Consumers don't tell businesses what the price should be. They either buy or don't buy. In response to that the producers either reduce the price or stop selling the product. That's capitalism. If consumers had the right to tell producers what the price should be, they would be dictating the price, and historicly they tend to dictate as low as they can. In the extreme case they dictate as low as possible and you end up with a broken Soviet style system.
In my previous post, I was criticizing the moralization from the Left, not the action of the market. Adam Smith called the market the "invisible hand" not the "obnoxious baby who keeps crying 'gimme, gimme, gimme'".
I think we probably agree on all this. It's just that you either misunderstood the semantics of my previous post, which is forgiveable; or perhaps you are just being difficult which sucks, but online forums are full of people who like to be difficult.
Look, for 15 years US software houses have been charging nearly ten times as much money as they should for their applications.
I know this is hard to grasp for some of the socialists on Slashdot, but: It isn't one man's business to tell another what he should charge for a product. (note, I don't mean to imply that you are a socialist, but a lot of people on Slashdot are and just won't admit it).
The only legitimate exception to that is when the product is a government granted monopoly. Notice, just because you are selling IP does *not* mean that you have a government monopoly. The market is still competitive because comparable products can still enter the market.
Now if I were Adobe I would try lowering the price to something comensurate with the salary of the average Chinese citizen to see if I could make profit on larger volume. That's just my opinion though. There is absolutely no moral imperitive for anybody to lower the price on software.
Too many people on Slashdot look at high-priced software as a problem. By gosh! It's not a problem at all: IT'S AN OPPORTUNITY. Let that sink in. Whenever there is an overpriced product in any market, IT'S AN OPPORTUNITY FOR COMPETITORS TO ENTER.
This is exactly what Be Inc. tried to do, and as much as people would like to think it was killed by MSFT, it wasn't: It was killed by Free Software. Free Software makes enterring the market look like a really bad idea. If you want to kill competition, just give the product away for nothing--Internet Explorer.
So, if you think that any product (not just Chinese PhotoShop) is over-priced, here is what you do: Attempt to enter the market at a lower price. Either you will discover that it can't be done (which means that the product was fairly priced) or you will do it (which means that you are good at business).
Now, Slashdot is supposed to be a site for nerds. What are nerds? Well, they are *supposed* to be the people who produce this stuff. So, instead of complaining, why don't you have a go and enter the market?
A few months ago, inspired in part by Slashdot, I decided to try and bring some order to my websites. Instead of maintaining everything locally, I thought it would be cool to learn Perl and write a few basic scripts to manage things. The scripts worked OK (most of the time) but I discovererd that I just didn't like synchronizing from server to local. I was more comfortable syncing the other direction, and I liked the idea that my local copy was "the master".
Now, this is with scripts that I wrote, on a server where I have control of my data, on websites that are just for fun, and I still didn't like it.
I had suspected this before, but the experience confirmed it. At that point I have to ask myself, "Why am I willing to let Slashdot control my posts?". The only answers I can come up with are:
1. I was preconditioned by USENET that comments are somewhat expendable.
2. because they tend to be topical, I am not overly concerned about preserving them.
That said, it would be nice if Slashdot made it easier to access any post that I had ever archived. As it stands, Google can pull up a lot of them. The very nature of corporate ASPs is such that Google is not going to archive your data... at least, I hope not... hmm... but if the data were encrypted you could scam on all that Google capacity (evil grin).
This sounds just like Rifkin's "The End of Work" in which he lamented the decline of ordinary labor and the rise of the "symbolic analyst" class amidst predictions of economic doom and gloom. His book was written in, wait for it... 1995. Just a few years later the tech boom put us on cloud 9. Now the business cycle has turned so doom books are becoming popular again. In fact, the publication of doom books may signal the bottom of the business cycle, just as articles featuring "the bull" or "the bear" in Time Magazine signal a turn in the stock market.
So, if you have a copy of Rifkin's book, you could probably save yourself some money on this one. Dust it off and read it again.
Assuming that that's true... How does clerking for a conservative justice make you a conservative? If he had worked for some small conservative activist org your argument might make sense, but Supreme Court clerkships are so prestigous that politics are likely to be set aside by applicants. As well they should be, since the Supreme Court is ostensably neither conservative nor liberal. Lessig and Scalia were both obligated to determine constitutionality, so the clerkship really says nothing about his leanings.
None of you get it. I'm as open minded as the next guy, but Slashdot and Salon are obsessed with Lessig. Surely there are other law professors and/or academics with an opinion on these subjects. Let's hear from them and let's hear both sides of the story. Let's have an open call for law professors and/or academics who will defend the status quo and agree to be interviewed on Slashdot. I doubt it will happen. Who is it that only wants to listen to ideas that conform to their own?
It seems like everyday there is an article about this guy: Joe Blow interviews Lessig, Lessig writes an op-ed piece, Lessig gives a speach, Lessig takes a dump...
I'm not interested in joining the Fashionably Left. Could you please give him his own category so I can filter him?
Yes, and in the latest version there is a lengthy explanation of why the previous guide was woefully underpowered, and how the next version is going to have a complete real-time model of the entire universe with a customized Total Perspective Vortex (TM) designed to match the buyer. They are just waiting for those dime-sized hard drives that hold 10 googolplex bytes. They are expected to hit the market Real Soon Now.
However, we have to warn you that in testing there have been problems with the UPS (Universal Positioning System) which is required to make sure that the real-time universe model doesn't try to recursively model all the other real-time universe models in the universe. Testers have confirmed that when this happens, the electronics inside tend to blow up.
I didn't sign up, but it's on my radar now. Disappointments: No REM, No Police. However, when I was searching for the Police it gave me "Music Like the Police" which had the following artists:
Men At Work
Madness
Go-Go's
The Fixx
Blondie
I wonder what Sting would think of that.
If it weren't for the selection issue, I would sign up for something like this in a heartbeat. Eventually, the major players will probably consolidate and form a monopoly which will solve the selection problem and impose a price problem. Then, the government will sue them, yada yada yada. So, instead of doing that the messy way, I think we should impose a licensing fee on all MP3 transfers and kick it back to the copyright holder. Yes, it's government intervention, but I don't see any better way.
1. I'm skeptical of anything titled "Teach yourself $language in $time". The smaller the $time, the more skeptical I am. Let's carry this to its logical extreme and publish a book titled: "Teach Yourself Multidimensional Particle Physics Before You Even Buy This Book".
2. I'm skeptical of any language designed to describe something written in another language. The Tower of Babel ain't gonna be rebuilt anytime soon folks.
Stuff like UML is perhaps useful when you are working on some huge government project where they spend $10 million on auditing to make sure you don't waste $2 million tax dollars. Other than that, it isn't very useful.
This is where Open Source has an advantage--there are no audit trails or design documents; just mailing list archives. Now, if someone came up with a smart program for reading such archives that didn't require developers to change their ways of communicating, you might have something. And yes, I understand that many see the lack of design documents and audits in Open Source as a disadvantage but it depends on where you are. A prehensile tail is a big advantage if you are a monkey in a tree. It's a disadvantage in a board meeting.
Scenario 1: Ubiquitous wireless home networking. I can get up from the football game and there is a networked screen in the bathroom, etc... In fact, I think somebody did a commercial that illustrated that vision.
Scenario 2: I can't network anything without paying twice for content I've already bought, and the devices that do it cost more because they have to support real-time encryption. Because of this, I choose not to buy the devices and simply do the "bathroom and snack rush" during commercials.
This just makes no sense. Once the content is in the home, why should they care how many outlets it comes out of? This is like the electric company charging me more for installing a new socket, even though I'm using the same number of kilowatt-hours.
Ordinarily I dismiss some of the things I see on/. as AIP/paranoia, but I have to concede to the/. crowd that controls like this for intrahome networking violate fair use, and probably a number of other things.
Seriously? They were cool during the 80s, then it seemed like there was a transition where they stopped playing videos and started doing sucky shows.
Is this channel a bore now because I'm approaching middle age, or is there something else going on? Can anybody who watches MTV explain the appeal? MTV was something special in its day because they played stuff the radio didn't. The internet had (perhaps still has) the potential to shake up music in a positive way, but hasn't yet. Hint: It won't happen by weazeling around copyright.
I was thinking that what we need is something like a Slashdot for music, where artists could stream selected songs at no charge to promote their album in exchange for giving the website exclusive rights to the CD sales, with a percentage to the artist and a percentage to the site. It would have a user/feedback moderation like Slashdot. You would also have to have a mechanism for category creation in the event that a truly novel form of music came along. I'm not sure what you would do about radio. Maybe the site would just charge radio stations a flat fee or make that a giveaway too. Hasn't anybody tried that, and if so, why did it fail?
I swear, RMS could tell people not to stick their fingers in a light socket, and they would actually have a desire to do so when he was done.
Now, I dislike Word just as much as the next guy, but for different reasons. First, there is the macrovirus issue. I don't like closed formats either, but that's a technical issue that a lot of people don't understand. Refer to Word as a "secret format" and people will think you are smoking crack. For Joe Blow, Word is not a secret format, "it's Word format. What's the secret?".
Instead, if I get this stuff, I say:
I don't use Word. Could you please send plain text or HTML.
That's it. No diatribe. No technical jargon. If this becomes the socially acceptable way to transmit documents, people will learn it because they are inconvenienced having to send the message twice, not because they want to join the Glorius People's Revolution, which most us would actually like to avoid. I wouldn't subject myself to PDF or any print-oriented format unless they said it was the only alternative. That's for a little ideological reason of my own: These formats are a PITA to read on the screen, and printing them out is bad for the environment. I have nothing personal against Adobe. If Reader were more screen friendly I wouldn't hesitate to suggest PDF.
They're reselling them for £100? Either these are real POS laptops, or the price is that low because they are afraid to get caught and want to move them quickly. Doesn't that work out to about $160? Even if it's something like a bottom of the line ThinkPad I'd be willing to pay $500 for a new laptop. So, is it worth it for me to grab one of those $300 Brittish Airways specials and hop over there? THAT'S IT. It's not about helping the poor. It's to help Brittish Airways.
Doing anything other than simply turning the computer off or unplugging it is not an intuitive way to shut down the machine. None of the OS's being discussed here are designed to work that way.
Ugh! One time my room-mate lost a few hours of work due to a corrupted WP file. He asked if I could fixed it. About an hour into carefully studying the revealed codes, I decided I needed some help. So I went to Corel's website. There were literally hundreds of ways that WP files could become corrupted. The problem was particularly heinous because this particular file would cause the entire system--not just WP, to lock up when you cursored into the wrong part of the file. We eventually gave up, and my room-mate reconstructed his writings from memory (human memory that is).
Of course, that's just one bad experience. Anyone else care to comment about corrupted files in these programs? Automatic backups are always an option, but my room mate did this on a school machine which went down, and he was unaware of that feature anyway.
Of course the best thing would be to have files never get corrupted in the first place, but if they do it should be easy to recover.
Re:You're kidding about that Terrorism thing...
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
Amen. I know that after 911 my whole attitude about military service shifted. After all, if they can get me on the way to lunch with a business partner, why not join the best equipped fighting force in the world and kick some tail to prevent that?
I used to make bus connections through the Pentagon everyday when I worked in Arlington. That really made it hit home for me. If they had hit the bus station, it could have been me. I have a friend in LA. What if I had taken a non-stop out to see him that day? Chance. Fate. It's the same way in a battlezone, but at least you get to help solve the problem.
Re:They're wrong
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
, Barry McCaffrey's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division mounted what may be the largest flanking maneuver in military history
IIRC, it was Gen. Schwartzkopf who later confessed that the exposed flank was so obvious, he thought it might be a trap filled with poison gas mines or even nuclear weapons. Fortunately, it wasn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Consumers don't tell businesses what the price should be. They either buy or don't buy. In response to that the producers either reduce the price or stop selling the product. That's capitalism. If consumers had the right to tell producers what the price should be, they would be dictating the price, and historicly they tend to dictate as low as they can. In the extreme case they dictate as low as possible and you end up with a broken Soviet style system.
In my previous post, I was criticizing the moralization from the Left, not the action of the market. Adam Smith called the market the "invisible hand" not the "obnoxious baby who keeps crying 'gimme, gimme, gimme'".
I think we probably agree on all this. It's just that you either misunderstood the semantics of my previous post, which is forgiveable; or perhaps you are just being difficult which sucks, but online forums are full of people who like to be difficult.
Take a look at this. In particular, look at the chart on the right, and this post
So, assuming that this large trade really did happen, it looks like something that ought to be investigated.
Customer: I can't connect.
Tech: What's your operating system?
Customer: AOL.
Tech: (trying not to laugh) No sir, that's your browser. I need to know what comes up when you turn on your computer.
Customer: I told you. AOL.
Tech: Maybe AOL is in your startup folder. What comes up before AOL?
Customer: It's the first thing that comes up.
Manager: Can you put the customer on hold?
Tech: Can you hold please?
Customer: OK.
Tech: Sorry this is taking so long. I've got a real idiot. Thinks his OS is AOL.
Manager: Didn't you get the memo?
Tech: What memo?
Tech 2: Hey did you see that guy go postal in cubicle 6?
Tech 3: No. By the way, there's some kind of memo. Have you read it?
Tech 2: Nah. I was gonna wait until break...
Look, for 15 years US software houses have been charging nearly ten times as much money as they should for their applications.
I know this is hard to grasp for some of the socialists on Slashdot, but: It isn't one man's business to tell another what he should charge for a product. (note, I don't mean to imply that you are a socialist, but a lot of people on Slashdot are and just won't admit it).
The only legitimate exception to that is when the product is a government granted monopoly. Notice, just because you are selling IP does *not* mean that you have a government monopoly. The market is still competitive because comparable products can still enter the market.
Now if I were Adobe I would try lowering the price to something comensurate with the salary of the average Chinese citizen to see if I could make profit on larger volume. That's just my opinion though. There is absolutely no moral imperitive for anybody to lower the price on software.
Too many people on Slashdot look at high-priced software as a problem. By gosh! It's not a problem at all: IT'S AN OPPORTUNITY. Let that sink in. Whenever there is an overpriced product in any market, IT'S AN OPPORTUNITY FOR COMPETITORS TO ENTER.
This is exactly what Be Inc. tried to do, and as much as people would like to think it was killed by MSFT, it wasn't: It was killed by Free Software. Free Software makes enterring the market look like a really bad idea. If you want to kill competition, just give the product away for nothing--Internet Explorer.
So, if you think that any product (not just Chinese PhotoShop) is over-priced, here is what you do: Attempt to enter the market at a lower price. Either you will discover that it can't be done (which means that the product was fairly priced) or you will do it (which means that you are good at business).
Now, Slashdot is supposed to be a site for nerds. What are nerds? Well, they are *supposed* to be the people who produce this stuff. So, instead of complaining, why don't you have a go and enter the market?
A few months ago, inspired in part by Slashdot, I decided to try and bring some order to my websites. Instead of maintaining everything locally, I thought it would be cool to learn Perl and write a few basic scripts to manage things. The scripts worked OK (most of the time) but I discovererd that I just didn't like synchronizing from server to local. I was more comfortable syncing the other direction, and I liked the idea that my local copy was "the master".
Now, this is with scripts that I wrote, on a server where I have control of my data, on websites that are just for fun, and I still didn't like it.
I had suspected this before, but the experience confirmed it. At that point I have to ask myself, "Why am I willing to let Slashdot control my posts?". The only answers I can come up with are:
1. I was preconditioned by USENET that comments are somewhat expendable.
2. because they tend to be topical, I am not overly concerned about preserving them.
That said, it would be nice if Slashdot made it easier to access any post that I had ever archived. As it stands, Google can pull up a lot of them. The very nature of corporate ASPs is such that Google is not going to archive your data... at least, I hope not... hmm... but if the data were encrypted you could scam on all that Google capacity (evil grin).
One scam to... oh nevermind.
This sounds just like Rifkin's "The End of Work" in which he lamented the decline of ordinary labor and the rise of the "symbolic analyst" class amidst predictions of economic doom and gloom. His book was written in, wait for it... 1995. Just a few years later the tech boom put us on cloud 9. Now the business cycle has turned so doom books are becoming popular again. In fact, the publication of doom books may signal the bottom of the business cycle, just as articles featuring "the bull" or "the bear" in Time Magazine signal a turn in the stock market.
So, if you have a copy of Rifkin's book, you could probably save yourself some money on this one. Dust it off and read it again.
...is great for telling people "the URL is too long so just type this into google and it's the 2nd link".
This really is better if your site has a URL like:b low/cool_stuff/turing/passes.htm
http://www.podunk.edu/cs/prof/smith/student/~joe_
The defaults are everything,
Will you remember that the next time somebody installs a Linux workstation with every daemon in the world running?
PR Man (PR): I've just completed that study you asked for, the one on why the Slashdot editors hate us.
Bill Gates (BG): Can you give me the executive summary?
PR: It's because we don't place enough emphasis on security.
BG: Fine. We'll do more about security.
6 months later
PR: I've just completed that report on why the Slashdot editors still hate us.
BG: And?
PR: It's because we place too much emphasis on security.
Assuming that that's true... How does clerking for a conservative justice make you a conservative? If he had worked for some small conservative activist org your argument might make sense, but Supreme Court clerkships are so prestigous that politics are likely to be set aside by applicants. As well they should be, since the Supreme Court is ostensably neither conservative nor liberal. Lessig and Scalia were both obligated to determine constitutionality, so the clerkship really says nothing about his leanings.
In other words, "nice try".
None of you get it. I'm as open minded as the next guy, but Slashdot and Salon are obsessed with Lessig. Surely there are other law professors and/or academics with an opinion on these subjects. Let's hear from them and let's hear both sides of the story. Let's have an open call for law professors and/or academics who will defend the status quo and agree to be interviewed on Slashdot. I doubt it will happen. Who is it that only wants to listen to ideas that conform to their own?
It seems like everyday there is an article about this guy: Joe Blow interviews Lessig, Lessig writes an op-ed piece, Lessig gives a speach, Lessig takes a dump...
I'm not interested in joining the Fashionably Left. Could you please give him his own category so I can filter him?
Yes, and in the latest version there is a lengthy explanation of why the previous guide was woefully underpowered, and how the next version is going to have a complete real-time model of the entire universe with a customized Total Perspective Vortex (TM) designed to match the buyer. They are just waiting for those dime-sized hard drives that hold 10 googolplex bytes. They are expected to hit the market Real Soon Now.
However, we have to warn you that in testing there have been problems with the UPS (Universal Positioning System) which is required to make sure that the real-time universe model doesn't try to recursively model all the other real-time universe models in the universe. Testers have confirmed that when this happens, the electronics inside tend to blow up.
I didn't sign up, but it's on my radar now. Disappointments: No REM, No Police. However, when I was searching for the Police it gave me "Music Like the Police" which had the following artists:
Men At Work
Madness
Go-Go's
The Fixx
Blondie
I wonder what Sting would think of that.
If it weren't for the selection issue, I would sign up for something like this in a heartbeat. Eventually, the major players will probably consolidate and form a monopoly which will solve the selection problem and impose a price problem. Then, the government will sue them, yada yada yada. So, instead of doing that the messy way, I think we should impose a licensing fee on all MP3 transfers and kick it back to the copyright holder. Yes, it's government intervention, but I don't see any better way.
1. I'm skeptical of anything titled "Teach yourself $language in $time". The smaller the $time, the more skeptical I am. Let's carry this to its logical extreme and publish a book titled: "Teach Yourself Multidimensional Particle Physics Before You Even Buy This Book".
2. I'm skeptical of any language designed to describe something written in another language. The Tower of Babel ain't gonna be rebuilt anytime soon folks.
Stuff like UML is perhaps useful when you are working on some huge government project where they spend $10 million on auditing to make sure you don't waste $2 million tax dollars. Other than that, it isn't very useful.
This is where Open Source has an advantage--there are no audit trails or design documents; just mailing list archives. Now, if someone came up with a smart program for reading such archives that didn't require developers to change their ways of communicating, you might have something. And yes, I understand that many see the lack of design documents and audits in Open Source as a disadvantage but it depends on where you are. A prehensile tail is a big advantage if you are a monkey in a tree. It's a disadvantage in a board meeting.
Scenario 1: Ubiquitous wireless home networking. I can get up from the football game and there is a networked screen in the bathroom, etc... In fact, I think somebody did a commercial that illustrated that vision.
Scenario 2: I can't network anything without paying twice for content I've already bought, and the devices that do it cost more because they have to support real-time encryption. Because of this, I choose not to buy the devices and simply do the "bathroom and snack rush" during commercials.
This just makes no sense. Once the content is in the home, why should they care how many outlets it comes out of? This is like the electric company charging me more for installing a new socket, even though I'm using the same number of kilowatt-hours.
Ordinarily I dismiss some of the things I see on /. as AIP/paranoia, but I have to concede to the /. crowd that controls like this for intrahome networking violate fair use, and probably a number of other things.
Seriously? They were cool during the 80s, then it seemed like there was a transition where they stopped playing videos and started doing sucky shows.
Is this channel a bore now because I'm approaching middle age, or is there something else going on? Can anybody who watches MTV explain the appeal? MTV was something special in its day because they played stuff the radio didn't. The internet had (perhaps still has) the potential to shake up music in a positive way, but hasn't yet. Hint: It won't happen by weazeling around copyright.
I was thinking that what we need is something like a Slashdot for music, where artists could stream selected songs at no charge to promote their album in exchange for giving the website exclusive rights to the CD sales, with a percentage to the artist and a percentage to the site. It would have a user/feedback moderation like Slashdot. You would also have to have a mechanism for category creation in the event that a truly novel form of music came along. I'm not sure what you would do about radio. Maybe the site would just charge radio stations a flat fee or make that a giveaway too. Hasn't anybody tried that, and if so, why did it fail?
I swear, RMS could tell people not to stick their fingers in a light socket, and they would actually have a desire to do so when he was done.
Now, I dislike Word just as much as the next guy, but for different reasons. First, there is the macrovirus issue. I don't like closed formats either, but that's a technical issue that a lot of people don't understand. Refer to Word as a "secret format" and people will think you are smoking crack. For Joe Blow, Word is not a secret format, "it's Word format. What's the secret?".
Instead, if I get this stuff, I say:
I don't use Word. Could you please send plain text or HTML.
That's it. No diatribe. No technical jargon. If this becomes the socially acceptable way to transmit documents, people will learn it because they are inconvenienced having to send the message twice, not because they want to join the Glorius People's Revolution, which most us would actually like to avoid. I wouldn't subject myself to PDF or any print-oriented format unless they said it was the only alternative. That's for a little ideological reason of my own: These formats are a PITA to read on the screen, and printing them out is bad for the environment. I have nothing personal against Adobe. If Reader were more screen friendly I wouldn't hesitate to suggest PDF.
Reporter: You mean, the procurement officer paid $6,000,000 for grep?
Guy with face hidden: Yes.
Reporter: What happened to him when they found out?
Guy with face hidden: Well, they were going to hit him with a hammer, but they decided that would be hypocritical...
They're reselling them for £100? Either these are real POS laptops, or the price is that low because they are afraid to get caught and want to move them quickly. Doesn't that work out to about $160? Even if it's something like a bottom of the line ThinkPad I'd be willing to pay $500 for a new laptop. So, is it worth it for me to grab one of those $300 Brittish Airways specials and hop over there? THAT'S IT. It's not about helping the poor. It's to help Brittish Airways.
Doing anything other than simply turning the computer off or unplugging it is not an intuitive way to shut down the machine. None of the OS's being discussed here are designed to work that way.
Ugh! One time my room-mate lost a few hours of work due to a corrupted WP file. He asked if I could fixed it. About an hour into carefully studying the revealed codes, I decided I needed some help. So I went to Corel's website. There were literally hundreds of ways that WP files could become corrupted. The problem was particularly heinous because this particular file would cause the entire system--not just WP, to lock up when you cursored into the wrong part of the file. We eventually gave up, and my room-mate reconstructed his writings from memory (human memory that is).
Of course, that's just one bad experience. Anyone else care to comment about corrupted files in these programs? Automatic backups are always an option, but my room mate did this on a school machine which went down, and he was unaware of that feature anyway.
Of course the best thing would be to have files never get corrupted in the first place, but if they do it should be easy to recover.
Amen. I know that after 911 my whole attitude about military service shifted. After all, if they can get me on the way to lunch with a business partner, why not join the best equipped fighting force in the world and kick some tail to prevent that?
I used to make bus connections through the Pentagon everyday when I worked in Arlington. That really made it hit home for me. If they had hit the bus station, it could have been me. I have a friend in LA. What if I had taken a non-stop out to see him that day? Chance. Fate. It's the same way in a battlezone, but at least you get to help solve the problem.
, Barry McCaffrey's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division mounted what may be the largest flanking maneuver in military history
IIRC, it was Gen. Schwartzkopf who later confessed that the exposed flank was so obvious, he thought it might be a trap filled with poison gas mines or even nuclear weapons. Fortunately, it wasn't.