You know, it's just amazing to me that nobody went off on the obvious online sex part of these input devices. Oh so obvious, and like everything else on the internet the big enchilada re: actually making money at it.
Just don't expect me to invest in the damn things.
Yes the poor man's cruise missile would work- up to the point that an alert is on. Then everything that even looks sideways at a USAF base gets shot down. Same with a van/truck nuke driving down the road, except it will be security people rather then SAMs.
Try flying over military reservation portions of the Western US and let me know if you come back in one piece.
The reason to have ICBMs therefore is to be able to destroy a base without regard to the conventional defenses around it. So yes the rogue state issue is a red herring, we're actually looking to put China back in a Second Power standing.
That's not to say that ABM won't protect us, it just won't protect cities. Instead it will ensure MAD.
We still need to (pardon the expression) beef up the bioweapon defenses though. Biodiversity of crops and herd animals is a good hedge as well- remember killing our food supply is as good as killing humans directly.
I said this in the earlier.us article ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/07/19/05142 37&cid=158 ) and I'll say it again- we should avoid the whole Hague convention mess and force everything to go through the national TLDs. If we want to have our own squirrely IP laws, great, we can screw up our own world and leave everyone else alone. If the French or Germans are freaked out over free speech issues re: Nazis on e-Bay, we don't have to comply and they can block it at the telecoms. Simple, neat, and it leaves us out of being dragged into an international political correctness syndrome.
The internet was designed to maintain the military-industrial complex's nervous system after a nuclear war. The idea that governments will allow everyone to do whatever they want domain name-wise or content-wise is absurd. Remember- they have the police power to march in and pull the plug on their nation's domain name root server and/or telecommunications infrastructure. In fact I expect the next uprising/suppression to include the line 'X forces took the radio, TV and internet routing stations'. Libertarian communications ain't happening in the biggest communication revolution since TV.
So given this ugly reality, I say nationalise the domains lest we lose even our own paltry rights to free speech to some international body.
The bad thing about banner ads is that they are boring. They are about at the same stage as 1960s TV ads. If the advertisers want to get hits they need to get some entertainment built it.
P.S. I wonder if the no-java XP IE will kill off autospawning ads. I always control them by leaving javascript off as an option, I would hate to lose control over them.
Rather than have the Hague convention everyone's net rights, I have a simple solution. Force all website IDs to use their national domain names from their country of origin, and then any national laws re: censorship are applied to that domain. The domains become 'national' property in the same sense that radio spectrum is, and we're done with these legal hassles.
Won't happen, but it is elegant.
In WWII America and Britain had a stockpile of pulmonary anthrax bombs sitting in England ready to go if Hitler tried anything. Interestingly enough, he didn't, reportedly because he feared the retaliatory response. Japan of course had the infamous Unit 731.
Here are some links for those who are more curious about the history-
http://www.hs.state.az.us/phs/edc/edrp/es/bthist or 2.htm
http://www.wood.army.mil/CHBULLETIN/Jan99/Biowar fa re.htm
This type of technology will go a long way to fix bandwidth issues.
What I would love to see is cheap reliable fiber IN the boxes. 1 TB per second to your lasercube, that's what I want. Storage being accessed at better than memory speeds now, oh mymymymy.
Let's face it, porn has been THE consistent seller on the internet. Content creation is cheap, no warehousing or shipping costs, and the addicts will paypaypay to get their itch scratched. Why shouldn't Yahoo go for it?
I suspect that Yahoo will clearly mark out it's adult directory structure for the censorware makers, so this will be a non-issue.
On the other hand AOL may be able to make hay by claiming the moral/family 'high ground' and truly become the WalMart of the Internet.
Clearly Mr. Katz thinks the scenarios dealt with in Stephenson's works like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age re: tribal clades is where we are going. Perhaps in a world government structure where one can voluntarily choose his or her tribe without fatal repurcussions, but not now- the megatribes represented by entities such as the USA and PRC are far too powerful to allow true individual sovereignty. Check back in 200 years.
Yes Katz, governments screw up and get themselves into situations like this where neither side can afford being perceived as backing down. But that does not mean that smaller netcentric cultural groupings will be any nimbler or smarter. Study human behavior in any large group, and you'll see the same sort of issues recur at every level.
The P-3 incident may indeed turn out to be a classic example of large megatribal countries failing to optimize their behavior, but it does not follow that smaller tribes will do better.
As far as your collective complaints/wishlists re: Trek issues, a lot of them are answered in anime.
I'll go ahead and plug my fave, Legends of The Galactic Heroes (good overview at http://logh.net ). This series makes B5 look like patty-cake. Orbital nuking, machiavellian intrigue, assassination, huge fleet battles with 50,000+ ships on each side, cynical PR campaigns, intentional starvation as a tactic, power-mad individuals- and oh yeah, major characters die like flies. The more you like them, the more likely they are going down.
Re: The Lone Gunmen- yeah there were plot holes one could drive a truck through, but so what? This is about an amatuer Mission:Impossible team, or maybe Mission:Improbable. They'll loosen up and have fun. Relax.
What I would like to see in Trek is the dirty politics end of the Federation. People don't stop being ambitious just because they live under dilithium-powered socialism. That and since the death rate must be far lower then it is today, overpopulation means push is coming to shove re: desirable territory. Yup, the Federation has got to be propped up on some really nasty sordid deals.
Heck, then we can have the Federation Lone Gunman. See, it all fits together.....
Someone like Disch should definitely know better than to make the statement that Science Fiction is an American art form.
For heaven's sake, the word robot comes from Czech writer Karel Capek's play R.U.R., and that 1920's classic German silent Metropolis predates the Campbell crowd by years. The aforementioned points re: H.G. Wells and Kepler are other excellent points.
Certainly there has always been a fascination with gadgetry that has been intertwined with American history from the beginning- it is only fitting that there is a literature here to explore the stories that stem from our tools. But to say that science fiction IS American is going much too far.
Science Fiction to me is about what happens when people get to plausible new environments either of their own creation or somewhere/somewhen else, and the story that flows from that situation. Certainly Americans are all about that New Frontier or 'We Can Fix That For You Wholesale', but American SF is just one aspect of the whole literature.
I will say that the biggest cultural effect that SciFi has had on humanity as a whole (other than inspiring actual inventors/inventions) is American SF movies and TV. The sheer visceral impact of imagery delivered via Star Wars, Star Trek, 2001, Close Encounters (and it's gung-ho younger brother Independence Day), etc. has had far more effect on the Eloi than all of the most brilliant books put together. I do not say this out of pride, just stating the sad facts.
One example of a zero-sum/non-zero-sum game that I found hilarious was the old Dune board game distributed by Avalon Hill and designed by the Cosmic Encounters folks.
In Dune you have a diplomatic phase brought on by a random Nexus card. If everyone allied with every other player, by the end of the turn all of the strategic areas would be owned by the Big Alliance and everyone would win. Guess how many times that happened......
Frankly, most any game can be played to be non-zero-sum. A good example would be multi-player Civ, where theoretically each player's Civilization could peacefully trade Caravans and technology and advance far faster than non-cooperative players.
However, the mindset is not likely there- guess it's the eternal struggle of the individual gameplayer's place in the baboon troop versus beating all those other baboon troops.....
This weapon system is essentially a Theater Defense against high-speed strategic ballistic missile attack. It doesn't have enough range to do anything but cover a city, a landing beach or a tightly-packed missile range, so it's not going to be an effective ABM system for national defense purposes. Rather, it will be used to protect expeditionary forces such as Gulf War ops, and to protect embattled allied nations such as Taiwan or Israel. It could also protect AWACS from very-long-range SAMs, so the two planes may be needed to mutually support each other.
This system will buy us 10-15 years of temporary theater ballistic superiority until such time as more powerful ground-based lasers or cheap long-range SAMs are deployed.
In looking long-term at the entire ABM issue, I have come to conclusions which displease both pro- and anti-ABM people.
ABM systems cannot protect cities from van/suitcase/cargo container nukes for the reasons so often cited in earlier posts. The idea that the citizenry would be directly protected by such systems is a mockery of the truth.
On the other hand, ABM systems have a reasonable chance of protecting a few specific patches of land, such as say an ICBM base or a C3I facility. Since such high-value land can be protected by security forces on the ground from the suitcase bomber, China, Russia or whomever would have no choice but to attack that land with a missile. If an ABM system works properly, the missile will fail and we will be able to direct our retaliation effectively.
A key element of missile targeting that is not often noted by the press or hysteria-mongers is recon, especially post-strike. You have to know where to attack in order to fire a missile, and to know whether you need to 'revisit' a target. LA may be hard to miss but it's a bit more difficult to attack moving ground forces or missiles. Space warfare in the form of ASAT weapons is a very key element in effective ABM warfare.
Incidentally the ABL-747s greatest strategic effect may be in ASAT warfare.
Bottom Line- ABM can ensure MAD and thus deterrence, but can never protect us. ABM should be pursued to keep our deterrence up and allow our conventional and special operations to function, but we should not destroy our nation's treasury or diplomatic position to pursue a chimerical level of protection that we will never acheive.
Novell has been making hideous missteps for a long time. The two biggest that comes to mind is the WordPerfect/Groupwise debacle and buying the Unix license. The problem with these two moves is that they distracted the company from what they needed to be doing, which was making NLMs or a successor platform THE most popular development platform for apps (either that or getting a sales/marketing force together). Killer SDKs, eyeballs and winning hearts is what gets developers creating the apps any OS/NOS vendor needs to survive. Novell didn't see that as a priority and now they are dependent on extant customers and surviving on NDS charity until MS catches up to AD or writes in enough IE/.NET extensions to AD that Novell cannot use.
Also note that Novell sat out the browser wars, thus ensuring that it's deadliest enemy had control of the internet clients.
The battle now shifts to the home thin client console market for server share. Again, Novell could have been winning this one if it was partnered with Sony to create one-click access apps to serve multi-player for PS2 but they keep missing the opportunities to lead markets. I just don't think Novell has had the smarts to get it done.
Playing remora to Microsoft's shark in a strategic area gets you killed. Novell has to get NLMs or whatever else in play so outside smart people can create the next Notes/DB/killer app to move product, or they become just another Banyan.
Actually my perception is that the Net has already had a huge real-world effect in business, specifically the fact that the Fed has been loaning money like crazy, thus creating the Roaring 90's IPO net market.
The Fed banks are well aware that there is absolutely no difference between the money supply they create and transmit around electronically and a Net-based currency, other than enforceability and trust. I believe that the Fed has had a loose money policy during these past few years partly to ensure that there is enough investor money to keep popular portals in the hands of owners that are on board with traditional Nationalistic Corporatism and out of Net currency. I call the strategy Positive Despotism- don't crush your potential enemies, buy them out, or at least make everybody fat, dumb and happy enough to not question the freedoms that they are losing.
I also believe that the Clipper chip and associated technologies are anti-Net currency initiatives moreso than anything else, as a key component of any such system is verification and privacy for tax-avoidance. Fortunately for the Fed and the US Government, it looks like everyone who might have made a Net currency play has been bought out or gone to ground.
By the way, the Templars were the first European internationalist bankers and the first entity to allow checks to be written from one Priory and cash it at another. They achieved this by putting a validation code on the 'check' that could be deciphered and verified at cashout time. As noted before, Philip the Fair of France and his stooge Pope created trumped-up charges to allow the ransacking of the Order's riches. Encryption, money, freedoms and police power have been interrelated issues for a long time.
The key problem I see with the online Merchant Republic concept is trust in contract enforcement- how do I know the goods, services and currency I pour into such an entity will give me value and have a mechanism for redress of grievances? Short of a tribal clade treaty such as those in Stephenson's books, there would be NO enforcement or due process outside of one's Republic. Thus, the Merchant Republic/tribal system is unlikely to occur unless there is
1)a complete collapse of the justice system (therefore people lose faith in the US image-myth, bringing on chaos and a need for adhoc groups for survival),
2) or a collapse of the currency system.
So far the Fed and the Government appear to be defending the currency, so the justice system breakdown is the more likely scenario. Rampant insane corporatism crushing the individual and buying up justice is more likely to create the Merchant Republics rather than Katz' magic Net.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, it's just amazing to me that nobody went off on the obvious online sex part of these input devices. Oh so obvious, and like everything else on the internet the big enchilada re: actually making money at it.
Just don't expect me to invest in the damn things.
Yes the poor man's cruise missile would work- up to the point that an alert is on. Then everything that even looks sideways at a USAF base gets shot down. Same with a van/truck nuke driving down the road, except it will be security people rather then SAMs.
Try flying over military reservation portions of the Western US and let me know if you come back in one piece.
The reason to have ICBMs therefore is to be able to destroy a base without regard to the conventional defenses around it. So yes the rogue state issue is a red herring, we're actually looking to put China back in a Second Power standing.
That's not to say that ABM won't protect us, it just won't protect cities. Instead it will ensure MAD.
We still need to (pardon the expression) beef up the bioweapon defenses though. Biodiversity of crops and herd animals is a good hedge as well- remember killing our food supply is as good as killing humans directly.
I said this in the earlier .us article ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/07/19/05142 37&cid=158 ) and I'll say it again- we should avoid the whole Hague convention mess and force everything to go through the national TLDs. If we want to have our own squirrely IP laws, great, we can screw up our own world and leave everyone else alone. If the French or Germans are freaked out over free speech issues re: Nazis on e-Bay, we don't have to comply and they can block it at the telecoms. Simple, neat, and it leaves us out of being dragged into an international political correctness syndrome.
The internet was designed to maintain the military-industrial complex's nervous system after a nuclear war. The idea that governments will allow everyone to do whatever they want domain name-wise or content-wise is absurd. Remember- they have the police power to march in and pull the plug on their nation's domain name root server and/or telecommunications infrastructure. In fact I expect the next uprising/suppression to include the line 'X forces took the radio, TV and internet routing stations'. Libertarian communications ain't happening in the biggest communication revolution since TV. So given this ugly reality, I say nationalise the domains lest we lose even our own paltry rights to free speech to some international body.
The bad thing about banner ads is that they are boring. They are about at the same stage as 1960s TV ads. If the advertisers want to get hits they need to get some entertainment built it. P.S. I wonder if the no-java XP IE will kill off autospawning ads. I always control them by leaving javascript off as an option, I would hate to lose control over them.
Rather than have the Hague convention everyone's net rights, I have a simple solution. Force all website IDs to use their national domain names from their country of origin, and then any national laws re: censorship are applied to that domain. The domains become 'national' property in the same sense that radio spectrum is, and we're done with these legal hassles. Won't happen, but it is elegant.
In WWII America and Britain had a stockpile of pulmonary anthrax bombs sitting in England ready to go if Hitler tried anything. Interestingly enough, he didn't, reportedly because he feared the retaliatory response. Japan of course had the infamous Unit 731.
t or 2.htm
r fa re.htm
Here are some links for those who are more curious about the history-
http://www.hs.state.az.us/phs/edc/edrp/es/bthis
http://www.wood.army.mil/CHBULLETIN/Jan99/Biowa
http://www.sonic.net/~west/biorefs.htm
The only lock-in any company has is to tie the company's data to a given OS/platform.
Red Hat has no choice but to do this- look what being application agnostic did for Novell.
Check out Legend of the Galactic Heroes when you get through with playing with J-pop stars as strategic weapons. http://logh.net
This type of technology will go a long way to fix bandwidth issues.
What I would love to see is cheap reliable fiber IN the boxes. 1 TB per second to your lasercube, that's what I want. Storage being accessed at better than memory speeds now, oh mymymymy.
Let's face it, porn has been THE consistent seller on the internet. Content creation is cheap, no warehousing or shipping costs, and the addicts will paypaypay to get their itch scratched. Why shouldn't Yahoo go for it? I suspect that Yahoo will clearly mark out it's adult directory structure for the censorware makers, so this will be a non-issue. On the other hand AOL may be able to make hay by claiming the moral/family 'high ground' and truly become the WalMart of the Internet.
Clearly Mr. Katz thinks the scenarios dealt with in Stephenson's works like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age re: tribal clades is where we are going. Perhaps in a world government structure where one can voluntarily choose his or her tribe without fatal repurcussions, but not now- the megatribes represented by entities such as the USA and PRC are far too powerful to allow true individual sovereignty. Check back in 200 years. Yes Katz, governments screw up and get themselves into situations like this where neither side can afford being perceived as backing down. But that does not mean that smaller netcentric cultural groupings will be any nimbler or smarter. Study human behavior in any large group, and you'll see the same sort of issues recur at every level. The P-3 incident may indeed turn out to be a classic example of large megatribal countries failing to optimize their behavior, but it does not follow that smaller tribes will do better.
As far as your collective complaints/wishlists re: Trek issues, a lot of them are answered in anime.
I'll go ahead and plug my fave, Legends of The Galactic Heroes (good overview at http://logh.net ). This series makes B5 look like patty-cake. Orbital nuking, machiavellian intrigue, assassination, huge fleet battles with 50,000+ ships on each side, cynical PR campaigns, intentional starvation as a tactic, power-mad individuals- and oh yeah, major characters die like flies. The more you like them, the more likely they are going down.
Re: The Lone Gunmen- yeah there were plot holes one could drive a truck through, but so what? This is about an amatuer Mission:Impossible team, or maybe Mission:Improbable. They'll loosen up and have fun. Relax.
What I would like to see in Trek is the dirty politics end of the Federation. People don't stop being ambitious just because they live under dilithium-powered socialism. That and since the death rate must be far lower then it is today, overpopulation means push is coming to shove re: desirable territory. Yup, the Federation has got to be propped up on some really nasty sordid deals.
Heck, then we can have the Federation Lone Gunman. See, it all fits together.....
Someone like Disch should definitely know better than to make the statement that Science Fiction is an American art form.
For heaven's sake, the word robot comes from Czech writer Karel Capek's play R.U.R., and that 1920's classic German silent Metropolis predates the Campbell crowd by years. The aforementioned points re: H.G. Wells and Kepler are other excellent points.
Certainly there has always been a fascination with gadgetry that has been intertwined with American history from the beginning- it is only fitting that there is a literature here to explore the stories that stem from our tools. But to say that science fiction IS American is going much too far.
Science Fiction to me is about what happens when people get to plausible new environments either of their own creation or somewhere/somewhen else, and the story that flows from that situation. Certainly Americans are all about that New Frontier or 'We Can Fix That For You Wholesale', but American SF is just one aspect of the whole literature.
I will say that the biggest cultural effect that SciFi has had on humanity as a whole (other than inspiring actual inventors/inventions) is American SF movies and TV. The sheer visceral impact of imagery delivered via Star Wars, Star Trek, 2001, Close Encounters (and it's gung-ho younger brother Independence Day), etc. has had far more effect on the Eloi than all of the most brilliant books put together. I do not say this out of pride, just stating the sad facts.
One example of a zero-sum/non-zero-sum game that I found hilarious was the old Dune board game distributed by Avalon Hill and designed by the Cosmic Encounters folks. In Dune you have a diplomatic phase brought on by a random Nexus card. If everyone allied with every other player, by the end of the turn all of the strategic areas would be owned by the Big Alliance and everyone would win. Guess how many times that happened...... Frankly, most any game can be played to be non-zero-sum. A good example would be multi-player Civ, where theoretically each player's Civilization could peacefully trade Caravans and technology and advance far faster than non-cooperative players. However, the mindset is not likely there- guess it's the eternal struggle of the individual gameplayer's place in the baboon troop versus beating all those other baboon troops.....
This weapon system is essentially a Theater Defense against high-speed strategic ballistic missile attack. It doesn't have enough range to do anything but cover a city, a landing beach or a tightly-packed missile range, so it's not going to be an effective ABM system for national defense purposes. Rather, it will be used to protect expeditionary forces such as Gulf War ops, and to protect embattled allied nations such as Taiwan or Israel. It could also protect AWACS from very-long-range SAMs, so the two planes may be needed to mutually support each other.
This system will buy us 10-15 years of temporary theater ballistic superiority until such time as more powerful ground-based lasers or cheap long-range SAMs are deployed.
In looking long-term at the entire ABM issue, I have come to conclusions which displease both pro- and anti-ABM people.
ABM systems cannot protect cities from van/suitcase/cargo container nukes for the reasons so often cited in earlier posts. The idea that the citizenry would be directly protected by such systems is a mockery of the truth.
On the other hand, ABM systems have a reasonable chance of protecting a few specific patches of land, such as say an ICBM base or a C3I facility. Since such high-value land can be protected by security forces on the ground from the suitcase bomber, China, Russia or whomever would have no choice but to attack that land with a missile. If an ABM system works properly, the missile will fail and we will be able to direct our retaliation effectively.
A key element of missile targeting that is not often noted by the press or hysteria-mongers is recon, especially post-strike. You have to know where to attack in order to fire a missile, and to know whether you need to 'revisit' a target. LA may be hard to miss but it's a bit more difficult to attack moving ground forces or missiles. Space warfare in the form of ASAT weapons is a very key element in effective ABM warfare.
Incidentally the ABL-747s greatest strategic effect may be in ASAT warfare.
Bottom Line- ABM can ensure MAD and thus deterrence, but can never protect us. ABM should be pursued to keep our deterrence up and allow our conventional and special operations to function, but we should not destroy our nation's treasury or diplomatic position to pursue a chimerical level of protection that we will never acheive.
Novell has been making hideous missteps for a long time. The two biggest that comes to mind is the WordPerfect/Groupwise debacle and buying the Unix license. The problem with these two moves is that they distracted the company from what they needed to be doing, which was making NLMs or a successor platform THE most popular development platform for apps (either that or getting a sales/marketing force together). Killer SDKs, eyeballs and winning hearts is what gets developers creating the apps any OS/NOS vendor needs to survive. Novell didn't see that as a priority and now they are dependent on extant customers and surviving on NDS charity until MS catches up to AD or writes in enough IE/.NET extensions to AD that Novell cannot use. Also note that Novell sat out the browser wars, thus ensuring that it's deadliest enemy had control of the internet clients. The battle now shifts to the home thin client console market for server share. Again, Novell could have been winning this one if it was partnered with Sony to create one-click access apps to serve multi-player for PS2 but they keep missing the opportunities to lead markets. I just don't think Novell has had the smarts to get it done. Playing remora to Microsoft's shark in a strategic area gets you killed. Novell has to get NLMs or whatever else in play so outside smart people can create the next Notes/DB/killer app to move product, or they become just another Banyan.
Actually my perception is that the Net has already had a huge real-world effect in business, specifically the fact that the Fed has been loaning money like crazy, thus creating the Roaring 90's IPO net market.
The Fed banks are well aware that there is absolutely no difference between the money supply they create and transmit around electronically and a Net-based currency, other than enforceability and trust. I believe that the Fed has had a loose money policy during these past few years partly to ensure that there is enough investor money to keep popular portals in the hands of owners that are on board with traditional Nationalistic Corporatism and out of Net currency. I call the strategy Positive Despotism- don't crush your potential enemies, buy them out, or at least make everybody fat, dumb and happy enough to not question the freedoms that they are losing.
I also believe that the Clipper chip and associated technologies are anti-Net currency initiatives moreso than anything else, as a key component of any such system is verification and privacy for tax-avoidance. Fortunately for the Fed and the US Government, it looks like everyone who might have made a Net currency play has been bought out or gone to ground.
By the way, the Templars were the first European internationalist bankers and the first entity to allow checks to be written from one Priory and cash it at another. They achieved this by putting a validation code on the 'check' that could be deciphered and verified at cashout time. As noted before, Philip the Fair of France and his stooge Pope created trumped-up charges to allow the ransacking of the Order's riches. Encryption, money, freedoms and police power have been interrelated issues for a long time.
The key problem I see with the online Merchant Republic concept is trust in contract enforcement- how do I know the goods, services and currency I pour into such an entity will give me value and have a mechanism for redress of grievances? Short of a tribal clade treaty such as those in Stephenson's books, there would be NO enforcement or due process outside of one's Republic. Thus, the Merchant Republic/tribal system is unlikely to occur unless there is
1)a complete collapse of the justice system (therefore people lose faith in the US image-myth, bringing on chaos and a need for adhoc groups for survival),
2) or a collapse of the currency system.
So far the Fed and the Government appear to be defending the currency, so the justice system breakdown is the more likely scenario. Rampant insane corporatism crushing the individual and buying up justice is more likely to create the Merchant Republics rather than Katz' magic Net.