We human beings not only crave personal interaction with others, but we also crave physical interaction with others in the real world.
Most of us. Careful with the generalizations, there.
Whether or not their seclusion includes a computer and an internet connection, they are still oddities of nature.
I agree, but so what? Seclusion with an internet connection still beats seclusion without, hands down. Yes, there are undoubtedly some people caught in a web-hermit rut who would be much happier if they got out more. But there are also people - oddities of nature, maybe, but still people - who truly cannot cope with "getting out more". I don't think it's helpful to stigmatize what may be their only social contact.
Shrug. I might be remembering details wrong, but that was certainly the gist of the article - plotting by hand on graph paper and photographing.
More to the point, I don't find the story so unbelievable. Perhaps as a kid he couldn't afford a computer. Perhaps at that time he was a graphics geek but not yet a computer geek. (Allen Hastings, one of the guys behind Lightwave and my prime suspect for this foggy memory, lists his background as fine art and music.) We tend to forget how easy it was to be completely unaware of things happening in other fields, back in the dark days before the internet. Carmack has said on the record that he had no idea how "real" 3D was done when he wrote "Doom", hence all that mucking about with polar coordinate systems.
they don't make geeks period like they used to, either - back when geeks used to remember history, instead of repeating it like they seem to do today...
IIRC, the guy behind one of the early 3D modelling apps (Lightwave? Real3D? I forget) started out making 3D animated movies *by hand*. That is, by applying matrix transforms (using a calculator) to each point on each frame, plotting the transformed coordinates on graph paper, photographing the paper and arranging the photographs into a movie.
They don't make graphics geeks like they used to...
Indeed. Although I've just got back from a few days in Athens, and the air quality was actually surprisingly good. You can walk around all day without then having to go through the traditional London rite of chiselling caked soot out of your nostrils.
True, but for a lot of people it might as well be. I have to use Outlook at work, and I'd happily trade all the other features for search that worked as well as Gmail.
I don't think this is like Office, where everyone (allegedly) uses a different 10% of the feature set. Mail plus calendar probably covers a sizeable chunk of the Outlook user base.
Here's a different example. Skilled construction jobs are way up, and they are largely union. Therefore, unions create larger markets.
Except that construction jobs can't easily be offshored. GP's argument is far from conclusive, but it's more defensible than this (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) one.
The big, glossy, expensive games may not be doing so well. And if you're taking total revenue as a measure of health then maybe the paper&pencil gaming scene isn't doing so well. As the subject says, meh. A drop in Britney Spears sales does not indicate a crisis in music.
What TFA mostly failed to mention was the extraordinary progress in indie RPG design over the last few years. The indies may not be raking in money hand over fist, but that hasn't stopped them creating some very good games (Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard and Matt Wilson's Primetime Adventures, f'rinstance) and, more importantly, getting a solid theoretical handle on what RPGs are about and how they work. What Lajos Egri did for playwriting and Robert McKee did for screenwriting, these guys are doing for RPGs. I've been following the industry since the early 1980s, and the last few years have been a real eyeopener. No, the GM is not God. Yes, system does matter. No, throwing together a huge heap of rules and expecting fun to magically fall out is not going to cut it.
Interesting. So (speaking as a physics illiterate), what is it that's not being modelled by impulse-constraint engines? Compression?
I've seen this in movie CGI as well as games, so it can't be just down to realtime computational constraints. Most recently in Serenity (the docking clamp on Beaumonde and the final crash sequence both made the ship look far too light).
I don't think this is a general physics processor. It seems to be aimed at "eyecandy" physics calculations - mostly particle systems - whose results don't need to feed back into application logic. Which makes sense, given than GPU->CPU readbacks are a notorious perfomance killer.
Potentially shiny, but not really revolutionary or new. People have been doing particle system updates with shaders for a while now.
Interesting. In addition to the factors you mention, maybe people are more afraid of losing access to their data than of someone else gaining access to it. Forgetting passwords is the obvious risk, but I'd imagine that it's also significantly trickier to recover data from an encrypted filesystem if and when something breaks.
That's an interesting angle. There'd be a lot of little details that necessarily didn't quite fit because there's no direct human analogue, but that in itself could be very effectively disconcerting. Y'know, it has all the ingredients of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.
It's hard to argue that the nations involved in [WWI] were real democracies. Most of them were closer to dictatorships. Plus, there were a lot of different nations conspiring to take over all of Europe.
Hard to argue? Because of all those oppressive free elections, no doubt. The Kaiser played a larger-than-usual role in forming policy, but the equivalent wasn't true of Britain, and France didn't have any kind of monarch.
And precisely no nations were conspiring to take over "all of Europe". France wanted Alsace-Lorraine back; Britain just wanted to enforce Belgian neutrality; Germany was a somewhat expansionist but not to a Pinky-and-the-Brain degree.
And the jury's still out on whether DPRK has nukes. [...] Regardless, having nukes did not increase our opinion or fear of them at all.
No argument that the DPRK are bullshitters extraordinaire, but why do you think the US has been paying Danegeld to them for all these years? Spontaneous generosity?
we'll move to disarm them just as we did Saddam
Except that you didn't move to disarm Saddam, since Saddam was not in fact (WMD-)armed...
And remember under whose administration Pakistan got nukes!
This has what to do with what, exactly?
And also remember that the nukes in Pakistan are a bargaining chip that we use to make sure the Pakistani government cooperate.
OK, I give up. Your logic does not resemble our Earth logic.
I can't find the article, so this is hearsay.
That would be a charitable description...
France has been public about declaring their intention to use nukes against anyone that uses nukes against them.
Yes, that's called nuclear deterrence. Not really much point having the things otherwise. Has absolutely nothing to do with invading Iran, which was your original claim.
The fact that the Vietcong were supplied with weapons, training, and leadership by neighboring communists and the Soviets meant they were connected.
Connected? Sure. But that's no more than the US did for Al-Qaeda, and you presumably wouldn't claim that the US was trying to make Afghanistan a "wing of the American empire".
(1) People get edgy with all those hormones and fight for no reason at all. [...] Democracies, by and large, don't have this kind of structure.
I'm not sure I agree. As caricatures go, "hormonal" isn't a bad description of the First World War's origins. Germany was a stroppy adolescent and wanted the respect it saw as its due; France wanted payback for the humiliation of 1870; Britain was afraid of losing its naval preeminence. The general populations of these powers, democracies all, were ardently militaristic and absolutely thrilled at the prospect of a good war.
And that was probably just the most egregious example. Modern history is littered with democratically elected leaders taking their countries into wars which were neither just nor generally beneficial to that country's citizens, often to bolster their own support at home.
Here's a current modern day example. Iran has at its head a group of people whose purpose is to start a world war. They want a new piece of technology --- nuclear weapons --- because they think it will give them power enough to stand up to the US. It's really not certain if nuclear weapons are powerful enough to convince the American democracy to cower in fear. (They may well be!) So Iran is more bold in moving towards aggression and making threats.
There's a significant difference between "stand up to the US" and "start a world war". Iran aspires to regional dominance; it is not liked by the US; it has an awful lot of oil and a limited window of opportunity while the US is tied down in Iraq. It looks at North Korea and sees that possession of WMD, however rudimentary, does indeed confer a significant level of security and can be played effectively even with an otherwise weak diplomatic hand. It looks at Iraq and notes that non-possession of WMD (especially when combined with possession of oil) does not confer any kind of security. It draws the obvious conclusions and acts accordingly. Regrettable, but in no way indicative of the slavering insanity you portray.
Already, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia have pledged to help with the invasion of Iran.
Source? Speaking as a UK citizen this comes as news to me, and I suspect it comes as news to France, Germany and Russia as well.
The Vietnam war, likewise, wasn't caused by a bunch of military industrialists. It was caused by communist aggression. They tried to turn a sovereign, democratic country into a wing of the Communist empire by force.
South Vietnam wasn't really sovereign; the '54 Geneva partition was explicitly only a temporary one. Calling it democratic is highly contentious as well, but I don't really have the energy to get into that one. And "wing of the Communist empire"? Really, where do you get this stuff? "Communism" was never, ever a monolithic bloc, any more than "the West" or "the Third World" was.
Well put. We've found agile development to be a very effective way to build reasonable-quality software, for surprisingly high values of "reasonable", but as you say it's absolutely unsuited to building lots-of-nines software.
Of course, very few customers actually want lots-of-nines software, where "want" means "are prepared to pay for".
Nobody collects printer cartridges. Nobody gets emotionally attached to printer cartridges. Nobody finds a dusty old printer cartridge in their grandfather's attic and weeps that they're unable to use the glorious old ink it undoubtedly contains.
Printer cartridges are just throwaway consumables; obsolescence is built in. Many people don't consider their favourite books, music or films to be throwaway; when they buy them, they expect to be able to keep them for as long as they want to. DRM combined with proprietary formats fails that expectation; if you can't space/time/format-shift a work freely, you *will* lose access to it sooner or later. That's what many of us find unacceptable.
Re:The worst is yet to come...
on
Forecasting Doomsday
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sensible post, but I disagree about nuclear war and MAD. I think humanity was just damn lucky there.
From everything I've read on the Cuban missile crisis, the situation came incredibly close to all-out nuclear war. And "Mutual Assured Destruction" was always highly iffy because the assurance was never really mutual; the Soviet leadership mostly believed that a nuclear was was eminently survivable, and planned according. Their civil defence preparations went a long way beyond the West's "duck and cover".
Look at the maps. Both of these dominated a larger fraction of the world's population than the US currently does, and they did it with knives, bows, horses and pointy sticks.
In fact, I believe war requires democracy.
At this point I'm starting to suspect that I've been trolled. I mean, have you even heard of history?
I can't speak for the grandparent poster, but having participated in several discussions around this in various fora I've noticed a definite cultural bias to the atheist/agnostic split. USAmericans who don't believe in a deity generally describe themselves as agnostic, while Brits with the exact same views would generally describe themselves as atheist - "agnostic" here implies uncertainty with no strong leaning either way. As you can imagine, this causes no end of confusion.
Quite why this should be so I'm not sure, but I'd be surprised if social pressure wasn't involved somehow. (Large segments of US society seem to view atheism as some sort of character defect, and strongly religious people are often viewed as slightly peculiar here in the UK.) There's one pernicious meme which comes up over and over, which is the notion that to be an atheist one must be able to prove the non-existence of any and all deities. (Must one be able to prove the existence of God to be a theist?) Some people seem to have real trouble with the whole "beyond a reasonable doubt" concept.
Donning my own (larval and very rusty) scientist hat for a moment, I'd say that theism is prima facie highly implausible and has no discernable explanatory or predictive power, therefore I don't believe it. I can't prove that all conceivable formulations of it are false, granted. I can't prove that frozen yoghurt isn't sentient, but I don't believe it, and I don't consider that disbelief an article of faith.
Every input peripheral attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those peripherals which do so expand, however, are ignored in favour of ones which still have a clue.
So then, as a matter of principle, you won't be suing me when I rent a few billboards near your house and put your name, address, and photo on them, along with labeling you a known liar, thief, and pedophile.
You're getting some "don't be daft" responses, but unfortunately this isn't the silly hypothetical it sounds like. The Scientologists have employed very similar tactics against their critics.
once the expected cost of defending themselves is greater than the cost of caving in, most businesses will cheerfully cave. In fact, for publicly traded companies you can make a decent case that it's their duty to do so.
Except that if a clause like this were upheld, all the spyware makers would start adding similar clauses in short order, and anti-spyware makers would be out of business. It shouldn't be too hard to explain this to shareholders.
Those incidents in Nicaragua and Chile were not supported by the American public.. those were operations carried out in secret (by the CIA).
*COUGH*bullshit*COUGH*
I remember the "Ollie North for President" days. I remember people talking seriously about changing the Constitution to give Reagan another term, after all this had come out. I'm having trouble recalling any great groundswell of public support for reform or disbanding of the CIA, though. The CIA isn't some unaccountable force of nature, it's an agency under the control of people you vote for. If the American public doesn't support it, they're hardly vociferous in their disapproval.
If you lived in France, and every year people from Tunisia would risk death on rafts that barely float, starving, and damn near dead to arrive at your shores asking for amnesty..
What would you think about Tunisia? Because those feelings are how America feels about Cuba.
Well, I might think, "Gee, maybe they'd be a little less desperate if the most powerful state on the planet hadn't been conducting an economic vendetta against them for the last half-century". But that's just me.
Slashdot Mirror
We human beings not only crave personal interaction with others, but we also crave physical interaction with others in the real world.
Most of us. Careful with the generalizations, there.
Whether or not their seclusion includes a computer and an internet connection, they are still oddities of nature.
I agree, but so what? Seclusion with an internet connection still beats seclusion without, hands down. Yes, there are undoubtedly some people caught in a web-hermit rut who would be much happier if they got out more. But there are also people - oddities of nature, maybe, but still people - who truly cannot cope with "getting out more". I don't think it's helpful to stigmatize what may be their only social contact.
You must be remembering wrong...
Shrug. I might be remembering details wrong, but that was certainly the gist of the article - plotting by hand on graph paper and photographing.
More to the point, I don't find the story so unbelievable. Perhaps as a kid he couldn't afford a computer. Perhaps at that time he was a graphics geek but not yet a computer geek. (Allen Hastings, one of the guys behind Lightwave and my prime suspect for this foggy memory, lists his background as fine art and music.) We tend to forget how easy it was to be completely unaware of things happening in other fields, back in the dark days before the internet. Carmack has said on the record that he had no idea how "real" 3D was done when he wrote "Doom", hence all that mucking about with polar coordinate systems.
they don't make geeks period like they used to, either - back when geeks used to remember history, instead of repeating it like they seem to do today...
Miaow.
IIRC, the guy behind one of the early 3D modelling apps (Lightwave? Real3D? I forget) started out making 3D animated movies *by hand*. That is, by applying matrix transforms (using a calculator) to each point on each frame, plotting the transformed coordinates on graph paper, photographing the paper and arranging the photographs into a movie.
They don't make graphics geeks like they used to...
Indeed. Although I've just got back from a few days in Athens, and the air quality was actually surprisingly good. You can walk around all day without then having to go through the traditional London rite of chiselling caked soot out of your nostrils.
Outlook isn't just an email and calendar app.
True, but for a lot of people it might as well be. I have to use Outlook at work, and I'd happily trade all the other features for search that worked as well as Gmail.
I don't think this is like Office, where everyone (allegedly) uses a different 10% of the feature set. Mail plus calendar probably covers a sizeable chunk of the Outlook user base.
Here's a different example. Skilled construction jobs are way up, and they are largely union. Therefore, unions create larger markets.
Except that construction jobs can't easily be offshored. GP's argument is far from conclusive, but it's more defensible than this (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) one.
The big, glossy, expensive games may not be doing so well. And if you're taking total revenue as a measure of health then maybe the paper&pencil gaming scene isn't doing so well. As the subject says, meh. A drop in Britney Spears sales does not indicate a crisis in music.
What TFA mostly failed to mention was the extraordinary progress in indie RPG design over the last few years. The indies may not be raking in money hand over fist, but that hasn't stopped them creating some very good games (Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard and Matt Wilson's Primetime Adventures, f'rinstance) and, more importantly, getting a solid theoretical handle on what RPGs are about and how they work. What Lajos Egri did for playwriting and Robert McKee did for screenwriting, these guys are doing for RPGs. I've been following the industry since the early 1980s, and the last few years have been a real eyeopener. No, the GM is not God. Yes, system does matter. No, throwing together a huge heap of rules and expecting fun to magically fall out is not going to cut it.
Interesting. So (speaking as a physics illiterate), what is it that's not being modelled by impulse-constraint engines? Compression?
I've seen this in movie CGI as well as games, so it can't be just down to realtime computational constraints. Most recently in Serenity (the docking clamp on Beaumonde and the final crash sequence both made the ship look far too light).
I don't think this is a general physics processor. It seems to be aimed at "eyecandy" physics calculations - mostly particle systems - whose results don't need to feed back into application logic. Which makes sense, given than GPU->CPU readbacks are a notorious perfomance killer.
Potentially shiny, but not really revolutionary or new. People have been doing particle system updates with shaders for a while now.
The '90s called. They want their FUD back.
Interesting. In addition to the factors you mention, maybe people are more afraid of losing access to their data than of someone else gaining access to it. Forgetting passwords is the obvious risk, but I'd imagine that it's also significantly trickier to recover data from an encrypted filesystem if and when something breaks.
That's an interesting angle. There'd be a lot of little details that necessarily didn't quite fit because there's no direct human analogue, but that in itself could be very effectively disconcerting. Y'know, it has all the ingredients of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.
Good thought; thanks for posting it.
Nah, I don't think Neuromancer is unfilmable. You want unfilmable, try Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky.
The principal protagonists are giant hairy carnivorous alien spiders. And you're rooting for them all the way.
It's hard to argue that the nations involved in [WWI] were real democracies. Most of them were closer to dictatorships. Plus, there were a lot of different nations conspiring to take over all of Europe.
Hard to argue? Because of all those oppressive free elections, no doubt. The Kaiser played a larger-than-usual role in forming policy, but the equivalent wasn't true of Britain, and France didn't have any kind of monarch.
And precisely no nations were conspiring to take over "all of Europe". France wanted Alsace-Lorraine back; Britain just wanted to enforce Belgian neutrality; Germany was a somewhat expansionist but not to a Pinky-and-the-Brain degree.
And the jury's still out on whether DPRK has nukes. [...] Regardless, having nukes did not increase our opinion or fear of them at all.
No argument that the DPRK are bullshitters extraordinaire, but why do you think the US has been paying Danegeld to them for all these years? Spontaneous generosity?
we'll move to disarm them just as we did Saddam
Except that you didn't move to disarm Saddam, since Saddam was not in fact (WMD-)armed...
And remember under whose administration Pakistan got nukes!
This has what to do with what, exactly?
And also remember that the nukes in Pakistan are a bargaining chip that we use to make sure the Pakistani government cooperate.
OK, I give up. Your logic does not resemble our Earth logic.
I can't find the article, so this is hearsay.
That would be a charitable description...
France has been public about declaring their intention to use nukes against anyone that uses nukes against them.
Yes, that's called nuclear deterrence. Not really much point having the things otherwise. Has absolutely nothing to do with invading Iran, which was your original claim.
The fact that the Vietcong were supplied with weapons, training, and leadership by neighboring communists and the Soviets meant they were connected.
Connected? Sure. But that's no more than the US did for Al-Qaeda, and you presumably wouldn't claim that the US was trying to make Afghanistan a "wing of the American empire".
(1) People get edgy with all those hormones and fight for no reason at all. [...] Democracies, by and large, don't have this kind of structure.
I'm not sure I agree. As caricatures go, "hormonal" isn't a bad description of the First World War's origins. Germany was a stroppy adolescent and wanted the respect it saw as its due; France wanted payback for the humiliation of 1870; Britain was afraid of losing its naval preeminence. The general populations of these powers, democracies all, were ardently militaristic and absolutely thrilled at the prospect of a good war.
And that was probably just the most egregious example. Modern history is littered with democratically elected leaders taking their countries into wars which were neither just nor generally beneficial to that country's citizens, often to bolster their own support at home.
Here's a current modern day example. Iran has at its head a group of people whose purpose is to start a world war. They want a new piece of technology --- nuclear weapons --- because they think it will give them power enough to stand up to the US. It's really not certain if nuclear weapons are powerful enough to convince the American democracy to cower in fear. (They may well be!) So Iran is more bold in moving towards aggression and making threats.
There's a significant difference between "stand up to the US" and "start a world war". Iran aspires to regional dominance; it is not liked by the US; it has an awful lot of oil and a limited window of opportunity while the US is tied down in Iraq. It looks at North Korea and sees that possession of WMD, however rudimentary, does indeed confer a significant level of security and can be played effectively even with an otherwise weak diplomatic hand. It looks at Iraq and notes that non-possession of WMD (especially when combined with possession of oil) does not confer any kind of security. It draws the obvious conclusions and acts accordingly. Regrettable, but in no way indicative of the slavering insanity you portray.
Already, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia have pledged to help with the invasion of Iran.
Source? Speaking as a UK citizen this comes as news to me, and I suspect it comes as news to France, Germany and Russia as well.
The Vietnam war, likewise, wasn't caused by a bunch of military industrialists. It was caused by communist aggression. They tried to turn a sovereign, democratic country into a wing of the Communist empire by force.
South Vietnam wasn't really sovereign; the '54 Geneva partition was explicitly only a temporary one. Calling it democratic is highly contentious as well, but I don't really have the energy to get into that one. And "wing of the Communist empire"? Really, where do you get this stuff? "Communism" was never, ever a monolithic bloc, any more than "the West" or "the Third World" was.
Ho hum. I suspect IH probably BT, but never mind.
Well put. We've found agile development to be a very effective way to build reasonable-quality software, for surprisingly high values of "reasonable", but as you say it's absolutely unsuited to building lots-of-nines software.
Of course, very few customers actually want lots-of-nines software, where "want" means "are prepared to pay for".
Nobody collects printer cartridges. Nobody gets emotionally attached to printer cartridges. Nobody finds a dusty old printer cartridge in their grandfather's attic and weeps that they're unable to use the glorious old ink it undoubtedly contains.
Printer cartridges are just throwaway consumables; obsolescence is built in. Many people don't consider their favourite books, music or films to be throwaway; when they buy them, they expect to be able to keep them for as long as they want to. DRM combined with proprietary formats fails that expectation; if you can't space/time/format-shift a work freely, you *will* lose access to it sooner or later. That's what many of us find unacceptable.
Sensible post, but I disagree about nuclear war and MAD. I think humanity was just damn lucky there.
From everything I've read on the Cuban missile crisis, the situation came incredibly close to all-out nuclear war. And "Mutual Assured Destruction" was always highly iffy because the assurance was never really mutual; the Soviet leadership mostly believed that a nuclear was was eminently survivable, and planned according. Their civil defence preparations went a long way beyond the West's "duck and cover".
You can't fight a global war with knives
*cough* Roman Empire *cough*
*cough* Mongol Empire *cough*
Look at the maps. Both of these dominated a larger fraction of the world's population than the US currently does, and they did it with knives, bows, horses and pointy sticks.
In fact, I believe war requires democracy.
At this point I'm starting to suspect that I've been trolled. I mean, have you even heard of history?
I can't speak for the grandparent poster, but having participated in several discussions around this in various fora I've noticed a definite cultural bias to the atheist/agnostic split. USAmericans who don't believe in a deity generally describe themselves as agnostic, while Brits with the exact same views would generally describe themselves as atheist - "agnostic" here implies uncertainty with no strong leaning either way. As you can imagine, this causes no end of confusion.
Quite why this should be so I'm not sure, but I'd be surprised if social pressure wasn't involved somehow. (Large segments of US society seem to view atheism as some sort of character defect, and strongly religious people are often viewed as slightly peculiar here in the UK.) There's one pernicious meme which comes up over and over, which is the notion that to be an atheist one must be able to prove the non-existence of any and all deities. (Must one be able to prove the existence of God to be a theist?) Some people seem to have real trouble with the whole "beyond a reasonable doubt" concept.
Donning my own (larval and very rusty) scientist hat for a moment, I'd say that theism is prima facie highly implausible and has no discernable explanatory or predictive power, therefore I don't believe it. I can't prove that all conceivable formulations of it are false, granted. I can't prove that frozen yoghurt isn't sentient, but I don't believe it, and I don't consider that disbelief an article of faith.
HTH
the US [...] wastes space with urban sprawl, huge houses that cost a fortune.
Exactly! They're so backward. Here in London we've advanced to tiny, shitty little one-bed flats that cost a fortune.
So then, as a matter of principle, you won't be suing me when I rent a few billboards near your house and put your name, address, and photo on them, along with labeling you a known liar, thief, and pedophile.
You're getting some "don't be daft" responses, but unfortunately this isn't the silly hypothetical it sounds like. The Scientologists have employed very similar tactics against their critics.
once the expected cost of defending themselves is greater than the cost of caving in, most businesses will cheerfully cave. In fact, for publicly traded companies you can make a decent case that it's their duty to do so.
Except that if a clause like this were upheld, all the spyware makers would start adding similar clauses in short order, and anti-spyware makers would be out of business. It shouldn't be too hard to explain this to shareholders.
Those incidents in Nicaragua and Chile were not supported by the American public.. those were operations carried out in secret (by the CIA).
*COUGH*bullshit*COUGH*
I remember the "Ollie North for President" days. I remember people talking seriously about changing the Constitution to give Reagan another term, after all this had come out. I'm having trouble recalling any great groundswell of public support for reform or disbanding of the CIA, though. The CIA isn't some unaccountable force of nature, it's an agency under the control of people you vote for. If the American public doesn't support it, they're hardly vociferous in their disapproval.
If you lived in France, and every year people from Tunisia would risk death on rafts that barely float, starving, and damn near dead to arrive at your shores asking for amnesty..
What would you think about Tunisia? Because those feelings are how America feels about Cuba.
Well, I might think, "Gee, maybe they'd be a little less desperate if the most powerful state on the planet hadn't been conducting an economic vendetta against them for the last half-century". But that's just me.