You know, I was right with you in what you said -- until I read your signature line. If you look at his voting record Ron Paul is about as much for liberty and democracy as Kennedy is on the left, or the Gingrich types on the right.
You want liberty and democracy, you have to find a moderate.
Interesting that you would mention both. In totalitarian regimes, the silent eavesdroppers call the armed soldiers. And are free to act however they want to without fear of reprisals. AKA Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Iraq under Saddam, and a host of other dictators.
Which is why Benjamin Frankin's statement about those who value security over freedom end will end up having neither is so prescient.
Have I spoken against Sun's code or against the legal system that results in these weird patent fights?
One of the reasons that my sig states that Open Source isn't the only answer but is often the best one -- and what I have been pointing at in this thread is that to the greatest extent possible I avoid code I can't prove to be untainted, i.e. GPL or fully Open Sourced code that the community has already basically approved of. I think that this is probably the single most overlooked and important part of the OS movement -- many eyes prevent many mistakes -- including for the most part at this point in time, patent-encumbered code.
Well, I have to use MS-Office, etc. at work. But none of my deployed websites for my customers use Java, and OpenOffice is already OS licensed -- which excludes it from my boycott list. But I won't go to something with ZFS until the patent mess is out of the way.
All based on what? Patents on software algorithms, that brainchild of the '90's when some legal geniuses decided that "how you do business" is as patentable as a device, which was not the intent of the Founding Fathers of the good ole' US of A.
Well, like my own position on buying stuff from Amazon or Disney (which means that at present I have spent $0 on them in the last ten years), I think I can successfully live without tech from Sun OR NetApp -- until the current software patent madness comes to an end -- or at least the injunction induced extortion rackets die down.
Which is where Open Source and GPL'd software really starts to make sense, don't you think?
Towards the end of the article I read the following:Since September 2003, the RIAA has filed more than 21,000 illegal downloading suits.
Think about it -- because many of these suits have a high number of defendants based on digitally obtained lists that may or may not be accurate based on the tool used to auto-generate the list. I can just about guarantee that another program took their lists and auto-generated many of the filings. [because I don't see the RIAA hiring masses of para-legal qualified folks to type up their legal filings....]. So at the minimum there is a
software list "maker" generating a list connected to
a software file-creator for that fills up the postal or other mail services for
the purposes of ostensibly extorting legal settlements,
and yet another set of programs filling up the legal system with cases based on program talking to program talking to program.
Anybody else have a problem with corporate law being conducted like that? To my way of thinking every filing should have to be done without the intervention of a software list generator, wouldn't you think? That way a corporation must risk the cost of the data entry and hand operations to generate their filings, just like the rest of us would. Seems fair enough, doesn't it?
BTW I am against the obvious M$ practice of buying a standards committee vote so blatantly . But I do have a question along the lines of "what happens if I throw a huge ($) party and nobody comes?"
What I am asking is this: let's assume that Microsoft spends major bucks to get their OOXML stuff accepted in a few different countries through a standards committee, but then the standard is proven to NOT be open -- as is being shown by work already in progress -- but that the lack of openness and the bad press generated by their blatant vote buys in the mean time pretty much corrupts the market value of their standard anyway.
What do you think?
Not news -- just effective marketing....
on
Solar Powered Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 1
Boil the article to it's essence and you get "Hey techno geeks!! If you hook up our big honkin' solar panel to our battery, plop our inverter and nearby, plug in a 'net hookup and a Wifi router, you got a great way to do a rural or remote WIFI point."
Of course that leaves out the fact that only about 15% of rural America has broadband access to begin with. Or that even if you have broadband nearby and you get the WIFI router set up, you still have to over-pay a telco or cable company, and if your WIFI point uses more than a bit of bandwidth you get a hugely increased bill or cut off altogether....
Where something like this really fits is "Yo! small municipalities. [or even 3rd world areas] Instead of opening your community to 'Net exploitation, try this: we will sell you common components that will allow you to bring in a single fairly wide 'Net pipe and then allow you to set up access for all of the folks in your town without having to run a large amount of extra wire. These components can use your existing street light power, or when it makes sense, use our solar panel/battery backup system, or both. We'll help you design and install the system and everybody benefits...."
I don't assume that this license bypass is a *good* thing, because Intel has no reason not to play nice only with M$ and the MPAA, RIAA's et. al of the world and it is far to simple to create a hypervisor linked to Intel's Trusted computing stuff and disable the ability of the motherboard to function in a friendly non-DRM restricted manner.
But I also question whether or not it matters as much-- once the various Linux desktops reach critical mass. The fact is that in the Linux World, DRM'd stuff is pretty much ignored or worked around ANYWAY, so if someone comes up with a GPL'd codec to a DRM'd content file, the vendors can't control the ability of the Linux OS running under the hypervisor to access the content anyway. Also, since most of us aren't going to be running hypervisors on our machines, why would we buy a machine configured to work against us?
But on the whole I don't have a big problem with this technology, because -- as opposed to the CIA, NSA, and others -- in the last 20 years or so my impression is that the FBI doesn't seem bent on discriminatory practices as much as it does the assistance of local and national law enforcement with keeping crime -- including terrorist crime-- away from the average citizenry. So the FBI has complied with the Calea law passed by Congress -- and built an effective infrastructure for digital wiretaps. There are also provisions for protecting the US Citizenry's rights under the laws. So still, no big deal.
Where it becomes a big deal is towards the end of the article -- with the concept of backdoors into the provider switches becoming a security issue with connectivity to the internet. More problematic still, the article doesn't really deal with the changes in the Patriot act that basically make un-adjudicated wiretaps easy to obtain. The stats showed an increase in wiretaps of roughly 50% over a couple of years ago -- and no stats on why/how those were related to Patriot act activities. So now you have a presumably "good" government organization acting at the behest of people with political agendas -- which is most assuredly *not* a good thing.
What most people don't realize is that for years Acer was one of the largest sources for COMPONENTS, not finished systems -- so they tend to weed out poor components first, resulting in better systems at the end of the assembly chain.
So [as a former Acer reseller / small business consultant who moved more into data engineering and away from hardware by choice, not necessity] I would have to say that "this figures". Why? Because I could always upgrade the Acer machines I bought/sold to my clients, and in all of the sites I ever sold to and supported I think I had one machine failure before "end of cycle", i.e., about 3 years later when the cost benefit ratio for a new machine becomes higher than the cost of maintaining an old one. Versus the Gateway, Packard Bell, or even Dell reputation for crap service.
Hmmm. I wonder if this might actually make Gateway stock worth *something* again....
No but vast amounts of the code libraries which you see out there for those languages HAVE been released under the GPL. For example
li>in the CPAN FAQ: "Most, though not all, modules on CPAN are licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL)..."
The PEAR repository for PHP states: herefore "with this announcement the license choices are [for future modules] reduced to the following short list: {PHP,Apache,LGPL, BSD style,MIT}but I do know that the GPL exists was used for a number of Pear modules
. BTW Ruby was not any of the above which surprised me, so I will have to subtract that from my original post, and I am going to add the MIT license to my list. I wasn't familiar with it until today.
I personally will almost exclusively stick to the four major OS licenses: the GPL (any version), Apache, Mozilla, and (though purists may disagree) the BSD. My experience has been that a developer generally doesn't have to blend -- most of the web-related work I do is related to Apache, therefore that fits for the C++ development. Most of the web work is in one of the GPL'd languages (Perl, Python, PHP, or Ruby), etc.
http://www.peertopatent.org/ is where it is at, and they have a mailout list that will keep you informed on new patent apps.
Although I haven't seen one where my knowledge could affect the process, the very first time I hear of a patent application that I can attack with prior art, I will do so immediately.
That way things like this patent don't get so damn close to being approved before we can jump on it.
So that the local stargazer's out there don't get radiation burns from the galacticore rock concert with the zillion starts hiding behind the 1 Million power SSPF (star screen protection formula (like sunscreen, just galactic...)
Okay, more seriously... Here we sit on a sphere 7,900 miles in diameter, deciding that from our view there is a hole in the universe where there's just nothing there -- that is billions of light years across. Okay, I'll buy that -- but because of the distances involved, exactly what is the angle of viewing from side to side on that dark spot. Well, hmmm... it takes good radio telescopes to even find it -- many years after radio telescopes were invented. On the science plus side, it can be tracked during the earth's circuit around the sun (about 186 million miles wide). So the evidence is pretty good.
But sitting in our little corner of the universe assuming anything at AU distances is a rather nebulous form of science, don't you think? Because hey, it's space which is mostly empty, and if galaxy's are moving apart, doesn't it make sense that there have to be places everything is moving apart from. And more importantly, why should we care?
Lost revenue? Yeah right. Funky numbers designed to support DRM and corporate greed more like.
Assume the average buyer like me spends $15.00 per CD avg. After marketing and retail costs, let's say that an average profit to the music company per unit is a max of 40% or about $6.00, divided by 10-15 tracks per CD or 40 to 60 cents each.
Now assume that I bought those same number of tracks from iTunes. Cost for distribution is nearly zero. Cost for marketing: nearly zero -- and many of the songs I am looking for aren't current albums, so the profit margin on these songs is even higher. Net profit between Apple and the music company and the musician? let's say 90%, shall we?
You figure it out. But the politicians probably never will.
Personally, my favorite aspect of this interview is that Linus himself basically considers the core OS now stable enough that anything new is likely to be incremental instead of ground-shakingly different, at least on the x86 platforms.
Which would imply a stability that leads to dependability which leads to usability which leads to widespread use. At least that is my hope in the enterprise, that the combination of commodity hardware with a commodity, high powered and stable OS can be coupled with increasingly powerful database engines such as mySQL, Veritas, etc. Oracle on Linux is now considered stable as well.
At home? stability leading to dependability leading to integration leading to crossover applications that will no longer depend on a proprietary OS stack to function. The only thing missing from my desired tool set on Linux right now is basically an easy to use, high powered MIDI to music recording and notation system -- and the pieces for all of that is already there -- it's my time to research and integrate the pieces that is in short supply.
I guess my point is that stability and upgradeability cause me to buy (several Linuxes and Win2K). Give me yet a large bulkier OS that doesn't really do much but add coolness (Vista or even XP) and I yawn.
That's because a 1 KW system in silicon is silly expensive, not to mention a poor use of "juice".
Let me give you an example why. I spend about $200 for a set of solar "RV" ventilation fans, but used them in a better way -- ventilating my attic continuously when the sun is up. Each fan has about a 1W cell, but they move a fairly substantial amount of air at about 60 degrees celsius OUT of the attic. I also have about a 15 W panel pumping into an underground pipe array for "geothermal" cooling and back to the house -- so I have a total of about 20W providing literally many KW of cooling.
Once I have time I build a test rig for at least one of the attic fans out to pump it's share of hot air through an insulated water/radiator panel -- and build the interface to function right through the same hole in the roof -- and watch my hot water bill go way down.
Someone please mod this up, as it nails the essence of the problem in not too many words. I forget who said it but the "all politics are local" phrase basically comes into play for the exact reasons mentioned. Good job sumdumass!
...in the main article. My brief understanding was that the experiment was to teach the aversion, then fuzz the rats' taste memory receptor cells not too much later, then a day, week or month afterward see if the aversion still existed. Or was it time period independent, i.e. teach the rats and reinforce for a month or so (so that the long term memory is theoretically fully formed), and then at differing time periods (a day, week, or month later) do the fuzz chemical, and no matter what the period, the aversion is erased?
And the science still seems double edged unless there was an easy blood test to detect the chemical and one that would be able to tell days, weeks, or months later. Otherwise everyone's memory considered to be tamperable vs. just fallible.
I just read the article -- and am singularly unimpressed. They trained rats to avoid some tests, then inject drugs into the area where taste memory is stored, and poof, the taste aversion training seems to be kaput.
in rats...
I've got a simpler experiment. Try using a little ethyl alcohol on a brain circuit (you know, the stuff in beer, whiskey, etc.?) and if you get enough in the right place, no long term memory is formed because the brain is asleep. So a person wouldn't develop an aversion to something that happened while they were blacked out in terms of memory but still conscious otherwise.
But governmental experimenters can't force you to drink to destabilizwe your memories, and because -- to my knowledge most of our useful memories are stored in multiple areas of the brain and integrated by consciousness -- I'm not sure that the availability of a drug that can chemically destabilize memory is a good thing.
Prosecutor: What did you see? Witness: I....don't remember...
Get the picture?
Hello!! basic neuroanatomy 101: impulses are transmitted by electrochemical means and interpreted by electrochemical means, and presumably stored by changes brought about by electrochemical means. So if they flooded a little chunk of your brain with a neurococktail that fuzzed up the cellular chemistry that caused a change, it stands to reason that the change wouldn't remain stable.
Griesi said that he does not see any of these URI issues as something that needs to be fixed in Windows or Internet Explorer. That's up to the individual software developers whose programs may be misused... "It's not Microsoft's position to be the gatekeeper of all third-party applications."
Except that as far as I can tell, it's the WinXX OS kluges that are allowing the security breaches to access system resources. Correct me if I am wrong but wasn't it a Mr. Bill Gates told the world that security was now the number #1 priority at Microsoft a few years back.
Companies that speak with forked tongues deserve to have said tongue cut off, don't you think?
The latest accepted date for the book of Daniel is still pre-Christian era, and still pre-date Julius Caesar's dictatorship/declaration of "emporer" etc around 44 BC) to around 106 AD, and the break of of big empires into little kingdoms could not have been predicted, as the history of the region from around the time of Nebuchadnezzar (sp?) through the Roman Empire was a history of empire following empire following empire. There would have been no reason for anyone to assume that this would not continue, and instead devolve into strong and weak nations interspersed with each other, as happened in Europe and the Mediterranean and Middle east areas post- pax-Romana.
Therefore Daniel's interpretation of the dream and the idol was and is both specific, correct, and prophetic. And hard to ignore-- believe me I tried.
Slashdot Mirror
You want liberty and democracy, you have to find a moderate.
Which is why Benjamin Frankin's statement about those who value security over freedom end will end up having neither is so prescient.
One of the reasons that my sig states that Open Source isn't the only answer but is often the best one -- and what I have been pointing at in this thread is that to the greatest extent possible I avoid code I can't prove to be untainted, i.e. GPL or fully Open Sourced code that the community has already basically approved of. I think that this is probably the single most overlooked and important part of the OS movement -- many eyes prevent many mistakes -- including for the most part at this point in time, patent-encumbered code.
Well, I have to use MS-Office, etc. at work. But none of my deployed websites for my customers use Java, and OpenOffice is already OS licensed -- which excludes it from my boycott list. But I won't go to something with ZFS until the patent mess is out of the way.
Well, like my own position on buying stuff from Amazon or Disney (which means that at present I have spent $0 on them in the last ten years), I think I can successfully live without tech from Sun OR NetApp -- until the current software patent madness comes to an end -- or at least the injunction induced extortion rackets die down.
Which is where Open Source and GPL'd software really starts to make sense, don't you think?
Think about it -- because many of these suits have a high number of defendants based on digitally obtained lists that may or may not be accurate based on the tool used to auto-generate the list. I can just about guarantee that another program took their lists and auto-generated many of the filings. [because I don't see the RIAA hiring masses of para-legal qualified folks to type up their legal filings....]. So at the minimum there is a
- software list "maker" generating a list connected to
- a software file-creator for that fills up the postal or other mail services for
- the purposes of ostensibly extorting legal settlements,
- and yet another set of programs filling up the legal system with cases based on program talking to program talking to program.
Anybody else have a problem with corporate law being conducted like that? To my way of thinking every filing should have to be done without the intervention of a software list generator, wouldn't you think? That way a corporation must risk the cost of the data entry and hand operations to generate their filings, just like the rest of us would. Seems fair enough, doesn't it?What I am asking is this: let's assume that Microsoft spends major bucks to get their OOXML stuff accepted in a few different countries through a standards committee, but then the standard is proven to NOT be open -- as is being shown by work already in progress -- but that the lack of openness and the bad press generated by their blatant vote buys in the mean time pretty much corrupts the market value of their standard anyway.
What do you think?
Of course that leaves out the fact that only about 15% of rural America has broadband access to begin with. Or that even if you have broadband nearby and you get the WIFI router set up, you still have to over-pay a telco or cable company, and if your WIFI point uses more than a bit of bandwidth you get a hugely increased bill or cut off altogether....
Where something like this really fits is "Yo! small municipalities. [or even 3rd world areas] Instead of opening your community to 'Net exploitation, try this: we will sell you common components that will allow you to bring in a single fairly wide 'Net pipe and then allow you to set up access for all of the folks in your town without having to run a large amount of extra wire. These components can use your existing street light power, or when it makes sense, use our solar panel/battery backup system, or both. We'll help you design and install the system and everybody benefits...."
Or have I missed the target completely?
But I also question whether or not it matters as much-- once the various Linux desktops reach critical mass. The fact is that in the Linux World, DRM'd stuff is pretty much ignored or worked around ANYWAY, so if someone comes up with a GPL'd codec to a DRM'd content file, the vendors can't control the ability of the Linux OS running under the hypervisor to access the content anyway. Also, since most of us aren't going to be running hypervisors on our machines, why would we buy a machine configured to work against us?
Where it becomes a big deal is towards the end of the article -- with the concept of backdoors into the provider switches becoming a security issue with connectivity to the internet. More problematic still, the article doesn't really deal with the changes in the Patriot act that basically make un-adjudicated wiretaps easy to obtain. The stats showed an increase in wiretaps of roughly 50% over a couple of years ago -- and no stats on why/how those were related to Patriot act activities. So now you have a presumably "good" government organization acting at the behest of people with political agendas -- which is most assuredly *not* a good thing.
Thoughts?
Too bad the truth gets lost when the money starts talking. *sigh*
We all know that M$ doesn't play fair in terms of open standards, and never will. Why are we surprised?
So [as a former Acer reseller / small business consultant who moved more into data engineering and away from hardware by choice, not necessity] I would have to say that "this figures". Why? Because I could always upgrade the Acer machines I bought/sold to my clients, and in all of the sites I ever sold to and supported I think I had one machine failure before "end of cycle", i.e., about 3 years later when the cost benefit ratio for a new machine becomes higher than the cost of maintaining an old one. Versus the Gateway, Packard Bell, or even Dell reputation for crap service.
Hmmm. I wonder if this might actually make Gateway stock worth *something* again....
- li>in the CPAN FAQ: "Most, though not all, modules on CPAN are licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL)..."
- The PEAR repository for PHP states: herefore "with this announcement the license choices are [for future modules] reduced to the following short list: {PHP,Apache,LGPL, BSD style,MIT}but I do know that the GPL exists was used for a number of Pear modules
. BTW Ruby was not any of the above which surprised me, so I will have to subtract that from my original post, and I am going to add the MIT license to my list. I wasn't familiar with it until today.I personally will almost exclusively stick to the four major OS licenses: the GPL (any version), Apache, Mozilla, and (though purists may disagree) the BSD. My experience has been that a developer generally doesn't have to blend -- most of the web-related work I do is related to Apache, therefore that fits for the C++ development. Most of the web work is in one of the GPL'd languages (Perl, Python, PHP, or Ruby), etc.
Does this fit for most others? I don't know.
http://www.peertopatent.org/ is where it is at, and they have a mailout list that will keep you informed on new patent apps.
Although I haven't seen one where my knowledge could affect the process, the very first time I hear of a patent application that I can attack with prior art, I will do so immediately.
That way things like this patent don't get so damn close to being approved before we can jump on it.
So that the local stargazer's out there don't get radiation burns from the galacticore rock concert with the zillion starts hiding behind the 1 Million power SSPF (star screen protection formula (like sunscreen, just galactic...)
Okay, more seriously... Here we sit on a sphere 7,900 miles in diameter, deciding that from our view there is a hole in the universe where there's just nothing there -- that is billions of light years across. Okay, I'll buy that -- but because of the distances involved, exactly what is the angle of viewing from side to side on that dark spot. Well, hmmm... it takes good radio telescopes to even find it -- many years after radio telescopes were invented. On the science plus side, it can be tracked during the earth's circuit around the sun (about 186 million miles wide). So the evidence is pretty good.
But sitting in our little corner of the universe assuming anything at AU distances is a rather nebulous form of science, don't you think? Because hey, it's space which is mostly empty, and if galaxy's are moving apart, doesn't it make sense that there have to be places everything is moving apart from. And more importantly, why should we care?
Assume the average buyer like me spends $15.00 per CD avg. After marketing and retail costs, let's say that an average profit to the music company per unit is a max of 40% or about $6.00, divided by 10-15 tracks per CD or 40 to 60 cents each.
Now assume that I bought those same number of tracks from iTunes. Cost for distribution is nearly zero. Cost for marketing: nearly zero -- and many of the songs I am looking for aren't current albums, so the profit margin on these songs is even higher. Net profit between Apple and the music company and the musician? let's say 90%, shall we?
You figure it out. But the politicians probably never will.
Personally, my favorite aspect of this interview is that Linus himself basically considers the core OS now stable enough that anything new is likely to be incremental instead of ground-shakingly different, at least on the x86 platforms.
Which would imply a stability that leads to dependability which leads to usability which leads to widespread use. At least that is my hope in the enterprise, that the combination of commodity hardware with a commodity, high powered and stable OS can be coupled with increasingly powerful database engines such as mySQL, Veritas, etc. Oracle on Linux is now considered stable as well.
At home? stability leading to dependability leading to integration leading to crossover applications that will no longer depend on a proprietary OS stack to function. The only thing missing from my desired tool set on Linux right now is basically an easy to use, high powered MIDI to music recording and notation system -- and the pieces for all of that is already there -- it's my time to research and integrate the pieces that is in short supply.
I guess my point is that stability and upgradeability cause me to buy (several Linuxes and Win2K). Give me yet a large bulkier OS that doesn't really do much but add coolness (Vista or even XP) and I yawn.
That's because a 1 KW system in silicon is silly expensive, not to mention a poor use of "juice".
/radiator panel -- and build the interface to function right through the same hole in the roof -- and watch my hot water bill go way down.
Let me give you an example why. I spend about $200 for a set of solar "RV" ventilation fans, but used them in a better way -- ventilating my attic continuously when the sun is up. Each fan has about a 1W cell, but they move a fairly substantial amount of air at about 60 degrees celsius OUT of the attic. I also have about a 15 W panel pumping into an underground pipe array for "geothermal" cooling and back to the house -- so I have a total of about 20W providing literally many KW of cooling.
Once I have time I build a test rig for at least one of the attic fans out to pump it's share of hot air through an insulated water
Net investment? Maybe $500.
Someone please mod this up, as it nails the essence of the problem in not too many words. I forget who said it but the "all politics are local" phrase basically comes into play for the exact reasons mentioned. Good job sumdumass!
...in the main article. My brief understanding was that the experiment was to teach the aversion, then fuzz the rats' taste memory receptor cells not too much later, then a day, week or month afterward see if the aversion still existed. Or was it time period independent, i.e. teach the rats and reinforce for a month or so (so that the long term memory is theoretically fully formed), and then at differing time periods (a day, week, or month later) do the fuzz chemical, and no matter what the period, the aversion is erased?
And the science still seems double edged unless there was an easy blood test to detect the chemical and one that would be able to tell days, weeks, or months later. Otherwise everyone's memory considered to be tamperable vs. just fallible.
in rats...
....don't remember...
I've got a simpler experiment. Try using a little ethyl alcohol on a brain circuit (you know, the stuff in beer, whiskey, etc.?) and if you get enough in the right place, no long term memory is formed because the brain is asleep. So a person wouldn't develop an aversion to something that happened while they were blacked out in terms of memory but still conscious otherwise.
But governmental experimenters can't force you to drink to destabilizwe your memories, and because -- to my knowledge most of our useful memories are stored in multiple areas of the brain and integrated by consciousness -- I'm not sure that the availability of a drug that can chemically destabilize memory is a good thing.
Prosecutor: What did you see?
Witness: I
Get the picture?
Hello!! basic neuroanatomy 101: impulses are transmitted by electrochemical means and interpreted by electrochemical means, and presumably stored by changes brought about by electrochemical means. So if they flooded a little chunk of your brain with a neurococktail that fuzzed up the cellular chemistry that caused a change, it stands to reason that the change wouldn't remain stable.
Except that as far as I can tell, it's the WinXX OS kluges that are allowing the security breaches to access system resources. Correct me if I am wrong but wasn't it a Mr. Bill Gates told the world that security was now the number #1 priority at Microsoft a few years back.
Companies that speak with forked tongues deserve to have said tongue cut off, don't you think?
*ahem* I believe it is also important for her to resist unwanted intrusions and definitely no takedowns and active penetrations....
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Goofy thinking on both posts.
The latest accepted date for the book of Daniel is still pre-Christian era, and still pre-date Julius Caesar's dictatorship/declaration of "emporer" etc around 44 BC) to around 106 AD, and the break of of big empires into little kingdoms could not have been predicted, as the history of the region from around the time of Nebuchadnezzar (sp?) through the Roman Empire was a history of empire following empire following empire. There would have been no reason for anyone to assume that this would not continue, and instead devolve into strong and weak nations interspersed with each other, as happened in Europe and the Mediterranean and Middle east areas post- pax-Romana.
Therefore Daniel's interpretation of the dream and the idol was and is both specific, correct, and prophetic. And hard to ignore-- believe me I tried.