That's silly. All you have to do is actually take part in the moderation, and see the impact your own moderation has, then multiply that by the number of registered users on/., to understand that you're wrong. But you're AC, so you're just speculating out of ignorance, or a troll. If the latter, IHBT, and will HAND.
Visitors to your sites haven't signed any contract to view the ads. If you want adblocking visitors not to visit your site, put a notice up on a splash page. If you want to appeal to people's sense of fairness, solicit donations. Otherwise, you don't have a leg to stand on, legally, morally, or ethically. Not everyone who runs an ad-supported site cares if people block the ads, because for many sites it's just an extra, fairly marginal source of revenue.
If you've chosen to depend on such revenue, that's your choice, and you have to deal with the realities, including the reality of the fact that your content isn't all that valuable, otherwise you could charge people for it directly, via subscription or whatever; and the reality that competition is tough, that there are people out there who might do what you're doing for less, or even for free.
When I use MySQL, it's in the same sort of applications everyone else uses it - web sites and other fairly straightforward applications. I don't know of anyone using MySQL as a shared enterprise database. That market is pretty locked up by the likes of Oracle and IBM DB2, and to a lesser extent, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server.
You'll often hear people talk about this or that specific technical feature that MySQL doesn't support or doesn't handle well, but beyond that kind of thing I think the deal breaker is just that no-one else is using it in those environments, and there's no reason to be the first person to bet the operations of a multi-billion dollar company on it (other than certain dot-coms).
That's a situation that no admin team wants to find themselves in. It happened at Amazon because they were using the database in unusal ways. The way to avoid that is by using what every other company like you uses (Amazon didn't have that luxury at the time). MySQL hasn't been battle-tested in the sort of environments I'm talking about, and it lacks a whole range of features designed for systems where any downtime at all costs significant dollars. It also lacks an entire ecosystem of tools and personnel aimed at that market. Over time, I imagine MySQL might enter that space, but it'll need to acquire a lot of stuff along the way.
Re:Open-sourcing of Java will increase its use
on
2007 Java Predictions
·
· Score: 1
Sure, you can make your own packages. But Debian's package system is like crack - you get dependent on just doing "apt-get install" and not having to worry about a thing. Solaris can't compete, because it doesn't have Debian's repository.
Is our system, supported by the majority of the people (no less self-evident than Putin's 80%), developed and run by our best and most dedicated, so intolerable in your vision, you cannot share the world with us?
Hey, don't look at me, I'm not an American. I was born and raised in Africa. (Speaking of Chinese building in Africa, I once attended a concert in the Chinese-built sports stadium in Harare, Zimbabwe.)
This stance is in fact so threatening to China, it is the chief motivation for us to advance our conventional and other forces, at the expense of solving society's many pressing problems.
China should devote some serious resources to public relations, too. America's fear of China nowadays seems to be based on one main thing: the potential threat to U.S. economic dominance posed by an economically improving population more than triple the size of the U.S. Lou Dobbs on CNN talks about that all the time. It's made all the more scary by the fact that China seems more foreign to Americans than any Western nation, and less transparent than some other Asian nations. One of the only ways to address that would be by marketing direct to the American public, although it'd have to be somewhat subtle. Something as direct as TV ads wouldn't work.
(Perhaps China should offer to commit troops to help keep peace in Iraq.:) That probably goes against the Chinese strategy, but it'd be interesting to see the U.S. reaction to that.)
But another factor working against China in U.S. eyes is the perception that it offers less individual freedom. Many people in the U.S. naturally assume that they personally would not be happy under such a system, therefore it must be bad. I think that this is a more fundamental thing than democracy, capitalism, communism -- it goes to people's basic perspective on the relationship between themselves as individuals, and the state. The U.S. likes to limit the power of its federal government for these kinds of reasons, preferring power to remain local where possible. To be quite honest, I have no real idea of how China works on this level, and I'm sure it's the same for most Americans. As long as that's the case, it's easy for people to assume the worst.
The same sorts of issues apply to democracy as to socialism. I have the same issue with overzealous advocates of either. As you say, many attempts to introduce democracy have been failures, and advocates of democracy have certainly had events prove them wrong. Then again, some have been reasonably successful: many people expected apartheid South Africa to degenerate into civil war, but seemingly against all odds, it transitioned peacefully into a real democracy. It was probably important that this decision wasn't imposed from the outside, as such, although there was certainly significant outside pressure to end apartheid and enfranchise blacks.
The lesson I draw from this sort of thing is that it's very difficult to predict what entire societies are going to do, and different systems may be appropriate for different peoples. That's precisely why a bit of humility about what we know is a good thing. Too much faith in the inherent goodness of any sociopolitical system can be dangerous, as is too much faith in one's own rightness.
BTW, it's not clear to me what, if anything, you're actually advocating. Do you have an alternative to "political systems derived from electoral processes"? "Socialism" is not an alternative, at least not without significant qualification.
Right, but are you seriously calling everyone who argues fervently against socialism (or communism?) a Nazi? That's exactly the sort of thing I'm objecting to. That's such a famous argument-squasher that there's a name for it, Godwin's Law. And since you've opened that door, let me point out that the Nazi leadership made good use of the sort of rabble-rousing that you're defending.
ShieldW0lf's "dramatic statement" certainly seems like an argument squasher to me, very much along the lines of "it's for the children... you *do* like children, don't you?" If he wanted to say something about the most fervent detractors of socialism, he should have qualified it as such. But what he said was "anyone".
Besides, even if he just meant to talk about those most fervent detractors, saying "That guy wants to make you his slave!" is a close equivalent to "She's a witch! Burn her!" It's designed to appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect. It has nothing to do with the merits of the argument on either side. The best defense for it is "the other side does it too", but unfortunately that undermines any claims about the nobleness of the cause being promoted.
It might be different if there were some evidence of this slave-owning mindset, but afaict it's unsupported speculation. You take that speculation a step further when you drag people's ancestry into it. The whole premise is a distraction at best, and an unnecessarily inflammatory one at that.
That's my biggest objection to this sort of stuff: it's classic crowd-rallying propaganda. The best defense for it is perhaps "the other side does it too", but unfortunately that undermines any argument you might make about the nobleness of the cause being promoted.
I was responding to the claim that foreign key integrity should be handled by the application rather than the database. MySQL's support for foreign keys doesn't affect my point.
..which is exactly the abstract goal of socialism!
That's yet another partial and very general definition. The same thing could be said to be a goal of democracy.
The economic freedom of capitalism [...]
Who said anything about capitalism? We were discussing "anyone who argues against...". And that's the problem, what we're seeing here is extremism, pure and simple: "if you don't agree with me, you're my enemy (must be a capitalist!) and you want to enslave people". That's not argument or debate, it's an exercise in indulging one's irrational side, and it has nothing to do with truly achieving ends such as social justice.
It looks to me like it's more important for the person saying such things to win, or at least squash any argument, than to be right. That doesn't bode well for whatever cause is being advocated.
It's not different. The problem is when you find yourself having "less of a problem with tyranny" of some idea. Tyranny is tyranny, and no matter how wonderful the idea you think is worthy of tyranny, you corrupt that idea when you start believing that tyranny may be justified in its service.
As for the specifics in this case, the original post gave a vague potted description of socialism, which is not even a single well-defined idea, and then claimed that anyone who argues against the abstract merits of the thing that he hadn't even bothered to define "wants to make you his slave". That was a ludicrous claim.
You've now boiled that down to "abstract merits of social justice". But you're going to have to define social justice. I can tell you right now, my idea of social justice is not the same as yours. Same goes for "better world". You're making a similar mistake as the OP, which is to believe that your own personal perception of justice and a better world is an absolute one that everyone either does, or should, share.
Concepts like "social justice" are political concepts that can only be arrived at by social consensus. In reaching that consensus, you can't simply marginalize the ideas of everyone who disagrees with your particular perspective. That's a recipe for failure, often of a quite spectacular sort.
I suspect you're thinking of relatively simple cases where you have a single application working against a database. Which of course is the standard MySQL scenario.
Where foreign keys and the other referential integrity features really shine is in true enterprise scenarios, when you may have hundreds or thousands of applications, written in multiple languages, working against the same shared database(s).
In that scenario, the only viable way to duplicate the functionality of foreign keys at the application level is to have a middle layer which all other applications are required to go through. Realistically, that middle layer has to be implemented as a server, serving requests for object/record creation, update and delete over the network. Implementing it as a library to be linked into applications doesn't work well, because there are multiple applications accessing the database, and integrity enforcement needs to be centrally coordinated.
Implementing a middleware data server for an application isn't all that difficult, but integrating it into applications can be. Most application development environments know how to talk to databases, but don't automatically know how to talk to your application-specific, language-independent, data server. So now you're writing a client library for each app dev platform used in the enterprise, and dealing with things like integrating your custom interface with data-bound controls in the user interface. BTW, this is where people start resorting to e.g. SOAP, and projects start going off the rails (no pun intended, Ruby fans).
Luckily, as it turns out, there are already standardized, widely-available, well-supported systems that implement a centralized data serving service which enforces referential integrity. They're called databases. And foreign keys are an essential part of the service they provide.
Re your sig ("God spoke to me"), the other response says you're crazy. The usual diagnosis would be schizophrenia, but you might be interested to know that your experience may just be a throwback to a theorized prior human state, the bicameral mind (thanks, Neal Stephenson!) BTW, God spoke to me and said he didn't speak to you.
It's perfectly fair and reasonable to argue against the practicality or possibility of a perfect implementation of such a system, but anyone who argues against the abstract merit of such a system is secretly yearning to make you his slave and wants a system that will allow him to try.
What an absolutist, argument-suppressing position! A nice example of why most idealistic "I have a system to make society better" fail -- because of people such as yourself, who not-so-secretly yearn to suppress the opinions of all those who disagree with them.
I got a business visa to the USA with no problem. Maybe they thought you were suspicious? Maybe they discriminate against Russians?
I know people who've had a lot of trouble getting tourist visas, but they've mostly been students, or other people with limited assets who are considered a risk for overstay.
I see that Koni is a black lab, so that's OK. No-one in their right mind would vote for a yellow or chocolate lab, though! Nothing against yellow labs, I just don't think they have the chops to run Russia -- too friendly-looking. And don't get me started on those chocolate half-breeds.
(Note to moderators: no, there's no "Labrador Flamebait" mod, so you'll just have to leave me alone. What are you do... Offtopic?? Noooooooo!!)
The difficulty is that [Clinton] wasn't completely honest about it, likely due to marital woes.
Clinton wasn't completely honest about it because he was being sued for sexual harrassment by Paula Jones, after having allegedly exposed himself to her in a hotel room in Little Rock. The Lewinsky situation was introduced as evidence in that trial. If Clinton had been honest about it, he would have been found guilty, and Jones would have won her lawsuit. Clinton's strategy was to admit to as little as possible, which then led to problems with perjury, and to his famous wriggle about the meaning of "is". Nevertheless, Clinton's strategy was probably a smart one, for him personally. He ended up settling with Jones for $850,000.
I guess the ultra-liberal-"Bush-is-stoopid"-tree-huggers have mod points, today.
In defense of the ultra-liberal-"Bush-is-stoopid"-tree-huggers, Bush *is* pretty stupid. That's just a fact. Feel free to refute it by showing results from tests, or perhaps excuse him by identifying whatever learning disabilities he has, but refuses to acknowledge. But in the absence of such information, we can only go by the evidence we have, as Rumsfeld might say. Not least among that evidence is the enormous cost in lives, money, and public relations that the U.S. is currently suffering, to attain an unachievable goal. Consider it a lesson in the cost of putting a stupid guy in the White House. Hopefully now that they've brought in the minders from his Daddy's administration, things might improve.
And to those tempted to mod me troll, I have a challenge for you: try to refute my point. Is Bush really smart, and just hiding it well? Or if you admit that he's stupid, is there some subtle value to putting a stupid guy in the White House? I really want to know!
BTW, I realize that for Cheney and the various neocons, there's value to putting a stupid guy in the White House: you can control him, and he acts as the fall guy for the fallout from policies designed to serve various selfish ulterior motives. However, that's not the question. The question is, what is the value for the average American citizen of having a dumb guy in the White House?
It is absolutely predictable and enternaining to watch this phenomenon.)
It's predictable, sure, but I like my entertainment a bit more sophisticated. (Yeah, yeah, what am I doing on Slashdot.) That's why I'd prefer to see an actual response than a troll mod. I don't even know what my transgression was for sure. Probably the low opinion of Bush's performance, but seriously, is anyone arguing that this guy will go down in the history books as a high point in U.S. foreign policy? To be that gullible, you'd have to also be the kind of person who believes in a big ghostly daddy in the sky. Oh wait...
I don't disagree that the U.S. is flirting with the loss of its global dominance, in no small measure because of the Bush administration having one of the most incompetent foreign policies ever, but characterising its current position as being purely military-based is a severe oversimplification. Its dominance comes from a whole range of things, including leadership positions of various kinds in science, technology, finance, higher education, media, etc.
Even if its military were somehow de-emphasised as a source of power, none of those other things would change automatically. Certainly, all of those things are potentially under threat by other countries in various ways, but the space of future possibilities is huge. For example, China is still a third-world nation in many ways, and it's far from clear that it can sustain a rise of the kind you suggest, particularly in just, say, a few decades.
Back in the '70s, many thought that Japan was going to take over from the U.S., or even that it already had, but that turned out to be a temporary thing. Which brings me to your other point, about the U.S. becoming powerful by a fluke: again, that's an oversimplification which misses some important real sources of U.S. dominance. One of those is the way in which immigrants have affected the demographics of the country. A large part of the U.S. population is self-selected for risk-taking and competitiveness. It attracts some of the best and the brightest from around the world (which again, is admittedly under threat now that obtaining a visa virtually requires an anal probe).
I think it's far more likely that U.S. dominance will not be destroyed by China or by events in the Middle East, but rather by the increasing incompetence of its political leaders and damage to its political system via the undue influence of corporate lobbying and campaign finance, etc. That has resulted in a myriad of poor policy decisions in many different areas, which attacks the source of U.S. advantage on multiple fronts in a way that no other single nation could. But even this could be corrected with some halfway-decent leadership, and one might hope (for the sake of humanity) that there's nowhere to go from Bush but up. I wouldn't count the U.S. out just yet.
When it was the United Kingdom that had the job, it had a large pool of (frequently multilingual) sailors to draw on, and an upper class that learned Latin, Greek and French as a core part of the curriculum to prepare them for languages like Arabic later on.
They do have connections, though tenuous, to the US
So what you're telling me is that someone should invade the U.S. forthwith, to bring freedom to its people and to root out the source of all world terrorism?
Slashdot Mirror
That's silly. All you have to do is actually take part in the moderation, and see the impact your own moderation has, then multiply that by the number of registered users on /., to understand that you're wrong. But you're AC, so you're just speculating out of ignorance, or a troll. If the latter, IHBT, and will HAND.
Visitors to your sites haven't signed any contract to view the ads. If you want adblocking visitors not to visit your site, put a notice up on a splash page. If you want to appeal to people's sense of fairness, solicit donations. Otherwise, you don't have a leg to stand on, legally, morally, or ethically. Not everyone who runs an ad-supported site cares if people block the ads, because for many sites it's just an extra, fairly marginal source of revenue.
If you've chosen to depend on such revenue, that's your choice, and you have to deal with the realities, including the reality of the fact that your content isn't all that valuable, otherwise you could charge people for it directly, via subscription or whatever; and the reality that competition is tough, that there are people out there who might do what you're doing for less, or even for free.
When I use MySQL, it's in the same sort of applications everyone else uses it - web sites and other fairly straightforward applications. I don't know of anyone using MySQL as a shared enterprise database. That market is pretty locked up by the likes of Oracle and IBM DB2, and to a lesser extent, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server.
o racle-down.html
You'll often hear people talk about this or that specific technical feature that MySQL doesn't support or doesn't handle well, but beyond that kind of thing I think the deal breaker is just that no-one else is using it in those environments, and there's no reason to be the first person to bet the operations of a multi-billion dollar company on it (other than certain dot-coms).
Read this post about Oracle at Amazon in the early days:
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/03/early-amazon-
That's a situation that no admin team wants to find themselves in. It happened at Amazon because they were using the database in unusal ways. The way to avoid that is by using what every other company like you uses (Amazon didn't have that luxury at the time). MySQL hasn't been battle-tested in the sort of environments I'm talking about, and it lacks a whole range of features designed for systems where any downtime at all costs significant dollars. It also lacks an entire ecosystem of tools and personnel aimed at that market. Over time, I imagine MySQL might enter that space, but it'll need to acquire a lot of stuff along the way.
Sure, you can make your own packages. But Debian's package system is like crack - you get dependent on just doing "apt-get install" and not having to worry about a thing. Solaris can't compete, because it doesn't have Debian's repository.
Hey, don't look at me, I'm not an American. I was born and raised in Africa. (Speaking of Chinese building in Africa, I once attended a concert in the Chinese-built sports stadium in Harare, Zimbabwe.)
China should devote some serious resources to public relations, too. America's fear of China nowadays seems to be based on one main thing: the potential threat to U.S. economic dominance posed by an economically improving population more than triple the size of the U.S. Lou Dobbs on CNN talks about that all the time. It's made all the more scary by the fact that China seems more foreign to Americans than any Western nation, and less transparent than some other Asian nations. One of the only ways to address that would be by marketing direct to the American public, although it'd have to be somewhat subtle. Something as direct as TV ads wouldn't work.
(Perhaps China should offer to commit troops to help keep peace in Iraq. :) That probably goes against the Chinese strategy, but it'd be interesting to see the U.S. reaction to that.)
But another factor working against China in U.S. eyes is the perception that it offers less individual freedom. Many people in the U.S. naturally assume that they personally would not be happy under such a system, therefore it must be bad. I think that this is a more fundamental thing than democracy, capitalism, communism -- it goes to people's basic perspective on the relationship between themselves as individuals, and the state. The U.S. likes to limit the power of its federal government for these kinds of reasons, preferring power to remain local where possible. To be quite honest, I have no real idea of how China works on this level, and I'm sure it's the same for most Americans. As long as that's the case, it's easy for people to assume the worst.
The same sorts of issues apply to democracy as to socialism. I have the same issue with overzealous advocates of either. As you say, many attempts to introduce democracy have been failures, and advocates of democracy have certainly had events prove them wrong. Then again, some have been reasonably successful: many people expected apartheid South Africa to degenerate into civil war, but seemingly against all odds, it transitioned peacefully into a real democracy. It was probably important that this decision wasn't imposed from the outside, as such, although there was certainly significant outside pressure to end apartheid and enfranchise blacks.
The lesson I draw from this sort of thing is that it's very difficult to predict what entire societies are going to do, and different systems may be appropriate for different peoples. That's precisely why a bit of humility about what we know is a good thing. Too much faith in the inherent goodness of any sociopolitical system can be dangerous, as is too much faith in one's own rightness.
BTW, it's not clear to me what, if anything, you're actually advocating. Do you have an alternative to "political systems derived from electoral processes"? "Socialism" is not an alternative, at least not without significant qualification.
Right, but are you seriously calling everyone who argues fervently against socialism (or communism?) a Nazi? That's exactly the sort of thing I'm objecting to. That's such a famous argument-squasher that there's a name for it, Godwin's Law. And since you've opened that door, let me point out that the Nazi leadership made good use of the sort of rabble-rousing that you're defending.
Oops, got a bit cut-n-paste happy there, but you get my point...
ShieldW0lf's "dramatic statement" certainly seems like an argument squasher to me, very much along the lines of "it's for the children... you *do* like children, don't you?" If he wanted to say something about the most fervent detractors of socialism, he should have qualified it as such. But what he said was "anyone".
Besides, even if he just meant to talk about those most fervent detractors, saying "That guy wants to make you his slave!" is a close equivalent to "She's a witch! Burn her!" It's designed to appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect. It has nothing to do with the merits of the argument on either side. The best defense for it is "the other side does it too", but unfortunately that undermines any claims about the nobleness of the cause being promoted.
It might be different if there were some evidence of this slave-owning mindset, but afaict it's unsupported speculation. You take that speculation a step further when you drag people's ancestry into it. The whole premise is a distraction at best, and an unnecessarily inflammatory one at that.
That's my biggest objection to this sort of stuff: it's classic crowd-rallying propaganda. The best defense for it is perhaps "the other side does it too", but unfortunately that undermines any argument you might make about the nobleness of the cause being promoted.
I was responding to the claim that foreign key integrity should be handled by the application rather than the database. MySQL's support for foreign keys doesn't affect my point.
That's yet another partial and very general definition. The same thing could be said to be a goal of democracy.
Who said anything about capitalism? We were discussing "anyone who argues against...". And that's the problem, what we're seeing here is extremism, pure and simple: "if you don't agree with me, you're my enemy (must be a capitalist!) and you want to enslave people". That's not argument or debate, it's an exercise in indulging one's irrational side, and it has nothing to do with truly achieving ends such as social justice.
It looks to me like it's more important for the person saying such things to win, or at least squash any argument, than to be right. That doesn't bode well for whatever cause is being advocated.
It's not different. The problem is when you find yourself having "less of a problem with tyranny" of some idea. Tyranny is tyranny, and no matter how wonderful the idea you think is worthy of tyranny, you corrupt that idea when you start believing that tyranny may be justified in its service.
As for the specifics in this case, the original post gave a vague potted description of socialism, which is not even a single well-defined idea, and then claimed that anyone who argues against the abstract merits of the thing that he hadn't even bothered to define "wants to make you his slave". That was a ludicrous claim.
You've now boiled that down to "abstract merits of social justice". But you're going to have to define social justice. I can tell you right now, my idea of social justice is not the same as yours. Same goes for "better world". You're making a similar mistake as the OP, which is to believe that your own personal perception of justice and a better world is an absolute one that everyone either does, or should, share.
Concepts like "social justice" are political concepts that can only be arrived at by social consensus. In reaching that consensus, you can't simply marginalize the ideas of everyone who disagrees with your particular perspective. That's a recipe for failure, often of a quite spectacular sort.
I suspect you're thinking of relatively simple cases where you have a single application working against a database. Which of course is the standard MySQL scenario.
Where foreign keys and the other referential integrity features really shine is in true enterprise scenarios, when you may have hundreds or thousands of applications, written in multiple languages, working against the same shared database(s).
In that scenario, the only viable way to duplicate the functionality of foreign keys at the application level is to have a middle layer which all other applications are required to go through. Realistically, that middle layer has to be implemented as a server, serving requests for object/record creation, update and delete over the network. Implementing it as a library to be linked into applications doesn't work well, because there are multiple applications accessing the database, and integrity enforcement needs to be centrally coordinated.
Implementing a middleware data server for an application isn't all that difficult, but integrating it into applications can be. Most application development environments know how to talk to databases, but don't automatically know how to talk to your application-specific, language-independent, data server. So now you're writing a client library for each app dev platform used in the enterprise, and dealing with things like integrating your custom interface with data-bound controls in the user interface. BTW, this is where people start resorting to e.g. SOAP, and projects start going off the rails (no pun intended, Ruby fans).
Luckily, as it turns out, there are already standardized, widely-available, well-supported systems that implement a centralized data serving service which enforces referential integrity. They're called databases. And foreign keys are an essential part of the service they provide.
Re your sig ("God spoke to me"), the other response says you're crazy. The usual diagnosis would be schizophrenia, but you might be interested to know that your experience may just be a throwback to a theorized prior human state, the bicameral mind (thanks, Neal Stephenson!) BTW, God spoke to me and said he didn't speak to you.
I got a business visa to the USA with no problem. Maybe they thought you were suspicious? Maybe they discriminate against Russians?
I know people who've had a lot of trouble getting tourist visas, but they've mostly been students, or other people with limited assets who are considered a risk for overstay.
I see that Koni is a black lab, so that's OK. No-one in their right mind would vote for a yellow or chocolate lab, though! Nothing against yellow labs, I just don't think they have the chops to run Russia -- too friendly-looking. And don't get me started on those chocolate half-breeds.
(Note to moderators: no, there's no "Labrador Flamebait" mod, so you'll just have to leave me alone. What are you do... Offtopic?? Noooooooo!!)
In defense of the ultra-liberal-"Bush-is-stoopid"-tree-huggers, Bush *is* pretty stupid. That's just a fact. Feel free to refute it by showing results from tests, or perhaps excuse him by identifying whatever learning disabilities he has, but refuses to acknowledge. But in the absence of such information, we can only go by the evidence we have, as Rumsfeld might say. Not least among that evidence is the enormous cost in lives, money, and public relations that the U.S. is currently suffering, to attain an unachievable goal. Consider it a lesson in the cost of putting a stupid guy in the White House. Hopefully now that they've brought in the minders from his Daddy's administration, things might improve.
And to those tempted to mod me troll, I have a challenge for you: try to refute my point. Is Bush really smart, and just hiding it well? Or if you admit that he's stupid, is there some subtle value to putting a stupid guy in the White House? I really want to know!
BTW, I realize that for Cheney and the various neocons, there's value to putting a stupid guy in the White House: you can control him, and he acts as the fall guy for the fallout from policies designed to serve various selfish ulterior motives. However, that's not the question. The question is, what is the value for the average American citizen of having a dumb guy in the White House?
Instead of modding me troll, how about responding to the points you disagree with?
I don't disagree that the U.S. is flirting with the loss of its global dominance, in no small measure because of the Bush administration having one of the most incompetent foreign policies ever, but characterising its current position as being purely military-based is a severe oversimplification. Its dominance comes from a whole range of things, including leadership positions of various kinds in science, technology, finance, higher education, media, etc.
Even if its military were somehow de-emphasised as a source of power, none of those other things would change automatically. Certainly, all of those things are potentially under threat by other countries in various ways, but the space of future possibilities is huge. For example, China is still a third-world nation in many ways, and it's far from clear that it can sustain a rise of the kind you suggest, particularly in just, say, a few decades.
Back in the '70s, many thought that Japan was going to take over from the U.S., or even that it already had, but that turned out to be a temporary thing. Which brings me to your other point, about the U.S. becoming powerful by a fluke: again, that's an oversimplification which misses some important real sources of U.S. dominance. One of those is the way in which immigrants have affected the demographics of the country. A large part of the U.S. population is self-selected for risk-taking and competitiveness. It attracts some of the best and the brightest from around the world (which again, is admittedly under threat now that obtaining a visa virtually requires an anal probe).
I think it's far more likely that U.S. dominance will not be destroyed by China or by events in the Middle East, but rather by the increasing incompetence of its political leaders and damage to its political system via the undue influence of corporate lobbying and campaign finance, etc. That has resulted in a myriad of poor policy decisions in many different areas, which attacks the source of U.S. advantage on multiple fronts in a way that no other single nation could. But even this could be corrected with some halfway-decent leadership, and one might hope (for the sake of humanity) that there's nowhere to go from Bush but up. I wouldn't count the U.S. out just yet.