Well, I've seen a pre screening of this movies trailer and all I can say is "Wow." Lucas' intellect is like a single, solitary star, twinkling into a howling universe of unending blackness and despair that is modern America. Bravo, Lucas!
I knew that the inclusion of Colt 45 megastar and part time ladies man Billy Dee Williams in episode 6 portended the inclusion of more adult themes, but who could've expected this?
Lucas is growing up, and America is growing up with him. Or rather I should say his kids, who wrote over 25 lines (90% of the script) to the screenplay to Episode 1, have written this one in it's entirety. Well, for the final judgement, wait for the movie, but as for me, it's obvious that making the same movie over and over since 1975 hasn't dulled Lucas' intellect one bit.
No, you shouldn't. You are using the company's computers to send a message over the company's networks. That equipment does not belong to you; you do not have the right to do anything with it that the company does not explicitly allow.
Well I disagree.
You have no right to privacy when using company equipment. When I pay for your time and own the equipment, I reserve the right to monitor how you use it.
What you don't understand is that is your employees labor that paid for "your" computers, not you. Handing a paycheck to someone does not give you any moral right to run roughshod over their lives or control them in any way, and although your company's policies seem reasonable, your attitude is annoying, to say the least.
... that they used smallpox as an example, since smallpox was introduced by the Europeans into North America and devastated the Native Americans, who weren't used to living in sewers as the Europeans were:-).
No, they've only destroyed the inefficient competition of Mom & Pop stores, quaint as they might be. Free people vote with their dollars and go to Walmart. Are you saying they should be forced to go to higher-charging Mom & Pop stores under thread of jail?
1. Once all competition has been destroyed, there isn't much reason to keep prices low.
2. Once everyone in town works for minimum wage at wal mart, I guess they really DO appreciate those lower prices.
probably. Postgresql is already a 90% replacement for Oracle Workgroup server.
And before you flame me, that oracle workgroup server, not enterprise server. And most Oracle installations are the "workgroup" product, which is total overkill itself in most situations. Probably even MySQL would suffice for many things people use Oracle for.
Also, don't try to say that I, or the original poster are not "living" because we are makeing a choice not to live your type of lifestyle. I can "lighten up" and enjoy life without using mind-altering substances.
No I am just being smug. I simply see no reason to be sober all the time. Everything in moderation. I don't see any intrinsic value or virtue in abstinence.
I've never tried any drug, never smoked, never even drank a single drop of alcohol. No, I'm not religious (I'm an atheist at best). Drugs are stupid. Cigarettes are stupid. Alcohol is stupid.
Lack of curiosity is also stupid. Smoking pot is not like pouring draino down your throat. Lighten up and live a little.
No one ever made a more important observation in seven words than
Randolph Bourne once did: "War is the health of
the state". War has been the main motor for the
extension of state power in Europe for a thousand years,
and not only in Europe. War enlarges the state and increases its
wealth and its powers. It promotes obedience and justifies the
repression of dissent, redefined as disloyalty. It relieves social
tensions by redirecting them outwards at an enemy state which is, of
course, doing exactly the same thing with all the same consequences.
From the state's perspective, there is only one thing wrong with wars:
they end.
That wars end is ultimately more important than whether they end
in victory or defeat. Occasionally defeat spells destruction for
states, as for the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires after World
War I, but not usually, and even if it does, they give way to other
states. The state-system not only endures, it prevails. Usually war
is well worth the risk -- not to the combatants or the suffering
civilians, of course: but well worth the risk to the state.
Peace is something else again. The immediate consequence may be a
recession or a depression, as after the American Revolution and World
War I, whose hardships are all the more galling when they fall upon
the population which "won" the war and naively supposes it will share
in the fruits of a victory which belongs to its state, not to the
people. The regime may artificially prolong the wartime climate of
repression and sacrifice, as did the United States by working up the
Red Scare after World War I, but soon the people crave what Warren
Harding promised them, a return to normalcy. The vanquished, of
course, rarely fare as well as occupied Japan and Germany did after
World War II, but even then the Germans initially experienced famine.
There have been epochs in which certain states were almost always
at war, such as Republican Rome, whose oligarchs, as Livy
repeatedly demonstrates, were well aware of the way war was a
safety-valve for dissipating class conflict. Colonial wars well serve
the purpose since they are fought far from the home country and
usually waged against antagonists who are, however gallant, greatly
inferior militarily.
The British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a
good example. Engorged with the wealth of commercial capitalism (soon
to be unimaginably enlarged by the Industrial Revolution), secure in
its insularity, shielded by the world's greatest navy, with a robust
and ruthless ruling class wise to the ways of statecraft, the British
State could afford a war anytime it needed one. The cannon fodder was
easy to come by. There were outright mercenaries such as Hessions on
the market. And yesterday's enemies were today's troops. The Irish,
repeatedly crushed in the seventeenth century, were one source.
Starting in 1746 the British annihilated the society and culture of
the Scottish Highlanders, then recruited regiments from the survivors.
They would repeat these cost-effective methods in India, in Africa,
everywhere. And then there were the English sources of expendibles:
the peasants forced off the land by enclosure of the commons, and the
urban poor. They would not be missed, and there were always more
where they came from.
But times have changed. Some states can possibly carry on in the
old way for a while -- maybe Serbia, North Korea, Iraq -- but the
United States cannot, for at least two reasons: We are too squeamish,
and we are too poor.
Too squeamish in the sense that, as Saddam Hussein crowed before
the second Gulf War, America is a society which cannot tolerate 10,000
dead. He was right, although that did him no good, since he was
unable to inflict 10,000 or even 1,000 deaths. Grenada and Panama
were larks, but even such two-bit gang wars as Lebanon and Somalia
were not, and nobody has any stomach for war in Haiti or Bosnia.
Americans are fast losing their taste for media wars, to say nothing
of real wars.
And too poor for any war long enough to put a lasting blip in any
President's ratings. The attack on Iraq was the turning point. As
adroitly handled as the manipulation of the mass mind was, Americans
only went along with the war on the condition that the "Allies" pay
for it. Even the most dim-witted are dimly aware that the lion's
share of their Federal taxes goes to pay for war debts and military
spending they never reaped any benefits from. The trade-off for lives
in a high-tech, media-savvy, photogenic war is money. It costs more,
immensely more, than war ever has. But America does not have more,
immensely more wealth than it ever has. It has less, and less and
less all the time.
Even with the massed forces of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and all the rest
of the mainstream media behind him, and despite an overwhelming
victory which owed as much to luck as skill, George Bush became the
first President to win a war and then lose an election -- to a
pot-smoking, womanizing draft-dodger.
Thus the regime is caught in what the Marxists used to call a
"contradiction." It needs war, for war is the health of the state,
but (with occasional ephemeral exceptions) it cannot afford either to
win wars or lose them. But what kind of a war is it possible to wage,
at not too intolerable a cost, which avoids these twin pitfalls -- a
war which cannot be won or lost?
The "War on Drugs." Which is not a real war, of course, but what
the Germans call a Sitzkrieg, a phony war. Formerly they sold us the
war to end all wars. Now they sell us an endless war. The March of
Dimes is an instructive precedent. The March of Dimes raised lots of
money which (what was left of it after most of it went for advertising
and administration)financed research on a polio vaccine. Then came
catastrophe: Jonas Salk found a polio vaccine. So, its purpose
accomplished, the March of Dimes went out of business, right? (Just
kidding.) No, the organization moved on to an amorphous quest, to
conquer "birth defects," of which there are so many varieties that the
March of Dimes can count on doing business for many years to come.
Some people say "the ends justify the means," others say they don't.
The March of Dimes has transcended the contradiction: The means
justify the end.
Such is the utility, to the state, of the War on Drugs. It cannot
be lost, for there is no enemy to lose it to. And for countless
reasons it cannot be won. The government cannot inderdict more than a
fraction of the cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other drugs which, by
illegalizing them, the government has raised the price on to the point
that they are well worth smuggling in. And some of the dope, such as
marijuana and opium, is easily produced domestically. Many tens of
millions of Americans have indulged in illegal drugs, including the
President. Their kids see no reason not to try what their parents
did, regardless what the parents are preaching now. Children tend not
to heed their parents when they know they are lying. Besides, there
is always alcohol.
And in the suburbs as in the ghetto, legalizing drugs has jacked up
their prices so far that busting drug dealers has no "supply-side"
effect. Taking a drug dealer off the street just opens up a vacancy
for another entrepreneur. Indeed, it is standard practice for dealers
to get their competitors busted to take that competitive edge. But it
makes no more difference who is dealing the drugs than it makes who is
running the state. Indeed, they may be the same people! The Drug War
is the health of the state.
Because it is only a phony war, the War on Drugs is fiscally
manageable. The government can spend as much or as little as it
likes, since the result is always the same. Even the out-of-pocket
costs are disguised, divided as they are among Federal, state and
local governments and confused with funding for law enforcement. The
single greatest expense, prisons, is one which most people mistake for
just about the best thing the government does for them. Underpinning
this error is a misconception about what the product of the criminal
justice system is. It is not crime control, for even if that could be
measured with any accuracy, there is no evidence that law enforcement
in general reduces crime. The product is crime rates, which are a
function, not of the amount of crime, but of the amount of law
enforcement. Thus the authorities can manufacture a "crime wave" if
they want more money, or ease up on enforcement if they want to take
credit for doing exactly the opposite -- a reverse Catch-22, a no-lose
situation. Aside from themselves and their higher-ups, the only
beneficiaries of those 100,000 more police that President Clinton will
put on the streets will be Dunkin' Donut franchisees.
What's more, to some extent the War on Drugs pays for itself.
Just as armies used to subsist largely by "living off the land,"
pillaging the districts they passed through, so the drug warriors cram
their coffers with booty from forfeitures. And that's just on the
formal, legal level. Off the books, of course, the police have always
seized a lot more drugs than ever found their way to the evidence
room. The dealers and junkies are unlikely to complain. (The classic
scenario: a cop makes an illegal search on the street. He finds
something. He asks, courteously, "Is this yours?" The answer is
always no.) Some dope the police sell on their own account. Some
they use themselves. And some they use for "flaking" (planting drugs
on suspected drug dealers) and "padding" (adding more dope to what was
found to turn a misdemeanor into a felony).
In still another way the War on Drugs offers one of the benefits of
a real war without its costs and risks. Every real war is a civil
liberties holocaust. Even on the formal, legal level,
national security -- a so-called compelling state interest -- tends to
trump fundamental rights, at least until the shooting stops.
Meanwhile patriotic vigilantes carry out the castrations, the
lynchings, the arsons -- the dirty work too dirty for the state to do,
even in a supposed wartime emergency, but not too dirty for the state
to wink at afterwards. The United States during World War I and the
Red Scare is one example; the Italy which the liberals let the
Fascists take over, after letting them extralegally smash the
socialists, communists and anarchists, is another.
But peace returns and the legal ground lost is mostly recovered, or
even more ground is taken. Once the state has demolished the radical
opposition irreparably, it may well restore constitutional rights to
the impotent remnants and bask in its own announced glory, parading
its tolerance once it doesn't matter any more.
The phony war is much more effective. It cannot be conducted
without massive invasions of liberty and property. The single most
important right implicated, and endangered, by the War on Drugs is the
Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable searches and seizures.
This body of law effectively began during Prohibition, and today it
is, as Professor Fred Cohen says, "driven by drugs." The rights of
everyone are defined by the rights the judiciary grudgingly grants to
drug offenders.
Other rights are reduced too. Under the forfeiture laws, private
property is taken without due process or just compensation. Applied
to Native Americans and others, drug laws interfere with freedom of
religion; so does the common practice of forcing drunk drivers into
"rehabs" for indoctrination in the religious tenets of Alcoholics
Anonymous. Even the campaign against gun ownership is an indirect
consequence of the War on Drugs. Participants in the drug trade have
to enforce their own contracts, since the state will not. And
prohibition has made drugs very valuable commodities: in the inner
cities, by far the most valuable commodities. Meanwhile, drug addicts
rob and steal to support their habits. The result is an arms race and
the clamor for gun control. One prohibition leads to another.
For the criminal, the ultimate challenge is the perfect crime. For
the state, it is the perfect law. Is it prohibition?
Maybe not. Drug prohibition is today much more popular than
alcohol prohibition ever was, but within living memory,
decriminalization was a serious possibility. It might become so again
if the anti-drug hysteria continues to rise till it reaches a level
impossible to sustain. And it probably will rise, because the drug
war has been institutionalized. Various agencies and organizations
have a vested interest in its unlimited extension, although its
unlimited extension is not only impossible, it would deprive the state
of the great advantage of drug war over real war: its predictability
and manageability. As some organs of government grow and grow, there
is less for others. Since victory, like defeat, is impossible, there
will never be a "peace dividend" to divvy up. The state is probably
already draining more wealth out of civil society than is consistent
with the state's own long-term interests. If it takes more and more,
the parasite will kill the host -- or the host will kill the parasite.
Eventually the state may succumb to its own success. The state is
huge. And it is bureaucratic. That means that it is intricately
subdivided by function (or by what was initially considered a division
of labor by function: in fact, overlapping or competing jurisdiction
is common and tends to increase over time). Even if the left hand
knows what the right hand is doing, it may not be able to do anything
about it. (Or else, in the words of the German proverb, "one hand
washes the other.") Inter-agency cooperation becomes more difficult
as it becomes more frequent and more necessary. "The complexity of
joint action" thwarts action, or its purpose.
It is very hard, administratively, to reduce a bureau's budget,
but easy to increase it. Bureaus fiercely resist zero-based budgeting
-- that is, starting from scratch, the annual rejustification of every
line of the budget request -- as reinventing the wheel. And it is
difficult for higher-level authority to identify areas for cost
reduction, if it even wants to, since the very raison d'etre of
bureaucratic organization is deference to institutionalized expertise.
The easy way is to take the previous budget as presumptively the next
one; it is only departures from the status quo, not the status quo
itself, which require justification. The bureau, staffed with
supposed experts, is itself the usual source of justifications for
departures, and the departures are always in the direction of more
money and more power for the bureau. What goes for each bureau goes
for all of them. Thus government grows.
Referring to the way competition between workers lowers wages for
all of them, Fredy Perlman observed: "The daily practice of
all annuls the goals of each." Inter-agency interactions tend to have
the same effect. So does inter-agency competition for tax money.
The long-term implications for the War on Drugs are, for the
state, ominous. The more the state extends its control over society,
the less control it has over itself. The more the state absorbs
society, the weaker the state as an entity responsive to a common will
becomes. It disintegrates into an authoritarian pluralism reminiscent
of feudalism, but lacking its romantic charm. Some agencies fatten
off the War on Drugs, most do not. The ones that do are the first to
go their own way. Attorney General Janet Reno had no control over the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms when it exterminated the
Branch Davidians to win what amounted to nothing more than a gang war:
but she took responsibility. The Drug Enforcement Administration is
likewise as independent as Hoover's FBI or anybody's CIA.
For the state, another inevitable adverse consequence of the Drug
War is corruption. Not that corruption is necessarily a
bad thing for the state. Up to a point, police shakedowns of drug
dealers, bookies, pimps and other extralegal entrepreneurs benefit the
state in more than one way. The more the cops collect in payoffs and
confiscations, the less they have to be paid in salaries. Cops whose
supervisors know they are on the take (as they do, since they are on
the take too) look the other way unless and until for
some reason they need to get rid of a particular cop. Corruption is
thus a management tool.
But some cops get too greedy and go too far. Most are
"grass-eaters" (bribe-takers) who take what comes their way, but some
are "meat-eaters" (extortionists) -- proactively corrupt -- who
actively seek out or set up corruption opportunities, like the Special
Investigative Unit detectives depicted in the movie Serpico. The
grass-eaters cover for the meat-eaters (the "blue code of silence")
since they all have something to hide. Until recently, police
administrators and their academic allies thought that they could keep
corruption under control through various institutional reforms most of
which were initially proposed by the Knapp Commission.
Maybe the reforms would have worked, except for one thing: the War on
Drugs. Corruption is making a comeback, even in the Knapp-reformed
NYPD. Because penalties are much harsher and the
profits of drug trafficking much higher, the protection the police
sell commands a much higher price. Drug-driven corruption
is the growth sector of police misconduct.
For the state, the problem with runaway corruption is that it
cannot be confined to where its benefits exceed its costs. The state
needs the police for a modicum of selective law enforcement and, much
more important, for social control -- as the occasion calls for, to
break strikes, evict squatters, suppress riots, repress dissidents and
keep traffic moving. Even in our sophisticated times, when
manipulation is the hippest of control strategies, there is often no
substitute for the gun and the billy-club.
But a pervasively corrupt police force cannot be counted on when
push comes to shove. Meat-eaters cannot spare the time to enforce the
law. Officers on the nod are ineffective knights of the club. Police
who are enforcing drug laws are unavailable to enforce others.
There's been a tremendous expansion in undercover police work in
recent years, inevitably accompanied by more corruption. Police, as
workers, are notoriously difficult to manage because they are usually
out by themselves, unsupervised. Detectives especially are in a
position to be secretive about their activities, and more drug
enforcement means more detective/undercover work. These cops are
pursuing their own agendas. Why do dogs lick their balls? Because
they can.
Corruption scandals demoralise the police and delegitimize the
state. Most people obey the law most of the time, not because they
fear punishment if they don't, but because they believe in the system.
As they cease to believe, they will cease to obey -- not only the laws
that don't matter (like "don't use drugs") but also the ones that do
(like "pay your taxes"). And, ironically, crackdowns on corruption
impair police effectiveness for other purposes.
The state has overbuilt itself so heavily that the weight begins
to crack the foundations. It is not the sort of elephantiasis that
can be eased by privatization. It doesn't matter who collects the
garbage. What matters is who has the guns. Not "social pork" but the
essence of sovereignty -- the means to enforce order -- is tumorous.
Thus the cancer is inoperable. The state may die, fittingly, of an
overdose.
I agree. It seems to me there was a signifigant market for an os that did multimedia really well.
And the hardware to go with it. A studio appliance.
If they had built such an appliance, they might have gotten somewhere, instead of fiddle faddleing with home users and internet appliance stupidities.
The BeBox was a start. Throw in some very high end sound and video hardware, and a few key apps to go with it, and they would've had something. I know that multimedia people are dying to get rid of their trashy pc's and crash happy macs.
What wonderful company? I don't care whether or not they open their source, but they were stupid from the get go.
Be COULD have been marketed to people who do high end multimedia. There is a tremendous need for a reliable OS that can do multimedia really, really well. All Be needed was a few key applications and they would have found themselves in a lot of video and sound studios. Instead they stupidly tried to get into the home desktop market. That was insane.
Linux vendors at least know what they are doing: they market linux primarily as a server OS. As a result, they are not going down the toilet.
two drives using software raid5 on four partitions? Dude, that is crazy. Use RAID0 or mirroring. In your setup everything is slower because the disk is having to write the same data on different areas of the same disk. That negates on of the major advantages of RAID, which is to take advantage of the interface speed by combining disks to rw in parallel.
In addition, because you are only using two disks, on RAID5, you are not fault tolerant at all.
In addition to all that, reiser had serious problems with (software) RAID 1 or RAID5.
The Russians are too often portrayed in WW2 movies as nazi cannon fodder. The russians fought like hell in WW2, shit,
the germans didn't have a chance of beating the Soviet Army, one front, two fronts, doesn't matter. Stalingrad was
absolutely apocalyptic: two million casualties. Think about that for a minute.
Actually, this is accurate. The company depicted, though, must have been one of the luckier ones, many of the units had only one
rifle to share between 10 men. It didn't always matter, because alot of the fighting was hand to hand with knives and such. And the
Germans did have a very real chance of beating the Soviets. The casualty figures were closer to 1.3 million, with the Soviets
suffering about 1 million of those. It was a very costly victory for the Red Army. To get to Stalingrad, the German army had
already advanced 2000 miles through Russia, sweeping aside Soviet defenses like they weren't even there.
Well, the germans had chances and they did make a lot of mistakes, as did the Soviets. Most of the german generals wanted Moscow, not Stalingrad.
The Red Army was particularly suited to urban combat and the nazi army for open warfare. I don't think the Germans even had sub machine guns at this point, where the soviets had PPSh sub-machine guns in vast quantities (and the germans were terrified of them). While the Red Army was known for it's insane head on attacks, they did not generally fight this way in Stalingrad (as depicted in the movie). I would not have minded them showing NKVD officers shooting their own troops as long as they showed the Russians winning from time to time. They way it was depicted in the movie it looked like the Russians were getting cremated and then just somehow won.
Besides, by October, it was the germans making the insane head on attacks.
About the order of battle, I did some checking, since I'm rusty...
9/10's of the city was defended by Chuikov and the 62nd Army (about 54,000 men, 110 tanks). The Germans were able to commit over 50% of the Sixth Army's resources to fighting in the city proper - about 170,000 men, 500 tanks. So, OK I was wrong.
Also a note about production, just for kicks.
Tanks:
1941:
Russian: 6,590
German: 3,790
Yes they were evil but not nearly as evil as any of the communist regimes. Six million killed in nazi camps to over 60 million killed in soviet gulags. So who would you prefer to have as a neighbor: a clean cut business man who murdered his family in their sleep with a gun or a guy who just slaughted them with an ax? This whole sympathetic view of communists scares me.
There is a difference. Communist bosses tend to hate everyone equally, since anyone can be a threat to state power. Nazis target groups of people in order to make everyone else hate them. I'm not sure which is worse.
Excuse me? The Germans almost won. If there hadn't been some rumblings in Yugoslavia (and we all know that kind of terrain just swallows up infantry), Germany would have had more than enough to capture the Kremlin. That delayed them a coupled months before marching into the soviet union. Time that they needed before the Russian winter set in. Same kinda thing happened to Napoleon.
No the Germans had some spectacular successes in the beginning of the war, but after Stalingrad they were pretty much stomped everywhere they went. It was a constant retreat after that. If you look at the resources available to the Soviets it is hard to imagine that the Germans ever thought they could win. Even if the nazis had gotten further than they did, the Soviets would have relocated thier factories just as they did at the beginning of the war.
The german made Stalingrad was a better movie than this one, but... it was told from the German point of view, and that is getting really, really tired to me. Americans seems to have this "thing" for the nazis, a sort of distant admiration (know any war gamers?). It bothers me. Anyway, I really want Stalingrad to be given the treatment it deserves on film. this unfortunately wasn't it, although it was pretty good.
The Russians are too often portrayed in WW2 movies as nazi cannon fodder. The russians fought like hell in WW2, shit, the germans didn't have a chance of beating the Soviet Army, one front, two fronts, doesn't matter. Stalingrad was absolutely apocalyptic: two million casualties. Think about that for a minute.
My criticisms:
The set was beautiful and horrifying. nuff said
Most of the war footage was very good, but left me wanting more
Although the Soviet officers were very brutal, they were very short of men in Stalingrad before the counter attack took place. I doubt seriously they were gunning down their own soldiers at that point.
The Soviets had IIRC roughly two rifle divisions defending the entire city against the entire German Sixth Army. This is horrendous odds - yet they held out for several months, even after the german Operation Hubertus, which was their final push to take the factories near the Volga. The movie doesn't give you a sense of how desperate this was, or why the Soviets won.
The movie doesn't show the Kontraudar or even mention it. (in the end the germans "just lose", even though they appear to be winning the whole time. Americans are too ignorant for them to leave this out) The sixth army was encircled, all of their flanking units (the entire Romainian and hungarian armies) literally ceased to exist on the first day of the Soviet counter attack. They were wiped out. The Soviet counter attack in Stalingrad was one of the largest military operations ever conducted). After that they just let the Nazis freeze to death.
I wanted to see the Russians fire off some Katyusha batteries, those things make the most awesome sound I've ever heard, especially with thousands of them being launched at once (if you've never heard them they sound a little like a lound "boom" followed by a godzilla-like scream)
No T-34's or KV's. The russian tanks really fucked the Germans up in Stalingrad. Just that I'm tired of the German's reputation for killer tanks. The Soviets had theirs too.
Well it was nice to see a minstream movie about Stalingrad from the Russian point of view. But the battle deserves better treatment than this.
I think a good idea for a Stalingrad movie would be two hours of unrelenting violence. No plot, no story, no heroes. You get to know the characters for a few minutes and then they die, without warning and without ceremony.
I agree the love story was pretty bad; just there to prop up the plot, which was thin (two sniper hunting each other?)
The sex scene itself was good. They were both filthy yet had a good time... I think this is probably accurate.
You are wrong about females in combat. The Soviets used a lot of women, however, they were mostly in AA units. I imagine things got so chaotic in Stalingrad that it really didn't much matter. This was entirely plausible.
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Re:How many people will rush out and upgrade?
on
XFree 4.0.3 Released
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· Score: 1
Because my operating system, Windows 2000, supports every chipset that has existed and will ever exis
No you can't upgrade peices of windows, you're just SOL if it doesn't support your card. I've had to buy new video cards when different windows versions came out, because the old one's no longer supported.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I've seen a pre screening of this movies trailer and all I can say is "Wow." Lucas' intellect is like a single, solitary star, twinkling into a howling universe of unending blackness and despair that is modern America. Bravo, Lucas!
I knew that the inclusion of Colt 45 megastar and part time ladies man Billy Dee Williams in episode 6 portended the inclusion of more adult themes, but who could've expected this?
Lucas is growing up, and America is growing up with him. Or rather I should say his kids, who wrote over 25 lines (90% of the script) to the screenplay to Episode 1, have written this one in it's entirety. Well, for the final judgement, wait for the movie, but as for me, it's obvious that making the same movie over and over since 1975 hasn't dulled Lucas' intellect one bit.
Well I disagree.
What you don't understand is that is your employees labor that paid for "your" computers, not you. Handing a paycheck to someone does not give you any moral right to run roughshod over their lives or control them in any way, and although your company's policies seem reasonable, your attitude is annoying, to say the least.
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... that they used smallpox as an example, since smallpox was introduced by the Europeans into North America and devastated the Native Americans, who weren't used to living in sewers as the Europeans were :-).
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1. Once all competition has been destroyed, there isn't much reason to keep prices low.
2. Once everyone in town works for minimum wage at wal mart, I guess they really DO appreciate those lower prices.
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you're right ... mp3's are small files? they average 5MB in size.
/var/and /usr, especially /usr/doc ...
/usr on 2 4GB UW scsi drives striped w/ reiserfs ... that was fast.
But where reiser really makes a difference is on
For a while I was running
But reiser sadly has extreme corruption problems, at least for me.
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probably. Postgresql is already a 90% replacement for Oracle Workgroup server.
And before you flame me, that oracle workgroup server, not enterprise server. And most Oracle installations are the "workgroup" product, which is total overkill itself in most situations. Probably even MySQL would suffice for many things people use Oracle for.
But then ten years is a long time.
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because you can already do this much easier in any proxy server worth a damn (squid, etc.)
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anyone else see that great movie, "The Ruling Class?"
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All the o'reilly perl book are camel books.
Are you talking about "Lerning Perl"? Because that book sucks big time. It's horrible.
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No I am just being smug. I simply see no reason to be sober all the time. Everything in moderation. I don't see any intrinsic value or virtue in abstinence.
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Bull. Drink everyday for a month or two, and you will probably be an alchoholic. I know. :)
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Yep, Amtrak gives them free rides and the DEA gives Amtrak corporate officers uncut, pure Columbian Coacaine. Sounds like a good deal to me!
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Lack of curiosity is also stupid. Smoking pot is not like pouring draino down your throat. Lighten up and live a little.
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THE WAR ON DRUGS AS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE
by Bob Black
No one ever made a more important observation in seven words than Randolph Bourne once did: "War is the health of the state". War has been the main motor for the extension of state power in Europe for a thousand years, and not only in Europe. War enlarges the state and increases its wealth and its powers. It promotes obedience and justifies the repression of dissent, redefined as disloyalty. It relieves social tensions by redirecting them outwards at an enemy state which is, of course, doing exactly the same thing with all the same consequences. From the state's perspective, there is only one thing wrong with wars: they end.
That wars end is ultimately more important than whether they end in victory or defeat. Occasionally defeat spells destruction for states, as for the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires after World War I, but not usually, and even if it does, they give way to other states. The state-system not only endures, it prevails. Usually war is well worth the risk -- not to the combatants or the suffering civilians, of course: but well worth the risk to the state.
Peace is something else again. The immediate consequence may be a recession or a depression, as after the American Revolution and World War I, whose hardships are all the more galling when they fall upon the population which "won" the war and naively supposes it will share in the fruits of a victory which belongs to its state, not to the people. The regime may artificially prolong the wartime climate of repression and sacrifice, as did the United States by working up the Red Scare after World War I, but soon the people crave what Warren Harding promised them, a return to normalcy. The vanquished, of course, rarely fare as well as occupied Japan and Germany did after World War II, but even then the Germans initially experienced famine.
There have been epochs in which certain states were almost always at war, such as Republican Rome, whose oligarchs, as Livy repeatedly demonstrates, were well aware of the way war was a safety-valve for dissipating class conflict. Colonial wars well serve the purpose since they are fought far from the home country and usually waged against antagonists who are, however gallant, greatly inferior militarily.
The British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a good example. Engorged with the wealth of commercial capitalism (soon to be unimaginably enlarged by the Industrial Revolution), secure in its insularity, shielded by the world's greatest navy, with a robust and ruthless ruling class wise to the ways of statecraft, the British State could afford a war anytime it needed one. The cannon fodder was easy to come by. There were outright mercenaries such as Hessions on the market. And yesterday's enemies were today's troops. The Irish, repeatedly crushed in the seventeenth century, were one source. Starting in 1746 the British annihilated the society and culture of the Scottish Highlanders, then recruited regiments from the survivors. They would repeat these cost-effective methods in India, in Africa, everywhere. And then there were the English sources of expendibles: the peasants forced off the land by enclosure of the commons, and the urban poor. They would not be missed, and there were always more where they came from.
But times have changed. Some states can possibly carry on in the old way for a while -- maybe Serbia, North Korea, Iraq -- but the United States cannot, for at least two reasons: We are too squeamish, and we are too poor.
Too squeamish in the sense that, as Saddam Hussein crowed before the second Gulf War, America is a society which cannot tolerate 10,000 dead. He was right, although that did him no good, since he was unable to inflict 10,000 or even 1,000 deaths. Grenada and Panama were larks, but even such two-bit gang wars as Lebanon and Somalia were not, and nobody has any stomach for war in Haiti or Bosnia. Americans are fast losing their taste for media wars, to say nothing of real wars.
And too poor for any war long enough to put a lasting blip in any President's ratings. The attack on Iraq was the turning point. As adroitly handled as the manipulation of the mass mind was, Americans only went along with the war on the condition that the "Allies" pay for it. Even the most dim-witted are dimly aware that the lion's share of their Federal taxes goes to pay for war debts and military spending they never reaped any benefits from. The trade-off for lives in a high-tech, media-savvy, photogenic war is money. It costs more, immensely more, than war ever has. But America does not have more, immensely more wealth than it ever has. It has less, and less and less all the time.
Even with the massed forces of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and all the rest of the mainstream media behind him, and despite an overwhelming victory which owed as much to luck as skill, George Bush became the first President to win a war and then lose an election -- to a pot-smoking, womanizing draft-dodger.
Thus the regime is caught in what the Marxists used to call a "contradiction." It needs war, for war is the health of the state, but (with occasional ephemeral exceptions) it cannot afford either to win wars or lose them. But what kind of a war is it possible to wage, at not too intolerable a cost, which avoids these twin pitfalls -- a war which cannot be won or lost?
The "War on Drugs." Which is not a real war, of course, but what the Germans call a Sitzkrieg, a phony war. Formerly they sold us the war to end all wars. Now they sell us an endless war. The March of Dimes is an instructive precedent. The March of Dimes raised lots of money which (what was left of it after most of it went for advertising and administration)financed research on a polio vaccine. Then came catastrophe: Jonas Salk found a polio vaccine. So, its purpose accomplished, the March of Dimes went out of business, right? (Just kidding.) No, the organization moved on to an amorphous quest, to conquer "birth defects," of which there are so many varieties that the March of Dimes can count on doing business for many years to come. Some people say "the ends justify the means," others say they don't. The March of Dimes has transcended the contradiction: The means justify the end.
Such is the utility, to the state, of the War on Drugs. It cannot be lost, for there is no enemy to lose it to. And for countless reasons it cannot be won. The government cannot inderdict more than a fraction of the cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other drugs which, by illegalizing them, the government has raised the price on to the point that they are well worth smuggling in. And some of the dope, such as marijuana and opium, is easily produced domestically. Many tens of millions of Americans have indulged in illegal drugs, including the President. Their kids see no reason not to try what their parents did, regardless what the parents are preaching now. Children tend not to heed their parents when they know they are lying. Besides, there is always alcohol.
And in the suburbs as in the ghetto, legalizing drugs has jacked up their prices so far that busting drug dealers has no "supply-side" effect. Taking a drug dealer off the street just opens up a vacancy for another entrepreneur. Indeed, it is standard practice for dealers to get their competitors busted to take that competitive edge. But it makes no more difference who is dealing the drugs than it makes who is running the state. Indeed, they may be the same people! The Drug War is the health of the state.
Because it is only a phony war, the War on Drugs is fiscally manageable. The government can spend as much or as little as it likes, since the result is always the same. Even the out-of-pocket costs are disguised, divided as they are among Federal, state and local governments and confused with funding for law enforcement. The single greatest expense, prisons, is one which most people mistake for just about the best thing the government does for them. Underpinning this error is a misconception about what the product of the criminal justice system is. It is not crime control, for even if that could be measured with any accuracy, there is no evidence that law enforcement in general reduces crime. The product is crime rates, which are a function, not of the amount of crime, but of the amount of law enforcement. Thus the authorities can manufacture a "crime wave" if they want more money, or ease up on enforcement if they want to take credit for doing exactly the opposite -- a reverse Catch-22, a no-lose situation. Aside from themselves and their higher-ups, the only beneficiaries of those 100,000 more police that President Clinton will put on the streets will be Dunkin' Donut franchisees.
What's more, to some extent the War on Drugs pays for itself. Just as armies used to subsist largely by "living off the land," pillaging the districts they passed through, so the drug warriors cram their coffers with booty from forfeitures. And that's just on the formal, legal level. Off the books, of course, the police have always seized a lot more drugs than ever found their way to the evidence room. The dealers and junkies are unlikely to complain. (The classic scenario: a cop makes an illegal search on the street. He finds something. He asks, courteously, "Is this yours?" The answer is always no.) Some dope the police sell on their own account. Some they use themselves. And some they use for "flaking" (planting drugs on suspected drug dealers) and "padding" (adding more dope to what was found to turn a misdemeanor into a felony).
In still another way the War on Drugs offers one of the benefits of a real war without its costs and risks. Every real war is a civil liberties holocaust. Even on the formal, legal level, national security -- a so-called compelling state interest -- tends to trump fundamental rights, at least until the shooting stops. Meanwhile patriotic vigilantes carry out the castrations, the lynchings, the arsons -- the dirty work too dirty for the state to do, even in a supposed wartime emergency, but not too dirty for the state to wink at afterwards. The United States during World War I and the Red Scare is one example; the Italy which the liberals let the Fascists take over, after letting them extralegally smash the socialists, communists and anarchists, is another.
But peace returns and the legal ground lost is mostly recovered, or even more ground is taken. Once the state has demolished the radical opposition irreparably, it may well restore constitutional rights to the impotent remnants and bask in its own announced glory, parading its tolerance once it doesn't matter any more.
The phony war is much more effective. It cannot be conducted without massive invasions of liberty and property. The single most important right implicated, and endangered, by the War on Drugs is the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable searches and seizures. This body of law effectively began during Prohibition, and today it is, as Professor Fred Cohen says, "driven by drugs." The rights of everyone are defined by the rights the judiciary grudgingly grants to drug offenders.
Other rights are reduced too. Under the forfeiture laws, private property is taken without due process or just compensation. Applied to Native Americans and others, drug laws interfere with freedom of religion; so does the common practice of forcing drunk drivers into "rehabs" for indoctrination in the religious tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous. Even the campaign against gun ownership is an indirect consequence of the War on Drugs. Participants in the drug trade have to enforce their own contracts, since the state will not. And prohibition has made drugs very valuable commodities: in the inner cities, by far the most valuable commodities. Meanwhile, drug addicts rob and steal to support their habits. The result is an arms race and the clamor for gun control. One prohibition leads to another.
For the criminal, the ultimate challenge is the perfect crime. For the state, it is the perfect law. Is it prohibition?
Maybe not. Drug prohibition is today much more popular than alcohol prohibition ever was, but within living memory, decriminalization was a serious possibility. It might become so again if the anti-drug hysteria continues to rise till it reaches a level impossible to sustain. And it probably will rise, because the drug war has been institutionalized. Various agencies and organizations have a vested interest in its unlimited extension, although its unlimited extension is not only impossible, it would deprive the state of the great advantage of drug war over real war: its predictability and manageability. As some organs of government grow and grow, there is less for others. Since victory, like defeat, is impossible, there will never be a "peace dividend" to divvy up. The state is probably already draining more wealth out of civil society than is consistent with the state's own long-term interests. If it takes more and more, the parasite will kill the host -- or the host will kill the parasite.
Eventually the state may succumb to its own success. The state is huge. And it is bureaucratic. That means that it is intricately subdivided by function (or by what was initially considered a division of labor by function: in fact, overlapping or competing jurisdiction is common and tends to increase over time). Even if the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, it may not be able to do anything about it. (Or else, in the words of the German proverb, "one hand washes the other.") Inter-agency cooperation becomes more difficult as it becomes more frequent and more necessary. "The complexity of joint action" thwarts action, or its purpose.
It is very hard, administratively, to reduce a bureau's budget, but easy to increase it. Bureaus fiercely resist zero-based budgeting -- that is, starting from scratch, the annual rejustification of every line of the budget request -- as reinventing the wheel. And it is difficult for higher-level authority to identify areas for cost reduction, if it even wants to, since the very raison d'etre of bureaucratic organization is deference to institutionalized expertise. The easy way is to take the previous budget as presumptively the next one; it is only departures from the status quo, not the status quo itself, which require justification. The bureau, staffed with supposed experts, is itself the usual source of justifications for departures, and the departures are always in the direction of more money and more power for the bureau. What goes for each bureau goes for all of them. Thus government grows.
Referring to the way competition between workers lowers wages for all of them, Fredy Perlman observed: "The daily practice of all annuls the goals of each." Inter-agency interactions tend to have the same effect. So does inter-agency competition for tax money.
The long-term implications for the War on Drugs are, for the state, ominous. The more the state extends its control over society, the less control it has over itself. The more the state absorbs society, the weaker the state as an entity responsive to a common will becomes. It disintegrates into an authoritarian pluralism reminiscent of feudalism, but lacking its romantic charm. Some agencies fatten off the War on Drugs, most do not. The ones that do are the first to go their own way. Attorney General Janet Reno had no control over the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms when it exterminated the Branch Davidians to win what amounted to nothing more than a gang war: but she took responsibility. The Drug Enforcement Administration is likewise as independent as Hoover's FBI or anybody's CIA.
For the state, another inevitable adverse consequence of the Drug War is corruption. Not that corruption is necessarily a bad thing for the state. Up to a point, police shakedowns of drug dealers, bookies, pimps and other extralegal entrepreneurs benefit the state in more than one way. The more the cops collect in payoffs and confiscations, the less they have to be paid in salaries. Cops whose supervisors know they are on the take (as they do, since they are on the take too) look the other way unless and until for some reason they need to get rid of a particular cop. Corruption is thus a management tool.
But some cops get too greedy and go too far. Most are "grass-eaters" (bribe-takers) who take what comes their way, but some are "meat-eaters" (extortionists) -- proactively corrupt -- who actively seek out or set up corruption opportunities, like the Special Investigative Unit detectives depicted in the movie Serpico. The grass-eaters cover for the meat-eaters (the "blue code of silence") since they all have something to hide. Until recently, police administrators and their academic allies thought that they could keep corruption under control through various institutional reforms most of which were initially proposed by the Knapp Commission. Maybe the reforms would have worked, except for one thing: the War on Drugs. Corruption is making a comeback, even in the Knapp-reformed NYPD. Because penalties are much harsher and the profits of drug trafficking much higher, the protection the police sell commands a much higher price. Drug-driven corruption is the growth sector of police misconduct.
For the state, the problem with runaway corruption is that it cannot be confined to where its benefits exceed its costs. The state needs the police for a modicum of selective law enforcement and, much more important, for social control -- as the occasion calls for, to break strikes, evict squatters, suppress riots, repress dissidents and keep traffic moving. Even in our sophisticated times, when manipulation is the hippest of control strategies, there is often no substitute for the gun and the billy-club.
But a pervasively corrupt police force cannot be counted on when push comes to shove. Meat-eaters cannot spare the time to enforce the law. Officers on the nod are ineffective knights of the club. Police who are enforcing drug laws are unavailable to enforce others. There's been a tremendous expansion in undercover police work in recent years, inevitably accompanied by more corruption. Police, as workers, are notoriously difficult to manage because they are usually out by themselves, unsupervised. Detectives especially are in a position to be secretive about their activities, and more drug enforcement means more detective/undercover work. These cops are pursuing their own agendas. Why do dogs lick their balls? Because they can.
Corruption scandals demoralise the police and delegitimize the state. Most people obey the law most of the time, not because they fear punishment if they don't, but because they believe in the system. As they cease to believe, they will cease to obey -- not only the laws that don't matter (like "don't use drugs") but also the ones that do (like "pay your taxes"). And, ironically, crackdowns on corruption impair police effectiveness for other purposes.
The state has overbuilt itself so heavily that the weight begins to crack the foundations. It is not the sort of elephantiasis that can be eased by privatization. It doesn't matter who collects the garbage. What matters is who has the guns. Not "social pork" but the essence of sovereignty -- the means to enforce order -- is tumorous. Thus the cancer is inoperable. The state may die, fittingly, of an overdose.
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anyone care to do it?
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In debian I can choose which sources I want to include. If I just want security updates, I've got them, and nothing else.
Idiotic corporations and windows programmers should take a look.
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I agree. It seems to me there was a signifigant market for an os that did multimedia really well.
And the hardware to go with it. A studio appliance.
If they had built such an appliance, they might have gotten somewhere, instead of fiddle faddleing with home users and internet appliance stupidities.
The BeBox was a start. Throw in some very high end sound and video hardware, and a few key apps to go with it, and they would've had something. I know that multimedia people are dying to get rid of their trashy pc's and crash happy macs.
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What wonderful company? I don't care whether or not they open their source, but they were stupid from the get go.
Be COULD have been marketed to people who do high end multimedia. There is a tremendous need for a reliable OS that can do multimedia really, really well. All Be needed was a few key applications and they would have found themselves in a lot of video and sound studios. Instead they stupidly tried to get into the home desktop market. That was insane.
Linux vendors at least know what they are doing: they market linux primarily as a server OS. As a result, they are not going down the toilet.
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two drives using software raid5 on four partitions? Dude, that is crazy. Use RAID0 or mirroring. In your setup everything is slower because the disk is having to write the same data on different areas of the same disk. That negates on of the major advantages of RAID, which is to take advantage of the interface speed by combining disks to rw in parallel.
In addition, because you are only using two disks, on RAID5, you are not fault tolerant at all.
In addition to all that, reiser had serious problems with (software) RAID 1 or RAID5.
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Well, the germans had chances and they did make a lot of mistakes, as did the Soviets. Most of the german generals wanted Moscow, not Stalingrad.
The Red Army was particularly suited to urban combat and the nazi army for open warfare. I don't think the Germans even had sub machine guns at this point, where the soviets had PPSh sub-machine guns in vast quantities (and the germans were terrified of them). While the Red Army was known for it's insane head on attacks, they did not generally fight this way in Stalingrad (as depicted in the movie). I would not have minded them showing NKVD officers shooting their own troops as long as they showed the Russians winning from time to time. They way it was depicted in the movie it looked like the Russians were getting cremated and then just somehow won. Besides, by October, it was the germans making the insane head on attacks.
About the order of battle, I did some checking, since I'm rusty ...
9/10's of the city was defended by Chuikov and the 62nd Army (about 54,000 men, 110 tanks). The Germans were able to commit over 50% of the Sixth Army's resources to fighting in the city proper - about 170,000 men, 500 tanks. So, OK I was wrong.
Also a note about production, just for kicks.
Tanks:
1941:
Russian: 6,590
German: 3,790
1942:
Russian: 24,446
German: 6,180
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you need the x rated add on.
it's family oriented, of course it's boring!!
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There is a difference. Communist bosses tend to hate everyone equally, since anyone can be a threat to state power. Nazis target groups of people in order to make everyone else hate them. I'm not sure which is worse.
Excuse me? The Germans almost won. If there hadn't been some rumblings in Yugoslavia (and we all know that kind of terrain just swallows up infantry), Germany would have had more than enough to capture the Kremlin. That delayed them a coupled months before marching into the soviet union. Time that they needed before the Russian winter set in. Same kinda thing happened to Napoleon.
No the Germans had some spectacular successes in the beginning of the war, but after Stalingrad they were pretty much stomped everywhere they went. It was a constant retreat after that. If you look at the resources available to the Soviets it is hard to imagine that the Germans ever thought they could win. Even if the nazis had gotten further than they did, the Soviets would have relocated thier factories just as they did at the beginning of the war.
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The Russians are too often portrayed in WW2 movies as nazi cannon fodder. The russians fought like hell in WW2, shit, the germans didn't have a chance of beating the Soviet Army, one front, two fronts, doesn't matter. Stalingrad was absolutely apocalyptic: two million casualties. Think about that for a minute.
My criticisms:
Well it was nice to see a minstream movie about Stalingrad from the Russian point of view. But the battle deserves better treatment than this.
I think a good idea for a Stalingrad movie would be two hours of unrelenting violence. No plot, no story, no heroes. You get to know the characters for a few minutes and then they die, without warning and without ceremony.
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The sex scene itself was good. They were both filthy yet had a good time ... I think this is probably accurate.
You are wrong about females in combat. The Soviets used a lot of women, however, they were mostly in AA units. I imagine things got so chaotic in Stalingrad that it really didn't much matter. This was entirely plausible.
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No you can't upgrade peices of windows, you're just SOL if it doesn't support your card. I've had to buy new video cards when different windows versions came out, because the old one's no longer supported.
oh shit, I answered a troll ....
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