The big difference is that, unlike Saddam, Putin actually does have weapons of mass destruction.
And another big difference is that not much you can do about this:-)
But really all this naming game ("democracy", "dictatorship", "monarchy") starts getting silly. We now see, on US's own example, that democracy does not work (it's too easy to manipulate.) In Europe you can see that the democratic governments are pandering to the electors instead of doing the right things. So why all the surprises that for Russia a different model seems to be optimal, based on an elected, strong ruler who defends the stability of the country against all wandering salesmen of snake oil? It doesn't have to be a hereditary monarchy, of course, but people like long term stability. For example, US politicians are mostly concerned about reelecting themselves rather than about doing the job regardless of what the people think. There is a reason why US Supreme Court judges are given the job for life. But this is a delicate balancing act, obviously - a bad ruler can, and will hurt the country.
If you look around the world, there are just as many definitions of democracy as there are democratic countries. Deal with countries as they are, and not as you'd like them to be. Those countries know better, and the test for it is in popular opinion - it is somewhat harder to influence than an election.
there was more than one A380 built and none of them have been destroyed in hanger collapses.
It is important to understand the life cycle of prototypes: they are made to perform usually one function, in a very specific time frame. After that is done they are useless. I am sure nobody shed a tear over the damage to the prototype Buran because it should have been cut into pieces and recycled long ago (but probably not a single bureaucrat had enough bravery to order it done.)
Think of it this way: you have a spaceship that will cost you 100x your normal space launch rate to use. Also, it was never approved for commercial flights, let alone manned flights. The carrier for it (Energiya) is not manufactured (because there is no demand.) What do you do with such a spaceship? It is a black hole of maintenance and storage, for no reason at all.
I work in R&D, and we have tons of prototype designs that we build, test, demo and... scrap. That's what prototypes are for. There is no chance that Buran, as designed, will ever fly, so why to keep it?
To get a driver's license you had to study the workings of the car, and for a good reason - more than likely on a dark road, under rain, you'd have to open the hood and clean the contacts of the ignition (on Moskvitch) or to rearrange the wet rag on the fuel pump (Zhiguli) or just curse impotently (any ZAZ.) Very few Soviet cars were well made; Volga was rumored to be better than most, but completely unobtainable to an average man.
This is why the Clipper spaceship exists only as a mockup
The Clipper exists only as a mockup because the technology does not exist to build it cheaply enough, and nobody wants to repeat the financial performance of the Shuttle. There were a few bids, and none of them was good enough to start the project. So it got postponed, and the money is currently being used to work with European Space Agency - to develop something that has a chance.
Realistically, I fear Putin's plan for space development is a dream that would be realized many years behind schedule, if at all.
As Lao Tzu said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
This is a correct formula - for COMMUNISM and not for SOCIALISM. For the latter it is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work" - exactly as I said originally.
Unfortunately you posted as AC, at score 0, will anyone see your post?
Control by the workers of the means of production is designed precisely to tackle exploitation.
Are you serious? Paying 130 R/mo (USD $5/mo) to an engineer to design stuff is not an exploitation? A worker in socialism has no say in his salary; it's not even negotiable, it's set by the charts, and those charts are prepared high at the top.
Only under capitalism can people take a "share of wealth" grossly disproportional to "their contribution", through asset investment.
Someone bought their money, must be a fair deal then. A corporation is not required to go public, you know.
You'd be hard pressed to find a psychologist that doesn't consider "genius" to be identifiable by about the age of 5-6. A genius is formed of a mixture of good genetics and early nurturing environment. He will always receive greater admiration than the average Joe,
You have somewhat interesting ideas; but in the real world - in any country - smart children are usually just beaten up for all their smarts. The crowd does not like non-conformists.
and he will always have an easier time conquering problems; to give him lots of money in addition to these unearned gifts is nothing to do with entitlement. It's merely the capitalist way of making sure he's on your team.
It's a different way to describe his value to the capitalist, and through him - to the society.
In Stalin's time, for example, a professor could afford a personal chauffeured car
Why? Did he need his equipment to be carried around? Was it because he was often taking his underlings on field trips? Please, reveal to me why a dedicated professor would be interested in a chauffeur.
Most dedicated professors had poor eyesight, were too busy to learn driving and car-care, and the service was affordable to them, and they could work in the car. You have a market demand and a market offer, and they met.
So the problem was that during Stalin, millions of workers went hungry, but after Stalin, a few professors went hungry? And to you, this is a retrograde step?
Ignoring the numbers that you offer no citation for, one professor generally has a societal value far exceeding that of a large number of minimally educated machinists, drivers and factory floor cleaners.
Quite, you're revealing your fascist colours; you'd prefer that the weaker starve and only the stronger survive.
Sorry, you are introducing undefined, foreign concepts here (weaker, stronger.) I thought socialism is based on distribution of wealth per value added to the society, so why do you object that very thing?
So some academics see their jobs as a means to an end (wealth) rather than an end itself (scholarship). Never encountered a good academic with this attitude, however.
They were paid little, and ordered to work beneath their level (gathering potatoes, for example.)
I recall one of my better tutors, Cambridge grad, deciding to work as a miner for a year or two straight after graduation. Why? Picking potatoes / mining coal might be below your brilliant mind, but to his brilliant mind, every man could pull his weight wherever it was needed; he didn't see his brain as a "get out clause" from doing dirty work.
I agree with your tutor. However there is a big difference - he DECIDED to work as a miner, not was ORDERED to do so against his wishes and contrary to his studies.
There is sufficient wealth in Sweden, say, for no man to starve, nor to die from lack of medical care, nor to go without shelter.
No, there is not. I have some Swedish friends, by the way, and they tell me lots of stories about Swedish politics. But in any case, no country has inexhaustible resource of everything.
So, taking "needs" to be those things, it is possible to create a socialist country in which there can be consum
Capitalism does not channel selfish urges "for the greater good of society" it channels them for the good of the individual. Sometimes that benefits society as a whole, sometimes it doesn't.
The expression "A == C" can incorporate ("A == B" and "B == C"). There is no need to elaborate on the obvious. Capitalism benefits the society more than it hurts, or else it could not survive; just ask the corpse of feudalism, for example. My original statement is true.
Oh, and you might have an urge to own everything and control everything, but don't project your megalomaniacal tendencies onto the rest of us.
References to humans in general are of statistical nature. I can imagine that some people will refuse a free check worth $100M, but I strongly suspect that majority of the population of this planet will grab it as fast as they can (the current exchange rate notwithstanding.)
It is interesting that you mention that, but in the old USSR there was a central repository of all the software written by anyone in the country, and programmers were encouraged to participate by submitting their projects and by reusing existing code. Before the Internet, of course, it was not very user-friendly (mail, paper, tapes.) But since the State owned everything, there was no issues with ownership of IP. It was 100% Communism in this specific area.
But of course you refer mostly to the modern situation, where F/OSS distribution model has certain likeness of Communism (from everyone according to his capabilities, to everyone according to his needs, and there is no Government.) I guess the p1rate scene also follows, including music, at least on the consumption side.
I don't really disagree with you, but you are mentioning interesting conflicts:
You are assuming that population should "naturally grow"
This is something that a government can not control, unless it is truly totalitarian, and the USSR (for example) wasn't that bad. China tried (tries?) to control the population growth, with mixed results. But in a generally free country people can move around, create families, make children. The philosophers sitting at the top of that Ivory Tower may disagree, and they may prescribe zero growth to the nation, as their charts recommend, but how do you enforce that without infringing on many of the rights of the people? You can't just turn a dial and set zero growth to most prosperous cities, and 10% growth to agrarian regions, and -10% growth to already overpopulated places...
Like I said in another message, competing with Capitalists is not necessarily the ideal goal.
And from the position of a wise, old man you are absolutely right. However a stupid 15 y.o. teenager will gladly start a revolution to get a free iPod. It takes a great deal of knowledge of both societies to understand advantages and disadvantages of each, and then to choose the optimal compromise. You can not do that if all you know is the conditions "here", and the conditions "there" are repackaged to amplify the good, suppress the bad, and sold to you under the shiny cover of the "America" magazine, for example. You can get a lot of mileage from describing the new, shiny cars that an average American can buy; someone who can't afford even a badly made local car will be duly impressed. The cost of medical service (free in USSR) may be not mentioned so prominently, and people who expect it to be free will not even know why they should ask. A Soviet worker would never ask about your insurance premiums, or about your University loans - they didn't exist in the USSR because they were not needed. If you only tell him about your new car, and not mention the loan behind it, the worker will get wrong ideas (like free money, or streets paved with gold... all that.)
the people there see little reason to change
The people can be easily shown such a reason, even if the reason is false. As an example, the US population believed, and still believes, in many lies about Iraq. There is nothing strange, then, if some other society is led to believe that every family is entitled to one new, shiny car, and a house, and a TV with 1000 channels, and... (people's greed is limitless.)
One could argue that the Soviet Union's problem was their political system, not their economic system. They may not have been wealthy with shiny gizmos, but they could potentially produce enough to feed, cloth, and house everyone. Many Russians want the Soviet Union back, in fact.
The political system was just fine until Gorbachev started messing with it without understanding how it works. The old system was just like what China has now - a rule of few, and you could be one of those few if you are smart enough and if you know the right people. The economy was bad, that's the real problem.
Why was the economy bad? Because they couldn't "produce enough to feed, cloth, and house everyone." Most of the USSR is too far North, and agriculture there is a risky business. Summer is only 3 months if you are lucky, and if you are not then the year's harvest is dead (rains, for example, make it impossible to gather whatever you grew.) This is the reference to Ph.D's slogging through the potato fields and picking potatoes from the deep mud with their hands, one potato at a time. It's no Idaho there.
Clothing was generally OK, as long you don't demand variety. Most men wouldn't even realize that such a thing exists:-) But housing was terribly bad. The problem was so bad that most cities had mandatory residence permits (some still do) and it was almost impossible to get some of those, like in Moscow. With a permit you could rent from the state, but there was very little of available living space, and the growing population ate up all the new construction. Many families lived in a small apartment for their whole life, including their children and sometimes grandchildren. Why so? Because the state had a specific plan for new construction, and so much space, and so many workers. A capitalist would ask "why not to buy more land and hire more workers" and a socialist would reply that there is no money to pay for the land because the rents are unreasonably cheap (25R/mo, for example) and the construction workers are expensive (300R/mo) and there isn't enough of them anyway, and the machinery is in short supply because (points to another Ministry, across the road.) Dependencies everywhere; right now the free market fixes most of them, but 30 years ago it was impossible. If you wanted to open just a private car wash, with nothing but a bucket and a brush, you couldn't do it - such things were against the law, only the State could own means of production. That got dumped in 1990, in the first phase of Gorbachev's reforms.
But this assumes that fast technological progress is a good thing
Technological progress buys you better and faster tools to build more houses, to grow more food, and to make better clothes, for example. If you don't do that then your naturally growing population will starve (and that started to happen in 1980's.) Also if you don't employ your scientists then don't be so amazed when they leave the country, and then don't wonder why your TV is still black and white, and not that color-HD-whatever that Japanese watch every day. Military is also a major consumer of technology, and if you get rid of your scientists the generals will be very upset, and a wise man should not upset generals needlessly.
Note that the US may be doing just this also by offshoring all the non-people-facing technology/sci work to the 3rd world
"They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing." (link.)
If the suspect kept this information in a safe, or under his bed then the police would have access to it so why should criminals have a loophole which enables them to completely hide things
And what if the suspect kept this information in her head, without putting anything on paper? Should the police be able to [destructively] mind-probe the individual just in case?
What if she wrote a poem where each verse gives her (and only her) a hint about a name on a secret list? Should she be tortured to reveal associations between the verses and the names? Do those associations even exist? What if they don't, and a poem is just a poem? "Do androids dream of electric chickens?" - this could easily encode your nick if you know the rank of a certain Data person [modulo Lt.] and can think of a specific dish that you ate at some memorable time. For everyone else, if they ask, this line just refers to a well known novel, and that's it.
But in general the police, and the government, should only do what the society as a whole would want them to do to serve that society. There were times when the society wanted priests to burn suspected witches; there were times when the society wanted police to exterminate members of a different race or ethnicity. Today, as it seems, most western societies are weak in the knees and scared to death, so they authorize their minions (the government, police etc.) to arrest, torture and otherwise violate rights of some of the members just on an odd chance that it may help prevent some calamity or other. This, IMO, is not an act of a healthy society; this society is sick and near self-destruction, just like Romans; it's psychopathic, acting irrationally, and moving farther away from rationality with every passing day. A citizen accusing his neighbor of evil intent just because "it could be so" should be locked up in a rubber room; but who will lock up the whole society?
Socialism has at least one major fault: it depends on people taking their share of the common wealth, proportional to their contribution. Needless to say, this is impossible on every account. A genius scientist can be entitled to millions of dollars, but he is not married, lives at his lab and needs nothing. A family of janitors with 8 kids needs everything they can get from the society, and they are hardly earning anything from the society for their work.
This is an imbalance that was counter to the proclaimed idea of equality, and it was very real in the USSR. In Stalin's time, for example, a professor could afford a personal chauffeured car, a maid or two, and the best living accommodation - this was when people were paid for their worth. After Stalin things changed: a scientist went hungry (130 R/mo) and an uneducated metal worker at a factory (400-500 R/mo) started buying cars, dachas and tourist trips. This was one of those things that doomed the USSR; I can't imagine a more stupid idea than to herd your best and brightest into the lowest class. Many of them escaped to Israel and the USA as soon as they could; it was simply insulting for them to remain, be paid a pittance, and see their skills wasted on picking up potatoes in the field with locals just sitting around, smoking and crudely joking about it.
Communism goes even beyond that; but enough to say that Communism is based on the concept of unlimited availability of all worldly goods, and on unlimited consumption of those as your needs dictate. We can see Communism practiced on board of Enterprise in Star Trek, for example. Crew members can replicate anything they want and build whatever they like; use Holodecks as much as they want; and they are careful enough to take only what they really need, and not more. This is currently impossible because of many reasons, with unlimited availability of everything as one quite obvious example, and with a need for a "new human" as another concept that has no basis in reality.
Communism (or socialism) works for ants, but humans are possessive animals, with urge to own everything and control everything. You can't build socialism with those humans. But at least the basic capitalism can channel those human urges to the greater good of the society; socialism and communism just pretend that those urges do not exist. Capitalism is simply socialism with a working method of enforcing the rules.
I haven't lost any, personally, but it's easy to imagine how it happens. You are on a business trip since 5 am. You carry a suitcase, a laptop bag, a bag with a demo, and a jacket. In remaining hands you have the itinerary, the tickets, IDs, and other papers. You stop at various counters to get your boarding pass, to drop off or pick up the luggage, to buy a sandwich, to inquire about the flight, to go to bathroom, etc. At any of those places you have a chance of putting three items down and later picking up only two, just because you are tired and distracted and in a hurry to catch a plane or to arrive in time. You still try to do your best, but your company sent you on a tight schedule. If you lose something the company has a hand in it.
The problem here is that the court has no proof that the information is in fact in possession of the accused. How would you like if you, or any other random person, are grabbed off the street and tortured (or jailed) until you correctly tell where Osama is hiding - which nobody knows, as it seems. Modern PCs have millions of files in them - some of your own, and some coming from random sources, like the Web, friends, guests - who knows. You can not be expected to know everything about every file, even if this is your computer - not any more than you can be held responsible for every minute scrap of paper on your property. If someone prints a PGP message on a piece of paper, makes an airplane out of it and sends it flying over your fence you probably shouldn't be jailed if you have no idea where is the key.
How many are going to be returned because they don't have MS Office pre-installed on them?
Zero. MS Office is not preinstalled on computers, unless you count a teaser package that only tells you to buy the full Office. Many Windows laptops come with MS Works (not that it's useful for anything...) If the Linux box has OpenOffice preloaded, it's already more than any Windows laptop ever has, and I dare say that it's exactly what most Wal-Mart computer shoppers need.
Feel it. Detect gravitational signature of the big hunk of metal.
I think it would be almost the same signature as from the mass of water that the sub displaced. If you can resolve mild gravitational anomalies only a few feet in size (air, engines etc.) from tens of miles - best of luck, as you say:-)
Well, do that and the opponent responds by deploying thousands of robot torpedos. Current torpedos are mostly dumb, and mainly used as a bullet fired from a gun. But there is nothing impossible in developing a micro-submarine which has a small gasoline engine, a huge Li-Ion battery, plenty of explosives, and most importantly a good computer that controls the sub. This thing could sail inertially, check GPS, visually identify targets, receive commands through a satellite, and so on. It would be practically invulnerable to defensive weapons, containing no humans and being designed to withstand tens of G and huge water pressure (having no need to maintain an atmosphere within.) As necessary it would return to base, or to a resupply ship, for refueling. A country like China would be very well positioned to design and deploy a few thousands of those, and it's hard to defeat them when they are rising from 10,000 ft right up, into your bottom.
Giving away the fact that he was in range for a firing solution on a carrier could be regarded as a serious tactical error by the Chinese captain
I hope you don't suggest that the whole plan was designed and executed by the captain just because he was bored, or something? This is a political move, plain and simple, and it was planned and authorized from the very top of Chinese military and Party. I would not be surprised if several subs were involved, pre-positioned on the expected path of the US ships, and only the best positioned boat surfaced.
It would be far better to let the carrier group pass by, then slip off in silence and keep that knowledge secret.
If you have a doomsday weapon you must tell the others that you have it, otherwise it loses its deterrent value. China wanted the results.
Letting the US Navy know they can do that will only make the US Navy work very hard to find a solution to that problem and negate that advantage.
There is nothing wrong in sending an opponent on a wild goose chase. As many knowledgeable people indicated, an active sonar would have picked the sub up far enough. This is purely a show, to sneak up on a carrier group that does not expect an attack. In a battle condition this attack would be impossible, so it has no military value. And in any case China has many weapons that won't fail to hit a carrier from a few dozen miles, with underwater or air launch; countries with such weapons do not have to risk a close approach for a torpedo attack.
However, maybe it wasn't so voluntary. Possible reasons for it include running out of battery, losing control of his submarine, an equipment failure on board, or being actively pinged and forced to acknowledge his presence.
The existing evidence does not agree with those possibilities. A diesel sub does not need battery to stay submerged for a while, and one would think that *someone* at the controls would have his eyes glued to the "remaining battery charge" dial. Besides, what are the chances that out of the whole ocean the sub just happened to experience an emergency in the middle of a carrier group?
Chinese just gave a stupid answer to a stupid question. China is free to follow anyone in international waters, limited only by the international rules of navigation - which they clearly did not violate. In Cold War times such shadowing was commonplace in the air, on the surface, and under water. A good training for everyone involved too, and keeps ambitions in check.
A hard disk is mostly... hardware. There's a little software in it, even in a good, uninfected unit
Two cases here. First, you got an external USB HDD. It often contains lots of software. I have a Seagate USB/FireWire HDD, it comes with FreeAgent backup and configuration software. I bought the software with the HDD unit, they are one set. I would be an idiot if I format the HDD first.
Another case is when you get an internal HDD that is supposed to be unformatted. But you don't know if it is or isn't - not before you install it into your Windows box and power it up. If the HDD is blank, as it should be, then you need to format it, and all is well. However if it is already formatted for you and contains something, Windows has no way of knowing why it is so, and it will treat it as any other removable drive - namely, will read the autorun.inf and proceed running all the viruses in the world that the drive may contain, all that before you even realize that something is wrong.
In either case, if your antivirus finished loading by this time it may save you, if it is good enough. But I recall some recent review that claimed that a typical antivirus fails to catch as many as half of the viruses.
Catching of downloaders generally requires a lot of access to the routers of the Internet, or some massive portscanning operation, or some other system that maybe scans the trackers and attempts to identify who is having what, with geolocation. In either case this is not something that your typical city cops would do. This is not a city-wide operation to begin with, if anything it is a nation-wide or even an international action. What is the chance that out of 30 peers having [parts of] a certain file some are in your town, if those 30 can be anywhere on the planet ? If I were the police chief I would immediately realize that we'd need to hunt for months just to find someone, anyone from our jurisdiction. Considering the efforts and costs and required expertise to run the thing, I'd rather send those officers to the streets, to prevent real crime that hurts people.
Of course you could have made yourself a favor and bought a cheap second hand laptop (or a new desktop even) for a couple hundred dollars. A thesis sounds like a project where you'd want proper tools before you start. Doing the work on a PDA-sized phone is not reasonable.
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Competition is always welcomed, or so says everyone here
Do _you_ still say so, after this scenario?
And another big difference is that not much you can do about this :-)
But really all this naming game ("democracy", "dictatorship", "monarchy") starts getting silly. We now see, on US's own example, that democracy does not work (it's too easy to manipulate.) In Europe you can see that the democratic governments are pandering to the electors instead of doing the right things. So why all the surprises that for Russia a different model seems to be optimal, based on an elected, strong ruler who defends the stability of the country against all wandering salesmen of snake oil? It doesn't have to be a hereditary monarchy, of course, but people like long term stability. For example, US politicians are mostly concerned about reelecting themselves rather than about doing the job regardless of what the people think. There is a reason why US Supreme Court judges are given the job for life. But this is a delicate balancing act, obviously - a bad ruler can, and will hurt the country.
If you look around the world, there are just as many definitions of democracy as there are democratic countries. Deal with countries as they are, and not as you'd like them to be. Those countries know better, and the test for it is in popular opinion - it is somewhat harder to influence than an election.
It is important to understand the life cycle of prototypes: they are made to perform usually one function, in a very specific time frame. After that is done they are useless. I am sure nobody shed a tear over the damage to the prototype Buran because it should have been cut into pieces and recycled long ago (but probably not a single bureaucrat had enough bravery to order it done.)
Think of it this way: you have a spaceship that will cost you 100x your normal space launch rate to use. Also, it was never approved for commercial flights, let alone manned flights. The carrier for it (Energiya) is not manufactured (because there is no demand.) What do you do with such a spaceship? It is a black hole of maintenance and storage, for no reason at all.
I work in R&D, and we have tons of prototype designs that we build, test, demo and ... scrap. That's what prototypes are for. There is no chance that Buran, as designed, will ever fly, so why to keep it?
I take it you never drove the original Zhiguli then, or Moskvitch, or heavens forbid a Zaporozhets?
To get a driver's license you had to study the workings of the car, and for a good reason - more than likely on a dark road, under rain, you'd have to open the hood and clean the contacts of the ignition (on Moskvitch) or to rearrange the wet rag on the fuel pump (Zhiguli) or just curse impotently (any ZAZ.) Very few Soviet cars were well made; Volga was rumored to be better than most, but completely unobtainable to an average man.
This is why the Clipper spaceship exists only as a mockup
The Clipper exists only as a mockup because the technology does not exist to build it cheaply enough, and nobody wants to repeat the financial performance of the Shuttle. There were a few bids, and none of them was good enough to start the project. So it got postponed, and the money is currently being used to work with European Space Agency - to develop something that has a chance.
Realistically, I fear Putin's plan for space development is a dream that would be realized many years behind schedule, if at all.
As Lao Tzu said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
This is a correct formula - for COMMUNISM and not for SOCIALISM. For the latter it is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work" - exactly as I said originally.
Control by the workers of the means of production is designed precisely to tackle exploitation.
Are you serious? Paying 130 R/mo (USD $5/mo) to an engineer to design stuff is not an exploitation? A worker in socialism has no say in his salary; it's not even negotiable, it's set by the charts, and those charts are prepared high at the top.
Only under capitalism can people take a "share of wealth" grossly disproportional to "their contribution", through asset investment.
Someone bought their money, must be a fair deal then. A corporation is not required to go public, you know.
You'd be hard pressed to find a psychologist that doesn't consider "genius" to be identifiable by about the age of 5-6. A genius is formed of a mixture of good genetics and early nurturing environment. He will always receive greater admiration than the average Joe,
You have somewhat interesting ideas; but in the real world - in any country - smart children are usually just beaten up for all their smarts. The crowd does not like non-conformists.
and he will always have an easier time conquering problems; to give him lots of money in addition to these unearned gifts is nothing to do with entitlement. It's merely the capitalist way of making sure he's on your team.
It's a different way to describe his value to the capitalist, and through him - to the society.
Why? Did he need his equipment to be carried around? Was it because he was often taking his underlings on field trips? Please, reveal to me why a dedicated professor would be interested in a chauffeur.
Most dedicated professors had poor eyesight, were too busy to learn driving and car-care, and the service was affordable to them, and they could work in the car. You have a market demand and a market offer, and they met.
So the problem was that during Stalin, millions of workers went hungry, but after Stalin, a few professors went hungry? And to you, this is a retrograde step?
Ignoring the numbers that you offer no citation for, one professor generally has a societal value far exceeding that of a large number of minimally educated machinists, drivers and factory floor cleaners.
Quite, you're revealing your fascist colours; you'd prefer that the weaker starve and only the stronger survive.
Sorry, you are introducing undefined, foreign concepts here (weaker, stronger.) I thought socialism is based on distribution of wealth per value added to the society, so why do you object that very thing?
So some academics see their jobs as a means to an end (wealth) rather than an end itself (scholarship). Never encountered a good academic with this attitude, however.
They were paid little, and ordered to work beneath their level (gathering potatoes, for example.)
I recall one of my better tutors, Cambridge grad, deciding to work as a miner for a year or two straight after graduation. Why? Picking potatoes / mining coal might be below your brilliant mind, but to his brilliant mind, every man could pull his weight wherever it was needed; he didn't see his brain as a "get out clause" from doing dirty work.
I agree with your tutor. However there is a big difference - he DECIDED to work as a miner, not was ORDERED to do so against his wishes and contrary to his studies.
There is sufficient wealth in Sweden, say, for no man to starve, nor to die from lack of medical care, nor to go without shelter.
No, there is not. I have some Swedish friends, by the way, and they tell me lots of stories about Swedish politics. But in any case, no country has inexhaustible resource of everything.
So, taking "needs" to be those things, it is possible to create a socialist country in which there can be consum
The expression "A == C" can incorporate ("A == B" and "B == C"). There is no need to elaborate on the obvious. Capitalism benefits the society more than it hurts, or else it could not survive; just ask the corpse of feudalism, for example. My original statement is true.
Oh, and you might have an urge to own everything and control everything, but don't project your megalomaniacal tendencies onto the rest of us.
References to humans in general are of statistical nature. I can imagine that some people will refuse a free check worth $100M, but I strongly suspect that majority of the population of this planet will grab it as fast as they can (the current exchange rate notwithstanding.)
But of course you refer mostly to the modern situation, where F/OSS distribution model has certain likeness of Communism (from everyone according to his capabilities, to everyone according to his needs, and there is no Government.) I guess the p1rate scene also follows, including music, at least on the consumption side.
You are assuming that population should "naturally grow"
This is something that a government can not control, unless it is truly totalitarian, and the USSR (for example) wasn't that bad. China tried (tries?) to control the population growth, with mixed results. But in a generally free country people can move around, create families, make children. The philosophers sitting at the top of that Ivory Tower may disagree, and they may prescribe zero growth to the nation, as their charts recommend, but how do you enforce that without infringing on many of the rights of the people? You can't just turn a dial and set zero growth to most prosperous cities, and 10% growth to agrarian regions, and -10% growth to already overpopulated places...
Like I said in another message, competing with Capitalists is not necessarily the ideal goal.
And from the position of a wise, old man you are absolutely right. However a stupid 15 y.o. teenager will gladly start a revolution to get a free iPod. It takes a great deal of knowledge of both societies to understand advantages and disadvantages of each, and then to choose the optimal compromise. You can not do that if all you know is the conditions "here", and the conditions "there" are repackaged to amplify the good, suppress the bad, and sold to you under the shiny cover of the "America" magazine, for example. You can get a lot of mileage from describing the new, shiny cars that an average American can buy; someone who can't afford even a badly made local car will be duly impressed. The cost of medical service (free in USSR) may be not mentioned so prominently, and people who expect it to be free will not even know why they should ask. A Soviet worker would never ask about your insurance premiums, or about your University loans - they didn't exist in the USSR because they were not needed. If you only tell him about your new car, and not mention the loan behind it, the worker will get wrong ideas (like free money, or streets paved with gold ... all that.)
the people there see little reason to change
The people can be easily shown such a reason, even if the reason is false. As an example, the US population believed, and still believes, in many lies about Iraq. There is nothing strange, then, if some other society is led to believe that every family is entitled to one new, shiny car, and a house, and a TV with 1000 channels, and... (people's greed is limitless.)
The political system was just fine until Gorbachev started messing with it without understanding how it works. The old system was just like what China has now - a rule of few, and you could be one of those few if you are smart enough and if you know the right people. The economy was bad, that's the real problem.
Why was the economy bad? Because they couldn't "produce enough to feed, cloth, and house everyone." Most of the USSR is too far North, and agriculture there is a risky business. Summer is only 3 months if you are lucky, and if you are not then the year's harvest is dead (rains, for example, make it impossible to gather whatever you grew.) This is the reference to Ph.D's slogging through the potato fields and picking potatoes from the deep mud with their hands, one potato at a time. It's no Idaho there.
Clothing was generally OK, as long you don't demand variety. Most men wouldn't even realize that such a thing exists :-) But housing was terribly bad. The problem was so bad that most cities had mandatory residence permits (some still do) and it was almost impossible to get some of those, like in Moscow. With a permit you could rent from the state, but there was very little of available living space, and the growing population ate up all the new construction. Many families lived in a small apartment for their whole life, including their children and sometimes grandchildren. Why so? Because the state had a specific plan for new construction, and so much space, and so many workers. A capitalist would ask "why not to buy more land and hire more workers" and a socialist would reply that there is no money to pay for the land because the rents are unreasonably cheap (25R/mo, for example) and the construction workers are expensive (300R/mo) and there isn't enough of them anyway, and the machinery is in short supply because (points to another Ministry, across the road.) Dependencies everywhere; right now the free market fixes most of them, but 30 years ago it was impossible. If you wanted to open just a private car wash, with nothing but a bucket and a brush, you couldn't do it - such things were against the law, only the State could own means of production. That got dumped in 1990, in the first phase of Gorbachev's reforms.
But this assumes that fast technological progress is a good thing
Technological progress buys you better and faster tools to build more houses, to grow more food, and to make better clothes, for example. If you don't do that then your naturally growing population will starve (and that started to happen in 1980's.) Also if you don't employ your scientists then don't be so amazed when they leave the country, and then don't wonder why your TV is still black and white, and not that color-HD-whatever that Japanese watch every day. Military is also a major consumer of technology, and if you get rid of your scientists the generals will be very upset, and a wise man should not upset generals needlessly.
Note that the US may be doing just this also by offshoring all the non-people-facing technology/sci work to the 3rd world
"They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing." (link.)
And what if the suspect kept this information in her head, without putting anything on paper? Should the police be able to [destructively] mind-probe the individual just in case?
What if she wrote a poem where each verse gives her (and only her) a hint about a name on a secret list? Should she be tortured to reveal associations between the verses and the names? Do those associations even exist? What if they don't, and a poem is just a poem? "Do androids dream of electric chickens?" - this could easily encode your nick if you know the rank of a certain Data person [modulo Lt.] and can think of a specific dish that you ate at some memorable time. For everyone else, if they ask, this line just refers to a well known novel, and that's it.
But in general the police, and the government, should only do what the society as a whole would want them to do to serve that society. There were times when the society wanted priests to burn suspected witches; there were times when the society wanted police to exterminate members of a different race or ethnicity. Today, as it seems, most western societies are weak in the knees and scared to death, so they authorize their minions (the government, police etc.) to arrest, torture and otherwise violate rights of some of the members just on an odd chance that it may help prevent some calamity or other. This, IMO, is not an act of a healthy society; this society is sick and near self-destruction, just like Romans; it's psychopathic, acting irrationally, and moving farther away from rationality with every passing day. A citizen accusing his neighbor of evil intent just because "it could be so" should be locked up in a rubber room; but who will lock up the whole society?
This is an imbalance that was counter to the proclaimed idea of equality, and it was very real in the USSR. In Stalin's time, for example, a professor could afford a personal chauffeured car, a maid or two, and the best living accommodation - this was when people were paid for their worth. After Stalin things changed: a scientist went hungry (130 R/mo) and an uneducated metal worker at a factory (400-500 R/mo) started buying cars, dachas and tourist trips. This was one of those things that doomed the USSR; I can't imagine a more stupid idea than to herd your best and brightest into the lowest class. Many of them escaped to Israel and the USA as soon as they could; it was simply insulting for them to remain, be paid a pittance, and see their skills wasted on picking up potatoes in the field with locals just sitting around, smoking and crudely joking about it.
Communism goes even beyond that; but enough to say that Communism is based on the concept of unlimited availability of all worldly goods, and on unlimited consumption of those as your needs dictate. We can see Communism practiced on board of Enterprise in Star Trek, for example. Crew members can replicate anything they want and build whatever they like; use Holodecks as much as they want; and they are careful enough to take only what they really need, and not more. This is currently impossible because of many reasons, with unlimited availability of everything as one quite obvious example, and with a need for a "new human" as another concept that has no basis in reality.
Communism (or socialism) works for ants, but humans are possessive animals, with urge to own everything and control everything. You can't build socialism with those humans. But at least the basic capitalism can channel those human urges to the greater good of the society; socialism and communism just pretend that those urges do not exist. Capitalism is simply socialism with a working method of enforcing the rules.
I haven't lost any, personally, but it's easy to imagine how it happens. You are on a business trip since 5 am. You carry a suitcase, a laptop bag, a bag with a demo, and a jacket. In remaining hands you have the itinerary, the tickets, IDs, and other papers. You stop at various counters to get your boarding pass, to drop off or pick up the luggage, to buy a sandwich, to inquire about the flight, to go to bathroom, etc. At any of those places you have a chance of putting three items down and later picking up only two, just because you are tired and distracted and in a hurry to catch a plane or to arrive in time. You still try to do your best, but your company sent you on a tight schedule. If you lose something the company has a hand in it.
The problem here is that the court has no proof that the information is in fact in possession of the accused. How would you like if you, or any other random person, are grabbed off the street and tortured (or jailed) until you correctly tell where Osama is hiding - which nobody knows, as it seems. Modern PCs have millions of files in them - some of your own, and some coming from random sources, like the Web, friends, guests - who knows. You can not be expected to know everything about every file, even if this is your computer - not any more than you can be held responsible for every minute scrap of paper on your property. If someone prints a PGP message on a piece of paper, makes an airplane out of it and sends it flying over your fence you probably shouldn't be jailed if you have no idea where is the key.
I feel the janitor's pain. However a team of nuclear engineers probably has a chance to figure out how to use the toilet paper.
The same kid may also know a certain alphanumeric string that can fix the Linux trouble.
Zero. MS Office is not preinstalled on computers, unless you count a teaser package that only tells you to buy the full Office. Many Windows laptops come with MS Works (not that it's useful for anything...) If the Linux box has OpenOffice preloaded, it's already more than any Windows laptop ever has, and I dare say that it's exactly what most Wal-Mart computer shoppers need.
I think it would be almost the same signature as from the mass of water that the sub displaced. If you can resolve mild gravitational anomalies only a few feet in size (air, engines etc.) from tens of miles - best of luck, as you say :-)
Well, do that and the opponent responds by deploying thousands of robot torpedos. Current torpedos are mostly dumb, and mainly used as a bullet fired from a gun. But there is nothing impossible in developing a micro-submarine which has a small gasoline engine, a huge Li-Ion battery, plenty of explosives, and most importantly a good computer that controls the sub. This thing could sail inertially, check GPS, visually identify targets, receive commands through a satellite, and so on. It would be practically invulnerable to defensive weapons, containing no humans and being designed to withstand tens of G and huge water pressure (having no need to maintain an atmosphere within.) As necessary it would return to base, or to a resupply ship, for refueling. A country like China would be very well positioned to design and deploy a few thousands of those, and it's hard to defeat them when they are rising from 10,000 ft right up, into your bottom.
I hope you don't suggest that the whole plan was designed and executed by the captain just because he was bored, or something? This is a political move, plain and simple, and it was planned and authorized from the very top of Chinese military and Party. I would not be surprised if several subs were involved, pre-positioned on the expected path of the US ships, and only the best positioned boat surfaced.
It would be far better to let the carrier group pass by, then slip off in silence and keep that knowledge secret.
If you have a doomsday weapon you must tell the others that you have it, otherwise it loses its deterrent value. China wanted the results.
Letting the US Navy know they can do that will only make the US Navy work very hard to find a solution to that problem and negate that advantage.
There is nothing wrong in sending an opponent on a wild goose chase. As many knowledgeable people indicated, an active sonar would have picked the sub up far enough. This is purely a show, to sneak up on a carrier group that does not expect an attack. In a battle condition this attack would be impossible, so it has no military value. And in any case China has many weapons that won't fail to hit a carrier from a few dozen miles, with underwater or air launch; countries with such weapons do not have to risk a close approach for a torpedo attack.
However, maybe it wasn't so voluntary. Possible reasons for it include running out of battery, losing control of his submarine, an equipment failure on board, or being actively pinged and forced to acknowledge his presence.
The existing evidence does not agree with those possibilities. A diesel sub does not need battery to stay submerged for a while, and one would think that *someone* at the controls would have his eyes glued to the "remaining battery charge" dial. Besides, what are the chances that out of the whole ocean the sub just happened to experience an emergency in the middle of a carrier group?
Chinese just gave a stupid answer to a stupid question. China is free to follow anyone in international waters, limited only by the international rules of navigation - which they clearly did not violate. In Cold War times such shadowing was commonplace in the air, on the surface, and under water. A good training for everyone involved too, and keeps ambitions in check.
Two cases here. First, you got an external USB HDD. It often contains lots of software. I have a Seagate USB/FireWire HDD, it comes with FreeAgent backup and configuration software. I bought the software with the HDD unit, they are one set. I would be an idiot if I format the HDD first.
Another case is when you get an internal HDD that is supposed to be unformatted. But you don't know if it is or isn't - not before you install it into your Windows box and power it up. If the HDD is blank, as it should be, then you need to format it, and all is well. However if it is already formatted for you and contains something, Windows has no way of knowing why it is so, and it will treat it as any other removable drive - namely, will read the autorun.inf and proceed running all the viruses in the world that the drive may contain, all that before you even realize that something is wrong.
In either case, if your antivirus finished loading by this time it may save you, if it is good enough. But I recall some recent review that claimed that a typical antivirus fails to catch as many as half of the viruses.
Catching of downloaders generally requires a lot of access to the routers of the Internet, or some massive portscanning operation, or some other system that maybe scans the trackers and attempts to identify who is having what, with geolocation. In either case this is not something that your typical city cops would do. This is not a city-wide operation to begin with, if anything it is a nation-wide or even an international action. What is the chance that out of 30 peers having [parts of] a certain file some are in your town, if those 30 can be anywhere on the planet ? If I were the police chief I would immediately realize that we'd need to hunt for months just to find someone, anyone from our jurisdiction. Considering the efforts and costs and required expertise to run the thing, I'd rather send those officers to the streets, to prevent real crime that hurts people.
Of course you could have made yourself a favor and bought a cheap second hand laptop (or a new desktop even) for a couple hundred dollars. A thesis sounds like a project where you'd want proper tools before you start. Doing the work on a PDA-sized phone is not reasonable.