Whatever you do, when you meet an alien in space and you are using lasers as propulsion, do not, DO NOT try to back up. This could lead to a serious misunderstanding.
At least, do not do it without knowing the consequences. Read more Larry Niven, especially stories from before humans bought their first hyperdrive.
To quote (I hope, or at least paraphrase), the efficiency of any reaction drive is directly related to its effectiveness as a weapon. And vice versa.
> microsoft wouldn't exist without apple inventing the PC
MITS Altair II
And MS did write the first decent BASIC for it. Not the best BASIC in the end, of course.
So if the Altair II hadn't existed, and hadn't had a decent language for non-professionals to noodle around with, maybe there wouldn't have been a Google, after all.
OTOH, nothing since they delivered PC DOS 2.0 would have helped. Well, maybe MSDOS 3.1 for the AT, too. Otherwise, they have always been late to the party.
No weapon of the enemy's is as dangerous as one of your own second lieutenants armed with a map and compass
That was a commissar with a map and a compass. Second Lieutenants have their sergeants to keep them from screwing up too badly, but no one could overrule his commissar, however stupid or wasteful of your men he was. And if he lost enough, he would have you executed for incompetence.
But you have to admit, Microsoft helped bring computing to the masses. If there had been no Microsoft, the internet would be what USENET was back in the day: something used by geeks and scientists and not much else.
No. If there had been no Microsoft, someone else would have done that. Maybe Apple, maybe BSD, maybe Linux/GNU/etc, maybe some company we've never heard of. Maybe OS/2 would have taken off.
Novell comes to mind. They were doing local networking when connecting to the real world was something done via a terminal program. Why shouldn't they go on and connect the LAN to the Internet?
If the not-Bill meant without MS, there wouldn't be home computers, CPM86. On even a Unix, twenty plus years early! Plus, if MS and IBM were both required for the IBM-PC and clones to take off, maybe we would be really lucky and not have the entire industry built around an overgrown traffic light controller.
This ignores, of course, that the Internet was so much better before you newbies started in. When you had to be the government, military, a military contractor, and any nerdy student at the right university who could suck up to the operators, the signal to noise ratio was... (well it was almost the same, ignoring spam and phishing that only came with popularity, but I don't really want to remember it that way:-)
He (the non-anon) meant that the dead (and moved) need to be removed. This will have the effect of reducing Chicago Democratic voting to a shell of its former level, of course, and ruin employment opportunities for bums previously hired to vote for the non-existant, but them's breaks.
> using fraudulent tactics to keep people out of the polls to begin with.
If people are so dumb that they fall for the "Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans on Tuesday" jokes that always circulate, then we shouldn't want them as electors, anyway. If they hear that voters at certain places will be harmed, they should still go, or their ancestors who braved the original KKK during Reconstruction should arise and haunt them until they do. If they had none such, then looking at the voting rates in Iraq, regardless of bombs, should still goad them into it from embarrassment.
> Or perhaps 2 different machines from two different providers
Hell, I have long thought that there should be three way redundancy, based on very different CPUs (or other technology) and different companies (integration by a fourth, of course), and requiring agreement between all three or else the blue light goes on, and at least one poll watcher from the Dems and GOP come over to determine if the machine should be taken out off service, rebooted after recording the partial count on some hard-to-erase medium (clay tablets stuck in the oven works, and lasts for millenia, if nothing better can be found:-), or whatever else may be appropriate. If it is good enough for the pre-Proxmired Space Shuttle, it should be good enough for voting.
Actually, I always thought that the 1940s era mechanicals were great, because they were so hard to keep in service that it was almost impossible to subtly affect them (unsubtle screwing up should be detectable by the poll monitors in prior testing, or the party losing out should have chosen better monitors). Of course, I expect that they were broken over most of the country, already, or we wouldn't have half of these messes:-)
> We all like that e-votes are counted immediately,
I don't, actually. It is a waste of time and effort, since more and more people are taking advantage (in multiple senses of the term) of absentee balloting, and those will require hand processing, anyway. Furthermore, I think that reporting the results before polls close anywhere, however distant, can effect the results in a fashion that it shouldn't. It may be suppressing the Democratic voters in Hawaii, or if we are really lucky the entire Left Coast (joking, there)(well, half. If it does affect their vote, maybe we shouldn't be trusting them, anyway?), or just skewing results for offices or questions farther down on the ballot; neither should happen just because the 24 hour networks need more grist for their reporting mill.
> but accuracy and verifiable results to the populace are more important.
Damned right. Delay reporting the results for a week, what will it affect? Both Bush and Gore should have been figuring out their respective appointments during the 2000 mess, even while litigating it. With a delay, that will certainly happen (not a bad thing, I should think) and will give time for things to settle down and all the absentees to arrive and be counted.
> Well there are probably two scenarios. > > One, the NSA has been able to do this for years,
Why not? They were, according to people who talked years after, 10-15 years ahead of CDMA in using that technology (CDMA is a minor variation of Hedy Lamarr's patent from the WWII era, so it was out in theory long before there WAS an NSA).
> Two, this is honestly being done first by civilians, and > the NSA (or some other government) will swoop in and make > it top secret
No, EVERY country where there are researchers doing this must swoop in. If one reveals it, the jig is up. Further, every government must decide that it is worth it to keep it secret, even though its enemies have the same abillities. Furthermore, despite noises from know-it-alls, saying that we should save money and use OTS encryption, as RSA-xxxx is certainly secure (after their NSA and their enemy's NSA has broken it for years).
It is much easier to go for the moving target, which is what they normally do.
For a corporation [Microsoft] that 'dislikes' UNIX/Linux/etc. they seem to spend an awful lot of time developing SFU [Services for Unix]..
Microsoft does not dislike Unix. After all, they once had one of the best selling Unix versions, Xenix (best selling on the basis of # copies installed, but at the time most Unixes were for many users using terminals, dumb or X windows).
They just dislike any Unix that they cannot control. Services For Unix is a way of maintaining the chance of exerting control over another group, rather than let that group drift off and never possibly return under their influence, let alone control. If they can come up with a SFU killer app, they might even recapture the non-kneejerk-MS-haters portion of the market segemnt. And they have an infinite supply of cash just sitting there, so why not give some of their developers something to do when not working on the money-makers?
Well, I did. First, I doubt that it would be replacing the memory buffers onboard the CPU chip, do you? Impedence mismatch would slow you down, if nothing else. Second, most systems aren't written for raw speed but more for reliability, simplicity, and/or security. If we wanted raw speed, we wouldn't waste time using files, we would do direct I/O to numbered sectors, ala the original FORTH disk I/O. Likewise, we would not waste our time with malloc(), but do direct calls to brk() and sbrk(), and handle smaller allocations ourselves (which I did, once, on an IBM-AT, just to see what it was like)(thereafter, back to malloc:-).
All of a sudden, all that buffering code written for
dealing with files does nothing but slow the system
down. Just treat the file pointer like a normal memory pointer.
On the main system where I work, IRIX64 and Solaris handled shared memory blocks as files on the ram disk (ie,/tmp), with zero length file buffers (well, from a outsider's view, sort of).
I do not know how Linux handles shmem, never having had to run anything that uses it on my single processor workstation, vs. the 40-or-more processor main machines. I do know that the one researcher, here, always comes back from the Tachyon Conference really annoyed at the Linux people for NOT caring about speed when the user (well, mostly him, and a few hundred other fanatics around the world) needs it.
It would force along the move to 64 bit or more OSs. It is already cheap enough to max out my home PC's 32 bit RAM address space, if I wanted, and we are far beyond that for partition c on our drives (assuming that the old convention that c covers the entire drive is still followed).
Maybe not, since WEP is only good for a couple of hours before it is cracked, when done by professionals. The recommendation that I heard was that using WEP was about as secure as not having a mat that actually said "Welcome" at your front door, and that you were better off running with no encryption on the links, and using VPN software to go to work or some wired proxy. Even without the VPN, you would be better off, since you at least knew that you were totally insecure, rather than being fooled.
I doubt that they are real Americans, or they would know that John Adams (co-writer of the Declaration Of Independence and 2nd President of the USA, thus presumably quite patriot-biased) place the proportion of loyalists at 1/3, not a mere 20%.
OTOH, no one would have called the Continental Congress or Army "terrorists" any more than they would have used that term for the Duke Of Monmouth's supporters in his revolt, or the King would have used it for the Parliamentary forces in the English Civil War. "Treasonous dogs" maybe, but not "terrorists".
> You are mostly right about our military history (add Dien Bien Phu and Sedan)
I used Trafalgar as an endpoint because the French Republic did do well in the beginning of the Revolutionary/Napoleanic Wars, but I cannot recall a victory after that point, except Borodino (and its aftermath rather cancels that out). You probably know of a couple, but was it a general run of successes or of failures after your fleets were destroyed? I know that Mahan was convinced that killed your chances, by letting the British do land/sea attacks wherever thay wanted.
> and may I mention Vietnam
Which we won, militarily, up until we pulled out, after the Paris Peace Treaty. Unfortunately, the problem was that the war wasn't just (or even largely) fought in the military plane, by the NVA, until after we had left. They then waited a year, and launched a conventional attack across the DMZ with more tanks than were in The Bulge. President Ford couldn't get the Democrats to let him give air support to the South Vietnamese (as required by the peace treaty), and the South was overrun.
> On the other hand the White House was burnt in 1812 by the British > he Seminoles killed a whole army in the 1820s > Custer lost ignominously in Little Big Horn
Single battles are not wars, though. We tied the War of 1812 (which was as good as a win -- would we have really wanted to be stuck with Quebec?), and won the Indian Wars that you mentioned (techncally lost the Black Hawk War, but won the followup about seven years later, despite Custer losing about 200 men, fewer than he would have lost in any Civil War victory, and he was *very* good in the Civil War). And the 7th Cavalry got to pay back the Sioux several times over, up to and including Wounded Knee.
As for Iraq, it looks like a standard counterinsurgency effort is required. Unfortunately, those require about 10 years of commitment to actually win, and it doesn't look like we will get it.
> But it is not true that the French Army surrendered without a fight.
OTOH, in the US, we expect that if your own country is invaded, you put up causalty figures roughly comparable to our Civil War (which you DID, during WWI, losing 1 or 3 of that generation, IIRC). You didn't during WWII (for good military reasons, to be fair), and then had the Vichy regime under a one-time French "hero" give the Germans a large portion of your country (and you collapsed faster than the Poles!).
It is not so much that you are cowards, you were just (seemingly) incompetents from Trafalgar on, and from 1700 to 1770ish before that. And worse, you go on about Napoleone Buonoparte as if he were a Parisian, and as if he were still around, which makes you look even more silly.
To be even more fair, my family has avoided the need for military service for 4 generations by choosing our birth dates with extraordinary skill, so any comments that I make are purely theoretical.
> If I recall correctly, the US didn't know where or when Pakistan > (or was it India?) was about to detonate its first test nuke
It would have to be India, as it was damned obvious that the Pakistani were going to set off one, if they had it at all.
If you recall, India was detonating one or two a week before the Pakistani response of detonating just one, and India stopped immediately after. I presume that forcing the Pakistani to do this was precisely the reason that India decided to set off only the 2nd set of nukes in their history (after the one or two that they had set off a decade before to show that they had the bomb, and would have to be treated with respect, henceforth). When the Pakistani set off theirs, they moved from long-time allies (albeit against a foe with which we were no longer in an immediate Cold War) to on our list of untrustworthy regimes (because the Dems had set up laws for anybody else who did that - now you see why Israel has never publicly tested, despite EVERBODY knowing that they have more now than the USSR had during the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps as many as Kennedy claimed the Soviets had during the 1960 election).
Keeping track of satellites and not moving when there are ones overhead is easy (even terrorists in Tom Clancy novels do it), the trick is the ones with side-looking capabilities.
Not since the XYZ Affair, in Washington's administration, except for about 18 months after we entered WWI, and a brief period after WWII. We were belligerents not officially at war during the period after the Louisiana Purchase (presumably due to problems related to France's OTHER war of that period), nonbelligerent enemies around the Civil War (see Emperor Maximillian), nonbelligerents with France (ie, Vichy) during WWII while working with their worst enemies, the Free French. DeGaulle's republic ended any alliance fairly soon after coming to power, if the Suez Affair didn't do so, before that.
This doesn't mean that we don't work with them on lots of matters, or that we are secretly enemies. It is just that there is no particular trust either way. They are not Poland, let alone the UK or Canada (where, if we spy on them, it is only so that we can give them the results where they are not allowed to spy on their own home territories, as they do for us). They are far more like Pakistan, where we work with part of the government, and nonobviously mention that other parts of their government (ISI, frex) are working more with our enemies than with us.
Thus, in this case, the French want all their secret satellites off our public registry, so are behaving like a Russian hacker who hits a website first, then confesses to the sysop and then offers his services. Presumably, there were originally high-level calls, and when we declined to delist (possibly just because we thought it trying to unring a bell, now) they decided to up the ante.
> Why not try using traditional computer programming and best practices of software engineering?
Because every generation has to make the same mistakes as the previous one before learning that just because it is the latest thing, that doesn't mean that you, educated in the latest thing, know what you are doing (until you actually do it for a while).
And then you learn it, everything works, and it seems a new golden age is upon us.
And then a new paradigm will come in, claiming that the only thing to do with (old paradigm) programmers is shoot them, just as we suggested doing to all the old COBOL programmers in our days of stupid youth, and in the meantime, lets skip all the cruft of the previous generation (wonder why everything is breaking, though).
No, it is not, was not, and was never intended to be. Democracy is the tyranny of int((n+1)/2) over int((n-1)/2). France during the Terror was a democracy. Athens, voting to exterminate another Greek polis because they were pissed at them and they could, was a democracy. We, sir, are a republic.
And what is appealing about (even the word) "democracy" to someone longing for a dictatorship (of the proletariet, which likely would exclude you, by Marx's early industrial definitions) is beyond me.
> *only land owners were allowed to vote, so as Rowan Atkinson put it > in Blackadder: "take Manchester for instance. Population: 60,000. Electoral roll: 3"
Which proves that he didn't know beans (pun just happened). Manchester had 3 (if that is right. I thought that they had none. Some other city, I guess) because that was the proportional representation from the last census. Granted, that last census was the Doomsday Book, was a century out of date by the first Parliament, and that then they ignored that half of all English Boroughs had been abandoned in the aftermath of the Black Death, and a bunch of new cities sprung up that, naturally, hadn't any representation because they had no population (at least in the late 1200s).
> We even tried to have a revolution, but it was more of a civil war,
Followed by a Restoration, Monmouth's Revolt (which failed) then the Dutch Conquest (which succeeded, and was then called "The Glorious Revolution" by the party that invited the Prince or Orange to take over). And that would have been followed by couter-revolution had James II and descendents been less feckless, militarily.
Preceded by the Rose Wars, various peasant revolts before, during, and after. Preceded by Simon de damn-I-forgot-his-name's revolt (DeMontfort?). Preceded by civil wars between Stephen De Blois and Maude Conqueror's Daughter.
And that is just the violent revolutions back to 1066 that I remember.
> I think near on a thousand years without a violent revolution,
And they accuse us Americans of having no sense of history. HAH!!
> However, in one sense, the idea that it's not unusual for > large groups of miners to die due to insufficient safety > measures...is itself newsworthy.
Only on a short time scale. For millenia before (counting Welsh flint mines, that preceded the tin mines, that preceded the coal mines) the idea that *it would be **newsworthy** that large groups of miners died* would be newsworthy. Subsurface mining is inherently very dangerous; that its safety record has improved to the point that mine disasters are "news" rather than just back page filler like the weekly police blotter is quite an improvement.
Of course, if a million chinese died in a disaster, that would just be a statistic (at least according to Stalin).
Also, you forgot Larry Niven, who hypothethized that a computer of human intellegence or better would eventually get bored and ignore us slow one-second-per-second types except to wheedle us into giving it more capacity so that it could solve the "really hard" problems. Eventually, it would go catatonic, although apparently running at full power.
You seem to be forgetting Vernor Vinge, who has written numerous stories about this. Of course, he mostly looks at man-machine augmentation where the carbon and silicon sides exist in symbiosis, barring occasional problems in Practical Theology (frex, avoiding being turned into grey goo, whether by accident, or by a God [superintellegence] that needs a ready supply of bioresources enough to con a nuisance civilization into gooing themselves).
The reason why Wachowskis, James Cameron, Lem, etc. seem to lean towards believing the human race would be destroyed or at least decimated is that (1) it makes a better story (people believe tragedy and horror far easier than they do Utopia, and anyways a utopia would be boring for any outsiders; see the story of the first version of the Matrix according to Agent Smith) or (2) worry that they will become irrelevent (most machines will not be interested in human stories anymore than most atheists are interested in RC hagiography), which they naturally think would be depressing just as the thought that we would be little better than ants in the visual sensors of real superintelligences can be depressing to people whose job is to think.
Slashdot Mirror
"War" clocks in at 591 million. Gee, I didn't know that many people liked that "Low Rider" that much :-)
At least, do not do it without knowing the consequences. Read more Larry Niven, especially stories from before humans bought their first hyperdrive.
To quote (I hope, or at least paraphrase), the efficiency of any reaction drive is directly related to its effectiveness as a weapon. And vice versa.
> microsoft wouldn't exist without apple inventing the PC
MITS Altair II
And MS did write the first decent BASIC for it. Not the best BASIC in the end, of course.
So if the Altair II hadn't existed, and hadn't had a decent language for non-professionals to noodle around with, maybe there wouldn't have been a Google, after all.
OTOH, nothing since they delivered PC DOS 2.0 would have helped. Well, maybe MSDOS 3.1 for the AT, too. Otherwise, they have always been late to the party.
That was a commissar with a map and a compass. Second Lieutenants have their sergeants to keep them from screwing up too badly, but no one could overrule his commissar, however stupid or wasteful of your men he was. And if he lost enough, he would have you executed for incompetence.
Novell comes to mind. They were doing local networking when connecting to the real world was something done via a terminal program. Why shouldn't they go on and connect the LAN to the Internet?
If the not-Bill meant without MS, there wouldn't be home computers, CPM86. On even a Unix, twenty plus years early! Plus, if MS and IBM were both required for the IBM-PC and clones to take off, maybe we would be really lucky and not have the entire industry built around an overgrown traffic light controller.
This ignores, of course, that the Internet was so much better before you newbies started in. When you had to be the government, military, a military contractor, and any nerdy student at the right university who could suck up to the operators, the signal to noise ratio was ... (well it was almost the same, ignoring spam and phishing that only came with popularity, but I don't really want to remember it that way :-)
He (the non-anon) meant that the dead (and moved) need to be removed. This will have the effect of reducing Chicago Democratic voting to a shell of its former level, of course, and ruin employment opportunities for bums previously hired to vote for the non-existant, but them's breaks.
> using fraudulent tactics to keep people out of the polls to begin with.
If people are so dumb that they fall for the "Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans on Tuesday" jokes that always circulate, then we shouldn't want them as electors, anyway. If they hear that voters at certain places will be harmed, they should still go, or their ancestors who braved the original KKK during Reconstruction should arise and haunt them until they do. If they had none such, then looking at the voting rates in Iraq, regardless of bombs, should still goad them into it from embarrassment.
> Or perhaps 2 different machines from two different providers
:-), or whatever else may be appropriate. If it is good enough for the pre-Proxmired Space Shuttle, it should be good enough for voting.
:-)
Hell, I have long thought that there should be three way redundancy, based on very different CPUs (or other technology) and different companies (integration by a fourth, of course), and requiring agreement between all three or else the blue light goes on, and at least one poll watcher from the Dems and GOP come over to determine if the machine should be taken out off service, rebooted after recording the partial count on some hard-to-erase medium (clay tablets stuck in the oven works, and lasts for millenia, if nothing better can be found
Actually, I always thought that the 1940s era mechanicals were great, because they were so hard to keep in service that it was almost impossible to subtly affect them (unsubtle screwing up should be detectable by the poll monitors in prior testing, or the party losing out should have chosen better monitors). Of course, I expect that they were broken over most of the country, already, or we wouldn't have half of these messes
> We all like that e-votes are counted immediately,
I don't, actually. It is a waste of time and effort, since more and more people are taking advantage (in multiple senses of the term) of absentee balloting, and those will require hand processing, anyway. Furthermore, I think that reporting the results before polls close anywhere, however distant, can effect the results in a fashion that it shouldn't. It may be suppressing the Democratic voters in Hawaii, or if we are really lucky the entire Left Coast (joking, there)(well, half. If it does affect their vote, maybe we shouldn't be trusting them, anyway?), or just skewing results for offices or questions farther down on the ballot; neither should happen just because the 24 hour networks need more grist for their reporting mill.
> but accuracy and verifiable results to the populace are more important.
Damned right. Delay reporting the results for a week, what will it affect? Both Bush and Gore should have been figuring out their respective appointments during the 2000 mess, even while litigating it. With a delay, that will certainly happen (not a bad thing, I should think) and will give time for things to settle down and all the absentees to arrive and be counted.
> Well there are probably two scenarios.
>
> One, the NSA has been able to do this for years,
Why not? They were, according to people who talked years after, 10-15 years ahead of CDMA in using that technology (CDMA is a minor variation of Hedy Lamarr's patent from the WWII era, so it was out in theory long before there WAS an NSA).
> Two, this is honestly being done first by civilians, and
> the NSA (or some other government) will swoop in and make
> it top secret
No, EVERY country where there are researchers doing this must swoop in. If one reveals it, the jig is up. Further, every government must decide that it is worth it to keep it secret, even though its enemies have the same abillities. Furthermore, despite noises from know-it-alls, saying that we should save money and use OTS encryption, as RSA-xxxx is certainly secure (after their NSA and their enemy's NSA has broken it for years).
It is much easier to go for the moving target, which is what they normally do.
Microsoft does not dislike Unix. After all, they once had one of the best selling Unix versions, Xenix (best selling on the basis of # copies installed, but at the time most Unixes were for many users using terminals, dumb or X windows).
They just dislike any Unix that they cannot control. Services For Unix is a way of maintaining the chance of exerting control over another group, rather than let that group drift off and never possibly return under their influence, let alone control. If they can come up with a SFU killer app, they might even recapture the non-kneejerk-MS-haters portion of the market segemnt. And they have an infinite supply of cash just sitting there, so why not give some of their developers something to do when not working on the money-makers?
Well, I did. First, I doubt that it would be replacing the memory buffers onboard the CPU chip, do you? Impedence mismatch would slow you down, if nothing else. Second, most systems aren't written for raw speed but more for reliability, simplicity, and/or security. If we wanted raw speed, we wouldn't waste time using files, we would do direct I/O to numbered sectors, ala the original FORTH disk I/O. Likewise, we would not waste our time with malloc(), but do direct calls to brk() and sbrk(), and handle smaller allocations ourselves (which I did, once, on an IBM-AT, just to see what it was like)(thereafter, back to malloc :-).
On the main system where I work, IRIX64 and Solaris handled shared memory blocks as files on the ram disk (ie, /tmp), with zero length file buffers (well, from a outsider's view, sort of).
I do not know how Linux handles shmem, never having had to run anything that uses it on my single processor workstation, vs. the 40-or-more processor main machines. I do know that the one researcher, here, always comes back from the Tachyon Conference really annoyed at the Linux people for NOT caring about speed when the user (well, mostly him, and a few hundred other fanatics around the world) needs it.
It would force along the move to 64 bit or more OSs. It is already cheap enough to max out my home PC's 32 bit RAM address space, if I wanted, and we are far beyond that for partition c on our drives (assuming that the old convention that c covers the entire drive is still followed).
Maybe not, since WEP is only good for a couple of hours before it is cracked, when done by professionals. The recommendation that I heard was that using WEP was about as secure as not having a mat that actually said "Welcome" at your front door, and that you were better off running with no encryption on the links, and using VPN software to go to work or some wired proxy. Even without the VPN, you would be better off, since you at least knew that you were totally insecure, rather than being fooled.
I doubt that they are real Americans, or they would know that John Adams (co-writer of the Declaration Of Independence and 2nd President of the USA, thus presumably quite patriot-biased) place the proportion of loyalists at 1/3, not a mere 20%.
OTOH, no one would have called the Continental Congress or Army "terrorists" any more than they would have used that term for the Duke Of Monmouth's supporters in his revolt, or the King would have used it for the Parliamentary forces in the English Civil War. "Treasonous dogs" maybe, but not "terrorists".
Ram disk
Also /dev/mem, I think.
Not until the first slashdotter blows himself up trying to use that formula.
You forgot that its 2,4,6NO2 C6CH3 Your way, they could try 2,3,4 or something.
> You are mostly right about our military history (add Dien Bien Phu and Sedan)
I used Trafalgar as an endpoint because the French Republic did do well in the beginning of the Revolutionary/Napoleanic Wars, but I cannot recall a victory after that point, except Borodino (and its aftermath rather cancels that out). You probably know of a couple, but was it a general run of successes or of failures after your fleets were destroyed? I know that Mahan was convinced that killed your chances, by letting the British do land/sea attacks wherever thay wanted.
> and may I mention Vietnam
Which we won, militarily, up until we pulled out, after the Paris Peace Treaty. Unfortunately, the problem was that the war wasn't just (or even largely) fought in the military plane, by the NVA, until after we had left. They then waited a year, and launched a conventional attack across the DMZ with more tanks than were in The Bulge. President Ford couldn't get the Democrats to let him give air support to the South Vietnamese (as required by the peace treaty), and the South was overrun.
> On the other hand the White House was burnt in 1812 by the British
> he Seminoles killed a whole army in the 1820s
> Custer lost ignominously in Little Big Horn
Single battles are not wars, though. We tied the War of 1812 (which was as good as a win -- would we have really wanted to be stuck with Quebec?), and won the Indian Wars that you mentioned (techncally lost the Black Hawk War, but won the followup about seven years later, despite Custer losing about 200 men, fewer than he would have lost in any Civil War victory, and he was *very* good in the Civil War). And the 7th Cavalry got to pay back the Sioux several times over, up to and including Wounded Knee.
As for Iraq, it looks like a standard counterinsurgency effort is required. Unfortunately, those require about 10 years of commitment to actually win, and it doesn't look like we will get it.
OTOH, in the US, we expect that if your own country is invaded, you put up causalty figures roughly comparable to our Civil War (which you DID, during WWI, losing 1 or 3 of that generation, IIRC). You didn't during WWII (for good military reasons, to be fair), and then had the Vichy regime under a one-time French "hero" give the Germans a large portion of your country (and you collapsed faster than the Poles!).
It is not so much that you are cowards, you were just (seemingly) incompetents from Trafalgar on, and from 1700 to 1770ish before that. And worse, you go on about Napoleone Buonoparte as if he were a Parisian, and as if he were still around, which makes you look even more silly.
To be even more fair, my family has avoided the need for military service for 4 generations by choosing our birth dates with extraordinary skill, so any comments that I make are purely theoretical.
> If I recall correctly, the US didn't know where or when Pakistan
> (or was it India?) was about to detonate its first test nuke
It would have to be India, as it was damned obvious that the Pakistani were going to set off one, if they had it at all.
If you recall, India was detonating one or two a week before the Pakistani response of detonating just one, and India stopped immediately after. I presume that forcing the Pakistani to do this was precisely the reason that India decided to set off only the 2nd set of nukes in their history (after the one or two that they had set off a decade before to show that they had the bomb, and would have to be treated with respect, henceforth). When the Pakistani set off theirs, they moved from long-time allies (albeit against a foe with which we were no longer in an immediate Cold War) to on our list of untrustworthy regimes (because the Dems had set up laws for anybody else who did that - now you see why Israel has never publicly tested, despite EVERBODY knowing that they have more now than the USSR had during the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps as many as Kennedy claimed the Soviets had during the 1960 election).
Keeping track of satellites and not moving when there are ones overhead is easy (even terrorists in Tom Clancy novels do it), the trick is the ones with side-looking capabilities.
> Last I heard, they were our allies.
Not since the XYZ Affair, in Washington's administration, except for about 18 months after we entered WWI, and a brief period after WWII. We were belligerents not officially at war during the period after the Louisiana Purchase (presumably due to problems related to France's OTHER war of that period), nonbelligerent enemies around the Civil War (see Emperor Maximillian), nonbelligerents with France (ie, Vichy) during WWII while working with their worst enemies, the Free French. DeGaulle's republic ended any alliance fairly soon after coming to power, if the Suez Affair didn't do so, before that.
This doesn't mean that we don't work with them on lots of matters, or that we are secretly enemies. It is just that there is no particular trust either way. They are not Poland, let alone the UK or Canada (where, if we spy on them, it is only so that we can give them the results where they are not allowed to spy on their own home territories, as they do for us). They are far more like Pakistan, where we work with part of the government, and nonobviously mention that other parts of their government (ISI, frex) are working more with our enemies than with us.
Thus, in this case, the French want all their secret satellites off our public registry, so are behaving like a Russian hacker who hits a website first, then confesses to the sysop and then offers his services. Presumably, there were originally high-level calls, and when we declined to delist (possibly just because we thought it trying to unring a bell, now) they decided to up the ante.
Because every generation has to make the same mistakes as the previous one before learning that just because it is the latest thing, that doesn't mean that you, educated in the latest thing, know what you are doing (until you actually do it for a while).
And then you learn it, everything works, and it seems a new golden age is upon us.
And then a new paradigm will come in, claiming that the only thing to do with (old paradigm) programmers is shoot them, just as we suggested doing to all the old COBOL programmers in our days of stupid youth, and in the meantime, lets skip all the cruft of the previous generation (wonder why everything is breaking, though).
And so on, and so on, and so on.
No, it is not, was not, and was never intended to be. Democracy is the tyranny of int((n+1)/2) over int((n-1)/2). France during the Terror was a democracy. Athens, voting to exterminate another Greek polis because they were pissed at them and they could, was a democracy. We, sir, are a republic.
And what is appealing about (even the word) "democracy" to someone longing for a dictatorship (of the proletariet, which likely would exclude you, by Marx's early industrial definitions) is beyond me.
> *only land owners were allowed to vote, so as Rowan Atkinson put it
:-)
> in Blackadder: "take Manchester for instance. Population: 60,000. Electoral roll: 3"
Which proves that he didn't know beans (pun just happened). Manchester had 3 (if that is right. I thought that they had none. Some other city, I guess) because that was the proportional representation from the last census. Granted, that last census was the Doomsday Book, was a century out of date by the first Parliament, and that then they ignored that half of all English Boroughs had been abandoned in the aftermath of the Black Death, and a bunch of new cities sprung up that, naturally, hadn't any representation because they had no population (at least in the late 1200s).
Quite representative.
> We even tried to have a revolution, but it was more of a civil war,
Followed by a Restoration, Monmouth's Revolt (which failed) then the Dutch Conquest (which succeeded, and was then called "The Glorious Revolution" by the party that invited the Prince or Orange to take over). And that would have been followed by couter-revolution had James II and descendents been less feckless, militarily.
Preceded by the Rose Wars, various peasant revolts before, during, and after. Preceded by Simon de damn-I-forgot-his-name's revolt (DeMontfort?). Preceded by civil wars between Stephen De Blois and Maude Conqueror's Daughter.
And that is just the violent revolutions back to 1066 that I remember.
> I think near on a thousand years without a violent revolution,
And they accuse us Americans of having no sense of history. HAH!!
> However, in one sense, the idea that it's not unusual for
> large groups of miners to die due to insufficient safety
> measures...is itself newsworthy.
Only on a short time scale. For millenia before (counting Welsh flint mines, that preceded the tin mines, that preceded the coal mines) the idea that *it would be **newsworthy** that large groups of miners died* would be newsworthy. Subsurface mining is inherently very dangerous; that its safety record has improved to the point that mine disasters are "news" rather than just back page filler like the weekly police blotter is quite an improvement.
Of course, if a million chinese died in a disaster, that would just be a statistic (at least according to Stalin).
Also, you forgot Larry Niven, who hypothethized that a computer of human intellegence or better would eventually get bored and ignore us slow one-second-per-second types except to wheedle us into giving it more capacity so that it could solve the "really hard" problems. Eventually, it would go catatonic, although apparently running at full power.
The reason why Wachowskis, James Cameron, Lem, etc. seem to lean towards believing the human race would be destroyed or at least decimated is that (1) it makes a better story (people believe tragedy and horror far easier than they do Utopia, and anyways a utopia would be boring for any outsiders; see the story of the first version of the Matrix according to Agent Smith) or (2) worry that they will become irrelevent (most machines will not be interested in human stories anymore than most atheists are interested in RC hagiography), which they naturally think would be depressing just as the thought that we would be little better than ants in the visual sensors of real superintelligences can be depressing to people whose job is to think.