Walsingham

You want to see him really mad, give him a mince pie. Seriously though, GD has a point about Clinton's "Let's hide under the duvet and hope it goes away" approach. He managed to trash the concept of UN intervention in humanitarian crises in Somalia, leading to the collapse of UNAMIR in Rwanda, and problems for UNPROFOR in the former Yugoslavia, and the UN mission to Haiti. He also signally did sweet FA about the Russians bombing the crud out of Chechnya. At the same time he fails totally to do anything about the rising tide of Islamic extremism, much of it (in the UK at least) fuelled by apparent indifference to muslim suffering in the aforementioned countries.* * Muslim extremists don't seem to find this ironic. they hate the US for doing nothing in Chechnya and the Balkans, then when they do something in Iraq they hate the US even more.

Er... it's kind of the difference between me shooting you accidentally, and on purpose. Shooting accidentally you can be lots of things, annoying, stupid, careless, drunk. You can engage with me to improve and not get shot again. If I shoot you on purpose there's not a lot to discuss.

Now, now, Walsh. No need to to make derogatory remarks even though I am wrong. It weakens your argument. You're saying you aren't a donkey? For some reason I thought this was you:

No. Screwed if you don't. Potentially screwed if you do. It depends how badly you make the play. For the love of all that's sane and reasonable, man! How do you think the US got so bloody big and powerful? By sitting at home with the lights off?

OK, if the modern world is too sensitive, what about the Hindu Kush during the Great Game? Vampire governor generals, trying to put a nosferatu pretender on the throne of Khabul. Hapless redcoated soldiers being lead into ambushes by Indian thaumaturges trying to use their blood for dark sorcery? The thundering glory of a cavalry charge in harsh dry sunlight, crashing like a wave into splintered foaming blood, as they hit a line of werewolf tribesmen. The soft night air around the red fort, alive with the scent of frangipani and the laughter of ghosts. A world where rumour and innuendo are as important as armies and muskets. Where the Raj greases the musket rounds, not with pig fat, but with human fat to produce more fierce warriors. And that's before we even begin to discover what truly lies behind the advance of the Tsar's agents southwards towards Herat...

I don't think that's cheesy. We used to play at the end of a day in the office, so I'm conditioned like Pavlov's dog.

But... freeze-dried icecream!

True, but you can make sure those who are getting harm deserves it. For example after WW2 it would have been a better punishment for Germany, Italy, and their allies to lose land and form the Jewish state there instead of the Middle East, taking land from the Arabs who have long since claimed that territory for centuries and did nothing in WW2 to deserve the land stolen from them. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Treaty of Versailles. The 'just punishment' of the losers of WW1, and the cause in many ways of WW2.

Your economy IS the world beyond your borders, you ass.

You can't change anything without harming SOMEONE.

And the US gets nothing from foreign exports, foreign imports, international treaties, internatinal corporations, foreign attack on its interests... Your position is completely mental. You're worse than the conspiracy guy. He pretends things are real which he can't see. YOU pretend things you CAN see aren't real.

i don't know much about programming, but I do know system design. Sounds to me like samm's right. It's the programmer's interface that needs to be reliable.

...Because doing anything always makes things worse. Once again, this discussion with you is pointless, because you start from a viewpoint where doing anything beyond your own borders has zero impact and zero benefit to you. Until you accept that we're just wasting time.

I dunno. Semisonic, Closing Time? Or is that too cheesy?

Tigs is being fair. You can't have it both ways by the same rules.

I can't find the link, but I read a good article about Raymond Chandler, noir, and chivalric legends. Actually just go read Raymond Chandler. You won't regret it.

Thanks, purkake. That looks like it may be the answer. As an aside I think it's great that one can play an old classic game on what is now a bare bones laptop. Hours of quality fun, and with very little battery drain due to simple graphics etc. Hello, I am playing a bunch of old games on my Asus Eee PC 1000H as well. I am assuming that you are using Dosbox as the DOS emulator? If so, thry these hotkeys here. Try CTRL-F11 to slow down the emulation and see if that works. I had the same problem with X-COM, but I don't think CTRL - F11 was enough to make it playable, though.

Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, and many Central and South American countries are good examples of US interference that has turned very poorly if not made the lives of the people living there far worse than before. I'd say that those countries are perfect examples of what bollocks the 'arms length' ideology is. You can't dabble in countries and expect it to work out. The successful examples Volo gave are ones where the USA went in with both feet, rather than sending five CIA agents, and an arthritic prostitute.

Absolutely false on it's face. The US had nothing at all to do with the Baathist revolution. If the US could be blamed for anything at all it would be arming Iraq when they were fighting Iran. And that was done because Iran was being armed by the USSR. It's a damn shame that war ever ended. If it continued on hot and heavy for another twenty or so years we would never have needed to worry about either country. Actually, if you look at the weapon systems being used it was France, China, and the USSR arming BOTH countries. And a million plus died, so let's not get carried away and say it was a great thing. Killion/Sand apparently subscribe to the idea that natives can't mount their own revolutions and only do so with the assistance of evil caucasians. Saddam wanted to be a hairdresser, but the CIA wouldn't let him.

OK, I'm confused about two things: 1. Why you think Krezack is less sensible than I am. 2. How you can accept that a theory is anything more than a more complex 'law', but refuse to acknowledge that a law is anything other than a temporarily upheld theory. Regarding two, if you and I were earwigs in a cup at the end of a piece of string being twirled around we might be able to posit theories of motion for objects. They might hold true for generation after generation. But the moment the beiing twirling the string stopped twirling, the rules change. Yes? My point is that I can go away and get as much educationas is humanly possible, but the total sum of it will not make the whole anything more than dependent on what we have observed.

You're in a band?

Resigned moderator status to concentrate on family. I felt I wasn't able to carry my weight, compared with the rest of the squad who work harder than you might think. Drank most of my stepfather's christmas present with my stepfather. a 21 year old Balvenie port wood single malt. We discussed ten dimensional beings, the Arab-Israeli problem, and male pregnancy. Sorted strategy for a 30 million pound court case am involved with. It's hilariously amateurish on the part of the opposition. At least it is hilarious if you've just drunk half a bottle of 21 year old malt whisky!

I'm replaying Panzer General on my Asus mini laptop, but the scroll speed on the game map is crazy. It's driving me completely nuts, and I can't seem to fix it. Does anyone know how I can change the screen scroll speed inside the DOS emulator or something?

You're being deliberately obtuse, taks. I'm not trying too put forward a very complex argument, and it holds true regardless of any proof. A theory, or law, or whatever you want to call it, only survives while there is insufficient evidence to disprove it. You're talking about universal laws that are immutable. But who is to say that what you call a law is dependent upon observations which are depending on very local phenomena in time and space? there could be an invisible giant space gnat sitting behind Mars which makes gravity behave differently.

I take you're volunteering to go into taliban held territory/the slums of Cairo/the plantations of Morocco and gather forensic evidence then? Oh, and don't forget to gather witnesses! Don't get me wrong, I fully support habeus corpus in civil and criminal courts. But this is hardly normal. Thinking point: we accept the military's ability to judge who is a terrorist when they open fire on people in the field. The fact that they shot back at an invading army doesn't necessarily indicate future intent of blowing things up. War is one thing, necessity dictates there can be no civil proceedings, but who decides when the war is over. These may indeed be dangerous people, but the principle of the thing is clear enough. I don't understand your point, excellent as it may be. I believe this is a non-binary affair. We should try wherever possible to bring legal proceedings, but to recognise that it is not good enough to simply allow people to run loose when we capture people on a battlefield with a battlefield certainty of them being guilty. Unfortunately the US legal system permits no grey areas. I suspect Sand is being mendacious, given his "hang 'em shoot 'em and fish 'em" attitude in most respects. We are better than they because we attempt to obey the rules of law, we do not target little children as a stated war aim, we do not target civilians as a stated war aim.