So I read through the comments people have already given you, and found that for once, there actually might be something I can add.
I've actually had a problem similar to yours. I have one a laptop with a crusoe chip. When I installed mandrake on it, I could not believe how slow it was. I mean, it was horrible, especially in gnome. Eventually, I found an RPM I couldn't upgrade because the old version was dependent on itself, so I installed slackware.
It's been like night and day. My computer is faster in throttled mode 333Mhz in slack than it was in fullspeed, 933Mhz on mandrake. I really can't explain it, but some friends have had similar experiences.
So maybe you just need a less bloated version of linux. Drop-line for slack dropline is really good too. I didn't drop my dual boots till I started using slack. Beware thought, X setup may prove to be a little tricky.
Also, I find it helps on slower computers to just run a windowmanager, without the desktop environments. Enlightenment is my personal choice, but there is no reason why others shouldn't work. This tends to save some resources. Also, this prevents gtk bugs from bringing your whole X session down.
Hope this helps make your linux experience more pleasant!
For better or worse, he's our president, not yours. We can elect whomever we want. Afterall, if the Germans and the French elected American-hating posturers, then we have every right to elect someone who doesn't care what they think. That's the way domestic politics work.
International politics are a joke, why else can the US do whatever it wants? There's just no way to enforce any rules without the powerhouse countries backing you. Until the French, the Germans, and the other europeans realize that they are no more the world than the US is , the UN will remain irrelvant. It's about time people on both sides of the pond got past this silly "we are against you because you are X-nationality" mindset. Maybe if the French and Germans appeared more cooperative, then there would not have been as much early American support for the War in Iraq.
And just to inform you, people in the US have been asking those questions since the first day Bush was elected (please, no senseless rants about how he wasn't actually elected). Of course, part of the reason many supported Bush was because he was putting together a big support staff.
What are you talking about? Sure the Cubs lose a lot, but have you ever been to a ballpark when the Cubs are playing? In some stadiums you're just as likely to see a Cubs hat as the home team's. The last game I went to was in Atlanta and at least 1/4 of the fans seemed to be rooting for the Cubs. This is in Atlanta mind you. Plus, even when the Cubs are losing badly, Wrigley Field still sells out.
Before this turns into a rant on how good the Cubs are (I have playoff tickets), the real point is that human nature doesn't match what you describe. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with what you talk about. People support the Cubs because they are loveable losers, they do what their friends do so that they have someone to do things with. Nobody, at least from who i've met, does what the news media tells them. People use UPS and FedEx because they provide decent service at a fair price. Open a small business and find out what I mean. People use windows because they are comfortable with it, their software runs on it, and their friends can help them when things go wrong.
When the above conditions change so do the reactions of people. After all, many of these things are necessary for survival. Case in point, when i didn't get hit with viruses, people started asking about linux. Just because people have different priorities doesn't mean they're stupid.
Indian programmers are not underpaid. If anything, they are overpaid compared to their peers in their country. If you can get 3 Indian programmers for the price of one American one, then each Indian programmer will make 20,000 which 900,000 rupees a year.
However, the cost of living comparision is more like 1/10 and not 1/50. But that still means that the "underpaid" Indian, is making $90,000 in "real" wages, which is 50% higher than his "spoiled" american counterpart. Even a 1 American, to 5 Indians isn't so bad for the Indian.
And remember, that in India, that kind of money buys you live in maids, drivers, and very posh surroundings. It's practically impossible for American workers to compete.
I'm not all that concerned with buying the fun new toys immediately. I have the money for that. Unfortunately, I lack the $20,000 for a good quality new car so I can get to work and the $300,000 for a decent house that's within commuting distance to the city. If the bank couldn't make interest, well then I'll never be able to afford those things.
Not to mention that we'll all have to start paying huge fees for our savings and checking accounts, since banks pay their operating costs in part from the interest they make.
I could go on... The bottom line is that nothing is safe anymore. Democracy and Capitalism are mutally exclusive.
I don't really understand how you get from your bad experiences to that line. I mean, you still have a choice of sending in a check every month or switching providers. If you can't switch providers, that's because of the government, not capitalism.
Plus, at least in my opinion, this also falls under an earlier poster's comments about "common sense." You don't trust MS with your checking accout, but you'd trust a service provider? What happens if they have a software bug, or their reader makes a mistake, and you suddenly get your account emptied before you even know about it? We all know how "helpful" most utility's customer support is.
In the end, it's simple things like not giving out more than what is completely necessary that make the difference.
I just got one a few weeks ago, and the answer is, I'm not really sure. I think the answer is probably, but it will take some time and tweaking on the user's part.
The problem is that the newest model, the P2120 (I can't speak for the P1000 series), only has support for ACPI, which means that all your powermanagement is controlled solely by your OS.
Unfortnately, ACPI is not quite there yet on linux and the controls it does have are somewhat hard to configure. I don't think there are any gui's that make it easy. It is also in experimental status. The 2.4.x series has it, but it's not that good. I hear 2.5.x is better, but I haven't had time to try it yet.
As for the other things, Mandrake 9.1 workes reasonably well right out of the box. It comes with a 40 gig harddrive, and the keyboard feels prety natural after a few hours of use. X requires some tweaking because it has a funny resolution, 1280 x 768. And USB devices crash the kernel, but I think that's because USB shares an interrupt with the buggy ACPI.
It's been a while since I last took a history class, but the feds were not able to collect income tax until the 1830's or so. I think it was amendment 16 that allowed it. The problem was that although the states were collecting money, no state really felt like giving any of it to the national government.
This set up didn't work then and there is no reason to think that it will work now.
Say what you want about business telecom providors, but if you have problem, within 12 hours it's fixed. You might wait for 2 weeks before your residential providor lifts a finger.
Commercial services cost more because busniess needs those telephone lines and are willing to pay for the service required to keep them up and runnning.
The parent is right on target. From everything I've seen, if you know what you want, you can't beat the price/performance ratio of indian programmers. The majority of programmers from that country that I have met have an attention to detail that is absolutely astounding.
However, once you need someone to think, their skills break down. I think the original poster is correct about it having to do with the curriculm. From what I've heard, the majority of thier coursework is rote memorization, whereas most american schools tend to stress problem solving. It's not very often you come across a CS test in the US where it is not open notes or book. It really leads to graduates with two totally different skillsets.
In the end, who you should hire really depends on what you need. Different people are suitable for different rolls.
I'm probably wrong, but I know there's a lot more to any modern army than guys with guns. For instance, some one has to maintain the communications infrastructure in the field. Or maybe a data center at the main base. I would imagine that these roles might be hard to fill competantly, since the majority of people who could do them can find jobs in which they don't get shot at.
Maybe it's this group who the army is really going after with AA?
Made up my mind about what? All i'm trying to say is that often times people get confused and it's not the best course of action to blindly respond to such queries with "RTFM," or a similarly rude statement. While there is some onus on the users to execute their part of the bargain, idealy, some effort should be made to help the ones who have acted responsibly, but still need help. If you don't want to take the time to figure out who is who, then your user base is better off if you don't bother replying at all. Let someone else do it. I'm having trouble seeing exactly what part of that you are objecting to.....
elisist - someone who believes in rule by an elite group ant: egalitarian (from Wordnet )
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The whole RTFM business is "once you know what you are talking about, you are allowed into our society." One of the earlier posters even mentioned how A'rpi complained because his project was in the control of the linux newbie crowd. How is that not elitism?
And according to American Heritage Dictionary, through Dictionary.com
my use of the word "ass" to describe a stupidly self important person is not an expletive.
I never said there was anything elitist about reading the docs. There is something elitist about saying "i read the docs and everything worked fine" because it implies the person with a problem is an idiot because he couldn't get it to work. Using statements like WTF and RTFM are inherently elitist. They imply that things are obvious. Unfortunatly, what is obvious to you, is not necessarily obvious to the person asking the question. Maybe that's why he asked it in the first place.
Docs can often be confusing. Sometimes ou can't find your answer in the 100's of pages of documentation that comes with a lot of software. Sometimes you misinterprite things. Sometimes you don't know where the fuck the documentation is. And sometimes you plain just don't get it. When that occurs, it helps to have the problem explained in slightly different language. To blindly respond with "RTFM' does nothing to help your software community. Most sensible advice does not come with expletives attached. You might not care, but that's no reason to act like an ass.
What makes it so difficult to treat the problem like spam? Just ignore those users. Why put your contact address up for users to find you if you don't really want to hear from them? And if it's a mailing list, why not just sit around and let someone else answer. Perferably someone who is not as bitter and cranky. The guy is making a movie player, what kind of target audience does he expect? When you make an app for the end user, you're going to get endusers. Not developers, not power users, but people who heard linux was cool/the next big thing/the best operating system ever/etc. and want to try it out.
I mean seriously, in what way does it help anyone to be rude? If you don't want to help, that's your right, but there is no reason to get pissy about it. It's a big project, let someone else deal with it.
Personally, i'm sick of seeing elitist crap like "well i read the docs and it worked just fine." Even the best of us have our moments of stupidity.
You've pretty much hit the nail right on the head. My parents are Indian, as is my girlfriend and we've often discussed the differences between the two societies. I was really surprised when I found out that they use mostly Microsoft over there. I figured that Linux would be a natural fit, because a windows license would cost about a month's wage. But over there, piracy is the way of life so windows lisences are as cheap as the media they come on. There's no need to suffer the learning curve since everything is the same price.
Sorry for putting words in your mouth then. I went what was supposed to be an open disscussion about the war that degenerated into an anti-war rally at then end. The common line was that war is murder and i think even one speaker used the 70's throwback "baby-killer." I guess I was transposing those setiments onto your post. I apologize.
We as Americans do support this war (over 60%, for whatever reason). Speak for yourself if you don't support it, but don't speak for others. You are not the voice of America.
I'm sure that like you, most Americans took the time to understand the facts and drew their own conclusions. Some decided that it wasn't nessecary, but others did. And you know what, that's great. It's what America is all about: you don't get shot for thinking the government is wrong.
With that said, what i find especially revolting is that, with all the complaining about dehumanization from the anti-war groups, they in turn, with no reluctance, dehumanize those with opposite feelings. You did it in your post, you just implied that i support murder because i think that saddam hussien is a threat to international stability.
Who wouldn't have wanted a peaceful resolution? You'd be crazy if you didn't. The difference between the the two sides is that one wanted a resolution. But because we believe this, and the anti-war and international community doesn't does not mean that we are bad people. Nor does it mean that those who oppose the war are evil traitors.
Calling french fries freedom fries is counterproductive, as is hanging signs saying "US citizens not welcome." The beauty of living in the freeworld is that we can have a difference of opinion and still get along!. The majority of the world does not have that yet, so those of us who do have that right should do our best to exercise it.
You can't really call the Confederacy a nation. It was more a loosely allied coalition of nation-states, much like the EU. Plus, depending on how you look at it, the CSA weren't ever not a part of the union. Therefore, the war was between one nation and a bunch of rebel states. This make sense since the primary sticking point was state's rights over federal rights. The agrarian states in the south didn't like the urban northern states telling them what to do. Slavery was a corrallary of that.
Hence, all the states sort of fought independently. Which is why one state would have a stockpile of shoes but not enough uniforms, but another state's army would go barefoot, but have a surplus of uniforms. Finally at the end of the war, they did start sharing more, but it was too little too late. The Union, who fought as one cohesive force didn't suffer from these problems. Never underestimate the importance of good footware when you spend the majority of your day marching.
Thank you for that quote. It really made me stop and think.
I think the fact that we didn't remove Saddam in the beginning is testament to this. Instead of taking the easy way out and deposing of the dictator as soon as we could, we tried to work with him. Unfortunatly, things did not work out, and we have been forced to fight this war.
They want to show that what is happening in iraq is not acceptable. They want to voice an opinion to their elected representatives that they are not in support of the war, and supporting said war will lead them to place their vote else where in the next election. A thousand people on TV is a lot more effective than a thousand letters you can throw away.
However, most protestors are stupid and don't get these things. For them, it's all just an excuse to run around and be hooligans. That's all they really want to accomplish. The majority of anti-war people don't even know what this war is about. They have it in their heads that it's about oil and don't even mention the words "weapons of mass destruction."
My point is, there are tons of good reasons to be against this war (economic costs, takes focus away from North Korea and Afganistan, etc.), but you never here them from these anti-war protestors. However, you never hear a rational arguement from these protestors. They'd rather just show how stupid they are by destroying things, and forcing moderates, like me, to favor the pro-war side.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that at the end of the war, more soldiers die from accidents than actual combat. Probably, the Army's mortality rate won't be much higher than it would be for a similar-sized group driving on American highways, or smoking American cigarettes.
Damn, I wish I still had the source, but I remember from a class a few years ago that there were fewer casualties during the gulfwar than there would have been in a similar time interval during training. Hence being at war is the safest state for people in the Army.
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So I read through the comments people have already given you, and found that for once, there actually might be something I can add.
I've actually had a problem similar to yours. I have one a laptop with a crusoe chip. When I installed mandrake on it, I could not believe how slow it was. I mean, it was horrible, especially in gnome. Eventually, I found an RPM I couldn't upgrade because the old version was dependent on itself, so I installed slackware.
It's been like night and day. My computer is faster in throttled mode 333Mhz in slack than it was in fullspeed, 933Mhz on mandrake. I really can't explain it, but some friends have had similar experiences.
So maybe you just need a less bloated version of linux. Drop-line for slack dropline is really good too. I didn't drop my dual boots till I started using slack. Beware thought, X setup may prove to be a little tricky.
Also, I find it helps on slower computers to just run a windowmanager, without the desktop environments. Enlightenment is my personal choice, but there is no reason why others shouldn't work. This tends to save some resources. Also, this prevents gtk bugs from bringing your whole X session down.
Hope this helps make your linux experience more pleasant!
For better or worse, he's our president, not yours. We can elect whomever we want. Afterall, if the Germans and the French elected American-hating posturers, then we have every right to elect someone who doesn't care what they think. That's the way domestic politics work.
International politics are a joke, why else can the US do whatever it wants? There's just no way to enforce any rules without the powerhouse countries backing you. Until the French, the Germans, and the other europeans realize that they are no more the world than the US is , the UN will remain irrelvant. It's about time people on both sides of the pond got past this silly "we are against you because you are X-nationality" mindset. Maybe if the French and Germans appeared more cooperative, then there would not have been as much early American support for the War in Iraq.
And just to inform you, people in the US have been asking those questions since the first day Bush was elected (please, no senseless rants about how he wasn't actually elected). Of course, part of the reason many supported Bush was because he was putting together a big support staff.
Before this turns into a rant on how good the Cubs are (I have playoff tickets), the real point is that human nature doesn't match what you describe. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with what you talk about. People support the Cubs because they are loveable losers, they do what their friends do so that they have someone to do things with. Nobody, at least from who i've met, does what the news media tells them. People use UPS and FedEx because they provide decent service at a fair price. Open a small business and find out what I mean. People use windows because they are comfortable with it, their software runs on it, and their friends can help them when things go wrong.
When the above conditions change so do the reactions of people. After all, many of these things are necessary for survival. Case in point, when i didn't get hit with viruses, people started asking about linux. Just because people have different priorities doesn't mean they're stupid.
Indian programmers are not underpaid. If anything, they are overpaid compared to their peers in their country. If you can get 3 Indian programmers for the price of one American one, then each Indian programmer will make 20,000 which 900,000 rupees a year.
However, the cost of living comparision is more like 1/10 and not 1/50. But that still means that the "underpaid" Indian, is making $90,000 in "real" wages, which is 50% higher than his "spoiled" american counterpart. Even a 1 American, to 5 Indians isn't so bad for the Indian.
And remember, that in India, that kind of money buys you live in maids, drivers, and very posh surroundings. It's practically impossible for American workers to compete.
And a few months later, he'll sell the house claiming that the deep blue water is another attempt by IBM to taunt him.
I'm not all that concerned with buying the fun new toys immediately. I have the money for that. Unfortunately, I lack the $20,000 for a good quality new car so I can get to work and the $300,000 for a decent house that's within commuting distance to the city. If the bank couldn't make interest, well then I'll never be able to afford those things.
Not to mention that we'll all have to start paying huge fees for our savings and checking accounts, since banks pay their operating costs in part from the interest they make.
I don't really understand how you get from your bad experiences to that line. I mean, you still have a choice of sending in a check every month or switching providers. If you can't switch providers, that's because of the government, not capitalism.
Plus, at least in my opinion, this also falls under an earlier poster's comments about "common sense." You don't trust MS with your checking accout, but you'd trust a service provider? What happens if they have a software bug, or their reader makes a mistake, and you suddenly get your account emptied before you even know about it? We all know how "helpful" most utility's customer support is.
In the end, it's simple things like not giving out more than what is completely necessary that make the difference.
Or more like the cost of the lawyers + the benefit of free good publicity less than the cost of buyout + marketing campaign.
Just because something doesn't match your ideas of moral relativism, doesn't mean it's flaimbait.
Everything the poster said was true and it's perfectly acceptable to form an opinion about those facts.
I just got one a few weeks ago, and the answer is, I'm not really sure. I think the answer is probably, but it will take some time and tweaking on the user's part.
The problem is that the newest model, the P2120 (I can't speak for the P1000 series), only has support for ACPI, which means that all your powermanagement is controlled solely by your OS.
Unfortnately, ACPI is not quite there yet on linux and the controls it does have are somewhat hard to configure. I don't think there are any gui's that make it easy. It is also in experimental status. The 2.4.x series has it, but it's not that good. I hear 2.5.x is better, but I haven't had time to try it yet.
As for the other things, Mandrake 9.1 workes reasonably well right out of the box. It comes with a 40 gig harddrive, and the keyboard feels prety natural after a few hours of use. X requires some tweaking because it has a funny resolution, 1280 x 768. And USB devices crash the kernel, but I think that's because USB shares an interrupt with the buggy ACPI.
It's been a while since I last took a history class, but the feds were not able to collect income tax until the 1830's or so. I think it was amendment 16 that allowed it. The problem was that although the states were collecting money, no state really felt like giving any of it to the national government.
This set up didn't work then and there is no reason to think that it will work now.
Say what you want about business telecom providors, but if you have problem, within 12 hours it's fixed. You might wait for 2 weeks before your residential providor lifts a finger.
Commercial services cost more because busniess needs those telephone lines and are willing to pay for the service required to keep them up and runnning.
The parent is right on target. From everything I've seen, if you know what you want, you can't beat the price/performance ratio of indian programmers. The majority of programmers from that country that I have met have an attention to detail that is absolutely astounding.
However, once you need someone to think, their skills break down. I think the original poster is correct about it having to do with the curriculm. From what I've heard, the majority of thier coursework is rote memorization, whereas most american schools tend to stress problem solving. It's not very often you come across a CS test in the US where it is not open notes or book. It really leads to graduates with two totally different skillsets.
In the end, who you should hire really depends on what you need. Different people are suitable for different rolls.
Yeah, it's just too bad that anyone who didn't already agree with his agenda will never bother to see it.
I'm probably wrong, but I know there's a lot more to any modern army than guys with guns. For instance, some one has to maintain the communications infrastructure in the field. Or maybe a data center at the main base. I would imagine that these roles might be hard to fill competantly, since the majority of people who could do them can find jobs in which they don't get shot at.
Maybe it's this group who the army is really going after with AA?
Made up my mind about what? All i'm trying to say is that often times people get confused and it's not the best course of action to blindly respond to such queries with "RTFM," or a similarly rude statement. While there is some onus on the users to execute their part of the bargain, idealy, some effort should be made to help the ones who have acted responsibly, but still need help. If you don't want to take the time to figure out who is who, then your user base is better off if you don't bother replying at all. Let someone else do it. I'm having trouble seeing exactly what part of that you are objecting to.....
elisist - someone who believes in rule by an elite group ant: egalitarian (from Wordnet )
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The whole RTFM business is "once you know what you are talking about, you are allowed into our society." One of the earlier posters even mentioned how A'rpi complained because his project was in the control of the linux newbie crowd. How is that not elitism?
And according to American Heritage Dictionary, through Dictionary.com my use of the word "ass" to describe a stupidly self important person is not an expletive.
I never said there was anything elitist about reading the docs. There is something elitist about saying "i read the docs and everything worked fine" because it implies the person with a problem is an idiot because he couldn't get it to work. Using statements like WTF and RTFM are inherently elitist. They imply that things are obvious. Unfortunatly, what is obvious to you, is not necessarily obvious to the person asking the question. Maybe that's why he asked it in the first place.
Docs can often be confusing. Sometimes ou can't find your answer in the 100's of pages of documentation that comes with a lot of software. Sometimes you misinterprite things. Sometimes you don't know where the fuck the documentation is. And sometimes you plain just don't get it. When that occurs, it helps to have the problem explained in slightly different language. To blindly respond with "RTFM' does nothing to help your software community. Most sensible advice does not come with expletives attached. You might not care, but that's no reason to act like an ass.
What makes it so difficult to treat the problem like spam? Just ignore those users. Why put your contact address up for users to find you if you don't really want to hear from them? And if it's a mailing list, why not just sit around and let someone else answer. Perferably someone who is not as bitter and cranky. The guy is making a movie player, what kind of target audience does he expect? When you make an app for the end user, you're going to get endusers. Not developers, not power users, but people who heard linux was cool/the next big thing/the best operating system ever/etc. and want to try it out.
I mean seriously, in what way does it help anyone to be rude? If you don't want to help, that's your right, but there is no reason to get pissy about it. It's a big project, let someone else deal with it.
Personally, i'm sick of seeing elitist crap like "well i read the docs and it worked just fine." Even the best of us have our moments of stupidity.
You've pretty much hit the nail right on the head. My parents are Indian, as is my girlfriend and we've often discussed the differences between the two societies. I was really surprised when I found out that they use mostly Microsoft over there. I figured that Linux would be a natural fit, because a windows license would cost about a month's wage. But over there, piracy is the way of life so windows lisences are as cheap as the media they come on. There's no need to suffer the learning curve since everything is the same price.
Sorry for putting words in your mouth then. I went what was supposed to be an open disscussion about the war that degenerated into an anti-war rally at then end. The common line was that war is murder and i think even one speaker used the 70's throwback "baby-killer." I guess I was transposing those setiments onto your post. I apologize.
We as Americans do support this war (over 60%, for whatever reason). Speak for yourself if you don't support it, but don't speak for others. You are not the voice of America.
I'm sure that like you, most Americans took the time to understand the facts and drew their own conclusions. Some decided that it wasn't nessecary, but others did. And you know what, that's great. It's what America is all about: you don't get shot for thinking the government is wrong.
With that said, what i find especially revolting is that, with all the complaining about dehumanization from the anti-war groups, they in turn, with no reluctance, dehumanize those with opposite feelings. You did it in your post, you just implied that i support murder because i think that saddam hussien is a threat to international stability.
Who wouldn't have wanted a peaceful resolution? You'd be crazy if you didn't. The difference between the the two sides is that one wanted a resolution. But because we believe this, and the anti-war and international community doesn't does not mean that we are bad people. Nor does it mean that those who oppose the war are evil traitors.
Calling french fries freedom fries is counterproductive, as is hanging signs saying "US citizens not welcome." The beauty of living in the freeworld is that we can have a difference of opinion and still get along!. The majority of the world does not have that yet, so those of us who do have that right should do our best to exercise it.
You can't really call the Confederacy a nation. It was more a loosely allied coalition of nation-states, much like the EU. Plus, depending on how you look at it, the CSA weren't ever not a part of the union. Therefore, the war was between one nation and a bunch of rebel states. This make sense since the primary sticking point was state's rights over federal rights. The agrarian states in the south didn't like the urban northern states telling them what to do. Slavery was a corrallary of that.
Hence, all the states sort of fought independently. Which is why one state would have a stockpile of shoes but not enough uniforms, but another state's army would go barefoot, but have a surplus of uniforms. Finally at the end of the war, they did start sharing more, but it was too little too late. The Union, who fought as one cohesive force didn't suffer from these problems. Never underestimate the importance of good footware when you spend the majority of your day marching.
Thank you for that quote. It really made me stop and think.
I think the fact that we didn't remove Saddam in the beginning is testament to this. Instead of taking the easy way out and deposing of the dictator as soon as we could, we tried to work with him. Unfortunatly, things did not work out, and we have been forced to fight this war.
They want to show that what is happening in iraq is not acceptable. They want to voice an opinion to their elected representatives that they are not in support of the war, and supporting said war will lead them to place their vote else where in the next election. A thousand people on TV is a lot more effective than a thousand letters you can throw away.
However, most protestors are stupid and don't get these things. For them, it's all just an excuse to run around and be hooligans. That's all they really want to accomplish. The majority of anti-war people don't even know what this war is about. They have it in their heads that it's about oil and don't even mention the words "weapons of mass destruction."
My point is, there are tons of good reasons to be against this war (economic costs, takes focus away from North Korea and Afganistan, etc.), but you never here them from these anti-war protestors. However, you never hear a rational arguement from these protestors. They'd rather just show how stupid they are by destroying things, and forcing moderates, like me, to favor the pro-war side.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that at the end of the war, more soldiers die from accidents than actual combat. Probably, the Army's mortality rate won't be much higher than it would be for a similar-sized group driving on American highways, or smoking American cigarettes.
Damn, I wish I still had the source, but I remember from a class a few years ago that there were fewer casualties during the gulfwar than there would have been in a similar time interval during training. Hence being at war is the safest state for people in the Army.