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User: towsonu2003

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Comments · 434

  1. Re:Too little too late... on 35 Articles of Impeachment Introduced Against Bush · · Score: 1

    I should find a way to use what you said in clsses I teach

  2. Re:While these stories are interesting... on 11-Year-Old Becomes Network Admin for Alabama School · · Score: 1

    What I want to know why is a 11 yr old doing this? Sure it makes for great news but being the network admin for a 60 PC school network is a full time job, where's the child labor laws? Or are they using him for free labor?
    communist!!11!
  3. Re:1st censorship death sentence on Internet Censorship's First Death Sentence? · · Score: 1
    You seem to suggest a conflict between civilizations. I have this quotation that's pretty insighful:

    Can we talk of the clash between two civilizations?
    This is fashionable talk, but it makes little sense. Suppose we briefly review some familiar history. The most populous Islamic state is Indonesia, a favorite of the United States ever since Suharto took power in 1965, as army-led massacres slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants, with the assistance of the U.S. and with an outburst of euphoria from the West that is so embarrassing in retrospect that it has been effectively wiped out of memory. Suharto remained "our kind of guy," as the Clinton administration called him, as he compiled one of the most horrendous records of slaughter, torture, and other abuses of the late 20th century. The most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state, apart from the Taliban, is Saudi Arabia, A U.S. client since its founding. In the 1980s, the U.S. Along with Pakistani intelligence (helped by Saudi Arabia, Britain, and others), recruited, armed, and trained the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists they could find to cause maximal harm to the Soviets in Afghanistan. As Simon Jenkins observes in the London Times, those efforts "destroyed a moderate regime and created a fanatical one, from groups recklessly financed by the Americans" (most of the funding was probably Saudi). One of the indirect beneficiaries was Osama bin Laden.

    Also in the 1980s, the U.S. and U.K. gave strong support to their friend and ally Saddam Hussein-more secular, to be sure, but on the Islamic side of the "clash"-right through the period of his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds, and beyond.

    Also in the 1980s the U.S. fought a major war in Central America, leaving some 200,000 tortured and mutilated corpses, millions of orphans and refugees, and four countries devastated. A prime target of the U.S. attack was the Catholic Church, which had committed the grievous sin of adopting "the preferential option for the poor."

    In the early 90s, primarily for cynical power reasons, the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients, hardly to their benefit.

    Without continuing, exactly where do we find the divide between "civilizations." Are we to conclude that there is a "clash of civilizations" with the Latin American Catholic Church on one side, and the U.S. and the Muslim world, including its most murderous and fanatic religious elements, on the other side? I do not of course suggest any such absurdity. But exactly what are we to conclude, on rational grounds?

    This is from Chomsky's 9-11, p. 24.
  4. Re:1st censorship death sentence on Internet Censorship's First Death Sentence? · · Score: 5, Funny

    Unfortunately, if you give a bunch of religous zealots democracy they will vote to stone you to death and revert to a dictatorship.
    I am utterly confused. I never expected such anti-Americanism on /. You are talking about the US, right?
  5. You suck (virtually) on Internet Censorship's First Death Sentence? · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Didn't you people "liberate" that country a few years ago?

  6. sick of on Physicist Calculates Trajectory of Tiger At SF Zoo · · Score: 1

    a Siberian Tiger he had allegedly been taunting at San Francisco zoo at the end of last year.
    I am really sick of this word "alleged", especially when used for stuff that really happened... Authors should stop using this nonsense word.
  7. Re:And on Some People Just Never Learn · · Score: 1

    There's nothing really good about men. Men suck. They're totally worthless.
    This is true of any group that holds power for too long. We have had power for centuries... What did you expect?
  8. And on Some People Just Never Learn · · Score: 1

    the researchers also told that they did not consider women as part of the human species.

  9. The G.I. Tux on Work Progressing on Army's Future Combat Systems · · Score: 1

    The G.I. Tux, one more thing we did not need in this world...

  10. can't decide on KDE Goes Cross-Platform, Supports Windows and OS X · · Score: 1

    I can't decide about whether this is a good or a bad move. On the one hand, people will have easier time switching from windows to linux if they are using kde (firefox and openoffice helped me a lot when I first switched). on the other hand, they are spending (probably) a lot of developer time that could be spent enhancing kde 4 faster and more efficiently...

  11. heal one on Training From America's Army Game Saved a Life · · Score: 1

    kill a million. I call THAT a game... oh wait...

  12. how about on Google To Offer Free Database Storage for Scientists · · Score: 1

    do you think social sciences could benefit from this as well? -that is, if they can get over they fears of opening their data to others- And if yes, how?

  13. During the collision on Aftermath of Distant Planetary Collision? · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    While they speculate about the possible aftermath of some collision of planets, we are living the (to borrow from Chomsky) 500+ years of collision of the West onto the countries it underdeveloped. If there was such a feature, I would rate the item as both "Irrelevant" and "Ironic".

  14. What? on The Video Game Industry Goes Political · · Score: 1

    I thought the political (sic) wing of the video industry was the army. What's up? Is army support not enough anymore?

  15. Ehm on AT&T's Plan to Play Internet Cop · · Score: 1
    When you are backed by the Invisible Government, you don't need to worry about

    ATT's new strategy 'exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders,' concludes Wu.
  16. Re:well.. on What Would You Do As President? · · Score: 1

    At first I thought you were a dumbass who needs a foot in the ass the "That 70s Show" style. But then again, there are those who rated your post as Interesting. World is a surprising and interesting place after all.

  17. Re:Is it like the pilot project? on OLPC To Be Distributed To US Students · · Score: 1

    Why don't you go back to Stormfront, you jackass?
    I don't get the insightfulness of this comment.
  18. Re:US loves wasting money on OLPC To Be Distributed To US Students · · Score: 1

    It's that skilled workers are VERY profitable for your country.
    Not quite afaik. The more skilled your workers are, the less you will be able to convince them that low wages are normal. This of course doesn't work for the US-like societies, where workers actually believe that wages correlate with hard work... Anyway, you get the point (being an overly simplified equation)- the more educated your workers are, the less profit you'll get out of them.

    There was a time when most of the most skilled workers in the world were American. People are finally starting to realize that it's a very bad thing to keep the trend going as is.
    Well, actually, increased education in *some* parts of the world isn't actually the result of free will of those people. They weren't some "bunch of idiots who didn't know better" - they were *allowed* to get better education only after the kind of "trade" (read: exploitation) they were involved in (read: subjected to) changed its nature from less technological to more so (e.g. cash crops vs tech support in India, an ex-British now-American colony).

    globalization/free trade
    There is no such thing as free trade. Trade is, and has always been regulated, in an asymmetrical manner of course...

    Finally these people in other countries are getting this opportunity.
    I doubt the education they receive can be called opportunity. After all, the education that is set up for them (and not "by them" per se) is oriented towards the kinds of jobs they will get in the neocolonial market, and that market isn't very kind to them...
  19. Re:what the hell... on OLPC To Be Distributed To US Students · · Score: 0, Troll

    ..is with the messed up tag: "onelaptopperblackchild"? Am I the only one who thinks that's slightly wrong?
    what is "slightly" wrong is that the US (and the rest of the world to which colonialism "touched") is a racist society and it treats its black people almost as the same as the people of its colonies... Though others might use the tag as irony or something, I think there is merit to the use: it is not known for the US to test everything first "on" its black almost-citizens; to cast them away and starve them to death; to finance only those public services, which it knows will probably fail at the end; and to force them to be poor and stay poor. So I think there is more to the tag than just irony and error... It's rather insightful, if you ask me.
  20. Re:Patriotic??? on OLPC To Be Distributed To US Students · · Score: 1

    turning home only after selling everywhere else
    Actually, many (now-Western) institutions were tested first in the colonies before being applied at "home", so what he is doing make sense, but it sounds conflicting with what he set himself up to do\ldots{}
  21. apropos patriotism on OLPC To Be Distributed To US Students · · Score: 2, Informative

    Patriotism is dangerous, we all know it by now. Doing something "in the name of patriotism" is even more dangerous.

  22. Some crappiness in "negative" aspects on How to Recognize a Good Programmer · · Score: 1

    Doesn't seem too smart
    Did you ever see someone who looks "too smart"?

    Started programming at university
    You need to have a quite rich family.

    All programming experience is on the CV
    You shouldn't participate any "how to write a CV" workshops.
  23. The Summary is Here on How to Recognize a Good Programmer · · Score: 1

    The author is a good programmer, hire her.

  24. ehm on Coverity Reports Open Source Security Making Great Strides · · Score: 1

    I'm a bit more interested in who were the least in fixing their bugs...

  25. Re:Mo money on Firefox Struggling to Compete as Corporate Browser · · Score: 1

    What Mozilla needs to do is create their own operating system and incorporate Firefox into it in such a way that it cannot be uninstalled
    It's called Ubuntu :P