Armchair solutions to projected problems, yet again. Funny how nobody proposes anything that might actually require work or making changing spending habits.
Just keep kicking that tarbaby. You'll lick it one day.
Speaking as an American, I'm also troubled by this trend in warfare.
After the "accidental" bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the opinion of many countries (most notably China, of course) was that Americans are so afraid of losing their own lives, that they are willing to be reckless with the lives of other people. Some have gone so far as to link this behavior to the fact that we are willing to get involved where Europeans or Oil is at stake (not necessarily in that order of importance), even if mass slaughter is going on and human rights are being severely violated with impunity. Rwanda and Cambodia are often cited as examples of this. Who can forget all that great Vietnam war video of bamboo huts disappearing into clouds of napalm launched from thousands of feet up? This sort of self-centered recklessness leaves Americans with the reputation of being racist cowards, and unfortunately, we have done little to disprove it in the past 25 years since the Vietnam war ended.
However powerful we are, we can't afford this sort of a reputation, whether or not it is fair or true. Cruise missiles and other unmanned weapons are only going to re-enforce this argument and breed a resentment of our power in the world at large, especially since they are easy, painless, and impersonal for us to use, but cause great destruction and personal pain.
What bugs me is that it is not because we really are cowards or racists or in some way fundamentally evil or that we enjoy this sort of warfare for the fun of it. It's a slow, greyish descent into immorality which we will allow to continue because the price tag of each of these beauties is going to make a lot of people very rich, and each new line of products will keep the arms makers and their thousands of employees very happy. The sales pitch is going to be "who can put a price on a human life, especially when that life is your boy or girl being shot out of the sky? After all, the people who are being killed by this weapon would be killed anyway whether or not it is manned or unmanned." In one hundred years, we'll be so out of touch with the humanity of the rest of humanity that we'll be blowing up third world dictators by remote control on TV as an entertainment sport. We'll be so busy with the Hollywood version of events that we won't notice the rest of the world ganging up against us.
Or breeding new and interesting versions of Mad Cow Disease to spray into cattle feed. Or slipping discrete lead-lined packets out of Khazakstan. Or suicide bombing our ships. Or cutting back on oil production.
This is obviously a fake, but my question is why anyone should care what a dinosaur like Bill Gates thinks anyway? I hated his Basic (For Apple II) for the same reasons I hate his company's software: It's simply badly designed and requires more from the user than it gives back. Ultimately, the Open Source movement will take more and more legacy code into it's domain simply because that's the natural progression for this sort of endeavor. Windows will remain a standard interface and API, but it will eventually be totally reverse-engineered and open. It's just a matter of time. M$ knows this, so they concentrate on exclusive multimedia agreements and acquisistions of promising technology. Marketing has always been their one and only strong point, and that's what they capitalize on.
Gnu/Linux is not a threat to M$. It is simply the act of the people taking back control of the software that should have been theirs from the very beginning. All the infighting in the Open Source crowd is the very stuff that Democracy thrives on. It is the IT Agora (The Bazaar) and we should remain damn well proud of that feature.
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Armchair solutions to projected problems, yet again. Funny how nobody proposes anything that might actually require work or making changing spending habits.
Just keep kicking that tarbaby. You'll lick it one day.
If you kill off all proprietary/closed source Linux offerings, what's left? Well, the need for stronger open source ones.
Thank-you Microsoft for helping to push all the alternatives into the open-source fee-for-service world.
And at last they might fix that braindamaged attachment manager. Can you believe it's 2001 and AOL still can't handle multipart-mime?
Why?
After the "accidental" bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the opinion of many countries (most notably China, of course) was that Americans are so afraid of losing their own lives, that they are willing to be reckless with the lives of other people. Some have gone so far as to link this behavior to the fact that we are willing to get involved where Europeans or Oil is at stake (not necessarily in that order of importance), even if mass slaughter is going on and human rights are being severely violated with impunity. Rwanda and Cambodia are often cited as examples of this. Who can forget all that great Vietnam war video of bamboo huts disappearing into clouds of napalm launched from thousands of feet up? This sort of self-centered recklessness leaves Americans with the reputation of being racist cowards, and unfortunately, we have done little to disprove it in the past 25 years since the Vietnam war ended.
However powerful we are, we can't afford this sort of a reputation, whether or not it is fair or true. Cruise missiles and other unmanned weapons are only going to re-enforce this argument and breed a resentment of our power in the world at large, especially since they are easy, painless, and impersonal for us to use, but cause great destruction and personal pain.
What bugs me is that it is not because we really are cowards or racists or in some way fundamentally evil or that we enjoy this sort of warfare for the fun of it. It's a slow, greyish descent into immorality which we will allow to continue because the price tag of each of these beauties is going to make a lot of people very rich, and each new line of products will keep the arms makers and their thousands of employees very happy. The sales pitch is going to be "who can put a price on a human life, especially when that life is your boy or girl being shot out of the sky? After all, the people who are being killed by this weapon would be killed anyway whether or not it is manned or unmanned." In one hundred years, we'll be so out of touch with the humanity of the rest of humanity that we'll be blowing up third world dictators by remote control on TV as an entertainment sport. We'll be so busy with the Hollywood version of events that we won't notice the rest of the world ganging up against us.
Or breeding new and interesting versions of Mad Cow Disease to spray into cattle feed. Or slipping discrete lead-lined packets out of Khazakstan. Or suicide bombing our ships. Or cutting back on oil production.
Gnu/Linux is not a threat to M$. It is simply the act of the people taking back control of the software that should have been theirs from the very beginning. All the infighting in the Open Source crowd is the very stuff that Democracy thrives on. It is the IT Agora (The Bazaar) and we should remain damn well proud of that feature.