Political/Political Humor
Sunday, June 15, 2003[7:35:52 PM]
Why task-switching is unbearable on the Mac....
Some developers are glad enough for unbroken features of the Mac that they put up with the rest.
Not many.
You more or less have to drink the kool-aid.
Those un-pre-disposed find insurmountable obstacles, task-switching in particular.
Why?
Because if developers started developing for OS X, Microsoft would snuff it. As long as OS X is just a music/photo/video platform for the rich, Bill is happy: give up a few points of market share as cover against charges of monopoly, and steal anything that catches attention.
But the user interface has to be focused on morons and boosters so very few independent develepers make software for it.
[7:12:26 PM]
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."--Ken Olsen, president of DEC
[5:32:12 PM]
The battle of Nasiriya....
This was where the Myers/Rumsfeld plan of attack fell apart, killing dozens of American soldiers.
We -- infamously -- predicted an inglorious end to the war, based on the certainty that ten American deaths per day would be unsustainable.
As it turns out, the plan was just nightmarishly bad. The Americans didn't die because of effective Iraqi resistance -- they died because of the wrong strategy. US forces shut down the offensive for several days, then continued the campaign in a way that got far fewer Americans killed.
In fact, it was almost impossible for the Iraqis to kill Americans in body armor or in tanks. Even the lightest American armored vehicles were not typically vulnerable to Iraqi RPGs.
The other noteworthy thing about the battle was that the US attacked in a way that lead to massive civilian casualties -- at least 1,000 in a few days. American helicopters chewed up sections of the city with rockets and heavy machine guns. Cluster bombs sliced and diced civilians as effectively as fighters. We should also note that Iraqis often attempted to use civilians as so-called 'human shields', leading to many deaths because US soldiers went ahead and shot the civilians. (I'm certainly not blaming individual soldiers -- what a miserable hell to live through.)
This is what would have happened in Baghdad, if the Iraqis hadn't given up. It's pretty clear the US made a deal to end resistance. It may be that the deal was with an Iraqi general. More likely, the deal was with Hussein. If Bush gave Hussein a billion dollars to abandon Baghdad, I wouldn't complain a bit. It was worth every penny.
Nasiriya was essential because the Americans couldn't build their own bridges to go around the city. All of those deaths -- Americans and Iraqi civilians -- would have been avoided if the plan had included building bridges, rather than fighting through the city.
One of the propaganda claims of the US military is that they use so-called smart weapons to avoid civilian casualties. In fact, the US military appeared to do very little to avoid civilian deaths. Certainly there was no pressue on field commanders to avoid using artillery-fired cluster bombs. Certainly they didn't take signs and materials for roadblocks to make it obvious that civilians should stop. Apparently they did nothing to avoid civilian casualties in Nasiriya, and they did not make appropriate plans to avoid the need to fight there.
In fact, the US military was willing to slaughter any number of Iraqi civilians.
Individual soldiers and commanders had a wide range of willingness to kill civilians, though the willingness generally and understandably went up as the days went by.
[5:02:15 PM]
Did you notice Senator Lugar suggesting the US attack Hamas?
Predicted here first.
Note: For some inexplicable reason, people have referred to Lugar as a master of foreign policy. He's a nut. It's hard to believe anyone listens to him. If he says something, expect that the opposite is true.
[4:59:26 PM]
That bastard Colin Powell's last line of WMD defense was saying that if the so-called WMD trailers weren't for WMD, Saddam would have brought them out the next day.
What the fuck is with rationalizations as foreign policy?
So now it's clear that the WMD trailers are not WMD trailers.
Mr. Powell (trying to be polite...), what do you have to say now?
Shall we really think of Powell as anything more than Rove's stooge?
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Last update: 9/20/03; 2:37:20 PM.