I gave you hard numbers and facts. You provided none. You provided empty rhetoric and flames. Perhaps you failed to notice, but I'm done. When I kindly asked someone to downmod you for being a Troll, I was implying that I don't consider you worth my time.
Someone said that Bush was responsible for killing 40,000 Iraqi civilians. I was directly responding to that statement. Stabilizing a region of 30 million lives at risk is a difficult task. And one can not blame Bush alone for the acts of militant factions who want to see each other dead, and were killing each other before we came along.
Treason? Please explain to me how he committed treason otherwise I'm calling Troll and moving along.
One could argue Bush Sr. committed treason when he sold arms in the Iran-Contra affair. One could argue Clinton committed treason when he took money illegally from the Chinese government and then changed policy in regards to China afterwards.
Initially you raise a good point. One should not justify ass-hattery with other ass-hattery. And I said that Bush is a prick. I'm not defending him. I am however pointing out hyperbole. These are not the darkest days in the world.
The things we need to be holding Bush accountable for are rarely mentioned in the press, because actual facts and policy are hidden under media spin.
Most people in this country firmly believe that Bush lied to get us in this war. Everyone I've asked seems convinced he created a situation to steal oil. Did you know we haven't taken one drop of oil? Did you know we're not taking money from Iraq? Did you know we've spent near $200 billion of our dollars on Iraq?
See, perception and reality are often different. I am a stickler for facts.
I believe that Bush believed he did what was right. I believe he operated on the intel that he was given. And one could argue the legal validity of the war. The UN did recognize it as being legal after the fact for one, and the UN in 1991 gave us right to go into Iraq. The cease-fire was only on the grounds of total complicity on the part of Iraq, whom the UN found in violation some 70 times. The UN Security Council then voted unanimously to give them one final warning, which Iraq then violated again.
Iran is demonstrating right now that the UN means nothing. No one respects UN law.
I also believe that arrogance in our military leaders prevented them from forseeing the outcome of the scenario. Despite our incredible technology, it is hard to fight an enemy that doesn't wear a uniform, uses human shields, and suicide bombers.
How do you design an exit strategy when you can't even tell when the country is secure? See, there are problems with what happened.
And I certainly hate much of Bush's policy. But when someone makes a BS statement, I will call BS on it.
Now, I asked you a serious question. What actual civil rights have we lost? Do you have an answer?
I partake in this very debate on a regular basis. I hope you did your homework.
Odd. Clinton bombed 4 countries and didn't form a single alliance.
Serbia, Iraq, Syria, and Aghanistan. You can look it up.
The countries that are at odds with the US have been for a long time. Many people just didn't realize it. Americans are so self-centered it barely occured to them that people might resent our power, wealth and politics.
If you think people in the Middle East only started to hate the US recently, then perhaps you can explain the past 30 years of terrorist attacks, or the people who spend millions to fund terrorist camps.
You still stated that we are currently living in the darkest days since Jim Crow laws. I'm just playing devil's advocate. Clinton intentionally turned his back on China's human rights violations, which include ACTUAL torture and transmigration (killing off the male population, colonizing and breeding a people out of existence).
But stripping a guy down in front of a woman trumps that in your book.
The primary motivator behind much of the Muslim/American conflicts stems over Israel, which isn't exactly a new issue.
Let me just play devil's advocate for a second. Mind you I'm a liberal. But while Clinton was in office, China was threatening Taiwan with nuclear missles and practicing transmigration (a small step removed from Genocide). The UN was up in arms. China was also pirating billions of dollars of American IP. Businesses were up in arms. Both demanded action.
Clinton went over to China, lessened tariffs and gave them favored trading partner status, which hurt our economy. He also took campaign money from Chinese officials which was against the law, and then a Chinese official was found buried in Arlington National Cemetary. The guy sold out our country to one of the worst regimes on the planet.
That was a direct decision on Clinton's behalf. Under Bush's presidency, some soldiers attempting to gather information that may be necessary to save lives humiliated Muslim men by interrogating them nude in front of women.
Is that torture? Were they permanently injured? Are scare tactics truly torture? Where do you draw the line? How would you interrogate people and obtain information if lives were on the line?
Which is the worse situation?
We exist in a land of hyperbole. Everyone swears the world is ending. Every civil right is gone. These are the darkest days.
As a fellow liberal, I say bullshit. Read about the reconstruction of the South sometime. Have you seen how Russia responded to terroism? Do you want to talk about rolling back the clock on civil rights? In England, they shoot innocent civilians on the street because they ran from the cops. No evidence, no problem. We're not talking about holding prisoners, they shoot people just for running and Blair said it was okay. He said national security trumps everything, and if the cops have to carry guns and shoot potential suspects, then so be it.
The truth is that our civil rights haven't greatly been rolled back. This particular decision in the article is sad to see. But let me ask you, what damage to our civil rights actually occurred over the past few years? Do you know, or are you regurgitating media hype?
Surely Bush is solely responsible for the death of Iraqi civilians, and not the militant forces that were at civil war and practiced genocide on their own people.
The Sunni and Kurds were getting along just fine before we came along. They never gassed their own people, raped them, drove them out of their homes and into hiding in the mountains. They never blocked food or water from the cities.
Nope, not at all.
Bush may be a fuck-head, but 30 million Iraqi lives were in very uncertain status before we came along. And while I'm sure everyone wants the situation to be resolved as soon as possible, there are a great deal number of people over there who were very grateful to have Americans there, and for the regime change. My friend just got back from Iraq.
For once I'd like to see some non-partisan fact-based news reporting. I'm sure the war could have been handled better. I wish we had a better exit strategy. But saying that Bush is responsible for the deaths of 40,000 civilians is far from a fair statement, yet it is the only statement you will hear from the press.
I don't believe in posting as an AC. Please forgive this being a bit off-topic, but I'm trying to answer a question.
My problems with Ubuntu are three-fold.
1 - Gnome based. I know plenty of people love it, and Ubuntu is the most popular distro around these days. I'm all for choice, and if Gnome does it for you, then more power for you. However Gnome is built upon the predication that their users are stupid. I don't want to be patronized by my software. There is no need for a major Gnome/KDE battle here, but I spent some time researching both so that I could make my decision on which to go with.
I think KDE is a stronger toolkit than GTK+. I think C++ is a better language to code in that C. I think OOP is the way to go. I think KDE looks nicer. I think the UI is much more robust. I think KDE is far more feature rich.
The negatives were supposedly bloat and performance, but actual real world benchmarks show both performing right around the same. Again, these are all my opinions. But the real kicker was reading actual posts by Gnome developers saying that the system needs to be dumbed down because users can't understand it.
2 - What does Ubuntu do better than other distros? SuSE, Mandriva and many others are just as easy to install and use. Many other distros come with Gnome and the same software. What exactly is the specific benefit of Ubuntu? If there is no real benefit that I see over any other distro.
3 - It is the most popular distro, which frustrates me to an extent. Everyone constantly praises it and recommends it. I feel like conformity seems more important than quality, and in a supposed informed community like the Linux-verse, it is sad to see this is the case.
I know this is rather presumptive, but I imagine if people tried other distros and did research they'd find something better. Instead they settle./rant
But the Steve Jobs line? Apple wins in marketing and sexiness these days. However, they sold stock to Microsoft and helped launch IE and Office on the Mac. Then they jumped to a BSD-base and broke compatibility with all their apps. Then they jumped to Intel which they swore they would never do. They they released a program to help you install Windows on a Mac. And then they went back on their kernel being open-source.
(Maybe that is why they went with BSD instead of Linux in the first place. They couldn't rewrite their kernel off GPL code then close it after the fact).
I'm not trying to dog on Apple. Disagreeing with the almighty Apple is sure to get you labeled as a Troll, but I don't see consistency with said company.
I should consider it an honor when someone breaks into my house and steals my TV? They consider it worthy of being stolen after all.
Look, I know I won't get much sympathy for the film and music industry here, and perhaps rightfully so. However billions and billions are stolen from the US alone from China every year. Where as consumers in the US still pay for music, movies, software, etc. perhaps half the time, 86% piracy rate exists in China, and if I had to guess, I'd wager that a large part of the 14% that isn't pirated is home grown.
When you miss out on 1.3 BILLION consumers because they are allowed to steal from you without anyone caring to enforce IP rights, then I don't think China is allowed to take the moral high ground on such issues.
"for ur ignorance", China's population is over 1.3 billion people. With a piracy rate of 86%, that would make 1,123,429,878 pirates. That would make them the largest pirate nation in the world.
YaST would still exist as the SuSE installer and configuration tool. But here is why YaST can't be used anywhere else. SuSE puts configuation files, and the whole file structure in different places than anyone else. So they write this great tool, and most of the Linux community doesn't get to see it.
I saw that list, but it is by percentages. Take said percentage, and multiply it by the population and China becomes the largest pirate nation on the planet.
Given a choice between Mandriva and Ubuntu, I'd take Madriva any day of the week. Honestly, I'm not sure why distros like Mandriva and Suse haven't become more popular with the first-time Linux user crowd. They are simple to install, simple to use, and well, I don't really want to get into Ubuntu.
As I said in another post, she is impatient. That's why I couldn't install Gentoo on her laptop. She shouldn't have to hunt and find something.
The funny thing is that I put on Beagle to speed up searches on her laptop, but I don't think she ever used it. Like me, she is anal in how she organizes things. Having a good file structure means you don't have to hunt for items. All Beagle did was take up over 2 gigs with indexing data. Sheesh!
(Side note, but I think an even happier medium is virtual folders by grouping via meta-data. I know that this has been discussed in both the Windows and Linux world, and I can't wait for a decent implentation of said idea).
However I disagree that the attitude only exists with teenagers. I absolutely love OSS software. I love the concept. However, especially with F/OSS, the author really doesn't owe us anything, so when they get pestered with requests they often respond in indignant fashion.
They made their program the way they made it, and who is anyone else to suggest it should be changed?
Because of the informal nature of OSS software, and the lack of standards, the products often look unprofessional, despite the functionality, which often surpasses commercial software.
The GNU/Linux community needs a spit-shine when it comes to small details.
I just don't understand the need for binaries to be placed in ten different locations arbitrarily. I understand somewhat why the structure started the way it did, for security purposes. But security permissions have evolved a great deal, and a much simpler tree I believe is best.
Do we really need anything past:/home/usr/var/bin/src/tmp
Maybe/log?
Would it be so horrific to have a simple tree with all binaries branching from the/bin folder?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't respond to Trolls, nor personal attacks.
I gave you hard numbers and facts. You provided none. You provided empty rhetoric and flames. Perhaps you failed to notice, but I'm done. When I kindly asked someone to downmod you for being a Troll, I was implying that I don't consider you worth my time.
I hope that is more clear.
Someone said that Bush was responsible for killing 40,000 Iraqi civilians. I was directly responding to that statement. Stabilizing a region of 30 million lives at risk is a difficult task. And one can not blame Bush alone for the acts of militant factions who want to see each other dead, and were killing each other before we came along.
Treason? Please explain to me how he committed treason otherwise I'm calling Troll and moving along.
One could argue Bush Sr. committed treason when he sold arms in the Iran-Contra affair. One could argue Clinton committed treason when he took money illegally from the Chinese government and then changed policy in regards to China afterwards.
How the hell did Bush Jr. commit treason?
The things we need to be holding Bush accountable for are rarely mentioned in the press, because actual facts and policy are hidden under media spin.
Most people in this country firmly believe that Bush lied to get us in this war. Everyone I've asked seems convinced he created a situation to steal oil. Did you know we haven't taken one drop of oil? Did you know we're not taking money from Iraq? Did you know we've spent near $200 billion of our dollars on Iraq?
See, perception and reality are often different. I am a stickler for facts.
I believe that Bush believed he did what was right. I believe he operated on the intel that he was given. And one could argue the legal validity of the war. The UN did recognize it as being legal after the fact for one, and the UN in 1991 gave us right to go into Iraq. The cease-fire was only on the grounds of total complicity on the part of Iraq, whom the UN found in violation some 70 times. The UN Security Council then voted unanimously to give them one final warning, which Iraq then violated again.
Iran is demonstrating right now that the UN means nothing. No one respects UN law.
I also believe that arrogance in our military leaders prevented them from forseeing the outcome of the scenario. Despite our incredible technology, it is hard to fight an enemy that doesn't wear a uniform, uses human shields, and suicide bombers.
How do you design an exit strategy when you can't even tell when the country is secure? See, there are problems with what happened.
And I certainly hate much of Bush's policy. But when someone makes a BS statement, I will call BS on it.
Now, I asked you a serious question. What actual civil rights have we lost? Do you have an answer?
I partake in this very debate on a regular basis. I hope you did your homework.
Someone please downmod the above Troll.
Odd. Clinton bombed 4 countries and didn't form a single alliance.
Serbia, Iraq, Syria, and Aghanistan. You can look it up.
The countries that are at odds with the US have been for a long time. Many people just didn't realize it. Americans are so self-centered it barely occured to them that people might resent our power, wealth and politics.
If you think people in the Middle East only started to hate the US recently, then perhaps you can explain the past 30 years of terrorist attacks, or the people who spend millions to fund terrorist camps.
You still stated that we are currently living in the darkest days since Jim Crow laws. I'm just playing devil's advocate. Clinton intentionally turned his back on China's human rights violations, which include ACTUAL torture and transmigration (killing off the male population, colonizing and breeding a people out of existence).
But stripping a guy down in front of a woman trumps that in your book.
The primary motivator behind much of the Muslim/American conflicts stems over Israel, which isn't exactly a new issue.
You're not biased or partisan in the least.
I won't dignify "use ur brain plz".
Same thing for the Ultima series over 20 years ago.
Let me just play devil's advocate for a second. Mind you I'm a liberal. But while Clinton was in office, China was threatening Taiwan with nuclear missles and practicing transmigration (a small step removed from Genocide). The UN was up in arms. China was also pirating billions of dollars of American IP. Businesses were up in arms. Both demanded action.
Clinton went over to China, lessened tariffs and gave them favored trading partner status, which hurt our economy. He also took campaign money from Chinese officials which was against the law, and then a Chinese official was found buried in Arlington National Cemetary. The guy sold out our country to one of the worst regimes on the planet.
That was a direct decision on Clinton's behalf. Under Bush's presidency, some soldiers attempting to gather information that may be necessary to save lives humiliated Muslim men by interrogating them nude in front of women.
Is that torture? Were they permanently injured? Are scare tactics truly torture? Where do you draw the line? How would you interrogate people and obtain information if lives were on the line?
Which is the worse situation?
We exist in a land of hyperbole. Everyone swears the world is ending. Every civil right is gone. These are the darkest days.
As a fellow liberal, I say bullshit. Read about the reconstruction of the South sometime. Have you seen how Russia responded to terroism? Do you want to talk about rolling back the clock on civil rights? In England, they shoot innocent civilians on the street because they ran from the cops. No evidence, no problem. We're not talking about holding prisoners, they shoot people just for running and Blair said it was okay. He said national security trumps everything, and if the cops have to carry guns and shoot potential suspects, then so be it.
The truth is that our civil rights haven't greatly been rolled back. This particular decision in the article is sad to see. But let me ask you, what damage to our civil rights actually occurred over the past few years? Do you know, or are you regurgitating media hype?
Surely Bush is solely responsible for the death of Iraqi civilians, and not the militant forces that were at civil war and practiced genocide on their own people.
The Sunni and Kurds were getting along just fine before we came along. They never gassed their own people, raped them, drove them out of their homes and into hiding in the mountains. They never blocked food or water from the cities.
Nope, not at all.
Bush may be a fuck-head, but 30 million Iraqi lives were in very uncertain status before we came along. And while I'm sure everyone wants the situation to be resolved as soon as possible, there are a great deal number of people over there who were very grateful to have Americans there, and for the regime change. My friend just got back from Iraq.
For once I'd like to see some non-partisan fact-based news reporting. I'm sure the war could have been handled better. I wish we had a better exit strategy. But saying that Bush is responsible for the deaths of 40,000 civilians is far from a fair statement, yet it is the only statement you will hear from the press.
I can Linus already gearing up to defend his position that microkernels are crap.
However, I thought the purpose of a microkernel was stability, not performance.
I don't believe in posting as an AC. Please forgive this being a bit off-topic, but I'm trying to answer a question.
/rant
My problems with Ubuntu are three-fold.
1 - Gnome based. I know plenty of people love it, and Ubuntu is the most popular distro around these days. I'm all for choice, and if Gnome does it for you, then more power for you. However Gnome is built upon the predication that their users are stupid. I don't want to be patronized by my software. There is no need for a major Gnome/KDE battle here, but I spent some time researching both so that I could make my decision on which to go with.
I think KDE is a stronger toolkit than GTK+.
I think C++ is a better language to code in that C.
I think OOP is the way to go.
I think KDE looks nicer.
I think the UI is much more robust.
I think KDE is far more feature rich.
The negatives were supposedly bloat and performance, but actual real world benchmarks show both performing right around the same. Again, these are all my opinions. But the real kicker was reading actual posts by Gnome developers saying that the system needs to be dumbed down because users can't understand it.
2 - What does Ubuntu do better than other distros? SuSE, Mandriva and many others are just as easy to install and use. Many other distros come with Gnome and the same software. What exactly is the specific benefit of Ubuntu? If there is no real benefit that I see over any other distro.
3 - It is the most popular distro, which frustrates me to an extent. Everyone constantly praises it and recommends it. I feel like conformity seems more important than quality, and in a supposed informed community like the Linux-verse, it is sad to see this is the case.
I know this is rather presumptive, but I imagine if people tried other distros and did research they'd find something better. Instead they settle.
I agree with you on your thoughts about Linux.
But the Steve Jobs line? Apple wins in marketing and sexiness these days. However, they sold stock to Microsoft and helped launch IE and Office on the Mac. Then they jumped to a BSD-base and broke compatibility with all their apps. Then they jumped to Intel which they swore they would never do. They they released a program to help you install Windows on a Mac. And then they went back on their kernel being open-source.
(Maybe that is why they went with BSD instead of Linux in the first place. They couldn't rewrite their kernel off GPL code then close it after the fact).
I'm not trying to dog on Apple. Disagreeing with the almighty Apple is sure to get you labeled as a Troll, but I don't see consistency with said company.
I should consider it an honor when someone breaks into my house and steals my TV? They consider it worthy of being stolen after all.
Look, I know I won't get much sympathy for the film and music industry here, and perhaps rightfully so. However billions and billions are stolen from the US alone from China every year. Where as consumers in the US still pay for music, movies, software, etc. perhaps half the time, 86% piracy rate exists in China, and if I had to guess, I'd wager that a large part of the 14% that isn't pirated is home grown.
When you miss out on 1.3 BILLION consumers because they are allowed to steal from you without anyone caring to enforce IP rights, then I don't think China is allowed to take the moral high ground on such issues.
Again, this is very hypocritical for the country.
"for ur ignorance", China's population is over 1.3 billion people. With a piracy rate of 86%, that would make 1,123,429,878 pirates. That would make them the largest pirate nation in the world.
YaST would still exist as the SuSE installer and configuration tool. But here is why YaST can't be used anywhere else. SuSE puts configuation files, and the whole file structure in different places than anyone else. So they write this great tool, and most of the Linux community doesn't get to see it.
How is that really helpful?
I saw that list, but it is by percentages. Take said percentage, and multiply it by the population and China becomes the largest pirate nation on the planet.
Given a choice between Mandriva and Ubuntu, I'd take Madriva any day of the week. Honestly, I'm not sure why distros like Mandriva and Suse haven't become more popular with the first-time Linux user crowd. They are simple to install, simple to use, and well, I don't really want to get into Ubuntu.
I will not comment on Ubuntu, less I wish to be downmodded as a troll.
You forgot the history of Taiwan.
Does anyone find this a bit hypocritical given that China is arguably the largest pirate nation on the planet?
Neither the populace nor government has any respect for foreign intellectual property value.
Actually right after I hit submit I realized I should have put Gamer.
There are plenty of people who want a completely streamlined, tweaked out build specifically for gaming.
As I said in another post, she is impatient. That's why I couldn't install Gentoo on her laptop. She shouldn't have to hunt and find something.
The funny thing is that I put on Beagle to speed up searches on her laptop, but I don't think she ever used it. Like me, she is anal in how she organizes things. Having a good file structure means you don't have to hunt for items. All Beagle did was take up over 2 gigs with indexing data. Sheesh!
(Side note, but I think an even happier medium is virtual folders by grouping via meta-data. I know that this has been discussed in both the Windows and Linux world, and I can't wait for a decent implentation of said idea).
However I disagree that the attitude only exists with teenagers. I absolutely love OSS software. I love the concept. However, especially with F/OSS, the author really doesn't owe us anything, so when they get pestered with requests they often respond in indignant fashion.
They made their program the way they made it, and who is anyone else to suggest it should be changed?
Because of the informal nature of OSS software, and the lack of standards, the products often look unprofessional, despite the functionality, which often surpasses commercial software.
The GNU/Linux community needs a spit-shine when it comes to small details.
No she is impatient and she doesn't like to wait for compiles. She can't live without her notebook attached directly to her fingers.
I just don't understand the need for binaries to be placed in ten different locations arbitrarily. I understand somewhat why the structure started the way it did, for security purposes. But security permissions have evolved a great deal, and a much simpler tree I believe is best. Do we really need anything past: /home /usr /var /bin /src /tmp
Maybe /log?
Would it be so horrific to have a simple tree with all binaries branching from the /bin folder?