Ehhh, not really. We remember the empires that have gone before -- and so do the descendants of the people who built them. The US has been, and still is, far too important to world affairs to go down completely into the dust. But I can well imagine a time, not too far away, when tourists come to look at Mt. Rushmore and the Washington Monument in much the same way as we look at the Pyramids or the Coliseum or Nelson's Column.
Bottom line, we can do it because we have the power and the might. We don't need to play well with others, others need to play well with us.
We're not the first nation to think that way. A century or so ago, one particularly keen observer of empire wrote:
"Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget!"
It happened to Britain, and to Spain, and Rome; it will happen to us too. Nothing lasts forever. With luck, we'll go out the way the British did, gracefully and with a certain amount of good will in the world. But if people like you have their way, it will be more like the way the Romans ended things: ever weaker, arrogant and paranoid and half-mad, harried by people who hate us, until we're a shattered wreck of remembered glory.
No, I live in a world where we have a religious fanatic for an AG who would be an amusing self-parody if he weren't so damned scary. Every time I think Ashcroft has reached the limit of wackiness, he pulls out some new trick. Nothing I or anyone else could say about him would be wilder than the truth.
I was under the impression that they were eventually hoping to get scramjets up to Mach 15 or so -- which isn't orbital velocity, but it's a hell of a lot closer. And you can gain a lot of altitude, too, which makes a difference; the less atmosphere you have to punch through when you light the rocket, the better. Put simply, Mach 15 at 200,000 feet beats 0 at sea level every time.
I don't have anything against rockets; they do indeed work, and I think we should keep doing everything we can to develop rocket technology in parallel with air-breathing engines. But not having to carry oxidizer for a large portion of the trip to orbit is inarguably a Good Thing.
I served as a USAF medic for eight years, including Desert Storm; you will, I trust, acknowledge that I've earned the right to comment on this.
The sympathy for the GIs in Iraq who are facing the possibility of death every day is not feigned at all. It's a horrible job. No sane soldier wants to die in battle, ever -- anyone who does is much more of a threat to himself and his unit than he is to the enemy. Like Patton said, "Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to go out there and manke the other son of a bitch die for his country." A glorious death may be a useful recruiting tool for idealistic 18-year-olds, but that fantasy tends to wear off pretty damn fast the first time you actually see someone get shot.
I considered it a great honor to serve my country. I'm proud of my service. But what I'm proud of is that I saved lives -- not that my parents had to worry for months that they would get their son home in a body bag.
Well, I've seen many negative depictions of Gates. But never a racist. Bravo.
Oh, for Christ's sake, it was a joke.
Re:arguing against manned space missions?
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 1
Only because Bush was putting it forward. Had it been Howard Dean proposing a manned space mission we would have everyone here drooling at the possiblity.
I see this accusation of cognitive dissonance fairly often on/., usually in liberal-vs.-conservative or Mac-or-Linux-vs.-Windows arguments -- "You're only against it because it's a [Republican|Microsoft] thing, but you'd cheer if it were [the Democrats|Apple|Red Hat]." The thing is, it's not true. We lefty Unix-heads are entirely willing (and sometimes a bit too eager, IMO, in practical terms) to attack our own side; it seems to me that it's generally the right-wingers and Microsoft apologists who adhere rigorously to the party line.
(And no, I'm not saying that there's any correlation between governmental and computational politics. I may despise Rush Limbaugh, but if he wants to push Macs that's just fine with me.)
I have said before, and will say again, that if Bush's space initiative bears any fruit, I will praise him to the skies (so to speak) for that accomplishment, no matter how much I may disagree with just about everything else he does. I'm a believer in manned space flight, for all kinds of reasons, and I would dearly love to see permanantly manned Moon and Mars bases in my lifetime -- and I would particularly like it if at least some of those bases flew the Stars and Stripes. For myself, at least, if I criticize Bush's plans, it's because I think he's talking big and doesn't have the willpower or political muscle to actually make it happen. The goal itself is eminently worthwhile, and if we reach it, it will be an accomplishment which will far outlast the politics of the day.
... but why weren't we doing this 40+ years ago? The X-43 seems to me like a logical evolution of the X-15, which is the kind of thing we should have been working on all this time. Big dumb one-shot boosters to get heavy materials that we never intend to bring back down into space, combined with winged air-launched reusable vehicles for carrying people, instead of hybrids like the Saturn V and the Shuttle... it seems so obvious, now that we've had decades of a space program which now can't even reliably get people into and out of LEO.
I'd like to think that we will, in the next decade, see a manned descendant of the X-43 which will use scramjets to achieve orbital velocities and rockets for maneuvering in orbit, and will provide human transportation to/from LEO orders of magnitude cheaper than the Shuttle. It's certainly technically possible. But I'm not holding my breath.
The Cosa Nostra calls them for advice on how to make money.
o/~ Woke up this morning, got myself a gun o/~
"Bill, it's Tony. Listen, I got a problem."
"You got a problem, huh? What problem?"
"I'm not pulling in the dough like I used to, Bill. My guys -- they're not bringing it in any more, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah, so what the fuck do you want me to do about it, Tony?"
"Just thought you could maybe give me some advice, is all. You and Steve, I respect you guys. You always have some scam going. How do you do it?"
"You think I'm going to tell you that, Tony? How I do it? Fuck you. No, you just keep on doing what I tell you, you got that? And oh yeah, this Mario Monti guy. Sounds like a Wop name. So I want you Wops to take care of him. Take care of him good, you know what I mean, Tony? And do it soon, you got that?"
(quietly) "Um, yes sir, Mr. Gates. Thanks for your time."
The way Microsoft's corporate behavior could be moderated, quite successfully, would be to break it up into separate companies, as the DoJ wanted to do back in the days when we had a DoJ that was more concerned with things like antitrust laws than with calico cats and bare boobies. But of course, no European court has the authority to impose such a penalty on a US company, so don't expect anything to change any time soon.
Well, look at it this way. Microsoft has ~ $50 billion cash, and the fine is ~ $600 million. (Obviously the exact dollar value varies with the dollar-euro exchange rate.) This represents about 1.2% of their current cash on hand. Now, on average, I have a bank balance of about $3,000. The equivalent fine, for me, would therefore be $36, or about what I'd pay for a speeding ticket. And yes, I consider that pretty much peanuts.
Should have read the footnotes, I guess.;) Well, that makes it worse than I thought. Honestly, I'm amazed that anyone would rate their job satisfaction as 10/10, and those who did are surely not representative of their fields as a whole.
Oh, it's entirely possible that a specific distro could run the user as root by default -- IIRC, Lindows already does this, which strikes me as an incredibly bad idea, but that's Michael Robertson's problem. And given that fact that Lindows has so far generated a lot of publicity but very few sales, I'm not too worried about it. Let a thousand flowers bloom; most will wither and die.
What I hope to see happen is for desktop-oriented Linux distros to follow the Mac OS X model. Apple has done a beautiful job of integrating Unix security with the Mac's traditional ease of use. The key features are:
- The first user on the machine is set up as admin by default; this is not the same as root. Other new accounts on the machine are by default standard user accounts.
- Root access is disabled by default, and requires a few minutes of work by somewhat who knows what they're doing to enable. Once enabled, it's available by the usual "su" at the command line. Note that there is just about nothing you can do from the GUI that requires root access, ever.
- 99% of normal operations never require admin access. About the only common task that does is installing software that modifies security or other vital system settings. A dialog box pops up and asks for the admin password. Non-admin users don't get to do this, of course, but the idea is that someone with access to the machine is an admin and can take care of it.
The result is a secure, easy-to-use system that blocks just about anything dangerous coming in from the outside world, but lets users do everything they need to do. IMO any Linux distribution that adopts this model, and implements it well, will do very well in the market.
And then what happens when enough users are using Linux and companies decide to port software such as Bonzi Buddy to it?
Joe Luser decides to install spyware on his shiny new Linux box. The (hopefully) well-evolved GUI pops up a warning that says something like, "You must be running as a root user to install this software, because it wants to modify your security settings and may make your computer vulnerable to worms, viruses, and hackers. Running as root is very dangerous, and is not recommended unless you know exactly what you're doing." This scares the shit out of Joe Luser (as it should) and he doesn't install the software. Problem solved.
Linux and other Unices are inherently more secure than Windows, always have been, and probably always will be. It's not just the popularity, it's the code. Deal with it.
Since they reported the percentage of respondents who said they were "very happy", I'm assuming they used categories such as "very happy", "somewhat happy", etc. I'd like to see the whole breakdown. Suppose that hypothetically, workers in Job X were 5% "very happy" but 50% "somewhat happy", 20% "somewhat unhappy", and 25% "very unhappy", while those in Job Y were 10% / 20% / 30% / 40% on the same scale -- it would be hard to argue at that point that Y's are happier than X's, but that's how the survey results would be interpreted if you only "skim the cream" and report the top category.
Posts like the ones I was responding to merit a yawn because they're so trivial and repetitive. Sometimes I wonder if there's a Mindless Super-Patriot's Book Of Dumb Arguments floating around that all the right-wingers pull out whenever anyone starts talking international politics. Real patriotism (which bears very little relationship to the Fox News / GWB variety) requires thought.
Yawn. It is entirely possible, and indeed desirable, for patriotic Americans to look at specific things that other countries do better than we do and say, "That's a good idea, let's try it over here." The idea that there is one specific "American Way" which is automatically better than everyone else's way, and which can never ever be modified with ideas from outside our borders, strikes me as absurd, repulsive, and -- I have to say it -- un-American.
Why select a slower, more expensive platform and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
Because for the applications Pixar has in mind, G5 Macs are neither slower nor more expensive. It's really that simple. G5s deliver the best bang for the buck in the video editing world, period.
I would really, really like to see the "Macs are more expensive" meme disappear from these arguments. They're not more expensive than PCs of comparable power and quality, and haven't been for years.
... given the record of "scientists" and their truly vile and obscene pursuits throughout the ages...
Please be specific. Names, dates, places. With an explanation of what makes these incidents vile and obscene. Also please include a short, well-written essay on why you are willing to use the products of such a vile, obscene pursuit in your daily life rather than living in the woods and living on roots and berries.
Look, people: there are no angels in this business, and everybody knows it. Microsoft is evil, spammers are evil, AOL and Yahoo! are only slightly less evil than the first two; also on the "evil" list are Apple, Sun, IBM, Dell, Oracle, Adobe, and, well, pretty much any company with yearly revenue in excess of $1 million. Every single one of them would dominate the entire business world, crush the competition, and eliminate all innovation that didn't translate directly into greater short-term profits if they could.
What most of us down here at the bottom of the food chain understand is that it doesn't matter. We support companies -- whether "support" means buying their products or just cheering them on -- not on the basis of their moral purity (because there isn't any) but on the basis of what's most useful to us. If Microsoft spends some portion of its ill-gotten gains on cutting down on the amount of spam I get, that is useful to me, even if everything else they do is not only useless but actively harmful. There's no cognitive dissonance involved.
It sounds to me like the German provision is actually closer to the Tenth Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.") It's a beautiful idea, the very definition of federalism... and it has consistently been ignored or overridden by the US federal government almost since the ink was dry.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean forgotten glory.
Ehhh, not really. We remember the empires that have gone before -- and so do the descendants of the people who built them. The US has been, and still is, far too important to world affairs to go down completely into the dust. But I can well imagine a time, not too far away, when tourists come to look at Mt. Rushmore and the Washington Monument in much the same way as we look at the Pyramids or the Coliseum or Nelson's Column.
Bottom line, we can do it because we have the power and the might. We don't need to play well with others, others need to play well with us.
We're not the first nation to think that way. A century or so ago, one particularly keen observer of empire wrote:
"Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!"
It happened to Britain, and to Spain, and Rome; it will happen to us too. Nothing lasts forever. With luck, we'll go out the way the British did, gracefully and with a certain amount of good will in the world. But if people like you have their way, it will be more like the way the Romans ended things: ever weaker, arrogant and paranoid and half-mad, harried by people who hate us, until we're a shattered wreck of remembered glory.
No, I live in a world where we have a religious fanatic for an AG who would be an amusing self-parody if he weren't so damned scary. Every time I think Ashcroft has reached the limit of wackiness, he pulls out some new trick. Nothing I or anyone else could say about him would be wilder than the truth.
I was under the impression that they were eventually hoping to get scramjets up to Mach 15 or so -- which isn't orbital velocity, but it's a hell of a lot closer. And you can gain a lot of altitude, too, which makes a difference; the less atmosphere you have to punch through when you light the rocket, the better. Put simply, Mach 15 at 200,000 feet beats 0 at sea level every time.
I don't have anything against rockets; they do indeed work, and I think we should keep doing everything we can to develop rocket technology in parallel with air-breathing engines. But not having to carry oxidizer for a large portion of the trip to orbit is inarguably a Good Thing.
I served as a USAF medic for eight years, including Desert Storm; you will, I trust, acknowledge that I've earned the right to comment on this.
The sympathy for the GIs in Iraq who are facing the possibility of death every day is not feigned at all. It's a horrible job. No sane soldier wants to die in battle, ever -- anyone who does is much more of a threat to himself and his unit than he is to the enemy. Like Patton said, "Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to go out there and manke the other son of a bitch die for his country." A glorious death may be a useful recruiting tool for idealistic 18-year-olds, but that fantasy tends to wear off pretty damn fast the first time you actually see someone get shot.
I considered it a great honor to serve my country. I'm proud of my service. But what I'm proud of is that I saved lives -- not that my parents had to worry for months that they would get their son home in a body bag.
Well, I've seen many negative depictions of Gates. But never a racist. Bravo.
Oh, for Christ's sake, it was a joke.
Only because Bush was putting it forward. Had it been Howard Dean proposing a manned space mission we would have everyone here drooling at the possiblity.
/., usually in liberal-vs.-conservative or Mac-or-Linux-vs.-Windows arguments -- "You're only against it because it's a [Republican|Microsoft] thing, but you'd cheer if it were [the Democrats|Apple|Red Hat]." The thing is, it's not true. We lefty Unix-heads are entirely willing (and sometimes a bit too eager, IMO, in practical terms) to attack our own side; it seems to me that it's generally the right-wingers and Microsoft apologists who adhere rigorously to the party line.
I see this accusation of cognitive dissonance fairly often on
(And no, I'm not saying that there's any correlation between governmental and computational politics. I may despise Rush Limbaugh, but if he wants to push Macs that's just fine with me.)
I have said before, and will say again, that if Bush's space initiative bears any fruit, I will praise him to the skies (so to speak) for that accomplishment, no matter how much I may disagree with just about everything else he does. I'm a believer in manned space flight, for all kinds of reasons, and I would dearly love to see permanantly manned Moon and Mars bases in my lifetime -- and I would particularly like it if at least some of those bases flew the Stars and Stripes. For myself, at least, if I criticize Bush's plans, it's because I think he's talking big and doesn't have the willpower or political muscle to actually make it happen. The goal itself is eminently worthwhile, and if we reach it, it will be an accomplishment which will far outlast the politics of the day.
... but why weren't we doing this 40+ years ago? The X-43 seems to me like a logical evolution of the X-15, which is the kind of thing we should have been working on all this time. Big dumb one-shot boosters to get heavy materials that we never intend to bring back down into space, combined with winged air-launched reusable vehicles for carrying people, instead of hybrids like the Saturn V and the Shuttle ... it seems so obvious, now that we've had decades of a space program which now can't even reliably get people into and out of LEO.
I'd like to think that we will, in the next decade, see a manned descendant of the X-43 which will use scramjets to achieve orbital velocities and rockets for maneuvering in orbit, and will provide human transportation to/from LEO orders of magnitude cheaper than the Shuttle. It's certainly technically possible. But I'm not holding my breath.
The Cosa Nostra calls them for advice on how to make money.
o/~ Woke up this morning, got myself a gun o/~
"Bill, it's Tony. Listen, I got a problem."
"You got a problem, huh? What problem?"
"I'm not pulling in the dough like I used to, Bill. My guys -- they're not bringing it in any more, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah, so what the fuck do you want me to do about it, Tony?"
"Just thought you could maybe give me some advice, is all. You and Steve, I respect you guys. You always have some scam going. How do you do it?"
"You think I'm going to tell you that, Tony? How I do it? Fuck you. No, you just keep on doing what I tell you, you got that? And oh yeah, this Mario Monti guy. Sounds like a Wop name. So I want you Wops to take care of him. Take care of him good, you know what I mean, Tony? And do it soon, you got that?"
(quietly) "Um, yes sir, Mr. Gates. Thanks for your time."
The way Microsoft's corporate behavior could be moderated, quite successfully, would be to break it up into separate companies, as the DoJ wanted to do back in the days when we had a DoJ that was more concerned with things like antitrust laws than with calico cats and bare boobies. But of course, no European court has the authority to impose such a penalty on a US company, so don't expect anything to change any time soon.
Well, look at it this way. Microsoft has ~ $50 billion cash, and the fine is ~ $600 million. (Obviously the exact dollar value varies with the dollar-euro exchange rate.) This represents about 1.2% of their current cash on hand. Now, on average, I have a bank balance of about $3,000. The equivalent fine, for me, would therefore be $36, or about what I'd pay for a speeding ticket. And yes, I consider that pretty much peanuts.
Should have read the footnotes, I guess. ;) Well, that makes it worse than I thought. Honestly, I'm amazed that anyone would rate their job satisfaction as 10/10, and those who did are surely not representative of their fields as a whole.
LOL! Yeah, somehow that doesn't surprise me.
Oh, it's entirely possible that a specific distro could run the user as root by default -- IIRC, Lindows already does this, which strikes me as an incredibly bad idea, but that's Michael Robertson's problem. And given that fact that Lindows has so far generated a lot of publicity but very few sales, I'm not too worried about it. Let a thousand flowers bloom; most will wither and die.
What I hope to see happen is for desktop-oriented Linux distros to follow the Mac OS X model. Apple has done a beautiful job of integrating Unix security with the Mac's traditional ease of use. The key features are:
- The first user on the machine is set up as admin by default; this is not the same as root. Other new accounts on the machine are by default standard user accounts.
- Root access is disabled by default, and requires a few minutes of work by somewhat who knows what they're doing to enable. Once enabled, it's available by the usual "su" at the command line. Note that there is just about nothing you can do from the GUI that requires root access, ever.
- 99% of normal operations never require admin access. About the only common task that does is installing software that modifies security or other vital system settings. A dialog box pops up and asks for the admin password. Non-admin users don't get to do this, of course, but the idea is that someone with access to the machine is an admin and can take care of it.
The result is a secure, easy-to-use system that blocks just about anything dangerous coming in from the outside world, but lets users do everything they need to do. IMO any Linux distribution that adopts this model, and implements it well, will do very well in the market.
And then what happens when enough users are using Linux and companies decide to port software such as Bonzi Buddy to it?
Joe Luser decides to install spyware on his shiny new Linux box. The (hopefully) well-evolved GUI pops up a warning that says something like, "You must be running as a root user to install this software, because it wants to modify your security settings and may make your computer vulnerable to worms, viruses, and hackers. Running as root is very dangerous, and is not recommended unless you know exactly what you're doing." This scares the shit out of Joe Luser (as it should) and he doesn't install the software. Problem solved.
Linux and other Unices are inherently more secure than Windows, always have been, and probably always will be. It's not just the popularity, it's the code. Deal with it.
Since they reported the percentage of respondents who said they were "very happy", I'm assuming they used categories such as "very happy", "somewhat happy", etc. I'd like to see the whole breakdown. Suppose that hypothetically, workers in Job X were 5% "very happy" but 50% "somewhat happy", 20% "somewhat unhappy", and 25% "very unhappy", while those in Job Y were 10% / 20% / 30% / 40% on the same scale -- it would be hard to argue at that point that Y's are happier than X's, but that's how the survey results would be interpreted if you only "skim the cream" and report the top category.
Posts like the ones I was responding to merit a yawn because they're so trivial and repetitive. Sometimes I wonder if there's a Mindless Super-Patriot's Book Of Dumb Arguments floating around that all the right-wingers pull out whenever anyone starts talking international politics. Real patriotism (which bears very little relationship to the Fox News / GWB variety) requires thought.
Also, please learn to spell.
Yawn. It is entirely possible, and indeed desirable, for patriotic Americans to look at specific things that other countries do better than we do and say, "That's a good idea, let's try it over here." The idea that there is one specific "American Way" which is automatically better than everyone else's way, and which can never ever be modified with ideas from outside our borders, strikes me as absurd, repulsive, and -- I have to say it -- un-American.
Why select a slower, more expensive platform and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
Because for the applications Pixar has in mind, G5 Macs are neither slower nor more expensive. It's really that simple. G5s deliver the best bang for the buck in the video editing world, period.
I would really, really like to see the "Macs are more expensive" meme disappear from these arguments. They're not more expensive than PCs of comparable power and quality, and haven't been for years.
Thanks!
... given the record of "scientists" and their truly vile and obscene pursuits throughout the ages ...
Please be specific. Names, dates, places. With an explanation of what makes these incidents vile and obscene. Also please include a short, well-written essay on why you are willing to use the products of such a vile, obscene pursuit in your daily life rather than living in the woods and living on roots and berries.
Dolphins don't have thumbs.
I really hope this doesn't mean the Pentagon/CIA joint data mining operation to catch Osama isn't running on an AS/400.
Considering that Iraq and Osama bin Laden have nothing to do with each other, I doubt it.
God, this joke is getting old.
Look, people: there are no angels in this business, and everybody knows it. Microsoft is evil, spammers are evil, AOL and Yahoo! are only slightly less evil than the first two; also on the "evil" list are Apple, Sun, IBM, Dell, Oracle, Adobe, and, well, pretty much any company with yearly revenue in excess of $1 million. Every single one of them would dominate the entire business world, crush the competition, and eliminate all innovation that didn't translate directly into greater short-term profits if they could.
What most of us down here at the bottom of the food chain understand is that it doesn't matter. We support companies -- whether "support" means buying their products or just cheering them on -- not on the basis of their moral purity (because there isn't any) but on the basis of what's most useful to us. If Microsoft spends some portion of its ill-gotten gains on cutting down on the amount of spam I get, that is useful to me, even if everything else they do is not only useless but actively harmful. There's no cognitive dissonance involved.
Yep, exactly.
... and it has consistently been ignored or overridden by the US federal government almost since the ink was dry.
It sounds to me like the German provision is actually closer to the Tenth Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.") It's a beautiful idea, the very definition of federalism