Also you fail to note that those "daily occurrences" are only there because of other, much smaller, geothermal plants next door.
No, earthquakes of magnitudes under 4 are regular occurences throughout California (or, at least, along its many faultlines, including the ones in the area at issue) because of all the active fault systems, not because of geothermal plants. This is pretty well established.
Roads are specifically mentioned in the US Constitution.
Only post roads are mentioned.
US Taxpayer money to a private automaker? Fail. Unless you can point me to the clause I missed that specifically grants the US government that power
The article I, sec. 8, powers to operate a postal service and to build and maintain post roads, together with the necessary and proper clause, certainly give Congress the power to assure that there are vehicles available, which can be used by the postal service, which are, in the judgement of the Congress, appropriate for use the roads it funds under its authority to create post roads (appropriate including, in this case, having desirable environmental or other operational characteristics.) Just as the post roads Congress has the authority to fund may also be used for other purposes, so can the vehicles; if Congress finds that the most expeditious way to meet the needs is to make funds available for general purpose vehicles.
Alternatively, one could go the easier and shorter route and say, insofar as it is subsidizing particular activities in national and international commerce, Congress action is authorized under the Interstate Commerce Clause.
Or, if one wanted to appeal to people who are concerned that the principle legitimate function of the government is national defense, you could, noting that personal vehicles are important to the mobility of the informal militia, appeal to the Art. I, Sec. 8 power " to provide for...arming...the militia"; or since no doubt, insofar as even the regular military uses, for many purposes, vehicles available on the general market, and that Congress may deem it more efficient to acquire vehicles by making them generally available through loans rather than paying (rather than loaning) money for custom development where the vehicles would be of more general utility, simply the powers "to raise and support armies" and "to provide and maintain a navy".
Now that the government owns a big part of GM why not have a cheap electric car for 2010?
Well, there's the Chevy Volt, which is looking to cost about $40K.
The Chevy Volt is a gas-electric series hybrid whose battery is capable of plug-in charging. Its pure-electric range is substantialy shorter than late-1990s electric cars like the EV1.
Except economics is not science, it's mathematical hand-waving.
Economics is science. Like most social sciences, controlled experiments generally require statistical controls rather than constructed situations, but that's true for some investigations even in many areas of the physical and life sciences.
The problem economics has is that there are lots of people with ideological stakes in the outcomes, and a lot of them willing to put out money for the results they want, so you get a lot more, better supported, and better organized cranks than in most other fields, where the cranks usually have a narrower personal motivation and less chance of attracting any support.
To take those points and look at them from another pespective - If you are slower than your opposition and also have significantly more RCS on the aft of the aircraft like...Say...The F-35 (Joint Strike Fighter), you may be able to penetrate enemy airspace to bomb a target but you'd better hope like hell that you take out all the enemy Sukoi's on the ground or that the pilots are all AWOL as you'll be shit out of luck on the way out of the danger zone.;)
Or, of course, you'd better be in a highly maneuverable multi-role fighter designed not just for ground attack but also to be able to take care of itself in air-to-air combat. Something like, say, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
The advantage of spending as much money on your military as the rest of the world combined is that you really can make things that are better at everything, at the same time than anything in any other country's inventory. (The disadvantage, of course, is all over the rest of your country's infrastructure, economy, diplomacy, etc., but that's the cost of deciding that maintaining the ability to effectively fight anyone, anywhere on the planet is more important than, well, any of the other things a government might be called on to do.)
Hell, I use APA style, but it isn't much harder in MLA (the two biggest styles)...and it isn't hard to find even more...
Yeah, Chicago style, ALWD (a major style in legal works) have citation styles for web sources; in fact, I'd be surprised if there is a serious modern style manual that doesn't cover web citations. The excuse offered is ludicrous on its face.
I'm sure it would cost alot, but really. WTF 370 million? wow. I can only hope that we get away from the Imperial action sometime.
While some units are the same, and even more have the same names despite being different (e.g., the gallon), the US Customary system of measures is a different system from the Imperial system.
So there is no "Imperial action" for us to get away from.
The problem, from my readings of the story and associated stuff, seems to be that ScummVM was ported to the Wii (or at least to the official Nintendo APIs), but didn't release the changes. That's probably a GPL violation.
The really big issue from the initial complaint was not that ScummVM was being used (they seem rather happy about that), but that it was used without credit or attribution. That's a clear GPL violation.
The fundamental problem that seems to be at work here that prevents a cure to the GPL breach is that the Nintendo software which is neither GPL nor released under a GPL-compatible license is linked in, which means that if they continued distributing the software and stopped violating the GPL, they'd be violating the license on the Wii SDK. (From TFS, it seems that they were violating the Wii SDK simply by using "open source" software with it, regardless of the terms of the open source license at issue, which is, if accurate, a rather odd provision.)
Personally, I don't like contact forms. Would you advocate for a CAPTCHA or requiring a POST request to obtain the real email address?
Never happen, but better would be: You get the actual e-mail address via a POST request over SSL secured by a valid client certificate from a reputable CA, the client certicate's public key and associated identity information is transferred to the owner of the e-mail address, who requires e-mail to also be digitally signed, and who filters by using a sender address whitelist and validating the signature against the associated key. Senders are added to the whitelist when their key is received (e.g., from the website system, or out-of-band) and presumed good until they send spam or do something else unwelcome, at which point the receiver removes them from the whitelist.
Actually proper English indicates that you double consonant when adding 'ing' if it ends with one, or drop the 'e' if it ends with one:
hop -> hopping
hope -> hoping
so:
munge -> munging
mung -> mungging
No, actually, proper English doesn't have regular general rules for spelling changes for different word forms like this. It has some "rules of thumb" that can be inferred from common patterns, but most of them have quite a lot of exceptions. And, inasmuch as there is a rule of thumb of the type you describe here, it would be more accurate to state it as "when adding the suffix -ing to a word, the final consonant is doubled if it is a single consonant preceded by a vowel, and a final 'e' is dropped if it follows a single consonant preceded by a vowel," though even in this form there are exceptions.
Examples:
hop -> hopping but crack -> cracking (not crackking)
hope -> hoping but singe -> singeing (not singing)
An exception (there are certainly more): binge -> binging (though bingeing is also acceptable in some dictionaries.)
The "rule" would suggest:
mung -> munging and
munge -> mungeing
My wife tells me that most people are living in a world where all sorts of neat stuff happens magically, and when it stops happening the only real solution is to call some company (or, if they're lucky, a sufficiently tech-savvy friend) that can make that magic start working again.
This is fairly disturbing.
It is mildly amusing that someone who is disturbed to live in a world where people don't all understand how everything works and have to rely on someone more knowledgeable in a particular field to explain it to them starts out their description of the state of the world that they find disturbing with "My wife tells me..."
I mean, come on, aren't you fairly disturbed that you have to get information about how the world works from someone else, and you don't just intuitively know it all yourself?
(I, on the other hand, am not disturbed. It would be more disturbing if the society and technology were limited to the complexity at which every individual -- or even just every adult of average intelligence -- could comprehend the whole of it all themselves, and anything that would, individually or in combination with everything else in the world, cause that limit to be exceeded was suppressed. That is, it would be disturbing if it was possible, which it isn't.)
There is a sense of the word "spending" in which investing is "spending", but there is also an important economic distinction between "investing" (or, equivalently, "saving") and "spending", and it is in the sense relevant to that distinction that I was writing.
Invested money is still doing something
Well, yeah. But except in the corner case where actual manufactured goods are purchased for investment value, its doing something very different from the money spent on normal goods and services, which has different economic consequences (not inherently better or worse, but the effects are different, and so what produces a desired change in the state of the economy depends on what change you want and what the current state of the economy is), which is why people distinguish between "investing"/"saving" and "spending".
The problem isn't investing, or spending, its playing financial three card monte, where all these invested funds shuffled to strange services that don't actually DO anything besides shuffle money to other strange companies, whose soul purpose is shuffling money to other strange services. We lost the base of any functional or stable economy, industry and manufacturing. Without that, our economy is largely baseless and unsustainable, no matter what anyone is doing with their money.
Insofar as what you are describing is a problem -- and I agree that it is a fairly good description of a big part of the problem -- its not a problem independent of the relationship between investing and spending, its a problem that occurs when there is lots of money trying to go into "investment" without a healthy spending environment to support it; you get more and more arcane investing schemes built on top of each other, and more and more services which are ancillary to those investment schemes, and less and less of the economy dealing in providing real goods or services of direct utility.
The missing (or, more accurately, weakened) "base" of the economy whose weakness makes it unsustainable is the market of goods and services of direct utility that is supported by spending.
It's sad but true, that the 'recovery' we're looking for basically depends on the people who still have lots of money convincing the masses to go ahead and resume wasting theirs on things they really don't need at all.
Well, no. Because that well is pretty much pumped dry. What recovery really requires is that the people who don't have lots of money get more so that they can afford to make more purchases (whether productive or not) beyond the merely necessary.
The truly rich have a lower propensity to spend and a higher propensity to invest, but none of that investing does any good without spending. The economy's short and shallow rebound after the 2001 recession was pretty much most of the available credit for the great mass of the public -- much of it dependent, directly or indirectly, on inflated home values -- being exhausted, so (useful spending or "things they don't really need", it doesn't matter) a strong recovery in the economy isn't going to happen without a rearrangment of ability to spend (probably, and most sustainably, wealth, though a loosening of credit might work in at least the short term) so that the people who have something to spend more on have something to spend on it.
If I say my horse is faster than yours, and you says yours is faster, and we let our horses race around the track, that establishes the point. But if you shoot my horse, that leaves questions in the air. Is your horse really faster?
Well then, screw mobile device. How about using this to recharge electric vehicles? A 12-inch coil is no big deal in an automobile.
I expect that you will want to transfer energy more rapidly to your car than enough to power a single speaker. For more power at similar range, you will probably need a bigger antenna.
(And 20% power loss from transmitter to receiver is pretty horrible efficiency.)
It would be great for people without the luxury of a garage, and could mitigate the risks of a high power cable laying around outside all day.
So could a having a cable with a a cable reel and a fixed, locked cabinet, which would also give you a lot better transfer efficiency and capacity than this seems to offer.
The problem is that you're increasing the stakes for everyone that writes opinion blogs.
So, you are creating a new barrier to entry to a new market which is currently providing serious competition for an existing market (traditional media) in which there are stong structural barriers to entry already, thus restoring the status quo ante in which the few masters of that established market are secure against much substantial new competition.
Are you sure that's a problem, rather than the purpose?
Ok, do members of the old media have to disclose all their potential conflicts of interest? Do they face penalties if they don't?
In general, maybe, in that the FTC has general power to pursue "unfair and deceptive business practice", and there can be some enforcement action against certain abuses. But the kind of specific rules that are proposed for bloggers are not imposed on "old media" by the FTC, despite the fact that the exact practices -- free product given to reviewers, media outlets that offer reviews of the same products that they receive money to advertise, etc. -- at issue with bloggers are the norm in the traditional media, to the extent that there are just a handful of outlets (e.g., Consumer Reports) that do not engage in that kind of activity.
How is this even legal? If you own 5% of the company, you own 5% of the company, and "diluting" that would be theft.
You never own x% of a corporation. You own a certain number of shares of a certain class of stock issued by the corporation. Those shares come with certain legal voting rights, and other legal rights (such as divident priorities and claims on assets in the event the corporation is dissolved), which vary by class of stock.
Anytime you see a reference to someone owning x% of a corporation, it is a simplification.
If you think you can tell the difference from 10 to 15 feet about, you are full of it.
If you can't tell the difference at normal viewing distance, you have poor vision. With normal vision, a person can notice sharpness improvements until the pixel size gets down into the range of 0.3-0.4 arcminutes, which given the rule that at optimum viewing distance a screen should span 30 degrees horizontally, means up to a horizontal resolution of around 4,500-6000 pixels -- just under 2.5 to just over 3 times the horizontal resolution of 1080p video.
So, blu-ray has sold slightly more but still surprisingly not the roaring success that everyone expected Blu-Ray to be after HD-DVD officially died.
Yeah, mass adoption of new luxury products is slower during a severe recession than during more normal conditions, and "everyone" (at least, most entertainment market analysts) probably didn't expect the economy to slow down over the following few years into a major recession at the time of the format war.
The first HD movie I watched was "300" on my mates' PS3 linked to a 46" Hi-Def TV (full 1080p). I'll never watch another Hi-Def movie again.
The definition was so good that I could see the seperations around the actors and knew exactly when they were in front of a green screen and no on set. Totally ruined the visuals (which is, in all honesty, the only reason to watch that movie).
Conventional movies shown in theaters show more detail than HD; if the appearance was that bad then it is because 300 had exceptionally poorly executed visual effects, not because of any fundamental problem with HD video.
His point was that he finds it curious that when Amedinejad's supporters in the US attack a protest supporter, Slashdot blames the US for the protest supporter getting attacked.
Actually, no. It was that he assumed that that would happen, not that it actually had happened and that he found it curious.
Completely misses the point of accountability and responsibility for violent behavior.
Neither accountability nor responsibility are exclusive, and so arguments that make sense only with that assumption (such as that placing responsibility on one party denies it to another) themselves are missing the point of accountability and responsibility.
The Iranian Revolution took place with no cell phones or internet.
The regime they were rebelling against had less technology and ability to coordinate response, too. If only one side is advancing, the balance shifts in favor of that side.
I hear a lot of about twitter but I haven't heard any useful news with it cited as a source.
There's plenty of useful news that's been reported there, but most of it hasn't been picked up by any of the major TV news outlets that I've seen. They are more interested in putting up compelling (or confusing) video from the scene than anything else. The NY Times has been following a lot of the non-traditional sources (Twitter, et al.) and culling real news from them on their own blog that's been updated frequently every day.
True. But I doubt there would have been the need to rig the vote if Hussein was still in charge of Iraq. Removing Iraq as a threat enabled people to focus on things beyond their immediate security.
The last President before Ahmadinejad was a reformer (Khatami) who frequently clashed with the Supreme Leader and Guardian Council and who is closely associated with the current opposition. He was elected while Saddam Hussein was in power. After Saddam Hussein was removed, Ahmadinejad was elected (and, whether honest or not, the election was not met with anything like the protests seen in the current election.)
So, no, I don't think removing Hussein as a threat was the key thing empowering the reform movement. I think its more likely that removing bellicose US posturing toward Iran helped. But, fundamentally, the reform movement has, with short-term setbacks due to temporary propaganda advantages and direct action (like banning candidates) by the hardliners, been building in Iran for since at least the early-to-mid 1990s, and has been largely fueled by domestic Iranian politics.
The biggest foreign influence probably had to do with removing Saddam Hussein's immediate and imminent threat to Iran, which the end of the long war between Iraq, followed by the 1990-1991 Gulf War* which destroyed the alliance between the rich gulf states and Iraq and demolished Iraq's military capacity, accomplished.
(* I'm considering the period from the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 through the allied campaign in 1991 as a single war, here.)
In any case, no blood no foul, right? That is why we help Iranians in a potential civil war through our twitter accounts instead of sending them material aid that might actually be able to help them in case things start getting really ugly.
If it becomes a civil war, the opposition has lost (the existing regime has, too.) A win meanings getting the organs of government that that are currently not intervening (particularly the Guardian Council) to act on their demands.
The opposition being armed for war by foreigners is not going to promote the outcome they are seeking.
Slashdot Mirror
No, earthquakes of magnitudes under 4 are regular occurences throughout California (or, at least, along its many faultlines, including the ones in the area at issue) because of all the active fault systems, not because of geothermal plants. This is pretty well established.
Only post roads are mentioned.
The article I, sec. 8, powers to operate a postal service and to build and maintain post roads, together with the necessary and proper clause, certainly give Congress the power to assure that there are vehicles available, which can be used by the postal service, which are, in the judgement of the Congress, appropriate for use the roads it funds under its authority to create post roads (appropriate including, in this case, having desirable environmental or other operational characteristics.) Just as the post roads Congress has the authority to fund may also be used for other purposes, so can the vehicles; if Congress finds that the most expeditious way to meet the needs is to make funds available for general purpose vehicles.
Alternatively, one could go the easier and shorter route and say, insofar as it is subsidizing particular activities in national and international commerce, Congress action is authorized under the Interstate Commerce Clause.
Or, if one wanted to appeal to people who are concerned that the principle legitimate function of the government is national defense, you could, noting that personal vehicles are important to the mobility of the informal militia, appeal to the Art. I, Sec. 8 power " to provide for...arming...the militia"; or since no doubt, insofar as even the regular military uses, for many purposes, vehicles available on the general market, and that Congress may deem it more efficient to acquire vehicles by making them generally available through loans rather than paying (rather than loaning) money for custom development where the vehicles would be of more general utility, simply the powers "to raise and support armies" and "to provide and maintain a navy".
The Chevy Volt is a gas-electric series hybrid whose battery is capable of plug-in charging. Its pure-electric range is substantialy shorter than late-1990s electric cars like the EV1.
Economics is science. Like most social sciences, controlled experiments generally require statistical controls rather than constructed situations, but that's true for some investigations even in many areas of the physical and life sciences.
The problem economics has is that there are lots of people with ideological stakes in the outcomes, and a lot of them willing to put out money for the results they want, so you get a lot more, better supported, and better organized cranks than in most other fields, where the cranks usually have a narrower personal motivation and less chance of attracting any support.
Or, of course, you'd better be in a highly maneuverable multi-role fighter designed not just for ground attack but also to be able to take care of itself in air-to-air combat. Something like, say, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
The advantage of spending as much money on your military as the rest of the world combined is that you really can make things that are better at everything, at the same time than anything in any other country's inventory. (The disadvantage, of course, is all over the rest of your country's infrastructure, economy, diplomacy, etc., but that's the cost of deciding that maintaining the ability to effectively fight anyone, anywhere on the planet is more important than, well, any of the other things a government might be called on to do.)
Yeah, Chicago style, ALWD (a major style in legal works) have citation styles for web sources; in fact, I'd be surprised if there is a serious modern style manual that doesn't cover web citations. The excuse offered is ludicrous on its face.
While some units are the same, and even more have the same names despite being different (e.g., the gallon), the US Customary system of measures is a different system from the Imperial system.
So there is no "Imperial action" for us to get away from.
The fundamental problem that seems to be at work here that prevents a cure to the GPL breach is that the Nintendo software which is neither GPL nor released under a GPL-compatible license is linked in, which means that if they continued distributing the software and stopped violating the GPL, they'd be violating the license on the Wii SDK. (From TFS, it seems that they were violating the Wii SDK simply by using "open source" software with it, regardless of the terms of the open source license at issue, which is, if accurate, a rather odd provision.)
Never happen, but better would be:
You get the actual e-mail address via a POST request over SSL secured by a valid client certificate from a reputable CA, the client certicate's public key and associated identity information is transferred to the owner of the e-mail address, who requires e-mail to also be digitally signed, and who filters by using a sender address whitelist and validating the signature against the associated key. Senders are added to the whitelist when their key is received (e.g., from the website system, or out-of-band) and presumed good until they send spam or do something else unwelcome, at which point the receiver removes them from the whitelist.
Accountability, not obscurity.
No, actually, proper English doesn't have regular general rules for spelling changes for different word forms like this. It has some "rules of thumb" that can be inferred from common patterns, but most of them have quite a lot of exceptions. And, inasmuch as there is a rule of thumb of the type you describe here, it would be more accurate to state it as "when adding the suffix -ing to a word, the final consonant is doubled if it is a single consonant preceded by a vowel, and a final 'e' is dropped if it follows a single consonant preceded by a vowel," though even in this form there are exceptions.
Examples:
hop -> hopping but crack -> cracking (not crackking)
hope -> hoping but singe -> singeing (not singing)
An exception (there are certainly more): binge -> binging (though bingeing is also acceptable in some dictionaries.)
The "rule" would suggest:
mung -> munging and
munge -> mungeing
It is mildly amusing that someone who is disturbed to live in a world where people don't all understand how everything works and have to rely on someone more knowledgeable in a particular field to explain it to them starts out their description of the state of the world that they find disturbing with "My wife tells me..."
I mean, come on, aren't you fairly disturbed that you have to get information about how the world works from someone else, and you don't just intuitively know it all yourself?
(I, on the other hand, am not disturbed. It would be more disturbing if the society and technology were limited to the complexity at which every individual -- or even just every adult of average intelligence -- could comprehend the whole of it all themselves, and anything that would, individually or in combination with everything else in the world, cause that limit to be exceeded was suppressed. That is, it would be disturbing if it was possible, which it isn't.)
There is a sense of the word "spending" in which investing is "spending", but there is also an important economic distinction between "investing" (or, equivalently, "saving") and "spending", and it is in the sense relevant to that distinction that I was writing.
Well, yeah. But except in the corner case where actual manufactured goods are purchased for investment value, its doing something very different from the money spent on normal goods and services, which has different economic consequences (not inherently better or worse, but the effects are different, and so what produces a desired change in the state of the economy depends on what change you want and what the current state of the economy is), which is why people distinguish between "investing"/"saving" and "spending".
Insofar as what you are describing is a problem -- and I agree that it is a fairly good description of a big part of the problem -- its not a problem independent of the relationship between investing and spending, its a problem that occurs when there is lots of money trying to go into "investment" without a healthy spending environment to support it; you get more and more arcane investing schemes built on top of each other, and more and more services which are ancillary to those investment schemes, and less and less of the economy dealing in providing real goods or services of direct utility.
The missing (or, more accurately, weakened) "base" of the economy whose weakness makes it unsustainable is the market of goods and services of direct utility that is supported by spending.
Well, no. Because that well is pretty much pumped dry. What recovery really requires is that the people who don't have lots of money get more so that they can afford to make more purchases (whether productive or not) beyond the merely necessary.
The truly rich have a lower propensity to spend and a higher propensity to invest, but none of that investing does any good without spending. The economy's short and shallow rebound after the 2001 recession was pretty much most of the available credit for the great mass of the public -- much of it dependent, directly or indirectly, on inflated home values -- being exhausted, so (useful spending or "things they don't really need", it doesn't matter) a strong recovery in the economy isn't going to happen without a rearrangment of ability to spend (probably, and most sustainably, wealth, though a loosening of credit might work in at least the short term) so that the people who have something to spend more on have something to spend on it.
Yes, it is. Even if it wasn't previously.
I expect that you will want to transfer energy more rapidly to your car than enough to power a single speaker. For more power at similar range, you will probably need a bigger antenna.
(And 20% power loss from transmitter to receiver is pretty horrible efficiency.)
So could a having a cable with a a cable reel and a fixed, locked cabinet, which would also give you a lot better transfer efficiency and capacity than this seems to offer.
So, you are creating a new barrier to entry to a new market which is currently providing serious competition for an existing market (traditional media) in which there are stong structural barriers to entry already, thus restoring the status quo ante in which the few masters of that established market are secure against much substantial new competition.
Are you sure that's a problem, rather than the purpose?
In general, maybe, in that the FTC has general power to pursue "unfair and deceptive business practice", and there can be some enforcement action against certain abuses. But the kind of specific rules that are proposed for bloggers are not imposed on "old media" by the FTC, despite the fact that the exact practices -- free product given to reviewers, media outlets that offer reviews of the same products that they receive money to advertise, etc. -- at issue with bloggers are the norm in the traditional media, to the extent that there are just a handful of outlets (e.g., Consumer Reports) that do not engage in that kind of activity.
You never own x% of a corporation. You own a certain number of shares of a certain class of stock issued by the corporation. Those shares come with certain legal voting rights, and other legal rights (such as divident priorities and claims on assets in the event the corporation is dissolved), which vary by class of stock.
Anytime you see a reference to someone owning x% of a corporation, it is a simplification.
If you can't tell the difference at normal viewing distance, you have poor vision. With normal vision, a person can notice sharpness improvements until the pixel size gets down into the range of 0.3-0.4 arcminutes, which given the rule that at optimum viewing distance a screen should span 30 degrees horizontally, means up to a horizontal resolution of around 4,500-6000 pixels -- just under 2.5 to just over 3 times the horizontal resolution of 1080p video.
Yeah, mass adoption of new luxury products is slower during a severe recession than during more normal conditions, and "everyone" (at least, most entertainment market analysts) probably didn't expect the economy to slow down over the following few years into a major recession at the time of the format war.
Conventional movies shown in theaters show more detail than HD; if the appearance was that bad then it is because 300 had exceptionally poorly executed visual effects, not because of any fundamental problem with HD video.
Actually, no. It was that he assumed that that would happen, not that it actually had happened and that he found it curious.
Neither accountability nor responsibility are exclusive, and so arguments that make sense only with that assumption (such as that placing responsibility on one party denies it to another) themselves are missing the point of accountability and responsibility.
The regime they were rebelling against had less technology and ability to coordinate response, too. If only one side is advancing, the balance shifts in favor of that side.
There's plenty of useful news that's been reported there, but most of it hasn't been picked up by any of the major TV news outlets that I've seen. They are more interested in putting up compelling (or confusing) video from the scene than anything else. The NY Times has been following a lot of the non-traditional sources (Twitter, et al.) and culling real news from them on their own blog that's been updated frequently every day.
The last President before Ahmadinejad was a reformer (Khatami) who frequently clashed with the Supreme Leader and Guardian Council and who is closely associated with the current opposition. He was elected while Saddam Hussein was in power. After Saddam Hussein was removed, Ahmadinejad was elected (and, whether honest or not, the election was not met with anything like the protests seen in the current election.)
So, no, I don't think removing Hussein as a threat was the key thing empowering the reform movement. I think its more likely that removing bellicose US posturing toward Iran helped. But, fundamentally, the reform movement has, with short-term setbacks due to temporary propaganda advantages and direct action (like banning candidates) by the hardliners, been building in Iran for since at least the early-to-mid 1990s, and has been largely fueled by domestic Iranian politics.
The biggest foreign influence probably had to do with removing Saddam Hussein's immediate and imminent threat to Iran, which the end of the long war between Iraq, followed by the 1990-1991 Gulf War* which destroyed the alliance between the rich gulf states and Iraq and demolished Iraq's military capacity, accomplished.
(* I'm considering the period from the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 through the allied campaign in 1991 as a single war, here.)
If it becomes a civil war, the opposition has lost (the existing regime has, too.) A win meanings getting the organs of government that that are currently not intervening (particularly the Guardian Council) to act on their demands.
The opposition being armed for war by foreigners is not going to promote the outcome they are seeking.