The best examples are the ex communist countries, romania was particularly bad with the army fighting against its own citizens in quite overt urban warfare, until the army decided to switch sides, that effectively stopped the war there and then.
Umm, what events are you referring to? Surely nothing recent. I can't think of anything remotely resembling what you describe in the last 50 years. The most recent I can think of was the partisan resistance to the communist regime, the last members were caught in 1962.
I don't even see how that would work, the Army against unarmed civilians. Romanian citizens are largely unarmed; during the dictatorship owning weapons was prohibited; and since the Revolution the rules are still somewhat strict. Romania hasn't been a "right to bear arms" type of society for at least 100 years now, it's quite unlikely to find a fire weapon in most Romanian homes.
Well, whether they had weapons or not, there was the romanian revolution of 1989, the romanian army was sent in to quash riots and protests, there were over 1000 deaths.
The arab spring is also a good example, the army was sent in a few countries as well. Now i understand that they operate under the guise of keeping the peace or whatever, but, the defence force is the best equipped organisation and they are meant to defend the nation from external threats, internal ones are getting too political, in the romanian example, it's clear, the army was trying to suppress a revolution, and they did kill a lot of people in the process. I think sending the army to quash a revolution leaves no option but a violent one, if the people are committed enough,and as a result, the army, like i said before, being the best equipped force, shouldn't be interfering in internal affairs.
Soldiers are trained to follow orders, now they havn't completely perfected this, but in a nutshell, look at egypt and libya, a lot of soldiers did defect, but not all. Any US soldiers defecting would probably be court marshalled and executed if something like that were to happen, so unless a very large number of them decide to defect all at once, many of them would have to more or less put themselves up for effectively death.
The best examples are the ex communist countries, romania was particularly bad with the army fighting against its own citizens in quite overt urban warfare, until the army decided to switch sides, that effectively stopped the war there and then. Other eastern bloc countries had prolonged periods of bloodshed, like poland which had a period of martial law and the secret police were killing many upon many people for most of the 1980's, many see the point of no return was with the sadistic murder of a polish priest named Fr. Jerzy Popieuszko by the secret police
I think that, first that whatever weapons the defense forces wield, so should people be able to, or, it should be defined in the constitution of the respective country, that the army is not allowed to mobilise against its own people, that is an illegal act, but the problem with the last one is, well, at the end of the day, whoever controls the army, well, rules or constitutions don't matter do they.
I agree, the whole thing about it is that communism and capitalism sell the same lie, a society can only carry so many parasites, and both forms dangle identical carrots, ie, communism had the higher phases where only those who wanted to work would, but the lower phases needed to be overcome first, so everyone had to chip in, and capitalism has the same problem you mentioned, the means is different, but in the end it tries to suck people into thinking that everyone can sit around and do nothing, whilst still being rich, which in actual fact, is impossible, there's only so many people who can be carried by, for lack of a better word, the proletariat (i'm aware of its commie connotations) in government jobs, or positions which don't actually produce anything, investment bankers being a big one, they just shuffle money around and create inflation. They are literally becoming wealthy off the work of other people. They should start looking at taxing non productive industries differently.
There was a different policy in communist countries though, there wasn't much work, productivity was significantly lower and since education was paid for by the state, they made everyone go to university so that they stayed in school for longer, and placed less strain on the job market. Also, you'd have to check what exactly made an engineer, because even someone who shoveled coal or operated a lathe was called an engineer.
This is true, as an engineering student, i'm generally being told that the bulk of learning is through experience, or on the job, they aren't attempting to teach us everything or anything to specialise in. I think the business decision to not train anyone is ultimately the big problem.
I think this is the fundamental problem, engineering, for example, takes a specific sort of person, ie an intelligent one, only because the course material is pretty effective in keeping stupid people from finishing an engineering degree.
So as a result, they're desirable as workers in other sectors, because they're smart, and if they're desirable they get paid well, everywhere except in engineering
Anyone who says there's a shortage of engineers is quite stupid, there's a shortage of engineering work, if there was more of it, they'd get paid better, and that would attract more people into it. Getting more engineers in the current situation would only devalue engineering even more, and make more of them look for jobs in banks and finance companies.
It happens here in australia as well, except for mining sector, which is making a lot of people very wealthy, most engineering work is fairly typical, and there isn't much around, unless you get average wages.
I think one thing is, it will really depend on whether the wii u gets a foothold with the multiport games. If it doesn't then it will get problems kind of like the dreamcast, whether it will die though, i don't know. If it does get a foothold, most of the games, it won't matter if the ps4 and xbox whatever are more powerful, as they'll all just cater for the lowest common denominator, just like they've been doing now.
Isn't that why jobs in the public service are, government contractors are so lucrative, since their cheques don't bounce and hard to get sacked. It's an interesting idea anyway, but i'm struggling with the application, has logistics to soldiers been the biggest problem in the last few wars? I was under the impression that it was more that they were fighting against well hidden enemies (ie blended with civilians) and terrain which didn't suit any sort of vehicle around, mixed with a dash of no clear reason why they were there in the first place.
I'm convinced intel have been too set in their ways with portable computing, that, realistically none of their offerings can be considered serious attempts and that's why they haven't penetrated the market, but that's all because the x86 chips just havn't been small enough to be efficient and use little power to keep devices going for a long while. In the end, apple will say whatever the isheep will want to hear to keep them faithful, but they wouldn't have gone to intel if it didn't bring a vast array of improvements. I don't think arm will bring a vast array of improvements over x86 to the desktop sphere, and you have to remember that x86 has that huge backlog of software and familiarity that would be hard to just push to the side.
Yea i agree to this, my backlog is so large, that it ultimately doesn't matter, cool games can keep on coming, but i've got plenty of cool games already, and i don't mind playing a few ps2 games (although some of them look really good at 1080p on the pc emulator), or the isometric rpg's, in spite of the current gen graphics.
I honestly think this is what big content are fearful of, people distributing their work for free, at the moment free movie productions don't have a chance of competing with big block busters, but music is definitely moving in the direction of a real diverse mixture and a lot of the younger people, myself included, particularly when i was in high school not too long ago, the pop industry just couldn't cater to our tastes (be they what they may), it was largely underground or non mainstream music, and i've noticed now, the huge influence it has had on the pop industry, with all currently released music taking a lot of stylistic ques and motifs from underground electronic music of the 90's and 00's. I think that the record companies are now playing catch up rather than moving their weight around like the once did and told people more or less what to like by mass marketing it.
I think it's a testament to the times that you get attempts at laws to prevent the possibility of someone else being creative, since from what i read about SOPA, big content will be able to take down stuff which isn't even theirs, and i'm pretty sure, just like before, legitimately free things will be thrown in amongst the blatant piracy, but nevertheless, i for one am convinced that big content are trying to run the policies in such a way that guarantees their market more than their content.
Management are probably the first that should go, but naturally, they're the ones in a cozy job, and it certainly wouldn't look good on their CV. I think failure to remain competitive and failure to innovate are the critical things, it's hard to manage something like that, but ultimately, that's why they're there, and that's why they get paid for it.
If business was slowing down a lot, why weren't they sacking workers and reducing expenditure? I think this is more of a failure on management to restructure the company in a way that identifies that they can't really compete in the digital age how they once used to. I think that sometimes the management just have to realise that the company can't exist like it once did, and in order for the company to remain and still employ some people, they'll have to downsize a lot more than management might be comfortable about.
That is so true that i'm sad i wasted all my mod points yesterday.
Being late to the party with smartphones, i got an android, and the only reason i really want an update and why im so frustrated by the lack of them, is only because the latest firmware is so buggy. WP7, to me, appears to get the balance right, i'm considering just dumping android and going to wp7, but none of the wp7 seem to have the sort of features i want, and a few apps i'd like aren't available on wp7.
I think that a lot of people that push for technology (and don't have a vested interest) in the classroom don't realise that, good grades doesn't equal a good education. They try to make out that technology will increase their intelligence, i think it will just make it easier to spoonfeed students, it won't make them any better at developing their own ideas, conducting their own research, nor improving the quality of someones education.
Probably the biggest problem is, tests only identify those who are the best at regurgitating information, arguably, they need to know the information first, but exams don't really test how well students can conduct their own research (finding answers on google isn't research) nor how well they can formulate their own ideas (which is impossible to do on google, but hard to discern by a third party, ie teacher)
I think people should realise that technology has its place, and isn't an extension of somebody, technology is just a tool and not always the right tool.
I really can't say that is a significant problem here in australia. Yes you still get apathetic people, but i think it's a glib statement to say that people in general will be that simple, to just pick whoever they think looks the best, we had this bald, short ugly old fart for something like 11 years straight because his party won 4 consecutive elections. I personally didn't like him, but i think that's a different issue, arguably it was also a time of reasonably good stability for australia so that's why people kept on re-electing that party.
I think the emphasis on social networks and technology was just a case of the image of technology being used to encourage a grassroots campaign, in what was and will remain, an astroturf campaign. Obama still was funded (read; bought) by the usual suspects, and just like the who lyric in one of their songs, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" i think that all this talk of social networking is making people think they're doing something when they really aren't.
Fortunately here in australia, we have compulsory attendance to vote and as a result, campaign funding plays a subtly different role, it's more telling people why they should vote for one ahead of the other, rather than motivating people to actually vote. Compulsory attendance also means that people do pay some more attention (only slightly more) to the politics.
It's not magic. It can't automatically sign you up for Facebook or find your unrelated Facebook account from the Live ID you gave it, so it can't make you accidentally the social networking if you don't want it to.
I'm not too worried about that, it's more being constantly bothered to join, last thing i want is a phone which will start telling me that i need to join any particular thing. I don't mind the windows live id, because i already have a few to pick from. Thanks for the info though.
Since you have the phone and might be able to answer this, i don't use facebook, or any other social networking stuff, except form msn messenger, can that strong integration be removed or hidden, ie, if i don't use it, i don't want those tiles to show up nor options to be available to use the social networking?
I know one person who has a windows phone, and he's very happy with it (iirc htc mozart). I'm a bit late to the smartphones, only getting one a few months ago, in an SGS i9000 and i'm really disappointed, gotta go to optus and whinge see if i can get something else out of them under warranty, phone doesn't like working all the time. Im unhappy with android, it's a real backward step going from a phone which is comparatively low on features, but works reliably, to a phone with lots of features, when they work, because it's not reliable. I am considering a win phone only because from independant reviews, it looks like ms is trying to push a good product.
Finally, someone who's had a think about it, rather than just coming in with a closed mind, took a while to sift through commnts to find something interesting, pity i have no mod points.
Yea, just look at egypt, the had a bit of a revolution, well sort of, the regime gave up, sort of, it's more the faceless men in the backrooms who have remained where they are, and are still doing what they were doing as before, ultimate difference, same shit different smell.
Slashdot Mirror
I did check the spelling, dunno how i didn't change it, damn lack of edit button.
Umm, what events are you referring to? Surely nothing recent. I can't think of anything remotely resembling what you describe in the last 50 years. The most recent I can think of was the partisan resistance to the communist regime, the last members were caught in 1962.
I don't even see how that would work, the Army against unarmed civilians. Romanian citizens are largely unarmed; during the dictatorship owning weapons was prohibited; and since the Revolution the rules are still somewhat strict. Romania hasn't been a "right to bear arms" type of society for at least 100 years now, it's quite unlikely to find a fire weapon in most Romanian homes.
Well, whether they had weapons or not, there was the romanian revolution of 1989, the romanian army was sent in to quash riots and protests, there were over 1000 deaths.
The arab spring is also a good example, the army was sent in a few countries as well. Now i understand that they operate under the guise of keeping the peace or whatever, but, the defence force is the best equipped organisation and they are meant to defend the nation from external threats, internal ones are getting too political, in the romanian example, it's clear, the army was trying to suppress a revolution, and they did kill a lot of people in the process. I think sending the army to quash a revolution leaves no option but a violent one, if the people are committed enough,and as a result, the army, like i said before, being the best equipped force, shouldn't be interfering in internal affairs.
Soldiers are trained to follow orders, now they havn't completely perfected this, but in a nutshell, look at egypt and libya, a lot of soldiers did defect, but not all. Any US soldiers defecting would probably be court marshalled and executed if something like that were to happen, so unless a very large number of them decide to defect all at once, many of them would have to more or less put themselves up for effectively death.
The best examples are the ex communist countries, romania was particularly bad with the army fighting against its own citizens in quite overt urban warfare, until the army decided to switch sides, that effectively stopped the war there and then. Other eastern bloc countries had prolonged periods of bloodshed, like poland which had a period of martial law and the secret police were killing many upon many people for most of the 1980's, many see the point of no return was with the sadistic murder of a polish priest named Fr. Jerzy Popieuszko by the secret police
I think that, first that whatever weapons the defense forces wield, so should people be able to, or, it should be defined in the constitution of the respective country, that the army is not allowed to mobilise against its own people, that is an illegal act, but the problem with the last one is, well, at the end of the day, whoever controls the army, well, rules or constitutions don't matter do they.
I agree, the whole thing about it is that communism and capitalism sell the same lie, a society can only carry so many parasites, and both forms dangle identical carrots, ie, communism had the higher phases where only those who wanted to work would, but the lower phases needed to be overcome first, so everyone had to chip in, and capitalism has the same problem you mentioned, the means is different, but in the end it tries to suck people into thinking that everyone can sit around and do nothing, whilst still being rich, which in actual fact, is impossible, there's only so many people who can be carried by, for lack of a better word, the proletariat (i'm aware of its commie connotations) in government jobs, or positions which don't actually produce anything, investment bankers being a big one, they just shuffle money around and create inflation. They are literally becoming wealthy off the work of other people. They should start looking at taxing non productive industries differently.
There was a different policy in communist countries though, there wasn't much work, productivity was significantly lower and since education was paid for by the state, they made everyone go to university so that they stayed in school for longer, and placed less strain on the job market. Also, you'd have to check what exactly made an engineer, because even someone who shoveled coal or operated a lathe was called an engineer.
This is true, as an engineering student, i'm generally being told that the bulk of learning is through experience, or on the job, they aren't attempting to teach us everything or anything to specialise in. I think the business decision to not train anyone is ultimately the big problem.
I think this is the fundamental problem, engineering, for example, takes a specific sort of person, ie an intelligent one, only because the course material is pretty effective in keeping stupid people from finishing an engineering degree.
So as a result, they're desirable as workers in other sectors, because they're smart, and if they're desirable they get paid well, everywhere except in engineering
Anyone who says there's a shortage of engineers is quite stupid, there's a shortage of engineering work, if there was more of it, they'd get paid better, and that would attract more people into it. Getting more engineers in the current situation would only devalue engineering even more, and make more of them look for jobs in banks and finance companies.
It happens here in australia as well, except for mining sector, which is making a lot of people very wealthy, most engineering work is fairly typical, and there isn't much around, unless you get average wages.
I think one thing is, it will really depend on whether the wii u gets a foothold with the multiport games. If it doesn't then it will get problems kind of like the dreamcast, whether it will die though, i don't know. If it does get a foothold, most of the games, it won't matter if the ps4 and xbox whatever are more powerful, as they'll all just cater for the lowest common denominator, just like they've been doing now.
Isn't that why jobs in the public service are, government contractors are so lucrative, since their cheques don't bounce and hard to get sacked. It's an interesting idea anyway, but i'm struggling with the application, has logistics to soldiers been the biggest problem in the last few wars? I was under the impression that it was more that they were fighting against well hidden enemies (ie blended with civilians) and terrain which didn't suit any sort of vehicle around, mixed with a dash of no clear reason why they were there in the first place.
Interesting about apple, never thought about it.
I'm convinced intel have been too set in their ways with portable computing, that, realistically none of their offerings can be considered serious attempts and that's why they haven't penetrated the market, but that's all because the x86 chips just havn't been small enough to be efficient and use little power to keep devices going for a long while. In the end, apple will say whatever the isheep will want to hear to keep them faithful, but they wouldn't have gone to intel if it didn't bring a vast array of improvements. I don't think arm will bring a vast array of improvements over x86 to the desktop sphere, and you have to remember that x86 has that huge backlog of software and familiarity that would be hard to just push to the side.
Yea i agree to this, my backlog is so large, that it ultimately doesn't matter, cool games can keep on coming, but i've got plenty of cool games already, and i don't mind playing a few ps2 games (although some of them look really good at 1080p on the pc emulator), or the isometric rpg's, in spite of the current gen graphics.
I honestly think this is what big content are fearful of, people distributing their work for free, at the moment free movie productions don't have a chance of competing with big block busters, but music is definitely moving in the direction of a real diverse mixture and a lot of the younger people, myself included, particularly when i was in high school not too long ago, the pop industry just couldn't cater to our tastes (be they what they may), it was largely underground or non mainstream music, and i've noticed now, the huge influence it has had on the pop industry, with all currently released music taking a lot of stylistic ques and motifs from underground electronic music of the 90's and 00's. I think that the record companies are now playing catch up rather than moving their weight around like the once did and told people more or less what to like by mass marketing it.
I think it's a testament to the times that you get attempts at laws to prevent the possibility of someone else being creative, since from what i read about SOPA, big content will be able to take down stuff which isn't even theirs, and i'm pretty sure, just like before, legitimately free things will be thrown in amongst the blatant piracy, but nevertheless, i for one am convinced that big content are trying to run the policies in such a way that guarantees their market more than their content.
Management are probably the first that should go, but naturally, they're the ones in a cozy job, and it certainly wouldn't look good on their CV. I think failure to remain competitive and failure to innovate are the critical things, it's hard to manage something like that, but ultimately, that's why they're there, and that's why they get paid for it.
If business was slowing down a lot, why weren't they sacking workers and reducing expenditure? I think this is more of a failure on management to restructure the company in a way that identifies that they can't really compete in the digital age how they once used to. I think that sometimes the management just have to realise that the company can't exist like it once did, and in order for the company to remain and still employ some people, they'll have to downsize a lot more than management might be comfortable about.
That is so true that i'm sad i wasted all my mod points yesterday.
Being late to the party with smartphones, i got an android, and the only reason i really want an update and why im so frustrated by the lack of them, is only because the latest firmware is so buggy. WP7, to me, appears to get the balance right, i'm considering just dumping android and going to wp7, but none of the wp7 seem to have the sort of features i want, and a few apps i'd like aren't available on wp7.
I think that a lot of people that push for technology (and don't have a vested interest) in the classroom don't realise that, good grades doesn't equal a good education. They try to make out that technology will increase their intelligence, i think it will just make it easier to spoonfeed students, it won't make them any better at developing their own ideas, conducting their own research, nor improving the quality of someones education.
Probably the biggest problem is, tests only identify those who are the best at regurgitating information, arguably, they need to know the information first, but exams don't really test how well students can conduct their own research (finding answers on google isn't research) nor how well they can formulate their own ideas (which is impossible to do on google, but hard to discern by a third party, ie teacher)
I think people should realise that technology has its place, and isn't an extension of somebody, technology is just a tool and not always the right tool.
I really can't say that is a significant problem here in australia. Yes you still get apathetic people, but i think it's a glib statement to say that people in general will be that simple, to just pick whoever they think looks the best, we had this bald, short ugly old fart for something like 11 years straight because his party won 4 consecutive elections. I personally didn't like him, but i think that's a different issue, arguably it was also a time of reasonably good stability for australia so that's why people kept on re-electing that party.
I think the emphasis on social networks and technology was just a case of the image of technology being used to encourage a grassroots campaign, in what was and will remain, an astroturf campaign. Obama still was funded (read; bought) by the usual suspects, and just like the who lyric in one of their songs, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" i think that all this talk of social networking is making people think they're doing something when they really aren't.
Fortunately here in australia, we have compulsory attendance to vote and as a result, campaign funding plays a subtly different role, it's more telling people why they should vote for one ahead of the other, rather than motivating people to actually vote. Compulsory attendance also means that people do pay some more attention (only slightly more) to the politics.
It's not magic. It can't automatically sign you up for Facebook or find your unrelated Facebook account from the Live ID you gave it, so it can't make you accidentally the social networking if you don't want it to.
I'm not too worried about that, it's more being constantly bothered to join, last thing i want is a phone which will start telling me that i need to join any particular thing. I don't mind the windows live id, because i already have a few to pick from. Thanks for the info though.
Since you have the phone and might be able to answer this, i don't use facebook, or any other social networking stuff, except form msn messenger, can that strong integration be removed or hidden, ie, if i don't use it, i don't want those tiles to show up nor options to be available to use the social networking?
I know one person who has a windows phone, and he's very happy with it (iirc htc mozart). I'm a bit late to the smartphones, only getting one a few months ago, in an SGS i9000 and i'm really disappointed, gotta go to optus and whinge see if i can get something else out of them under warranty, phone doesn't like working all the time. Im unhappy with android, it's a real backward step going from a phone which is comparatively low on features, but works reliably, to a phone with lots of features, when they work, because it's not reliable. I am considering a win phone only because from independant reviews, it looks like ms is trying to push a good product.
It isn't old vs new technology, it was where he could make the most. I'm sure he'd love the new laws....if he could make a buck from them.
Well, wouldn't anyone love laws where they can make money from them!
Finally, someone who's had a think about it, rather than just coming in with a closed mind, took a while to sift through commnts to find something interesting, pity i have no mod points.
Yea, just look at egypt, the had a bit of a revolution, well sort of, the regime gave up, sort of, it's more the faceless men in the backrooms who have remained where they are, and are still doing what they were doing as before, ultimate difference, same shit different smell.
I think it's just free publicity, like just look, they got on /.