Anyone else think the $25/yr "iTunes Match" service is Apple creating - and getting a piece of - a music laundering game? Pay 25/yr, take your "otherwise acquired" music, and legitimize it. Literally the first thing that came to mind when I read about it
Pakistan is not happy with us over that. Under the rules of war, they can declare war on us for the invasion of their sovereignty. Which is what we did. But at the moment, they're the ones with egg on their face, and they'd be foolish to do so. Also, they're supposedly an ally, which means that they trust our intentions - at least ostensibly.
Does it give us the right to do what we want? Not really, but the fact remains that the ethics of war are highly complex. Since nobody can ever be "right", in absolute terms, it's basically come down to "might makes right" - in that it's up to other nations to police a misbehaving one. And it's up to the citizens of the fighting nations to determine if it's appropriate, by censuring their leaders if need be.
But you won't find me protesting. I'm of the opinion that this is how we should've handled the "war on terror" all along - as more of a police action against individuals and groups, because you can't wage war on an idea.
Well, yes that probably should've been considered an act of war. It did as much damage as a few dozen bombs would've and I'm sure they wouldn't have liked that.
Having said that, it's hard to prove - the point in TFS - and they're not stupid enough to fight the US unless they have to.
I was just saying this the other day - cyberattacks can be as damaging as tactical bomb raids (generally without human casualties though). If a nasty targeted worm got into the C&C systems? Definitely an act of war by its creator, though I'd be more worried about the fact that they weren't hardened.
It's a question of scale, though. Where do you draw the line? If the Russians flew in and blew up a useless bit of our forest, we'd fight back - but mostly because they invaded our airspace with military planes, not so much the damage done. But do you consider a cyberattack a foreign military invasion, or do you concern yourself only with the damage attempted/done? If somebody gets a worm onto the Dept. of Agriculture's secretaries' machines, I find it hard to believe we'd go to war.
It's distressingly rare nowadays, but people are still capable of judgement. I cautiously trust the government to make appropriate judgement calls on this.
Flamebait? Come on mods, if you disagree, have the common decency to say so. Flamebait actually means something, and while you may have problems with the content of my post, it is impossible to construe it as "flamebait"
Many State Prosecutors say that it is, and are arresting TSA officers for the act.
[citation needed]. I'm sure I would've heard of this, and if I somehow missed it I'd love to read it.
Second, you - like most people complaining about states' rights - forget that most decisions *are* left to the states. I agree with you that more *should* be left to the states. But the fact of the matter is that it is much, much easier to travel across the country than it once was. At the time of the Constitution's drafting, it was not feasible to traverse the country on a whim, fishing for a state that allowed whatever it is you wanted to do. For example, in my home state the age to buy tobacco is 19, but drive for an hour and you can buy them at 18. This wasn't exactly feasible at the time of the Constitution. Similarly, out-of-state sales tax was a non-issue until you could order online and have it shipped in 2 days. I know some people argue about sales tax, but the fact remains it's a good example of where increased mobility is subverting the original intent of state-based laws.
Finally, I don't really care what the Founders thought, aside from academically. One of the most important parts of the Constitution - and unquestionably the intention of the Founders - was that the Constitution was a living document, meant to be interpreted and changed as the nation grew. The Founders knew that the country in a few hundred years would be entirely different than the one they were in, and made this explicit. Their intentions are important for all Americans to understand as a matter of our history, but ultimately irrelevant. They're not gods, nor did they want to be. From my understanding of those men, they would have been mortified to hear that more than 200 years later, we were all running around going "but the founders!" Actually, that sounds like a religion - we've elevated them on a pedestal (as they've earned), but because of it some people aren't evaluating their words rationally and just accepting them as gospel.
This is mass hysteria. For every fanboy that raves about their model M, there are 20 people that can't stand 5 minutes typing on these things. I tried it. Your significant other can't sleep at night, and your fingers get tired. They are old outdated pieces of shit.
I agree with everything but this. On the best rubber dome keyboard I've ever used, there's still an unclear transition between "off" and "on". Not so on a buckling-spring keyboard. Once I used one for a week or so, I'd noticed that my typing speed had improved by 20 WPM. I didn't need to spend so long ensuring that I'd hit the key I wanted to, because I could feel whether I had or not. Consequently, I could move faster because proper strikes could be confirmed by feel. And since it provides a bit more resistance, my error rate went way down since it's harder to fat-finger.
And I spent $70 for mine, a lot but not unreasonable considering that I'm generally typing 12+ hours a day. By the heft of the thing, I'll have that keyboard for 20 years. And it came with a USB connector, not PS/2. It is loud, I'll grant you - but it's worth it to me.
What problem do you have, exactly, with AT&T? I have boatloads of problems with how they run their business, but the tech is solid (in my not-so-humble experience).
I just tested my 3G speed - 5Mbps/600Kbps and 100ms latency. This is pretty consistent across all areas I have HSDPA service (most of the places I go to). As for consistency, I only ever drop calls in tunnels or the thick-walled (bomb-shelter) basements of some buildings.
I keep hearing about the terrible quality of AT&T's tech - what, exactly, is it?
They have two options. They can either grandfather you in, in which case you still have unlimited plan, and only new signups will have the limits, or they can offer you a new contract, which you have the option of declining without penalty (ETF)
They'll probably go with option 1 for all kinds of reasons.
At the moment, Counter-Strike (not even Counter-Strike Source!) is the most-played game today. Fact is, it's just a better game than almost everything out there, so people play it even more than 10 years after its release.
Prompt criticality would be suspiciously like an atomic bomb, because that's how they work. But it seems like there was only very minor fallout, of short-term fission products (iodine, etc), which indicates that it just released existing product.
Perhaps the explosion was larger because there was more hydrogen? Also, don't underestimate the power of explosions like that - Chernobyl's steam explosion threw (much heavier) graphite moderator blocks a tremendous distance.
Compared to the reactor pressure vessel, the spent fuel rods are a waste of effort. A plane could crash into the building and compromise the spent fuel rod pool, but even if cooling was compromised (unlikely), there'd be loads of time to deal with it. Fukushima was different because they lost external power, which wasn't "supposed" to happen (the grid, generators, and battery backups).
Horse shit. Pure horse shit. Radiation levels at the moment are still extremely minor. Plant workers are still not exceeding their yearly allotment, they're being pulled out before hand. The yearly allotment is below the level that shows even a minor increase in cancer rates. The government has stopped fishing mostly for trust reasons - it's unlikely that anyone would've been made sick, but they want people to feel safe buying the fish when they do open it up.
This is a big problem, and it shouldn't have happened. But this event has made a few people sick (like a sunburn) for a few days because they didn't follow proper protocol. Meanwhile, the triggering event has killed, what, 20,000? Versus a couple people with minor injuries.
If you have evidence to refute the above points, I'd love to see your citations. I've been following this pretty closely, so I'd be very interested to see if I've been wrong.
But it seems like you're just making stuff up. There are plenty of facts in this debate. Don't go inventing nonsense just because the facts don't fit your opinion.
I'm not a nuclear fanboy, by any means. As an engineer, current plants make me nervous because they rely on active safety. But I'm more annoyed that NIMBYs aren't allowing research and production of the intrinsically-safe plants, than I am about the operators of the plant. Nuclear plants "feel" unsafe? Well they have just about the best safety record of all industrial facilities. This particular plant had multiple failures after design specifications were well exceeded, and even then the problems they've had have been extremely minor in relative and absolute terms.
That's a pretty nice processor, and you bought it separately so installed it yourself - assuming that's actually your box. At that level, it's almost a given that you know everything about the product by the time you walk in the door. That is, you don't walk in, say "I want that one", and spend $340 (if you did, most don't). You would've been pretty familiar with it beforehand - in the same way that a Lamborghini doesn't advertise its horsepower, since the target audience knows more about the car than you could fit on the sticker.
For the record, it's a 2.93GHz chip, but easily overclocked a good ways.
I was going to just mod you down, but I might as well reply instead.
Some things matter in this world. Computer science is no different. And while what "matters" is generally subjective, sometimes it's not. A good criteria to start with is "enables people to be more productive" (as in, it's a good tool). Or perhaps it's amusing or stress relieving - entertainment in general absolutely can have value. In any case, your list of things that have value despite the GP is a strawman - he'd completely agree with you, a more functional product is worthwhile. That's not the complaint here.
But "love points"... Aside from being highly derivative (FB is full of "xyz points"-type things, or otherwise sending meaningless crap around), who even cares? Of even the people who use it, I doubt you'd find any who would say it mattered to them. Probably more like "I installed it and never/only once used it". It's the same with those "fart apps" for cellphones.
So you're not convinced? Fair enough. 12 year old boys think that fart app is pretty important, I'm sure - why does my opinion matter specifically? Well, if you want a job, and your resumé says "developed chart-topping fart app on iOS" or "wrote a successful facebook "love points" app", I count it against you. It just seems like that's all you're capable of. Even if it's not, it's evidence of intellectual laziness, even if it's just your free time project - if that's what interests you, I want nothing to do with it.
And I'm not the only one who feels this way, which is liable to limit to you to horseshit jobs. The number of people making horseshit software out there may be surprisingly high (as in, I expected almost none), but how much money is in it when fundamentally you're not creating any value?
Perhaps you mean, social security was *managed* improperly. If run as designed, it would have a massive surplus at the moment, which is why the government pilfered from its coffers of course. That was a dumb idea, because had they not the program would be in no trouble today.
SS had an absolutely massive surplus. The government screwed it up by pilfering from its coffers, this is true, but the program itself isn't flawed. Had it run as designed, it would *still* run a surplus.
The government was created to do a number of things that aren't really relevant nowadays. By the same token, there's a number of things we require of our governments that simply did not exist when they were created. Any thinking person agrees that the FCC, in some form, is a requirement to avoid absolute radio chaos. Similarly, anti-trust laws are pretty hard to argue against - particularly when you look at historical abuses that did, in fact, happen, and how regulation made a big difference.
So I don't understand this anti-government mentality. I believe that a properly-run government can do things for its people in aggregate that are inefficient in smaller numbers - like health care. Again, it needs to be done properly - but Social Security was done properly, so projects of that scope are clearly possible.
I don't trust incompetent governments. But why is that a given? It's *our* government, we can make it competent if we really want to.
Wow. No, the objection every thinking person has to the "Tea Party" is that they aren't actually interested in anything specific. What they are interested in, under the guise of "limited government", is more of a corpratocracy (no regulation, no taxes for wealthy, etc). This isn't much of a surprise, considering that the "grass roots" organization is pretty much championed by very large corporations (Fox News)
In retrospect, supporting al Qaeda against the Soviets was a bad idea, there's no question. But we're doing a similar thing with Libya right now. And in any case, he had an enormous amount of money, from his father - if he wanted weapons, do you really think he couldn't get them himself?
Israel is a sovereign nation (that was originally a British colony), and as a sovereign nation they have a right to defend themselves. Do you take offense to its creation, or their actions since then? Presumably you think we shouldn't be an ally because of their actions, which is a reasonable statement. But since when do you attack a nonfighting ally of a nation you're in conflict with? Well, Japan attacked us, and we went to war with them. Then Germany attacked us (our ships) and we went to war with them. So al Qaeda attacked us (but hit civillian, not military targets) and we went to war with their supporting state, since they're not a nation. Seems pretty reasonable to me, regardless of what our allies may have done. We were attacked, we responded.
Imperialist bully? With Iraq, definitely. That's why I've been against it since it started. But we haven't been that big on colonies for a long time now (what, a hundred years?) so what exactly is this imperialism you speak of? Because if it's not "the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination", you're using a different definition than everyone else (for the record, this does not define "cultural imperialism")
Bush, for all his many, many, *many* faults, did not want to turn the world back by a thousand years. And of all the hundreds of thousands of people who died needlessly in Iraq, how many *billions* more would need to die for bin Laden to succeed? Because I sure as hell wouldn't go willingly, and I don't think there are many who would. Clearly, it's an impossible goal, but when the goal requires the elimination of *most* of humanity, I'd say that's pretty evil.
Nobody believes themselves to be evil. And I find it very hard to make the case that "turning back the world by a few thousand years and restoring the caliphate" can ever be considered a noble goal by anybody but, well, al Qaeda. Considering that his beliefs were inconsistent (what about the strict rules for jihad? not killing innocents?), I find it hard to believe that he was anything but a self-serving ass who used a supposed ideology to do what he wanted and convince disturbed people to go along with it.
Usually there are two sides to every worldview, but I personally find it impossible to defend the beliefs of anybody who believes what bin Laden did, and therefore can't justify actions based on them. And I'm usually the first to say "but the enemy *isn't* the devil", and the people tricked or coerced into strapping on bombs are as much victims as anyone else. Moral relativism has its place, and people do have a tendency to dismiss others as "bad" or "evil" for having a different worldview, but he was aiming to *destroy the world* (how many people would go back a thousand years willingly?) to achieve his goals. I think that's a pretty evil thing to do.
I find it very strange to cheer about somebody's death, but here I am.
It's pretty rare to find undiluted evil in the world, but he sure was it. I was in 5th grade at the time, in northeast NJ. We could see the towers from the top of the slide, and then just two pillars of smoke. Even though I was only 11, I knew damn sure what was going on and what it all meant.
And I'm damn glad he's dead. His organization continues, of course, but he wasn't exactly a figurehead either. I'm not going to speculate on the ramifications of this, because they're happening now and in the next few hours and days.
So good job to all involved. Truly a moment in history.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else think the $25/yr "iTunes Match" service is Apple creating - and getting a piece of - a music laundering game? Pay 25/yr, take your "otherwise acquired" music, and legitimize it. Literally the first thing that came to mind when I read about it
They did. Delta updates in App Store. All the devs in the room applauded, for precisely the reason you mentioned.
Pakistan is not happy with us over that. Under the rules of war, they can declare war on us for the invasion of their sovereignty. Which is what we did. But at the moment, they're the ones with egg on their face, and they'd be foolish to do so. Also, they're supposedly an ally, which means that they trust our intentions - at least ostensibly.
Does it give us the right to do what we want? Not really, but the fact remains that the ethics of war are highly complex. Since nobody can ever be "right", in absolute terms, it's basically come down to "might makes right" - in that it's up to other nations to police a misbehaving one. And it's up to the citizens of the fighting nations to determine if it's appropriate, by censuring their leaders if need be.
But you won't find me protesting. I'm of the opinion that this is how we should've handled the "war on terror" all along - as more of a police action against individuals and groups, because you can't wage war on an idea.
Well, yes that probably should've been considered an act of war. It did as much damage as a few dozen bombs would've and I'm sure they wouldn't have liked that.
Having said that, it's hard to prove - the point in TFS - and they're not stupid enough to fight the US unless they have to.
I was just saying this the other day - cyberattacks can be as damaging as tactical bomb raids (generally without human casualties though). If a nasty targeted worm got into the C&C systems? Definitely an act of war by its creator, though I'd be more worried about the fact that they weren't hardened.
It's a question of scale, though. Where do you draw the line? If the Russians flew in and blew up a useless bit of our forest, we'd fight back - but mostly because they invaded our airspace with military planes, not so much the damage done. But do you consider a cyberattack a foreign military invasion, or do you concern yourself only with the damage attempted/done? If somebody gets a worm onto the Dept. of Agriculture's secretaries' machines, I find it hard to believe we'd go to war.
It's distressingly rare nowadays, but people are still capable of judgement. I cautiously trust the government to make appropriate judgement calls on this.
Flamebait? Come on mods, if you disagree, have the common decency to say so. Flamebait actually means something, and while you may have problems with the content of my post, it is impossible to construe it as "flamebait"
First,
Many State Prosecutors say that it is, and are arresting TSA officers for the act.
[citation needed]. I'm sure I would've heard of this, and if I somehow missed it I'd love to read it.
Second, you - like most people complaining about states' rights - forget that most decisions *are* left to the states. I agree with you that more *should* be left to the states. But the fact of the matter is that it is much, much easier to travel across the country than it once was. At the time of the Constitution's drafting, it was not feasible to traverse the country on a whim, fishing for a state that allowed whatever it is you wanted to do. For example, in my home state the age to buy tobacco is 19, but drive for an hour and you can buy them at 18. This wasn't exactly feasible at the time of the Constitution. Similarly, out-of-state sales tax was a non-issue until you could order online and have it shipped in 2 days. I know some people argue about sales tax, but the fact remains it's a good example of where increased mobility is subverting the original intent of state-based laws.
Finally, I don't really care what the Founders thought, aside from academically. One of the most important parts of the Constitution - and unquestionably the intention of the Founders - was that the Constitution was a living document, meant to be interpreted and changed as the nation grew. The Founders knew that the country in a few hundred years would be entirely different than the one they were in, and made this explicit. Their intentions are important for all Americans to understand as a matter of our history, but ultimately irrelevant. They're not gods, nor did they want to be. From my understanding of those men, they would have been mortified to hear that more than 200 years later, we were all running around going "but the founders!" Actually, that sounds like a religion - we've elevated them on a pedestal (as they've earned), but because of it some people aren't evaluating their words rationally and just accepting them as gospel.
This is mass hysteria. For every fanboy that raves about their model M, there are 20 people that can't stand 5 minutes typing on these things. I tried it. Your significant other can't sleep at night, and your fingers get tired. They are old outdated pieces of shit.
I agree with everything but this. On the best rubber dome keyboard I've ever used, there's still an unclear transition between "off" and "on". Not so on a buckling-spring keyboard. Once I used one for a week or so, I'd noticed that my typing speed had improved by 20 WPM. I didn't need to spend so long ensuring that I'd hit the key I wanted to, because I could feel whether I had or not. Consequently, I could move faster because proper strikes could be confirmed by feel. And since it provides a bit more resistance, my error rate went way down since it's harder to fat-finger.
And I spent $70 for mine, a lot but not unreasonable considering that I'm generally typing 12+ hours a day. By the heft of the thing, I'll have that keyboard for 20 years. And it came with a USB connector, not PS/2. It is loud, I'll grant you - but it's worth it to me.
What problem do you have, exactly, with AT&T? I have boatloads of problems with how they run their business, but the tech is solid (in my not-so-humble experience).
I just tested my 3G speed - 5Mbps/600Kbps and 100ms latency. This is pretty consistent across all areas I have HSDPA service (most of the places I go to). As for consistency, I only ever drop calls in tunnels or the thick-walled (bomb-shelter) basements of some buildings.
I keep hearing about the terrible quality of AT&T's tech - what, exactly, is it?
They have two options. They can either grandfather you in, in which case you still have unlimited plan, and only new signups will have the limits, or they can offer you a new contract, which you have the option of declining without penalty (ETF)
They'll probably go with option 1 for all kinds of reasons.
So use Dosbox, which limits the processor to a selectable speed, for exactly this reason. This is exactly what he's asking.
So it's Half-Life 2...
I LOL'd. Check out the Steam stats: http://store.steampowered.com/stats
At the moment, Counter-Strike (not even Counter-Strike Source!) is the most-played game today. Fact is, it's just a better game than almost everything out there, so people play it even more than 10 years after its release.
For the record, this is a CS:S map.
Prompt criticality would be suspiciously like an atomic bomb, because that's how they work. But it seems like there was only very minor fallout, of short-term fission products (iodine, etc), which indicates that it just released existing product.
Perhaps the explosion was larger because there was more hydrogen? Also, don't underestimate the power of explosions like that - Chernobyl's steam explosion threw (much heavier) graphite moderator blocks a tremendous distance.
Compared to the reactor pressure vessel, the spent fuel rods are a waste of effort. A plane could crash into the building and compromise the spent fuel rod pool, but even if cooling was compromised (unlikely), there'd be loads of time to deal with it. Fukushima was different because they lost external power, which wasn't "supposed" to happen (the grid, generators, and battery backups).
Horse shit. Pure horse shit. Radiation levels at the moment are still extremely minor. Plant workers are still not exceeding their yearly allotment, they're being pulled out before hand. The yearly allotment is below the level that shows even a minor increase in cancer rates. The government has stopped fishing mostly for trust reasons - it's unlikely that anyone would've been made sick, but they want people to feel safe buying the fish when they do open it up.
This is a big problem, and it shouldn't have happened. But this event has made a few people sick (like a sunburn) for a few days because they didn't follow proper protocol. Meanwhile, the triggering event has killed, what, 20,000? Versus a couple people with minor injuries.
If you have evidence to refute the above points, I'd love to see your citations. I've been following this pretty closely, so I'd be very interested to see if I've been wrong.
But it seems like you're just making stuff up. There are plenty of facts in this debate. Don't go inventing nonsense just because the facts don't fit your opinion.
I'm not a nuclear fanboy, by any means. As an engineer, current plants make me nervous because they rely on active safety. But I'm more annoyed that NIMBYs aren't allowing research and production of the intrinsically-safe plants, than I am about the operators of the plant. Nuclear plants "feel" unsafe? Well they have just about the best safety record of all industrial facilities. This particular plant had multiple failures after design specifications were well exceeded, and even then the problems they've had have been extremely minor in relative and absolute terms.
In short, you're being irrational.
That's a pretty nice processor, and you bought it separately so installed it yourself - assuming that's actually your box. At that level, it's almost a given that you know everything about the product by the time you walk in the door. That is, you don't walk in, say "I want that one", and spend $340 (if you did, most don't). You would've been pretty familiar with it beforehand - in the same way that a Lamborghini doesn't advertise its horsepower, since the target audience knows more about the car than you could fit on the sticker.
For the record, it's a 2.93GHz chip, but easily overclocked a good ways.
I was going to just mod you down, but I might as well reply instead.
Some things matter in this world. Computer science is no different. And while what "matters" is generally subjective, sometimes it's not. A good criteria to start with is "enables people to be more productive" (as in, it's a good tool). Or perhaps it's amusing or stress relieving - entertainment in general absolutely can have value. In any case, your list of things that have value despite the GP is a strawman - he'd completely agree with you, a more functional product is worthwhile. That's not the complaint here.
But "love points"... Aside from being highly derivative (FB is full of "xyz points"-type things, or otherwise sending meaningless crap around), who even cares? Of even the people who use it, I doubt you'd find any who would say it mattered to them. Probably more like "I installed it and never/only once used it". It's the same with those "fart apps" for cellphones.
So you're not convinced? Fair enough. 12 year old boys think that fart app is pretty important, I'm sure - why does my opinion matter specifically? Well, if you want a job, and your resumé says "developed chart-topping fart app on iOS" or "wrote a successful facebook "love points" app", I count it against you. It just seems like that's all you're capable of. Even if it's not, it's evidence of intellectual laziness, even if it's just your free time project - if that's what interests you, I want nothing to do with it.
And I'm not the only one who feels this way, which is liable to limit to you to horseshit jobs. The number of people making horseshit software out there may be surprisingly high (as in, I expected almost none), but how much money is in it when fundamentally you're not creating any value?
Perhaps you mean, social security was *managed* improperly. If run as designed, it would have a massive surplus at the moment, which is why the government pilfered from its coffers of course. That was a dumb idea, because had they not the program would be in no trouble today.
SS had an absolutely massive surplus. The government screwed it up by pilfering from its coffers, this is true, but the program itself isn't flawed. Had it run as designed, it would *still* run a surplus.
The government was created to do a number of things that aren't really relevant nowadays. By the same token, there's a number of things we require of our governments that simply did not exist when they were created. Any thinking person agrees that the FCC, in some form, is a requirement to avoid absolute radio chaos. Similarly, anti-trust laws are pretty hard to argue against - particularly when you look at historical abuses that did, in fact, happen, and how regulation made a big difference.
So I don't understand this anti-government mentality. I believe that a properly-run government can do things for its people in aggregate that are inefficient in smaller numbers - like health care. Again, it needs to be done properly - but Social Security was done properly, so projects of that scope are clearly possible.
I don't trust incompetent governments. But why is that a given? It's *our* government, we can make it competent if we really want to.
Wow. No, the objection every thinking person has to the "Tea Party" is that they aren't actually interested in anything specific. What they are interested in, under the guise of "limited government", is more of a corpratocracy (no regulation, no taxes for wealthy, etc). This isn't much of a surprise, considering that the "grass roots" organization is pretty much championed by very large corporations (Fox News)
I heard it works great for Frogger games with your highscore too...
In retrospect, supporting al Qaeda against the Soviets was a bad idea, there's no question. But we're doing a similar thing with Libya right now. And in any case, he had an enormous amount of money, from his father - if he wanted weapons, do you really think he couldn't get them himself?
Israel is a sovereign nation (that was originally a British colony), and as a sovereign nation they have a right to defend themselves. Do you take offense to its creation, or their actions since then? Presumably you think we shouldn't be an ally because of their actions, which is a reasonable statement. But since when do you attack a nonfighting ally of a nation you're in conflict with? Well, Japan attacked us, and we went to war with them. Then Germany attacked us (our ships) and we went to war with them. So al Qaeda attacked us (but hit civillian, not military targets) and we went to war with their supporting state, since they're not a nation. Seems pretty reasonable to me, regardless of what our allies may have done. We were attacked, we responded.
Imperialist bully? With Iraq, definitely. That's why I've been against it since it started. But we haven't been that big on colonies for a long time now (what, a hundred years?) so what exactly is this imperialism you speak of? Because if it's not "the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination", you're using a different definition than everyone else (for the record, this does not define "cultural imperialism")
Bush, for all his many, many, *many* faults, did not want to turn the world back by a thousand years. And of all the hundreds of thousands of people who died needlessly in Iraq, how many *billions* more would need to die for bin Laden to succeed? Because I sure as hell wouldn't go willingly, and I don't think there are many who would. Clearly, it's an impossible goal, but when the goal requires the elimination of *most* of humanity, I'd say that's pretty evil.
Nobody believes themselves to be evil. And I find it very hard to make the case that "turning back the world by a few thousand years and restoring the caliphate" can ever be considered a noble goal by anybody but, well, al Qaeda. Considering that his beliefs were inconsistent (what about the strict rules for jihad? not killing innocents?), I find it hard to believe that he was anything but a self-serving ass who used a supposed ideology to do what he wanted and convince disturbed people to go along with it.
Usually there are two sides to every worldview, but I personally find it impossible to defend the beliefs of anybody who believes what bin Laden did, and therefore can't justify actions based on them. And I'm usually the first to say "but the enemy *isn't* the devil", and the people tricked or coerced into strapping on bombs are as much victims as anyone else. Moral relativism has its place, and people do have a tendency to dismiss others as "bad" or "evil" for having a different worldview, but he was aiming to *destroy the world* (how many people would go back a thousand years willingly?) to achieve his goals. I think that's a pretty evil thing to do.
I find it very strange to cheer about somebody's death, but here I am.
It's pretty rare to find undiluted evil in the world, but he sure was it. I was in 5th grade at the time, in northeast NJ. We could see the towers from the top of the slide, and then just two pillars of smoke. Even though I was only 11, I knew damn sure what was going on and what it all meant.
And I'm damn glad he's dead. His organization continues, of course, but he wasn't exactly a figurehead either. I'm not going to speculate on the ramifications of this, because they're happening now and in the next few hours and days.
So good job to all involved. Truly a moment in history.