Weird. I understand that your comment would be, well, questionable in isolation, but it appears in a thread on a Smallpox attack scenario (unfortunately I can't get at the original post right now since k5 is dead as a doornail but I follwed your link to the page on which your comment is found). There's no way I can see it could be construed as a direct threat, it was pretty obviously a comment on a hypothetical scenario posted by somebody else on k5. Nevertheless, infecting vice presidents with viruses is probably not a good topic for idle chat right now on the internet, as the Secret Service (ever notice that abbreviates to SS?) are watching. Remember Steve Jackson Games (actually, I barely do, but I remember the Secret Service stole lots of computers over some really silly nonsensical shit - I was, what, 13 or 14 years old at the time)? These aren't nice people.
LOL. I hope you are kidding. First of all, I like the blatant classism - cute. Secondly, no, I am from Manhattan - I own an apartment on 66th and Broadway. I also have a place in Boston, where I spend most of my time these days, since I graduated from Harvard here a few years ago. I spent my Thanksgiving at my uncle's house on Round Hill Road in Greenwich. So you see, I don't think I count as lower middle class. I have never even been to Norwalk - the only places in Connecticut I've spent any time at all are Westport and Greenwich, except for going to the Harvard-Yale game in New Haven.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. Connecticut, I agree, is a wasteland. Mostly this is the fault of municipalities like Greenwich that don't want too many cell towers mucking up the multimillion dollar estate landscape. I have no problems whatsoever on NYC streets. I have Voicestream. SprintPCS seems to be mostly okay too, as far as I can tell (many friends of mine have it). I don't WANT cell phones to work in a packed subway train - it's just downright rude to have loud conversations on your cell phone on public transportation.
Orion is a fabulous product - its weakness used to be terrible documentation (the last time I did a thorough J2EE server overview). I mean, really weak. I couldn't figure out how to do even relatively basic stuff - a lot of their documentation appeared to be written by non-native english speakers. Some of this applies to JBoss too, but JBoss has enough documentation to get you "close enough" for most things you need to do, and when that isn't enough it's got a great community, user forums, old mailing list archives, etc. which have proven very useful to me for cases where the obvious stuff didn't work and the documentation was poor or out of date.
I'm not going to disagree on this entirely - if you are willing and able in a shop to go the pure IBM route, then you can get a lot of benefits from that approach. However, you suffer from SERIOUS vendor tie in. Compared more realistically to a product like Weblogic, however, I think JBoss stands up admirably. You can get integration with IDEs and debuggers via add-on modules to JBuilder, etc. It may not be as easy to get and as smooth as the pure IBM approach, but you can maintain some degree of portability and you can keep your costs drastically lower, and still deploy in non-IBM shops. Anyway, just my experiences as the CTO of a company making J2EE-based apps that we sell to others - we can't afford to be an IBM shop in every sense of that word.
Re:What exactly is a Java application server?
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JBoss Founder Interview
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· Score: 3, Informative
JBoss is definitely not just an EJB server. It provides a JMX managed component framework with components that wrap around the various services that comprise a J2EE app. It provides JNDI, JMS, EJB 2.0, JMX, etc. I uses third party implementations of the Servlet/JSP subsystem which is appropriate, there's really no need to have anything more tightly integrated than that. JBoss also has a JCA implementation, obviously a JTA/JTS implementation, JAAS implementation, and is SOAP capable. So I think it is pretty complete.:)
I believe what you are referring to is Servlet performance. If you are using an embedded servlet engine in production for a high volume site and servlet processing seems to be partially responsible for the performance problems, then I would recommend using embedded Jetty rather than Tomcat (I see in Rickard's post that he can't, but that's his problem, and not a usual one).
Honestly, most of the J2EE apps I've seen, Servlet performance is a MINISCULE problem compared to much, much larger application architecture issues. You can always add more servlet engines on separate boxes, of course, then the RMI invocations are going to be slow. You did pay attention to using _coarse_ grained components, didn't you? Anyway, this is just my opinion.
In any case, you can't blame the JBoss team for this - you can pretty much embed any servlet engine you want into JBoss - Tomcat and Jetty are pre-done for you, and if some enterprising hackers want to find a better solution and embed that, it isn't that hard to do.
First, it seems like a lot of posters don't know what an "Application Server" in Java parlance is. JBoss and the other mentioned products in the post are really implementations of the J2EE or Java 2 Enterprise Edition API set, as specified by Sun. This is not in any way opposed to J2SE (Standard Edition), which is the baseline Java SDK (VM + API library), but is an addition to that - it includes the EJB (Enterprise Java Bean) API for writing transactionally aware business logic components and connecting them to persistent data sources (usually RDBMSen of various sorts). I'm mixed on EJB, having built several large systems with it - it's just too damned easy to make applications that suck with EJB if you don't know how to use it. The CORBA CCM spec seems a bit better, with some kinds of components that I consider very useful that EJB doesn't support. Oh well. J2EE also envelops JNDI, a very useful and underutilized naming and directory API that solves lots of VERY common problems in building enterprise apps (the old chicken-and-egg resource location/distributed configuration problem can be solved very easily with JNDI though few people correctly use it). JMS is a decent enterprise messaging API, essentially an API for reliable asynchronous communication between distributed components either within or between enterprises that abstracts the details of writing socket level communications, then worrying about bridging firewalls etc. from the application developer. But it has some serious flaws in the way it forces you to do things. Nevertheless people have addressed these in not-fully-compliant add-ons to the spec to make it more like successful, established products such as TIB Rendezvous. (there are other parts of the J2EE spec, like JMX and the Servlet API, and probably a few others I'm forgetting right now).
Now that J2EE has been briefly explained, and I've stated my position (useful services, with some warts and all, designed to the lowest common denominator, and unfortunately sometimes too easy to build systems that really perform like slugs) I will give JBoss some props for really driving forward the implementations of the standard in several ways. Adoption of JMX is great, JMX is very useful for building custom manageable components that don't fit into the standard J2EE framework (i.e. they need to be stateful and not session coupled so they can't be implemented as reasonably performing, compliant EJBs). Also JBoss provided the first reasonably performing EJB implementation I have seen. Far faster than most of the commercial implementations when it came out for the common case scenarios (the commercial implementations may have improved since, I don't really know). My company moved to JBoss from Weblogic as we discovered we couldn't afford enough Weblogic licenses for every developer to have his own test box. And that the nature of our system makes it really hard to test otherwise (note: this is partially the fault of our system's architectural stupidities, but let's put that aside for the moment). We have generally had great luck with JBoss, and found the JBoss community to be very, very helpful with problems when they sprung up (compared to Weblogic 5.1 where I got some very frustrated engineers on my team stuck with the job of calling Weblogic support bitching at them about weird problems with spontaneous breaking of the EJB standard - anyone who used it knows that SP6, SP7 and SP8 were all released in short succession around the time I'm speaking of).
The moral of all this is that the JBoss team has done a fabulous job at providing a great, useful product that has saved my company thousands of dollars and many hundreds of man-hours of developer time. While the J2EE spec is, err, deficient in certain ways, for a lot of enterprise software projects it's good enough for the task at hand. And JBoss, with full clustering support coming up now, should be good enough for most if not all of these jobs. If you need a real distributed application with high volume transaction processing, you might need to look at other kinds of systems that give you more access to lower level capabilities (think: Weblogic Enterprise, Tuxedo, etc.). Or roll your own.:)
Heh. In other words black people and poor white people mug rich white people and foreigners. Welcome to the real world. We've known this in New York for years.
LOL. This is just too funny. Apple thinks that it is illegal to TELL people to violate their EULAs. What is this, contributory EULA infringement? I don't think it exists. I don't see how telling people that deleting a file from their install CDs will let them use the CDs elsewhere could be illegal under any law, except possible the worst law ever written, the DMCA.
Infringing sentence: Make a copy of the CD without the line "CheckforOSX" in the System/Installation/Packages/Essentials.pkg file". Ooops, I've broken the law. Heh. This is even worse than the 3 line RSA being illegal - this isn't even an algorithm but a tiny fragment of english text.
Umm, how exactly would you extract that? Perhaps tidal forces can be utilized to extract power (tidal forces near the event horizon of a black hole are large, though surprisingly they are larger for a small black hole). But you can't just magically extract gravitational energy from a massive object with an r^2 gravitational field. Perhaps it's possible, but the gravity of even this massive black hole is only 14 times stronger than the Sun - so we could do whatever it is with the Sun first. I've never heard anybody propose extracting gravitational energy from the Sun, so I presume there is no easy way to do this. Accelerating particles falling inward hit an orbiting station which converts this accelerated stream into energy which it retransmits as electromagnetic waves outwards, perhaps? Sounds sort of like an artificial accretion disk - which is an interesting idea, come to think of it. Have no idea if this is at all self-consistent (much less practical).
I will beg to differ entirely on the Tivo. I've gained lots of benefits from the fact that the kernel is GPLed. For example, people were able to build loadable modules for TivoNet, a hacked together ethernet card for Tivo, because of it. If it used some weird proprietary kernel, it would be tons harder to do all the great stuff I've done. Admittedly, nobody has gone around recompiling the kernel, though there is a fishy issue with their 2.5 software - they added some nasty filesystem checksum checks to the kernel to prevent hacks. Some people were waiting for them to release source, but we ended up getting around the problem with a bit of hex editing before the 2.5 Tivo software kernel source was ever released.
So you are partially right, but there have clearly been huge benefits in comprehensibility and hackability which have contributed significantly to the market success of the Tivo in the "geek" crowd, which has driven adoption among a lot of others, even if they gain nothing per se from the use of Linux on the Tivo.
No, I don't think it's illegal other than the fact that it may breach your contract (Terms of Service), in which case they could sue you. If you never agreed to that term than they can't do anything to you (although most ISPs have clauses that let them change their terms of service with you at will - though I question the legality of that, unless they go ahead and send a physical copy of updated terms to all their users).
If you don't like their terms, find another provider. Get a business DSL line - I think those can usually be shared without any legal problems (my company split the cost of one with the company we sublet from until we could get our T1s run into our office when we moved).
Well, your comment on price stability is an understatement. A severe supply disruption, and not just from Saudi Arabia would occur. If the entire Middle East is plunged into war and revolution, it will result in massive price spikes, and we could have something that looks like what happened in California in every state in the US. That would be very bad. I'm not just talking back to 2 bucks a gallon at the gas station, which is bad enough.
Furthermore, a nice new terrorist-supporting regime would rapidly busy itself with supporting attacks on US soil. This has already devastated our already weak economy. This is making a lot of us poor and ruining our prosperity. Furthermore it would result in American deaths.
Sorry, but the US government is first and foremost responsible for ensuring national security and the lives and livelihoods of our citizens. Yes, altruism and helping other nations is good and I think we should help others, but if you honestly expect any government to welcome revolution in a country that will likely kill people in those countries and kill our own citizens, you are really out of it.
Like I said, I support the right of the Saudi people to revolt against their government if they want to and to have a democratic government in place. I am just a bit worried that taking the chance of letting the country fall into civil war and hoping that a democratic government comes out is not the best solution to the problem.
If you can propose a way to support democratization of Saudi Arabia without putting my life at risk and the lives of other US residents, then I'd love to hear it, and maybe I'll support it.
Sorry, my post was confusing. It was "off to the side" in 0.9.5 and was impossible to accidentally close. In the nightly builds there was no X at all for a while. I still haven't gotten to use 0.9.6 release yet, so I have yet to determine if they've come up with a compromise between the UI purists and the people who just want to close tabs easily.
The X on the tab itself (close current tab) WAS there. They removed it in the nightly builds in between 0.9.5 and 0.9.6. I assume it hasn't made a reappearance yet. This was removed because somebody decided it wasn't good UI design and currently they refuse to replace it. Assholes.
The correct means to close tabs is right-click close on the tab. Ctrl-w and middle click on the tab are shortcut mechanisms for this.
Re:What is this tabbed browsing thing?
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Mozilla 0.9.6 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Try right-clicking on any link. The context menu that pops up has an option for opening a new tab. Likewise, right click on the newly appeared tabs and you can close them.
I know lots of Iranians who hate the current regime. They are the ones who left. Naturally the ones who stayed were largely opposed to the Shah. Or too moderate to care either way. So that's a fucking truism and an imbecilic metric for anything.
Your comment about how Americans fuck peoples lives and therefore we should just bend over and let people commit acts on terrorism for us for a while until they've finished with their revenge is borderline retarded. The collective "we" (the US which is supposedly one entity) is not running around fucking people's lives. Since you fail to define your terms or explain what the fuck your rant is talking about, I have no idea how you can expect me to take you seriously.
You should understand that largely the people who want to kill us are the same people that make up the disgusting regimes. Fundamentalism in the Saudi regime is responsible for a lot of what some people find disgusting about them. Those SAME Wahabi fundamentalists have been starting Madrassah's and recruiting terrorists. Are these people opposed to the Al Saud family? Yes, very much so, but they are responsible for a large part of what Westerners find "disgusting" in the Saudi government these days. The things about the Saudi government that they are opposed to are more or less the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and the tendencies toward modernization and western appeasement that you mention. So it's not that they hate the west because the west supports the Saudis, it's that they hate the Saudi royal family because they are friendly with the west.
You really need to do a teeny tiny bit of thinking for yourself about this problem rather than just spewing out Euro-commie rhetoric.
I don't entirely agree. India has had a lot of people return to teach the skills and knowledge they acquired in the west to eager students there. That's why IIT is an excellent engineering school there now, on par with many American engineering schools.
Sure, a lot of H1Bs come over here because they can make more bucks here and want to stay. And people from fundamentally economically depressed areas who don't acquire sufficient skills to start businesses and contribute to the economy back home just send a few bucks here and there but never return. A lot of Mexicans for example seem to have stayed here because all they got was menial labor and not an education.
But I've also met Malaysians and Indonesians who are extremely eager to go back home and work for companies there as executives or start their own companies with the knowledge and experience they've acquired here. And I think that's great.
Hmm and looking at the story again (did Katz just edit it and add more stuff at the end?) It now mentions iPods and has some really unbelievable quotes in it attributed to this guy.
I'm just trying to figure out if Katz was trolled or if he is knowingly propagating false information. Journalistic integrity == 0.
This is a good reminder that there are good, forward thinking, open minded people everywhere. You can oppress them but you can't destroy them. It's guys like this who will help lift Afghanistan out of poverty. Let's say he brings over the kids who live in his town and shows them his computer, let's them play old games. Some kid dreams of learning how computers work. He grows up, travels off to an engineering school somewhere, and comes back and starts a technology company in the budding economy of Afghanistan as it modernizes.
Of course, as nice as this sounds, the story is a little strange - I was under the impression there were almost no remaining international phone lines and that electricity was probably out in many of these areas, so I am a bit suspicious. But what do I know, maybe he has a generator and maybe the international phone lines are back up. Also the line about trying to download movies is definitely suspicious. At 9600 baud perhaps? OK, give them the benefit of the doubt, 28.8k. Doesn't sound too believable to me.
So I think this submission is either a bit of a hoax or a bit exaggerated, but it still is a nice sentiment even if the specifics are not true. And hopefully there is a guy somewhere in Afghanistan digging up his old Commodore.:)
Your post is nonsensical. Proof of bin Laden's guilt has been broadcast on CNN from the mouth of the british prime minister. This information was enough proof for any rational thinking person, when combined with the words we heard coming out of bin Laden's own mouth. Oh yeah, and the plans for nuclear bombs we keep finding in Al Qaeda safehouses in Afganistan, I'm sure those were planted too. It's all a big conspiracy, of course.
Number of innocent casualties: incalculatable. Many, many thousands based on what I've heard on CNN. But it's hard to add these things up in the thick of war. It'll become clear after the fact. But who killed whom is unlikely to ever be obvious. Certainly quite a few people have died from stray US bombs and I'd guess it is over a thousand. It's quite unfortunate, but that is an unavoidable side effect of war, especially when you purposefully park your tanks around houses and towns.
As far as I know no war crimes have been committed by US troops. Hell, there aren't that many on the ground in Afganistan. I'm sure Northern Alliance troops have done bad things (looting, the occasional summary execution), as have the Taliban (well, the Taliban did the same about 10 fold over). The US troops are special ops and I really doubt they are going to do things that we would consider war crimes. Kill people? Yes, I'm sure they are doing that, but that's their job. If by war crimes you mean "war is a crime" then that's different - I hate war too, but the US didn't bring it on itself.
In short, you are a troll, your post makes no sense, and no information is being kept from you. There is a free press in the US, and the only things kept from it are specific operational details of troop movements, etc. Hell, we have tons of reporters on the ground in Afganistan and there isn't much you could hide entirely from them.
See my other post. The US doesn't think the Saudis are nice. They are better than the Taliban but not by much. However, the regime does not support terrorism and is cooperative with the international community in general. Furthermore the regime is far more progressive than the regime that would result if the Al Saud family were thrown out of power. I would be terribly inclined to see a democracy in Saudi Arabia, but like many people whose education consists primarily of fundamentalist religious indoctrination, I don't know if the people would naturally form a democracy when the government fell. Much more likely an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship like the Taliban. I.e. substantially worse than the current Saudi government, openly supportive of anti-western terrorist organizations, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The CMGPL is, well, stupid. They should just use the LGPL if they want to allow linking to proprietary apps. Duh. And axing the preamble? Why bother?
Weird. I understand that your comment would be, well, questionable in isolation, but it appears in a thread on a Smallpox attack scenario (unfortunately I can't get at the original post right now since k5 is dead as a doornail but I follwed your link to the page on which your comment is found). There's no way I can see it could be construed as a direct threat, it was pretty obviously a comment on a hypothetical scenario posted by somebody else on k5. Nevertheless, infecting vice presidents with viruses is probably not a good topic for idle chat right now on the internet, as the Secret Service (ever notice that abbreviates to SS?) are watching. Remember Steve Jackson Games (actually, I barely do, but I remember the Secret Service stole lots of computers over some really silly nonsensical shit - I was, what, 13 or 14 years old at the time)? These aren't nice people.
LOL. I hope you are kidding. First of all, I like the blatant classism - cute. Secondly, no, I am from Manhattan - I own an apartment on 66th and Broadway. I also have a place in Boston, where I spend most of my time these days, since I graduated from Harvard here a few years ago. I spent my Thanksgiving at my uncle's house on Round Hill Road in Greenwich. So you see, I don't think I count as lower middle class. I have never even been to Norwalk - the only places in Connecticut I've spent any time at all are Westport and Greenwich, except for going to the Harvard-Yale game in New Haven.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. Connecticut, I agree, is a wasteland. Mostly this is the fault of municipalities like Greenwich that don't want too many cell towers mucking up the multimillion dollar estate landscape. I have no problems whatsoever on NYC streets. I have Voicestream. SprintPCS seems to be mostly okay too, as far as I can tell (many friends of mine have it). I don't WANT cell phones to work in a packed subway train - it's just downright rude to have loud conversations on your cell phone on public transportation.
Orion is a fabulous product - its weakness used to be terrible documentation (the last time I did a thorough J2EE server overview). I mean, really weak. I couldn't figure out how to do even relatively basic stuff - a lot of their documentation appeared to be written by non-native english speakers. Some of this applies to JBoss too, but JBoss has enough documentation to get you "close enough" for most things you need to do, and when that isn't enough it's got a great community, user forums, old mailing list archives, etc. which have proven very useful to me for cases where the obvious stuff didn't work and the documentation was poor or out of date.
I'm not going to disagree on this entirely - if you are willing and able in a shop to go the pure IBM route, then you can get a lot of benefits from that approach. However, you suffer from SERIOUS vendor tie in. Compared more realistically to a product like Weblogic, however, I think JBoss stands up admirably. You can get integration with IDEs and debuggers via add-on modules to JBuilder, etc. It may not be as easy to get and as smooth as the pure IBM approach, but you can maintain some degree of portability and you can keep your costs drastically lower, and still deploy in non-IBM shops. Anyway, just my experiences as the CTO of a company making J2EE-based apps that we sell to others - we can't afford to be an IBM shop in every sense of that word.
JBoss is definitely not just an EJB server. It provides a JMX managed component framework with components that wrap around the various services that comprise a J2EE app. It provides JNDI, JMS, EJB 2.0, JMX, etc. I uses third party implementations of the Servlet/JSP subsystem which is appropriate, there's really no need to have anything more tightly integrated than that. JBoss also has a JCA implementation, obviously a JTA/JTS implementation, JAAS implementation, and is SOAP capable. So I think it is pretty complete. :)
Honestly, most of the J2EE apps I've seen, Servlet performance is a MINISCULE problem compared to much, much larger application architecture issues. You can always add more servlet engines on separate boxes, of course, then the RMI invocations are going to be slow. You did pay attention to using _coarse_ grained components, didn't you? Anyway, this is just my opinion.
In any case, you can't blame the JBoss team for this - you can pretty much embed any servlet engine you want into JBoss - Tomcat and Jetty are pre-done for you, and if some enterprising hackers want to find a better solution and embed that, it isn't that hard to do.
Now that J2EE has been briefly explained, and I've stated my position (useful services, with some warts and all, designed to the lowest common denominator, and unfortunately sometimes too easy to build systems that really perform like slugs) I will give JBoss some props for really driving forward the implementations of the standard in several ways. Adoption of JMX is great, JMX is very useful for building custom manageable components that don't fit into the standard J2EE framework (i.e. they need to be stateful and not session coupled so they can't be implemented as reasonably performing, compliant EJBs). Also JBoss provided the first reasonably performing EJB implementation I have seen. Far faster than most of the commercial implementations when it came out for the common case scenarios (the commercial implementations may have improved since, I don't really know). My company moved to JBoss from Weblogic as we discovered we couldn't afford enough Weblogic licenses for every developer to have his own test box. And that the nature of our system makes it really hard to test otherwise (note: this is partially the fault of our system's architectural stupidities, but let's put that aside for the moment). We have generally had great luck with JBoss, and found the JBoss community to be very, very helpful with problems when they sprung up (compared to Weblogic 5.1 where I got some very frustrated engineers on my team stuck with the job of calling Weblogic support bitching at them about weird problems with spontaneous breaking of the EJB standard - anyone who used it knows that SP6, SP7 and SP8 were all released in short succession around the time I'm speaking of).
The moral of all this is that the JBoss team has done a fabulous job at providing a great, useful product that has saved my company thousands of dollars and many hundreds of man-hours of developer time. While the J2EE spec is, err, deficient in certain ways, for a lot of enterprise software projects it's good enough for the task at hand. And JBoss, with full clustering support coming up now, should be good enough for most if not all of these jobs. If you need a real distributed application with high volume transaction processing, you might need to look at other kinds of systems that give you more access to lower level capabilities (think: Weblogic Enterprise, Tuxedo, etc.). Or roll your own.
Heh. In other words black people and poor white people mug rich white people and foreigners. Welcome to the real world. We've known this in New York for years.
Infringing sentence: Make a copy of the CD without the line "CheckforOSX" in the System/Installation/Packages/Essentials.pkg file". Ooops, I've broken the law. Heh. This is even worse than the 3 line RSA being illegal - this isn't even an algorithm but a tiny fragment of english text.
Umm, how exactly would you extract that? Perhaps tidal forces can be utilized to extract power (tidal forces near the event horizon of a black hole are large, though surprisingly they are larger for a small black hole). But you can't just magically extract gravitational energy from a massive object with an r^2 gravitational field. Perhaps it's possible, but the gravity of even this massive black hole is only 14 times stronger than the Sun - so we could do whatever it is with the Sun first. I've never heard anybody propose extracting gravitational energy from the Sun, so I presume there is no easy way to do this. Accelerating particles falling inward hit an orbiting station which converts this accelerated stream into energy which it retransmits as electromagnetic waves outwards, perhaps? Sounds sort of like an artificial accretion disk - which is an interesting idea, come to think of it. Have no idea if this is at all self-consistent (much less practical).
So you are partially right, but there have clearly been huge benefits in comprehensibility and hackability which have contributed significantly to the market success of the Tivo in the "geek" crowd, which has driven adoption among a lot of others, even if they gain nothing per se from the use of Linux on the Tivo.
If you don't like their terms, find another provider. Get a business DSL line - I think those can usually be shared without any legal problems (my company split the cost of one with the company we sublet from until we could get our T1s run into our office when we moved).
Furthermore, a nice new terrorist-supporting regime would rapidly busy itself with supporting attacks on US soil. This has already devastated our already weak economy. This is making a lot of us poor and ruining our prosperity. Furthermore it would result in American deaths.
Sorry, but the US government is first and foremost responsible for ensuring national security and the lives and livelihoods of our citizens. Yes, altruism and helping other nations is good and I think we should help others, but if you honestly expect any government to welcome revolution in a country that will likely kill people in those countries and kill our own citizens, you are really out of it.
Like I said, I support the right of the Saudi people to revolt against their government if they want to and to have a democratic government in place. I am just a bit worried that taking the chance of letting the country fall into civil war and hoping that a democratic government comes out is not the best solution to the problem.
If you can propose a way to support democratization of Saudi Arabia without putting my life at risk and the lives of other US residents, then I'd love to hear it, and maybe I'll support it.
Sorry, my post was confusing. It was "off to the side" in 0.9.5 and was impossible to accidentally close. In the nightly builds there was no X at all for a while. I still haven't gotten to use 0.9.6 release yet, so I have yet to determine if they've come up with a compromise between the UI purists and the people who just want to close tabs easily.
The correct means to close tabs is right-click close on the tab. Ctrl-w and middle click on the tab are shortcut mechanisms for this.
Try right-clicking on any link. The context menu that pops up has an option for opening a new tab. Likewise, right click on the newly appeared tabs and you can close them.
Your comment about how Americans fuck peoples lives and therefore we should just bend over and let people commit acts on terrorism for us for a while until they've finished with their revenge is borderline retarded. The collective "we" (the US which is supposedly one entity) is not running around fucking people's lives. Since you fail to define your terms or explain what the fuck your rant is talking about, I have no idea how you can expect me to take you seriously.
You should understand that largely the people who want to kill us are the same people that make up the disgusting regimes. Fundamentalism in the Saudi regime is responsible for a lot of what some people find disgusting about them. Those SAME Wahabi fundamentalists have been starting Madrassah's and recruiting terrorists. Are these people opposed to the Al Saud family? Yes, very much so, but they are responsible for a large part of what Westerners find "disgusting" in the Saudi government these days. The things about the Saudi government that they are opposed to are more or less the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and the tendencies toward modernization and western appeasement that you mention. So it's not that they hate the west because the west supports the Saudis, it's that they hate the Saudi royal family because they are friendly with the west.
You really need to do a teeny tiny bit of thinking for yourself about this problem rather than just spewing out Euro-commie rhetoric.
Sure, a lot of H1Bs come over here because they can make more bucks here and want to stay. And people from fundamentally economically depressed areas who don't acquire sufficient skills to start businesses and contribute to the economy back home just send a few bucks here and there but never return. A lot of Mexicans for example seem to have stayed here because all they got was menial labor and not an education.
But I've also met Malaysians and Indonesians who are extremely eager to go back home and work for companies there as executives or start their own companies with the knowledge and experience they've acquired here. And I think that's great.
I'm just trying to figure out if Katz was trolled or if he is knowingly propagating false information. Journalistic integrity == 0.
Of course, as nice as this sounds, the story is a little strange - I was under the impression there were almost no remaining international phone lines and that electricity was probably out in many of these areas, so I am a bit suspicious. But what do I know, maybe he has a generator and maybe the international phone lines are back up. Also the line about trying to download movies is definitely suspicious. At 9600 baud perhaps? OK, give them the benefit of the doubt, 28.8k. Doesn't sound too believable to me.
So I think this submission is either a bit of a hoax or a bit exaggerated, but it still is a nice sentiment even if the specifics are not true. And hopefully there is a guy somewhere in Afghanistan digging up his old Commodore.
RTFP (Read The F***ing Post). He dug it up from a hiding spot underneath the chicken coop. Stop trolling, it's not amusing.
Number of innocent casualties: incalculatable. Many, many thousands based on what I've heard on CNN. But it's hard to add these things up in the thick of war. It'll become clear after the fact. But who killed whom is unlikely to ever be obvious. Certainly quite a few people have died from stray US bombs and I'd guess it is over a thousand. It's quite unfortunate, but that is an unavoidable side effect of war, especially when you purposefully park your tanks around houses and towns.
As far as I know no war crimes have been committed by US troops. Hell, there aren't that many on the ground in Afganistan. I'm sure Northern Alliance troops have done bad things (looting, the occasional summary execution), as have the Taliban (well, the Taliban did the same about 10 fold over). The US troops are special ops and I really doubt they are going to do things that we would consider war crimes. Kill people? Yes, I'm sure they are doing that, but that's their job. If by war crimes you mean "war is a crime" then that's different - I hate war too, but the US didn't bring it on itself.
In short, you are a troll, your post makes no sense, and no information is being kept from you. There is a free press in the US, and the only things kept from it are specific operational details of troop movements, etc. Hell, we have tons of reporters on the ground in Afganistan and there isn't much you could hide entirely from them.
See my other post. The US doesn't think the Saudis are nice. They are better than the Taliban but not by much. However, the regime does not support terrorism and is cooperative with the international community in general. Furthermore the regime is far more progressive than the regime that would result if the Al Saud family were thrown out of power. I would be terribly inclined to see a democracy in Saudi Arabia, but like many people whose education consists primarily of fundamentalist religious indoctrination, I don't know if the people would naturally form a democracy when the government fell. Much more likely an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship like the Taliban. I.e. substantially worse than the current Saudi government, openly supportive of anti-western terrorist organizations, etc.