a lot of people died. When a lot of people die in war we tend to bury them in mass graves. Particularly in areas where it is really hot. In the Shiite uprising a very large number of people died. When the Bush administration talks about how many people Saddam killed, they always site the number including the Shiite uprising. This is disingenuous at best. You can't really blame Saddam for their death any more than you can blame Lincoln for the people who dies in the Civil War in the US or Washington for the people who died in the US fight for freedom against the Brits. In civil wars people die. Bad but unavoidable.
As for rape rooms and such, torture is sadly apparently perfectly fine today. I don't see how the US torturing people at Guantanamo is different from Saddam torturing people trying to overthrow his government. Honestly. The difference is cosmetic at best.
Sorry, but being wrong is not an impeachable offense, much less treason.
This is correct, but the administration wasn't wrong. They willfully, purposefully and with malicious intent presented a case for which there was no real support. They directed the intelligence service to produce results that matched policy and punished anyone who refused to cooperate.
The war in Iraq had one, and only one, purpose. To transfer as many tax dollars from mine and your pocket into the pockets of what a very smart president warned us about, namely the military-industrial complex. Nobody ever believed there were WMDs in Iraq. Not anyone with a brain anyway. The CIA had specifically stated that there was no Al Quaeda in Iraq either, so going in for that reason would be absurd. According to CIA Zarqawi was a blow-hole with no real Al Quaeda connections. Well, they thought so pre 2002 anyway. Oh, and no, the intelligence services weren't wrong about the WMDs, they were just never allowed to say what they really thought.
We have caused the death of 4000 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. For what? So that the wife of some CEO in Haliburton could get a face lift and a liposuction? For the thousands upon thousands of American soldiers who come home with less limbs than they had before they went. These boys traded their limbs for a nose job for the wife of a Blackwater executive. Is that a price America should be willing to pay?
As we are pouring trillions of tax dollars into the pockets of corporate America the administration has conveniently forgotten who perpetrated the terrorist acts of 9/11. That dude is sitting over in Afghanistan/Pakistan where we have no soldiers hunting for him. He's as safe as someone in Kentucky. Nobody in the administration could give a rats ass about getting him and bringing him to justice. Why? Because they have not found a way to do that in such a manner that they can pour more money on their friends. Any situation where corporations make more money out of government contracts than out of competing in the market place is a situation where the country is fairing badly. The Bush administration has made it far more attractive to have lobbyists in DC than to actually do efficient business.
Oh, and for the record, I am not a left-wing nut job. I would consider my self a republican if it had not been for the fact that the party is now entirely run by people who believe in big government, all power in Washington and the state meddling in any and all affairs of the individual. Also, we should not forget that almost no president in US history has added to the federal budget with the speed GWB has. That is also true if you keep the entire budget for the war out of the equation. Not since the "New Deal" has a president done so much damage to the economy as the current nut-job has. We paid for the "New Deal" for at least three decades. We are going to pay the price for this lunatic for at least as long, probably longer.
In other words, for the true conservatives among us, George W. Bush and his cronies are big-time socialists of the kind that the world haven't seen since Stalin. In fact I do not know a single world leader in history that remind me more of Stalin than does George W. Bush. They have so much in common it is scary. The communists finally took Washington, and nobody even noticed.
it's based on the fact that I believe that if they're interested in protecting Civil Rights, they shouldn't pick and chose which ones they support.
Just curious, what amendments is it that you think the ACLU doesn't support. They clearly support the 2nd, so that ends that discussion. What do you actually mean by "picking and chosing"?
the Second Amendment says quite clearly, "...keep and bear arms,"
Well, by quoting selectively we can find support for anything and everything anywhere. The 2nd doesn't say "all individuals" or "everybody" or "any person". It says "a well regulated militia". This is where the problem comes in. How do you define a "well regulated militia"? The ACLU interprets it the same way that the Supreme Court does, which means that having some limitations on who can an can not "bear arms" is not unconstitutional. I am, to my knowledge, not a member of any "well regulated militia" so the 2nd amendment doesn't necessarily give me the right to "bear arms".
It does however mean that they exist in every culture which means you can't (or at least shouldn't) bury your head in the sand and deny that they exist.
Huh? I love that "logic". Nobody has denied that religion exists. Of course religion exists. The fact that religion exists doesn't mean that any of the many gods the different religions believe in exists though. Belief in Santa is approaching near universal coverage in a certain age group. That doesn't mean he's real.
Since religion exists in every culture, there must be a reason for it
There are a number of theories why humans have become religious. The problem for the "logic" you are trying to build here is that your logic would only make sense if there was one religion, and that has been the only religion throughout time. That is not the case. There are a number of religions in the world, most of them are vastly different from the other religions that does exist and have existed throughout time. Each of these religions have exactly the same probability of being the one true religion. That, of course, is only possible in reality if that probability is about zero.
Science is in many ways a religion
Only in the eyes and minds of the extraordinarily ignorant.
Even listen to the words we use, believe/belief in evolution and science.
Those are the words of the religious community. I do not believe in science or evolution any more than I believe in gravity or oxygen. Saying that anyone believes oxygen exists is absurd. Science is not something you believe in, science is a set of methods used to describe and try to explain what we observe. Science and belief do not belong in the same world, science is the opposite of belief. That doesn't mean that science is to know, science is only "to explore" without pre-conceived notions. The opposite of belief.
If there is no God then how did we get here is an open question which needs solving.
How? Absolutely. We are well along the way to explain that. "God" can't explain "how". Religious people have tried and tried again and again to use "Godt" to explain "how". It doesn't work. At best "God" can explain "why", but that is an absurd question.
How did belief in god help us get were we are, did we out grow it's purpose?
There are a number of books that have given pretty good answers to that. I would recommend Dawkins "The God Delusion" since it not only proposes a very good answer, but because it also covers a number of other answers to this.
what is the evolutionary benefit of sexual abuse and belief in god?
There need not be any evolutionary benefit to religion. Humans and animals have all developed a vast number of traits that have no evolutionary benefit, some are even directly harmful. This is well known in biology, and it is dealt with in a number of excellent texts. In short, some times we develop traits that are bi-products of useful traits. That is, the trait in and of it self is not useful, but it developed as a bi-product of developing a useful trait. It seems highly probable that religion is such a trait.
When it comes to the evolutionary benefit of sexual abuse, that is rape of either adults or non-adults, that should be self-evident. It's evolutionary benefit is self-evident. My genes wants to get spread to the next generation and they couldn't give a rats ass about whether the carrier of my progeny is pregnant of her own free will or the result of my forcing her. The question you should rather ask is what evolutionary trait monogamy has, since it seems to run counter to the purpose of evolution.
Note to those of limited intellectual capability: I do not advocate rape above, I am just pointing out that in a strict gene-spreading sense it is rational.
Gen 1:1-2:2 covers the "when", and some of the "how" questions regarding the whole of creation. Gen 2:4+ is talking about the "who" and "why" questions regarding the creation of man.
This is one of those interesting explanations. Please show me where you find support for this explanation in the bible. Given the bible as the source of this, your statement above is 100% fabrication. It is called post-rationalization, and it is never particularly sensible.
The commandments" certainly can refer to the famous 10, or more generally to the whole of Levitical law
Again, an explanation that is absurd in the extreme, but makes total sense when you are incapable of using logic on your belief system. It is a pity that you try. Really. It doesn't work. The statement from Jesus is directly applicable to the commandments, and not to Leviticus law as such. The explanation for the problem is a lot easier, and if you study (rather than just read or memorize) the bible, you can even find support for this in the bible it self.
Why does Mark have Jesus quote the ten commandments wrong? Because the author of Mark, whoever he was, didn't know Jewish law and traditions all that well. This isn't the only place where this comes through. Where do you find support for this in the bible? In Luke. If you look at the text of Luke (not the English version, you'd need to study it a lot harder than that) you will find that the author of Luke, whoever he was, wrote the text he wrote with a specific purpose, and he had some good sources. Last first. His sources were Mark, Matthew and the lost text often referred to as 'Q'. It is quite clear from Luke, in the way the author uses words etc, that he at times copies Mark and Matthew verbatim. In other places he leaves things from these guys out, but copies 'Q' and probably also adds from other texts. What purpose did the author of Luke have when he wrote his text? He wanted to correct some mistakes in Mark and Matthew. Not just the famous misquote of the ten commandments. If you read Mark and Matthew it is clear that they believe Jesus will return rather soon. Luke, written quite a lot later, does not have as much faith in the immediate return of Christ. This is one of those hilarious things in the bible. It contains two gospels, and the one that was written to fix the errors and problems in the two. Funny in the extreme.
By the way, why does the bible contain four gospels? And why these four in particular? When did that happen? As late as 324AD there were far more gospels circulating than these four? In 325 we suddenly agree on four? Do you know why? Probably not. Let me enlighten you. Imagine a crazy munch from France (a tad inaccurate, but close enough). He is frantically trying to determine what gospels are correct and which are wrong. He is thinking and thinking and he is writing a book. Suddenly it hits him, there are four directions of the heavens, North, South, East and West, so ipso facto, the bible must have four gospels. Yeeeeahh! I got it. Not only did he get it, he wrote a whole book in defense of this absurd idea. The book was brought to Nicea by a heathen Roman who wanted to use Christianity to affirm his position as the ruler of the world, and therefore he needed a united Christian idea. The heathen Roman emperor forced the religious leaders to agree on a single text, and then he ruthlessly persecuted anyone who didn't agree with them.
The history of the bible is a great read, and the fact that its creation was, in reality, forced by a non-Christian Roman emperor just to solidify his power base is only one of the many fun facts. The fact that it has four books just because we have North, South, East and West is another fun anecdote.
Oh, and by the way, the four gospels were chosen because they were, at that point in time, the four best sellers. At the time buying a full bible was out of reach of most people. They would have been enormously expensive. People bought in
No contradictions? Did you ever read the bible? It is chock full of contradictions and bizarre errors. We are currently talking about Genesis which comes in various versions with a different sequence of creation. In one things are created in the following order:
Sky, Earth, light - Water - Plants - Sun, Moon, stars - Sea monsters, fish etc - Humans (together apparently)
OK, so that is one sequence... let's look at the other sequence
Earth and heavens - Adam(on a desolate Earth) - Plants - Animals - Eve
So, who got created first, plants or Adam? Animals or Eve?
As a side question - did Jesus know the ten commandments or was he an "idiot"? Mark 10:19 - You know the commandments: 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother (my emphasis).
So, did Jesus not know the ten commandments? Do not defraud is not, and never was, part of the ten commandments.
I have seen a number of "explanations" for these, all of them require the removal of a significant part of your brain.
Seems to me like a wise person would look at the fact that religious modes of thought exist in every culture around the world
Sexual abuse of children also exist in every culture around the world. That doesn't make it reasonable or acceptable. Religious modes of thought are irrational, one could say pathological modes of the mind, and I hesitate to call them "thought".
No, abandoning religion in favor of reason is not like abandoning a hammer in favor of a screwdriver, it is like a carpenter favoring a hammer over a Twinkie for work. Twinkies just aren't good tools for anything other than getting fat a lazy. They are generally bad for you. Just like religion. Any kind.
Massive exaggeration. The standard is evolving, and some of the earlier players were badly designed - who on earth builds non-upgradeable players today - but calling it a mess is a huge exaggeration.
Why is it that people conflate competition and competing formats? There was more competition in the Blu-Ray camp than there was in the HD DVD camp. Toshiba was dumping players, but there was still no real competition, Toshiba was the only (real) manufacturer. You can have competition when there is a single standard, no problem. There is, for example, competition in the DVD business, always has been. Are there more than one DVD format? Did the DivX fiasco add value for the consumer?
The format war would have made sure we had continued high prices for a long time to come since the war it self slowed down adoption. With slow adoption both consumers and producers will tend to do a lot of fence sitting, and that is not good for anybody since it takes longer to get to the benefits of economics of scale. Everybody but pirates benefits from this war being over.
Try any DL DVD burner and the HD DVD9 format (H.264 or VC9).
So, since when did a DL DVD burner burn HD DVD disks? It burns standard DVDs. Sure, you can burn a short HD movie to a DVD9, with, as you say, H.264 or VC-1 (not 9), but that is not burning a HD DVD disk. If it was, my DVD+R burner can burn Blu-Ray disks since it can burn an AVCHD disk onto a DVD9. A Blu-Ray AVCHD disk is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the "HD DVD9" format.
Most of the players on shelves right now are obsolete.
Why? Will they stop working in the future? Will they be unable to play Blu-Ray movies? Well, the answer to the first question is that they will stop working when they break, which is the case for any electronic equipment. The answer to the second is that any Blu-Ray player you buy today will play Blu-Ray movies released in the future. They may not be able to support all the new features, such as web-browsing from within your movie, but do you need that to watch the movie?
You do know that Warner got $500 million to go BD exclusive, right?
This is actually not correct. Warner decided to go Blu back in September '07 and they informed the HD DVD consortium relatively early - they had to with the legal implications. The HD DVD consortium started courting Warner and they offered significant incentives for Warner not to go Blu exclusive. In December the offer was $300M. The last meeting between Warner and the HD DVD association was just before CES, and it is possible that an offer of $500M was extended at that time, and that this is where the 500M number comes from. There was no $500M incentive offered from the Blu camp to entice Warner. That is pure myth. What is not pure myth is that Warner rebuffed the HD DVD consortium time and again, no matter how much they offered.
There was no reason for Warner to stay with HD DVD. In fact, it would have been really stupid of them. The current format war has significantly delayed the up-take in player adoption, and is currently a factor in the slowing in regular DVD sales (people are sitting on the fence). Going HD DVD would have indefinitely prolonged the war, to Warner's detriment. Going Blu exclusive was a healthy business decision, and the only rational thing Warner could do.
Where does MS come into this at all?
They are the main driving force behind HD DVD. Toshiba wanted to drop the format quite some time ago, but MS has been pressuring Tosh to keep it going. MS was also the entity behind the cash payout to Paramount when they switched (and yes, that payout has been confirmed, it is not pure fantasy like the Warner "payout").
the PS3 is the only worthwhile BD player out there.
Given that ignorance is bliss, you have to be seriously blissful. The PS3 isn't even considered the best Blu-Ray player, so your comment is absurd.
Eh, no, Blu-Rays typically have better sound than HD DVDs. You knew this, right?
it holds more data
all that matters is that both have plenty capacity to store Hi-Def films
Well, that is only partly true. The format must have the capacity to store the film (with the appropriate sound), but that is not the only thing. It also needs to be able to stream that film and that audio to the appropriate receiver and TV at maximum quality. The amount of data on the disk has no real bearing on what the film looks like, but the amount of data transferred from the disk to the TV does. Blu-Ray has significantly higher bandwidth than does HD DVD, so, when studios stop encoding for the minimum common denominator (HD DVD), we'll see even better movies.
Since Microsoft is much less involved in HD-DVD than Sony is in Blu-Ray, it is not only irrationnal, but a bit uninformed, to use Microsoft practices are a main argument to judge the HD-DVD format.
That's just funny. You are joking right? You can't be that uninformed. Microsoft is the sole reason that there is an HD DVD format. Toshiba wanted to drop this long ago but were persuaded by MS to keep it up.
Personnally if I had to choose between both I'd choose HD-DVD for the lack of region coding and the fact they have less DRM.
Personally I have chosen Blu-Ray to try to help end the war now. The reason is simple. MS is continuing to support this war because they want both formats to fail. If both formats fail then MS will be in a much stronger position to capture the download video on demand market with their VC-1 encoder and Media Center PCs. Do you really want Microsoft to own the entire distribution channel of your entertainment system?
Oh, and don't tell me that MS is just as bad/good as Sony, Sony doesn't own Blu-Ray.
Uh, no. HD-DVD mandates Managed Copy, completely cutting your argument to shreds.
So, if Blu-Ray supported Managed Copy, then your arguments would be completely cut to shreds? Note, Sony currently uses Managed Copy to distribute Blu-Ray movies from the PS3 to the PSP (or at least, that was the way I understood it).
Why we are having this discussion I am a little bit unsure of though. Toshiba has tried for two years to release a consumer or prosumer level burner, and have so far failed. You simply can't buy an HD DVD burner today, and I am willing to bet that you never will. This one is their latest attempt, and it simply didn't work according to testers.
I don't like being forced into buying a new player every time they want to update their specs.
Sigh. Why is it that all these HD DVD fans are always spouting this ignorance? Before you open your bigoted mouth, why don't you try to figure out the facts of the matter? Here is some advice for you: Better to keep your mouth shut and have people think you are an idiot than to open it and remove all doubt.
No, you don't have to get a new player to watch Blu-Ray movies in the future when the spec is updated. Your old player will work fine. It may not be able to surf the net, but you did buy the player to watch movies, right?
that would mean buying all new equipment to play it
This is blatantly obvious. In order for you to watch HD content you have to have, as a minimum, an HDTV. This is something many of us have already purchased. Why would I bother with a 42" TV with 720x480 resolution, that wouldn't have made sense. Of course I went with 1080p when I upgraded my TV.
All of my TV's are now HD
This contradicts what you are saying before. If they are already HD then you don't have to buy new TVs. Now, if the "now" in this statement means "after I finished buying all new equipment" as you said, again, that is obvious.
here is nothing on cable that to me would justify doubling the exhorbitant fee I pay every month to the cable company
I have basic cable plus internet only. In the basic cable all the channels that have both HD and SD content are included in both SD and HD. In other words, I don't have to pay a single dime extra for HD content. I don't think the cable companies differ in this regard. You say you don't have digital cable, but that is only going to be true for another few months, won't it? I mean, its all digital all the way from next year.
there is nothing on disc that would justify me buying new players
You just said that you were considering buying the re-release of Blade Runner. That contradicts your statement above. Have you watched the latest release of Blade Runner in HD? I mean 1080p HD in all it's glory on a nice 42" or bigger 1080p TV? With the new soundtrack? It is amazing.
HD doesn't improve the quality of the idiotic programs that today qualify as "entertainment".
But it sure makes Blade Runner look real purdy. I was too young to see the film as it was released in theaters, and these days the quality of the film when it comes to those odd theaters here and there that show it, is not stellar. I have owned every version of Blade Runner on digital format, I love that one. The latest release alone justifies my selecting a 1080p TV when I needed to upgrade, and the PS3 my wife got me for my birthday (no games ever played on it) was a very worthwhile investment since it is an excellent entertainment center. I can now watch every single DVD I have, all stored on my nice RAID drive on my PC in my office, far away from my living room, at the click (or three) of my PS3 remote. I can watch all the digital pictures and movies I have shot my self. I can also listen to all of my music, ripped to MP3 and stored on my PC. None of this requires I go to my PC and do anything at all any more.
Oh, and we were chatting with some guests the other day about a funny YouTube thing we had seen. They wanted to see it. Voila, I pull it up on my HDTV in my living room using just my remote. No PC. No computer. No putting down the beer and walking into my office to watch it on my PC monitor.
I love the digital, interconnected, networked world and when it also comes in high def, great.
Why, exactly? One would think that competition in ideas and standards would be just as healthy as a competition in the products themselves.
It is. Competition is good also in ideas. In this case Blu-Ray, which is the technically superior format, won the war. Sadly, the fact that a Microsoft funded Toshiba continues the fight just means that we will have more senseless damage to innocent bystanders and no different outcome in the end.
In this battle Toshiba is Microsoft's paid assassin, and the only thing MS wants out of this is to make sure all disk-based formats fail and Microsoft's download formats win. If you think the DRM for Blu-Ray is problematic, just wait until you are forced to purchase a new PC with the latest version of Windows Vista or whatever virus distribution tool Microsoft creates next, every two years just to watch high-def movies.
do you have any blu-ray movies? Don't they disclaim that they won't work in all blu-ray movie players?
Some of the early Blu-Ray players (and HD DVD players for that matter) had software issues that made them incompatible with some newer Blu-Ray movies. The disclaimer points out that if a movie doesn't play in your player, you need to update the player with new firmware. Both Blu-Ray and HD DVD players have had a number of firmware updates due to such problems.
So what is the advantage HD0DVD has that makes up for the seemingly fundamental major technical inferiorities, such as bitrate and capacity?
It's easier (at least in theory) to make illegal copies of an HD DVD movie.
They say HD DVD is more similar to DVD. Does this mean long-term or short-term savings? And how much were those HD-DVD players before Toshiba subsidy?
The physical structure of an HD DVD is similar to that of a DVD. How this is an advantage, given how easy it is to scratch DVDs is something I am not certain about. Twelve months ago this similarity meant that pressing HD DVDs was a bit less expensive than pressing Blu-Ray disks. Today that price difference is only a few cents. As for the price of HD DVD players, since the players are extremely similar, component wise, to a Blu-Ray player, the cost of manufacturing an HD DVD player is similar to the cost of manufacturing a Blu-Ray player. In the store they would therefore have similar price tags unless someone was dumping. Toshiba is the only producer of HD DVD players, and with Microsoft support they are dumping them on the market at below cost.
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Well, if it was, it was a defiant son. Nobody has ever written as good a response to the "why not overthrow Saddam" as George H. W. Bush did back in the 90s. His reasons were sound then and they were sound in 2003 when his dumb-ass son decided to go against his fathers advice and kill a large number of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. It is fairly well known that Daddy Bush despises the cronies who was behind the war in Iraq and that he was strongly opposed to it all the way. Daddy Bush has a brain you see, and he uses it.
BZZZT! Wrong. There is no way they could have planted WMDs in Iraq without being found out. This is based on the reality that in order for them to do so they would have had to involve too many people. With that many people involved, you will have a leak. Guaranteed. If they could have planted WMDs they would have done it to avoid the embarrassment that ensued. Why didn't they?
Never in our history has a more arrogant and self-righteous bunch of nut-cases run our government. Their sense of entitlement surpasses that of a five year old only-child from a rich family. In reality, they didn't give a shit about the fact that there were no WMDs there. And frankly, neither did the US population. Long after it was clear that there was no WMDs in Iraq the US population supported the war. In fact, well after the fiasco of the WMDs became clear, more than 70% of the US population thought that there was a link between terrorists (of the kind that his us on 9/11) and Iraq. In reality there never was, and even today the link is tenuous at best. The vast majority of the Iraqi insurgency is run by Iraqis and for Iraqis, and no, fighting an illegal occupation is not, and has never been terrorism.
Man, you have to stop drinking the cool aid. Really. You are mixing and matching grossly here. Not that that is a surprise, the Bush administration has done so for a long time.
Now, to what you are talking about. The gassing of one part of the Iraqi population and the mass graves which contained another part of the Iraqi population. These two are not related. You knew that right? Let us take the first one. Gassing.
In the late 70s and 80s Saddam did indeed gass Kurds and probably also Iranians. The total number is not extremely high but it is too high. One would be too high. Why did he do it? Well, he was at war with Iran and the Kurds in the north were always a problem. Where did he get the gass from? He got it from Germany. Why did the Germans sell him the gas? Because the US government couldn't be directly involved. That is why the US government went to the Germans and asked them to sell Saddam the gas. In other words, Saddam killed those people with our blessing and our assistance.
Now, to the mass graves. They are from the Shiite uprising in the early 90s. It was what you could call a civil war. After we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait the Shiites tried to take power through an armed uprising. We encouraged them, told them we'd help them and promptly abandoned them. Not that it mattered all that much.
In a civil war people die. In the US civil war a lot of people died. When a lot of people die in war we tend to bury them in mass graves. Particularly in areas where it is really hot. In the Shiite uprising a very large number of people died. When the Bush administration talks about how many people Saddam killed, they always site the number including the Shiite uprising. This is disingenuous at best. You can't really blame Saddam for their death any more than you can blame Lincoln for the people who dies in the Civil War in the US or Washington for the people who died in the US fight for freedom against the Brits. In civil wars people die. Bad but unavoidable.
As for rape rooms and such, torture is sadly apparently perfectly fine today. I don't see how the US torturing people at Guantanamo is different from Saddam torturing people trying to overthrow his government. Honestly. The difference is cosmetic at best.
This is correct, but the administration wasn't wrong. They willfully, purposefully and with malicious intent presented a case for which there was no real support. They directed the intelligence service to produce results that matched policy and punished anyone who refused to cooperate.
The war in Iraq had one, and only one, purpose. To transfer as many tax dollars from mine and your pocket into the pockets of what a very smart president warned us about, namely the military-industrial complex. Nobody ever believed there were WMDs in Iraq. Not anyone with a brain anyway. The CIA had specifically stated that there was no Al Quaeda in Iraq either, so going in for that reason would be absurd. According to CIA Zarqawi was a blow-hole with no real Al Quaeda connections. Well, they thought so pre 2002 anyway. Oh, and no, the intelligence services weren't wrong about the WMDs, they were just never allowed to say what they really thought.
We have caused the death of 4000 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. For what? So that the wife of some CEO in Haliburton could get a face lift and a liposuction? For the thousands upon thousands of American soldiers who come home with less limbs than they had before they went. These boys traded their limbs for a nose job for the wife of a Blackwater executive. Is that a price America should be willing to pay?
As we are pouring trillions of tax dollars into the pockets of corporate America the administration has conveniently forgotten who perpetrated the terrorist acts of 9/11. That dude is sitting over in Afghanistan/Pakistan where we have no soldiers hunting for him. He's as safe as someone in Kentucky. Nobody in the administration could give a rats ass about getting him and bringing him to justice. Why? Because they have not found a way to do that in such a manner that they can pour more money on their friends. Any situation where corporations make more money out of government contracts than out of competing in the market place is a situation where the country is fairing badly. The Bush administration has made it far more attractive to have lobbyists in DC than to actually do efficient business.
Oh, and for the record, I am not a left-wing nut job. I would consider my self a republican if it had not been for the fact that the party is now entirely run by people who believe in big government, all power in Washington and the state meddling in any and all affairs of the individual. Also, we should not forget that almost no president in US history has added to the federal budget with the speed GWB has. That is also true if you keep the entire budget for the war out of the equation. Not since the "New Deal" has a president done so much damage to the economy as the current nut-job has. We paid for the "New Deal" for at least three decades. We are going to pay the price for this lunatic for at least as long, probably longer.
In other words, for the true conservatives among us, George W. Bush and his cronies are big-time socialists of the kind that the world haven't seen since Stalin. In fact I do not know a single world leader in history that remind me more of Stalin than does George W. Bush. They have so much in common it is scary. The communists finally took Washington, and nobody even noticed.
Just curious, what amendments is it that you think the ACLU doesn't support. They clearly support the 2nd, so that ends that discussion. What do you actually mean by "picking and chosing"?
Well, by quoting selectively we can find support for anything and everything anywhere. The 2nd doesn't say "all individuals" or "everybody" or "any person". It says "a well regulated militia". This is where the problem comes in. How do you define a "well regulated militia"? The ACLU interprets it the same way that the Supreme Court does, which means that having some limitations on who can an can not "bear arms" is not unconstitutional. I am, to my knowledge, not a member of any "well regulated militia" so the 2nd amendment doesn't necessarily give me the right to "bear arms".
Huh? I love that "logic". Nobody has denied that religion exists. Of course religion exists. The fact that religion exists doesn't mean that any of the many gods the different religions believe in exists though. Belief in Santa is approaching near universal coverage in a certain age group. That doesn't mean he's real.
There are a number of theories why humans have become religious. The problem for the "logic" you are trying to build here is that your logic would only make sense if there was one religion, and that has been the only religion throughout time. That is not the case. There are a number of religions in the world, most of them are vastly different from the other religions that does exist and have existed throughout time. Each of these religions have exactly the same probability of being the one true religion. That, of course, is only possible in reality if that probability is about zero.
Only in the eyes and minds of the extraordinarily ignorant.
Those are the words of the religious community. I do not believe in science or evolution any more than I believe in gravity or oxygen. Saying that anyone believes oxygen exists is absurd. Science is not something you believe in, science is a set of methods used to describe and try to explain what we observe. Science and belief do not belong in the same world, science is the opposite of belief. That doesn't mean that science is to know, science is only "to explore" without pre-conceived notions. The opposite of belief.
How? Absolutely. We are well along the way to explain that. "God" can't explain "how". Religious people have tried and tried again and again to use "Godt" to explain "how". It doesn't work. At best "God" can explain "why", but that is an absurd question.
There are a number of books that have given pretty good answers to that. I would recommend Dawkins "The God Delusion" since it not only proposes a very good answer, but because it also covers a number of other answers to this.
There need not be any evolutionary benefit to religion. Humans and animals have all developed a vast number of traits that have no evolutionary benefit, some are even directly harmful. This is well known in biology, and it is dealt with in a number of excellent texts. In short, some times we develop traits that are bi-products of useful traits. That is, the trait in and of it self is not useful, but it developed as a bi-product of developing a useful trait. It seems highly probable that religion is such a trait.
When it comes to the evolutionary benefit of sexual abuse, that is rape of either adults or non-adults, that should be self-evident. It's evolutionary benefit is self-evident. My genes wants to get spread to the next generation and they couldn't give a rats ass about whether the carrier of my progeny is pregnant of her own free will or the result of my forcing her. The question you should rather ask is what evolutionary trait monogamy has, since it seems to run counter to the purpose of evolution.
Note to those of limited intellectual capability: I do not advocate rape above, I am just pointing out that in a strict gene-spreading sense it is rational.
This is one of those interesting explanations. Please show me where you find support for this explanation in the bible. Given the bible as the source of this, your statement above is 100% fabrication. It is called post-rationalization, and it is never particularly sensible.
Again, an explanation that is absurd in the extreme, but makes total sense when you are incapable of using logic on your belief system. It is a pity that you try. Really. It doesn't work. The statement from Jesus is directly applicable to the commandments, and not to Leviticus law as such. The explanation for the problem is a lot easier, and if you study (rather than just read or memorize) the bible, you can even find support for this in the bible it self.
Why does Mark have Jesus quote the ten commandments wrong? Because the author of Mark, whoever he was, didn't know Jewish law and traditions all that well. This isn't the only place where this comes through. Where do you find support for this in the bible? In Luke. If you look at the text of Luke (not the English version, you'd need to study it a lot harder than that) you will find that the author of Luke, whoever he was, wrote the text he wrote with a specific purpose, and he had some good sources. Last first. His sources were Mark, Matthew and the lost text often referred to as 'Q'. It is quite clear from Luke, in the way the author uses words etc, that he at times copies Mark and Matthew verbatim. In other places he leaves things from these guys out, but copies 'Q' and probably also adds from other texts. What purpose did the author of Luke have when he wrote his text? He wanted to correct some mistakes in Mark and Matthew. Not just the famous misquote of the ten commandments. If you read Mark and Matthew it is clear that they believe Jesus will return rather soon. Luke, written quite a lot later, does not have as much faith in the immediate return of Christ. This is one of those hilarious things in the bible. It contains two gospels, and the one that was written to fix the errors and problems in the two. Funny in the extreme.
By the way, why does the bible contain four gospels? And why these four in particular? When did that happen? As late as 324AD there were far more gospels circulating than these four? In 325 we suddenly agree on four? Do you know why? Probably not. Let me enlighten you. Imagine a crazy munch from France (a tad inaccurate, but close enough). He is frantically trying to determine what gospels are correct and which are wrong. He is thinking and thinking and he is writing a book. Suddenly it hits him, there are four directions of the heavens, North, South, East and West, so ipso facto, the bible must have four gospels. Yeeeeahh! I got it. Not only did he get it, he wrote a whole book in defense of this absurd idea. The book was brought to Nicea by a heathen Roman who wanted to use Christianity to affirm his position as the ruler of the world, and therefore he needed a united Christian idea. The heathen Roman emperor forced the religious leaders to agree on a single text, and then he ruthlessly persecuted anyone who didn't agree with them.
The history of the bible is a great read, and the fact that its creation was, in reality, forced by a non-Christian Roman emperor just to solidify his power base is only one of the many fun facts. The fact that it has four books just because we have North, South, East and West is another fun anecdote.
Oh, and by the way, the four gospels were chosen because they were, at that point in time, the four best sellers. At the time buying a full bible was out of reach of most people. They would have been enormously expensive. People bought in
No contradictions? Did you ever read the bible? It is chock full of contradictions and bizarre errors. We are currently talking about Genesis which comes in various versions with a different sequence of creation. In one things are created in the following order:
Sky, Earth, light - Water - Plants - Sun, Moon, stars - Sea monsters, fish etc - Humans (together apparently)
OK, so that is one sequence... let's look at the other sequence
Earth and heavens - Adam(on a desolate Earth) - Plants - Animals - Eve
So, who got created first, plants or Adam? Animals or Eve?
As a side question - did Jesus know the ten commandments or was he an "idiot"? Mark 10:19 - You know the commandments: 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother (my emphasis).
So, did Jesus not know the ten commandments? Do not defraud is not, and never was, part of the ten commandments.
I have seen a number of "explanations" for these, all of them require the removal of a significant part of your brain.
Which of them do I have to accept? They contradict each other.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
-- Denis Diderot
Sexual abuse of children also exist in every culture around the world. That doesn't make it reasonable or acceptable. Religious modes of thought are irrational, one could say pathological modes of the mind, and I hesitate to call them "thought".
No, abandoning religion in favor of reason is not like abandoning a hammer in favor of a screwdriver, it is like a carpenter favoring a hammer over a Twinkie for work. Twinkies just aren't good tools for anything other than getting fat a lazy. They are generally bad for you. Just like religion. Any kind.
Massive exaggeration. The standard is evolving, and some of the earlier players were badly designed - who on earth builds non-upgradeable players today - but calling it a mess is a huge exaggeration.
Why is it that people conflate competition and competing formats? There was more competition in the Blu-Ray camp than there was in the HD DVD camp. Toshiba was dumping players, but there was still no real competition, Toshiba was the only (real) manufacturer. You can have competition when there is a single standard, no problem. There is, for example, competition in the DVD business, always has been. Are there more than one DVD format? Did the DivX fiasco add value for the consumer?
The format war would have made sure we had continued high prices for a long time to come since the war it self slowed down adoption. With slow adoption both consumers and producers will tend to do a lot of fence sitting, and that is not good for anybody since it takes longer to get to the benefits of economics of scale. Everybody but pirates benefits from this war being over.
Only if you can squeeze the same amount of information through the thinner HD DVD pipe.
So, since when did a DL DVD burner burn HD DVD disks? It burns standard DVDs. Sure, you can burn a short HD movie to a DVD9, with, as you say, H.264 or VC-1 (not 9), but that is not burning a HD DVD disk. If it was, my DVD+R burner can burn Blu-Ray disks since it can burn an AVCHD disk onto a DVD9. A Blu-Ray AVCHD disk is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the "HD DVD9" format.
Why? Will they stop working in the future? Will they be unable to play Blu-Ray movies? Well, the answer to the first question is that they will stop working when they break, which is the case for any electronic equipment. The answer to the second is that any Blu-Ray player you buy today will play Blu-Ray movies released in the future. They may not be able to support all the new features, such as web-browsing from within your movie, but do you need that to watch the movie?
This is actually not correct. Warner decided to go Blu back in September '07 and they informed the HD DVD consortium relatively early - they had to with the legal implications. The HD DVD consortium started courting Warner and they offered significant incentives for Warner not to go Blu exclusive. In December the offer was $300M. The last meeting between Warner and the HD DVD association was just before CES, and it is possible that an offer of $500M was extended at that time, and that this is where the 500M number comes from. There was no $500M incentive offered from the Blu camp to entice Warner. That is pure myth. What is not pure myth is that Warner rebuffed the HD DVD consortium time and again, no matter how much they offered.
There was no reason for Warner to stay with HD DVD. In fact, it would have been really stupid of them. The current format war has significantly delayed the up-take in player adoption, and is currently a factor in the slowing in regular DVD sales (people are sitting on the fence). Going HD DVD would have indefinitely prolonged the war, to Warner's detriment. Going Blu exclusive was a healthy business decision, and the only rational thing Warner could do.
They are the main driving force behind HD DVD. Toshiba wanted to drop the format quite some time ago, but MS has been pressuring Tosh to keep it going. MS was also the entity behind the cash payout to Paramount when they switched (and yes, that payout has been confirmed, it is not pure fantasy like the Warner "payout").
Given that ignorance is bliss, you have to be seriously blissful. The PS3 isn't even considered the best Blu-Ray player, so your comment is absurd.
Eh, no, Blu-Rays typically have better sound than HD DVDs. You knew this, right?
Well, that is only partly true. The format must have the capacity to store the film (with the appropriate sound), but that is not the only thing. It also needs to be able to stream that film and that audio to the appropriate receiver and TV at maximum quality. The amount of data on the disk has no real bearing on what the film looks like, but the amount of data transferred from the disk to the TV does. Blu-Ray has significantly higher bandwidth than does HD DVD, so, when studios stop encoding for the minimum common denominator (HD DVD), we'll see even better movies.
That's just funny. You are joking right? You can't be that uninformed. Microsoft is the sole reason that there is an HD DVD format. Toshiba wanted to drop this long ago but were persuaded by MS to keep it up.
Personally I have chosen Blu-Ray to try to help end the war now. The reason is simple. MS is continuing to support this war because they want both formats to fail. If both formats fail then MS will be in a much stronger position to capture the download video on demand market with their VC-1 encoder and Media Center PCs. Do you really want Microsoft to own the entire distribution channel of your entertainment system?
Oh, and don't tell me that MS is just as bad/good as Sony, Sony doesn't own Blu-Ray.
So, if Blu-Ray supported Managed Copy, then your arguments would be completely cut to shreds? Note, Sony currently uses Managed Copy to distribute Blu-Ray movies from the PS3 to the PSP (or at least, that was the way I understood it).
Why we are having this discussion I am a little bit unsure of though. Toshiba has tried for two years to release a consumer or prosumer level burner, and have so far failed. You simply can't buy an HD DVD burner today, and I am willing to bet that you never will. This one is their latest attempt, and it simply didn't work according to testers.
Sigh. Why is it that all these HD DVD fans are always spouting this ignorance? Before you open your bigoted mouth, why don't you try to figure out the facts of the matter? Here is some advice for you: Better to keep your mouth shut and have people think you are an idiot than to open it and remove all doubt.
No, you don't have to get a new player to watch Blu-Ray movies in the future when the spec is updated. Your old player will work fine. It may not be able to surf the net, but you did buy the player to watch movies, right?
Looks terrible, but that isn't much different from my PC.
They did (players were at $99). It didn't (it is now officially dead).
This is blatantly obvious. In order for you to watch HD content you have to have, as a minimum, an HDTV. This is something many of us have already purchased. Why would I bother with a 42" TV with 720x480 resolution, that wouldn't have made sense. Of course I went with 1080p when I upgraded my TV.
This contradicts what you are saying before. If they are already HD then you don't have to buy new TVs. Now, if the "now" in this statement means "after I finished buying all new equipment" as you said, again, that is obvious.
I have basic cable plus internet only. In the basic cable all the channels that have both HD and SD content are included in both SD and HD. In other words, I don't have to pay a single dime extra for HD content. I don't think the cable companies differ in this regard. You say you don't have digital cable, but that is only going to be true for another few months, won't it? I mean, its all digital all the way from next year.
You just said that you were considering buying the re-release of Blade Runner. That contradicts your statement above. Have you watched the latest release of Blade Runner in HD? I mean 1080p HD in all it's glory on a nice 42" or bigger 1080p TV? With the new soundtrack? It is amazing.
But it sure makes Blade Runner look real purdy. I was too young to see the film as it was released in theaters, and these days the quality of the film when it comes to those odd theaters here and there that show it, is not stellar. I have owned every version of Blade Runner on digital format, I love that one. The latest release alone justifies my selecting a 1080p TV when I needed to upgrade, and the PS3 my wife got me for my birthday (no games ever played on it) was a very worthwhile investment since it is an excellent entertainment center. I can now watch every single DVD I have, all stored on my nice RAID drive on my PC in my office, far away from my living room, at the click (or three) of my PS3 remote. I can watch all the digital pictures and movies I have shot my self. I can also listen to all of my music, ripped to MP3 and stored on my PC. None of this requires I go to my PC and do anything at all any more.
Oh, and we were chatting with some guests the other day about a funny YouTube thing we had seen. They wanted to see it. Voila, I pull it up on my HDTV in my living room using just my remote. No PC. No computer. No putting down the beer and walking into my office to watch it on my PC monitor.
I love the digital, interconnected, networked world and when it also comes in high def, great.
Rubbish. Read it again before continuing to spread your ignorance.
It is. Competition is good also in ideas. In this case Blu-Ray, which is the technically superior format, won the war. Sadly, the fact that a Microsoft funded Toshiba continues the fight just means that we will have more senseless damage to innocent bystanders and no different outcome in the end.
In this battle Toshiba is Microsoft's paid assassin, and the only thing MS wants out of this is to make sure all disk-based formats fail and Microsoft's download formats win. If you think the DRM for Blu-Ray is problematic, just wait until you are forced to purchase a new PC with the latest version of Windows Vista or whatever virus distribution tool Microsoft creates next, every two years just to watch high-def movies.
Some of the early Blu-Ray players (and HD DVD players for that matter) had software issues that made them incompatible with some newer Blu-Ray movies. The disclaimer points out that if a movie doesn't play in your player, you need to update the player with new firmware. Both Blu-Ray and HD DVD players have had a number of firmware updates due to such problems.
It's easier (at least in theory) to make illegal copies of an HD DVD movie.
The physical structure of an HD DVD is similar to that of a DVD. How this is an advantage, given how easy it is to scratch DVDs is something I am not certain about. Twelve months ago this similarity meant that pressing HD DVDs was a bit less expensive than pressing Blu-Ray disks. Today that price difference is only a few cents. As for the price of HD DVD players, since the players are extremely similar, component wise, to a Blu-Ray player, the cost of manufacturing an HD DVD player is similar to the cost of manufacturing a Blu-Ray player. In the store they would therefore have similar price tags unless someone was dumping. Toshiba is the only producer of HD DVD players, and with Microsoft support they are dumping them on the market at below cost.