Why would they need to be democratic? They're obviously doing just fine without democracy. That's my point though, democracy does not equal freedom; in fact freedom is completely separate from democracy. Democracy is a way of making a functioning state, not a way of ensuring the freedoms of people in that state.
Democracy is not the only way to produce a functioning state. It is the way that works best here in The West due to our cultural background.
Look at The Soviet union, it managed to grow to superpower status, get people into space and be more than a military match for The West, and it was never a democracy. Of course The Soviet Union collapsed, and we like to think that was because it was undemocratic, although to me it seems that it was more due to a lot of bad policy decisions in the social, economic and authority sectors that caused it to collapse. For a more modern example see China, also not a particularly democratic place, and also a place which is set to become the new superpower now that the US seems to be making the same policy decision that The Soviets were making.
We used to be 'rich peasants' too, we used to be fundamentalists too (Recall the Catholic church in the dark ages and later on various forms of cultural fundamentalism), then we got rich by trade and various forms of mineral wealth.
Guess what happened then, we turned into a stable democratic society. It stands to reason that any society below a certain wealth/developmental level will tend towards fundamentalism of various kinds and as wealth and developmental level increase in society freedoms starts to emerge.
It has always bothered me that we in the developed world seem to have this idea that we can 'fix' the world, we seem to have this idea that we can just swoop in to a country which has a culture and history which is radically different from ours and impose our cultural values of 'freedom' on them. We used to be brutal and fundamentalist here in the western world and no-one came here to tell us how to live, instead we killed each other and did any number of horrible things and then eventually got tired of doing those things and settled down into what we known as the modern world.
Incidentally, what would happen if you downloaded and ran (through wine) malware.exe on a linux machine? I've always wondered about that, I mean it runs and replicates the windows directory structure just fine.
Sensors and stuff I can see, that'll be useful. Now painkiller dispensing underpants, that just sounds scary, will that lead to a sudden influx in junkies stealing underwear in the hope that it'll be filled with delicious opiates.
Why do you have the Slashdot/Games section on if you don't care about games?
Mainly because I'm too lazy to actually turn it off. I was going to try thinking up some other humorous reason for not having disabled it but come to think of it, laziness really is the only reason.
I really have a hard time getting exited about these sorts of things anymore. I mean Portal and HL2 are good games and all but still they're just games.
Ostensibly whatever it is Valve is going to be revealing at E3 is going to be a game, a new game perhaps or something like that. Either way it's hard to get exited about.
David Hoffman wrote on the semi-automatic nature of Dead Hand:
And they [the Soviets] thought that they could help those leaders by creating an alternative system so that the leader could just press a button that would say: I delegate this to somebody else. I don't know if there are missiles coming or not. Somebody else decide.
If that were the case, he [the Soviet leader] would flip on a system that would send a signal to a deep underground bunker in the shape of a globe where three duty officers sat. If there were real missiles and the Kremlin were hit and the Soviet leadership was wiped out, which is what they feared, those three guys in that deep underground bunker would have to decide whether to launch very small command rockets that would take off, fly across the huge vast territory of the Soviet Union and launch all their remaining missiles.
Now, the Soviets had once thought about creating a fully automatic system. Sort of a machine, a doomsday machine, that would launch without any human action at all. When they drew that blueprint up and looked at it, they thought, you know, this is absolutely crazy.
So while the Soviets (and by extension; the Russians) considered a system for automatically launching missiles and ordering bombers to strike, they decided against it for reasons which are hopefully obvious.
That being said it is still a Fail-deadly system, in so far as it is designed to act as a countermeasure against a decapitation strike (that is a strike that takes out the regular command infrastructure), it achieves this by automatically transferring launch authority to "three guys in a bunker".
The Dead Hand system is not a Dr. Strangelove-type doomsday machine. Instead it is a system that allows launch authority to be transfered automatically to a secure location in case of a Decapitation Strike.
As I understand it, the system is set up in such to monitor seismic sensors, radiation sensors and probably also visible light sensors for signs of a nuclear strike. If these sensors are tripped it then checks to see if the standard military/government communication lines are still operational; if it finds them broken then it will assume that nuclear war has broken out and launch authority will transfered to a secure location (A bunker under/near Moscow I think).
The system can be triggered by accident (and most likely has been on at least one occasion) without triggering nuclear war.
I mean ostensibly I can see how the Glide bot could be considered 'legal' in and of itself, I am of the firm belief that if you buy a game you can use (or abuse if you so desire) it any way you want.
Now in the case of WoW the EULA is not just for the game (which you own, or ought to anyhow) but also for the servers (which are owned by Blizzard). So seems to be that it is entirely fair that Blizzard can dictate what you can and cannot do on their servers, if they decide that they do not want a bot running on their servers then a they are in the clear when they ban the user of said bot. I mean it is fairly commonplace for people who run multiplayer notepad servers (excuse me I mean 'IRC servers) to say that they do not want unauthorized bots on their servers and most FPS games implement anti-cheating and systems and will ban people who cheat.
So Blizzard are not so much telling you what you can or cannot run on your computer as much as they are telling you what you can and cannot use on their servers.
This is Iridium we're talking about, they don't worry about details like "buisiness plans". When they first rolled out their service their business plan depended on the fact it would eventualy be as pervasive as cellular phones and that sure worked out fine.
Granted the inevitable human rebellion will have a surprisingly easy time fighting these things, I mean just hide up a sufficiently steep slope and the apparently top heavy ting will tumble over backwards. Alternatively you could just walk away at a reasonably brisk pace.
And speaking of military robots, am I the only one who's creeped out by Big Dog? Looks like some sort of unholy union between a deer and a spider..
Slashdot Mirror
Why would they need to be democratic? They're obviously doing just fine without democracy.
That's my point though, democracy does not equal freedom; in fact freedom is completely separate from democracy.
Democracy is a way of making a functioning state, not a way of ensuring the freedoms of people in that state.
Democracy is not the only way to produce a functioning state. It is the way that works best here in The West due to our cultural background.
Look at The Soviet union, it managed to grow to superpower status, get people into space and be more than a military match for The West, and it was never a democracy. Of course The Soviet Union collapsed, and we like to think that was because it was undemocratic, although to me it seems that it was more due to a lot of bad policy decisions in the social, economic and authority sectors that caused it to collapse.
For a more modern example see China, also not a particularly democratic place, and also a place which is set to become the new superpower now that the US seems to be making the same policy decision that The Soviets were making.
We used to be 'rich peasants' too, we used to be fundamentalists too (Recall the Catholic church in the dark ages and later on various forms of cultural fundamentalism), then we got rich by trade and various forms of mineral wealth.
Guess what happened then, we turned into a stable democratic society. It stands to reason that any society below a certain wealth/developmental level will tend towards fundamentalism of various kinds and as wealth and developmental level increase in society freedoms starts to emerge.
It has always bothered me that we in the developed world seem to have this idea that we can 'fix' the world, we seem to have this idea that we can just swoop in to a country which has a culture and history which is radically different from ours and impose our cultural values of 'freedom' on them.
We used to be brutal and fundamentalist here in the western world and no-one came here to tell us how to live, instead we killed each other and did any number of horrible things and then eventually got tired of doing those things and settled down into what we known as the modern world.
Incidentally, what would happen if you downloaded and ran (through wine) malware.exe on a linux machine?
I've always wondered about that, I mean it runs and replicates the windows directory structure just fine.
What was the goal of the Hayabusa mission?
This is true, it however, does not offer any evidence that a black hole will instantly evaporate if the event horizon is removed.
Show your work.
Sensors and stuff I can see, that'll be useful. Now painkiller dispensing underpants, that just sounds scary, will that lead to a sudden influx in junkies stealing underwear in the hope that it'll be filled with delicious opiates.
There's no porn on the iPhone.
I foresee TrueCrypt's website will be getting a lot of new visitors soon.
Yep, you pretty much hit the nail on the head there.
Well Chrome does all kinds of evil, it is just better at hiding it.
Why do you have the Slashdot/Games section on if you don't care about games?
Mainly because I'm too lazy to actually turn it off. I was going to try thinking up some other humorous reason for not having disabled it but come to think of it, laziness really is the only reason.
I really have a hard time getting exited about these sorts of things anymore. I mean Portal and HL2 are good games and all but still they're just games.
Ostensibly whatever it is Valve is going to be revealing at E3 is going to be a game, a new game perhaps or something like that. Either way it's hard to get exited about.
From Wikipedia
David Hoffman wrote on the semi-automatic nature of Dead Hand:
And they [the Soviets] thought that they could help those leaders by creating an alternative system so that the leader could just press a button that would say: I delegate this to somebody else. I don't know if there are missiles coming or not. Somebody else decide.
If that were the case, he [the Soviet leader] would flip on a system that would send a signal to a deep underground bunker in the shape of a globe where three duty officers sat. If there were real missiles and the Kremlin were hit and the Soviet leadership was wiped out, which is what they feared, those three guys in that deep underground bunker would have to decide whether to launch very small command rockets that would take off, fly across the huge vast territory of the Soviet Union and launch all their remaining missiles.
Now, the Soviets had once thought about creating a fully automatic system. Sort of a machine, a doomsday machine, that would launch without any human action at all. When they drew that blueprint up and looked at it, they thought, you know, this is absolutely crazy.
Which cites: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=113579843 as its source.
So while the Soviets (and by extension; the Russians) considered a system for automatically launching missiles and ordering bombers to strike, they decided against it for reasons which are hopefully obvious.
That being said it is still a Fail-deadly system, in so far as it is designed to act as a countermeasure against a decapitation strike (that is a strike that takes out the regular command infrastructure), it achieves this by automatically transferring launch authority to "three guys in a bunker".
Oooh like that!
Clever, clever.
Nerds of course.
The Dead Hand system is not a Dr. Strangelove-type doomsday machine.
Instead it is a system that allows launch authority to be transfered automatically to a secure location in case of a Decapitation Strike.
As I understand it, the system is set up in such to monitor seismic sensors, radiation sensors and probably also visible light sensors for signs of a nuclear strike. If these sensors are tripped it then checks to see if the standard military/government communication lines are still operational; if it finds them broken then it will assume that nuclear war has broken out and launch authority will transfered to a secure location (A bunker under/near Moscow I think).
The system can be triggered by accident (and most likely has been on at least one occasion) without triggering nuclear war.
No it didn't. I use chrome and I got a 'download safari' dialog box when I tried to view any of the showcases.
They're not being evil now, are they?
Never assume malice where incompetence will suffice.
Try intercepting someone's cell phone signals - with your dumb argument, you should be able to listen to them too and not get sued?
!
Yeah sure if GSM signals weren't encrypted you arguement would be sound. Now seeing as GSM is encrypted your argument kinda sucks.
Your time warping skills are impressive, do you give lessons?
I've tried drinking a lot of red bull but I still have not been able to bend the very fabric of time to my will and it saddens me.
I mean ostensibly I can see how the Glide bot could be considered 'legal' in and of itself, I am of the firm belief that if you buy a game you can use (or abuse if you so desire) it any way you want.
Now in the case of WoW the EULA is not just for the game (which you own, or ought to anyhow) but also for the servers (which are owned by Blizzard). So seems to be that it is entirely fair that Blizzard can dictate what you can and cannot do on their servers, if they decide that they do not want a bot running on their servers then a they are in the clear when they ban the user of said bot.
I mean it is fairly commonplace for people who run multiplayer notepad servers (excuse me I mean 'IRC servers) to say that they do not want unauthorized bots on their servers and most FPS games implement anti-cheating and systems and will ban people who cheat.
So Blizzard are not so much telling you what you can or cannot run on your computer as much as they are telling you what you can and cannot use on their servers.
This is Iridium we're talking about, they don't worry about details like "buisiness plans". When they first rolled out their service their business plan depended on the fact it would eventualy be as pervasive as cellular phones and that sure worked out fine.
Well I for one welcome our new robotic overlords.
Granted the inevitable human rebellion will have a surprisingly easy time fighting these things, I mean just hide up a sufficiently steep slope and the apparently top heavy ting will tumble over backwards. Alternatively you could just walk away at a reasonably brisk pace.
And speaking of military robots, am I the only one who's creeped out by Big Dog? Looks like some sort of unholy union between a deer and a spider..