Mogadishu was like the postapocalyptic world of Mel Gibson’s Mad Max movies, a world ruled by roving gangs of armed thugs. They were here to rout the worst of the warlords and restore sanity and civilization.
He knew the sound of an AK-47. It made a high-pitched, more mechanical crack than the American rifle, the M16, which made a deeper, rounder sort of pop.
Never had a general so effectively willed away the facts.
Historians say that revolutions come in a country not when things are at their worst but when they begin to improve, when an entire generation has been well fed, sheltered, and educated so that it feels its strength in a way previous generations, ignorant, ill fed, and unhealthy, did not.
Victory was for those willing to fight and die. Intellectuals could theorize until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands, but in the real world, power still flowed from the barrel of a gun.
Like most of the great turning points in history, it was obvious and yet no one saw it coming.
But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.
Regular users know nothing about program languages or varying exchange protocols. They just want the thing to run. So Microsoft invented a way to bundle executable programs and data, the DLL, that allows them to be smoothly exchanged by computers on different networks.
Westmoreland’s body counts were bogus. He believed them – he was not the first general to welcome statistics he wanted to hear. But, in practice, there was every incentive for field commanders to inflate or even invent body counts. It was how their performance was assessed, and it became one of the greatest self-reporting scams in history. The absurd body counts and kill ratios were proof of his leadership. Westmoreland sold them to LBJ, who in turn presented them as fact to the American people.
You could send in your bleeding-heart do-gooders, you could hold hands and pray and sing hootenanny songs and invoke the great gods CNN and BBC, but the only way to finally open the roads to the big-eyed babies was to show up with more guns. And in this real world, nobody had more or better guns than America. If the good-hearted ideals of humankind were to prevail, then they needed men who could make it happen.
But modern malware is aimed less at exploiting individual computers than exploiting the Internet. A botnet-creating worm doesn’t want to harm your computer; it wants to use it.
He was afraid a lot, but it had become a discerning fear.
60 Minutes, the most watched and most respected news program on the tube.
Sitting cross-legged on the rug, puffing on a pipe, wearing a fat gold Rolex on his wrist, Khamenei asked the colonel, “If we were to release all of you now, without any conditions, how long would it be before you could begin to supply us again with spare parts for our military forces?
Beware of men with theories that explain everything.
Steele gave the unapologetic impression that he could break you with his bare hands if it weren’t for his strict devotion to Jesus and army discipline.
His only cause, ultimately, was himself.
Instead of being assembled by genes, the worm was assembled by “memes,” a word coined by British scientist and polemicist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are original ideas. Dawkins argued that they play the same role in cultural evolution as genes play in biology, getting passed along from person to person, surviving and adapting as they move.
They were called Ontos, after the Greek word for “thing,” in part because they were ugly.
History is not easy,” Hue told me. “People are still confused why a huge force like the United States was defeated. But if you don’t know your enemy, you will lose every time.