Oh, but it can, that's what the military, tear gas, intelligence organizations, high taxation, UTICA, CDMA, nukes, police, media monopolies, and closed source are for. To ensure the continued hegemony.
I guess this depends on who, or what, you consider to have hegemony. The interesting thing, though, is that almost all of those have valid reasons for existence which have nothing to do with repressing the citizenry, and little to do with the degeneration of representative democracy (and some of them, like "high taxation", don't even exist, at least not here --- US taxation rates are by far the lowest in the industrialized world).
In any event: no government can last indefinitely once it loses the support of its people --- force eventually stops working (as the Soviets found out). Misleading the people into supporting the government is a more effective tactic --- but, at least in this country, it's not *the government* doing that, but the companies which dominate the economy, and they are doing it(I suspect) largely without intent.
Still, the point remains that the popular legitimacy of the government of the United States is decreasing --- and that's disconcerting, as unless it is corrected in some fashion, we will end up either with (a) a government which is irrelevant and a society which effectively approaches anarcho-capitalism; (b) a repressive government desperate to remain in power; (c) a violent, and at times nasty, revolution. None of those are particularly *pleasant* outcomes...
I want information on a candidate from *before* he became a senator.
Sure --- but the amount of time it would take someone to compile this sort of information, going back to legislative records from as much as *30 years ago*, is immense; and who is going to pay for it?
(I'm not saying what you're looking for wouldn't be cool, just that it's unrealistic to expect it...)
many issues are far, far too complex to discuss in an online forum.
This is arguably one of the problems with direct democracy, and why representative democracy is a good thing: most issues decided by legislatures are immensely complicated, and expecting everyone to devote the time and energy to understanding them is absurd. Yet, at the same time, when nobody trusts their representatives, representative democracy can't work.
It's probably the most significant problem in modern political science: expecting people to devote the effort needed to make direct democracy work on a large scale is like expecting to discover alien life tomorrow, but lack of trust in representatives is undermining the legitimacy of the current system.
it's about private property. Most people don't own private property (most people just own personal possessions)
I'm a bit unclear about the distinciton you're making here between private property and personal possessions --- clearly a toothbrush is a personal possession, and a house is private property; but what about a computer?
Besides, what you are saying isn't true; more than half the people *in the United States* own a house (or are married to someone who does).
Voting for leaders is worthless. Why waste the time?
Even if that were true, many states have referenda or initiative systems in which the voters vote *on laws*. Yeah, the vote is often heavily influenced by misleading advertising paid for by powerful special interest groups --- but we're still voting directly on laws, and it's not that unusual for the voters to spit in the face of the interest groups, as it were. (California has many examples of this, one of the most recent being the legalization of use of medical marijuana, over the objections of almost every mainstream politician in the state).
Actually, I've always found that the biggest zealots, of any cause, are the converts.
This is actually a well-known precept in academic sociology and political science; I wish I could cite something, but it's been a number of years since school, so my memory of that level of specific is shot...
As with any cultural minority, the only ones you ever notice are the ones you are least likely to like
Sort of says bad things about multiculturalism, doesn't it --- if the only members of "them" that you notice are the ones that are on the fringe, and doing things that irritate you, but you assume that those people are representative, there's never going to be a useful dialogue...
There's an interesting series being run by the NYT right now about race relations (first article was about an integrated pentecostal church, and the second was about how race in miami is different than race in havana) which touches on this issue...
People DO choose to become fundies, skinheads, etc. And there is nothing wrong with refusing service to such groups.
Sometimes, though, the 'choice' is a surface myth which doesn't really exist --- the vast majority of people who grow up in heavily fundamentalist families remain fundamentalist; did they 'choose' that? (This isn't a flame, really, but a serious question; the borders of the space defined by the word 'choice' are extremely fuzzy when analyzed philisophically).
I must disagree, though, with the second part of your statement: it is not true that 'there is nothing wrong with refusing service to such groups'; aside form being simply bad economics in most cases (Marriott's refusing to rent to non-married couples, for example, would be economically absurd), there really isn't that much difference between refusing to serve food to a black man and refusing to serve food to a christian fundamentalist: they are both arbitrary decisions based on characteristics of the person which are *irrelevant to the situation at hand*. The only difference is that race is *almost always* irrelevant, whereas religion is occasionally relevant.
If that wasn't in the contract s/he signed when they signed up with that ISP, then I would say (IANAL) that they could sue for damages.
Maybe not: sometimes law is perverse, and the ISP may have the legal power to discontinue service for this sort of thing *unless the contract explicitly denies them the power.*
Re:Grave of the Fireflies / Hotaru no haka
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Essential Anime
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· Score: 2
Also by the same guy who did Grave of the Fireflies is Princess Mononoke, an incredible late-midieval fantasy about a kid going off to find the source of the magical disease which has infected him. Was out in the theatres last year (dubbed), with the translation done by Neil Gaiman, and one of the voices by Gillian Anderson.
windows will still execute it No it won't. uh... there is *no* requirement that an executable file image be attached to a program with a.exe extension in any modern version of windows. I can create an executable named foo, and as long as windows detects the correct information in the header, it will execute it. Hell, I *have* done this, regularly. (It also is no longer true that.com files have to be under 64K in size or adhere to the compact memory model... that was true in win31, but no more). Now, its possible that *outlook* wont invoke it, because a lot of the automagic file invocation stuff happens with checks through the registry to discover what should be used to open a particular file, and outlook might be stupid enough to not know that something not named.exe is actually an executable --- i dont know, as i havent run outlook more than once or twice. but theres no inherent windows limitation, and hasnt been for years. -- Robert West Delphi R&D
*sigh*. so what keeps someone from renaming foo.exe to foo? it remains an executable image, windows will still execute it, and outlook wont know that it should suppress it....
Anonymous attacks are becoming more and more effective in the U.S.,
Yes and no.:) In the case Florida v. JL, handed down 28 March 2000, the Supreme Court ruled *unanimously* that "an anonymous tip that a person is carrying a gun is not, without more, sufficient to justify a police officer's stop and frisk of that person." The argument is that anonymous tips which are *predictive of behavior* can be trusted *when the predicted behavior manifests*, but tips which are merely *descriptive* cannot be --- otherwise you could call the police and accuse the otherwise innocent-looking black man standing at the bus stop of carrying a gun, and the police would be justified in searching him.
For more information, including the text of the decision, see http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/98-1993.ZS .html
Their methodology will have to come out, eventually.
Imagine (this isn't going to happen now, but something similar will someday) that Napster refuses to block the names on the list. Metallica sues, and the conversation in court looks like:
Metallica: "Napster won't block these known copyright violaters." Napster: "This is a random list of names; there is no proof they are copyright violators." Metallica: "Sure there is; NetPD told us they are." Napster: "How did they get the list?" What proof do we have they aren't just random names?" NetPD: "Trade secret, we can't tell you that."
Either NetPD's comment holds up in court, and *anonymous attacks* become acceptable legal practice (in which case we all ought to run to the nearest country with reasonable laws, as ours will cease to mean anything), or NetPD is forced to disclose their methodology to the court, or the list is thrown out as being invalid evidence in a court hearing.
Unfortunately, Shiller joins a long list of public figures who continue to be listened to, even after they've been proven wrong
*Proven* wrong? That's a slightly strong statement, isn't it? The thing is, we really don't *know* if we're experiencing a speculative bubble or not. Certainly it seems unlikely *to me* that the value of companies in the US increased by *500%* in the last ten years (based on the value of the DOW, you would assume that was true). But that doesn't mean we're experiencing a bubble; something else might be going on. Nobody knows for sure; most economists seem puzzled and confused.
One possible solution is for government regulation to mandate minimum values for trading, outside of the reach of small investors. Another solution could be to delay trading by 48 hours on small trades, minimizing the "herd" effects.
Thereby allowing only the "big boys" to play, and ensuring that if the stock market *does* take a dump, the small investors will get screwed the most.
I'd be more in favor of increasing the margin-backing requirement (you're only allowed to have a certain percentage of your portfolio out on margin; i'd decrease that percentage); this would protect people from the behavior most likely to hurt them if the market dumps.
Now, to Mr Katz and anyone else who really believes that the markets are valued wrong: why are you not out earning zillions?
Insufficient capital to play. I've got less than $10K in the bank at the moment; while I could earn some with that, it's not going to make me a millionaire.
Re:Katz, have you looked at the NASDAQ recently?
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Irrational Exuberance
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· Score: 1
Down as much as 35% of it's 52 week high, currently somewhat higher but still waaaayyyy down. Wait, hold on, I'm about to predict LAST YEAR's super bowl winner.... its, its, the RAMS!
Er... sure, NASDAQ is down from its high. But its PE ratio is still insane by historic standards, and the DOW isn't down significantly (although its PE ratio is insane as well).
Maybe we're at the start of a "soft landing". But I wouldn't bet on it.
Machine translation by its very nature sucks, and will continue to suck for the forseeable future.
The problem isn't the technology per se; it's that constructs in one language do not necessarily map particularly well into another.
Among western european languages, this is usually an overcomable obstacle, as they all have roughly similar grammars and vocabularies (although there are still subtleties; "embarassing" is a concept which doesn't translate well into German, for example). But when you get outside the germanic/romance languages, it gets harder; and a mechanistic mapping of word (a) in language (b) to word (c) in language (d) will often fail to render anything intelligible.
If you take an average web page, run it through babelfish into some other language, and then back into its original language, its meaning has often significantly degraded; do it a couple of times, and you frequently end up with something only a step above gibberish. This isn't because babelfish is lame; it's because translation is *hard*.
That's not to say that mechanical translation isn't useful --- it's *nice* to be able to know how to say "where is the bathroom" in any language, and machines can help with that. But they won't allow you to speak a language intelligently, or make sense of the conversations around you, any more than the tiny tourist dictionaries with hundreds of phrases that you can't pronounce correctly will.
Actually, the reason you can't shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre has nothing to do we free speech and everything to do with contract law
That is an interesting legal reasoning, but in *first amendment law*, "fire in a crowded theatre" has been used repeatedly as a metaphor for "speech which can be prohibited because failing to prohibit it would constitute a clear and present danger to innocent bystanders".
The total amount of speech which falls into this is fairly small, but it has been a recognized category of speech in first amendment jurisprudence for more than a century...
This kind of praising of the so-called "benefits" of technology
I find your message disturbing *not* because it says that technology has negative effects, but because it seems to go as far in that direction as you accuse mindless technology boosters of going.
Some technologies have *horrible* effects on society (I would argue television to be one of them, because of the way it has contributed to isolating us from each other). Others come close to being unmitigated good (refrigeration comes to mind; I *like* the fact that I can eat healthy and safe food year-round, and that my eggs won't spoil in less than 24 hours during the summer, and I can't see how anyone is hurt by it particularly).
But most of them are ambiguous in their effects. Is the car a good thing? Maybe --- it allows people to travel, to experience more of the world; it means people who live in a boring flat hot dry farmland valley can drive to the beach, or the mountains, and see that there is more to the world. But maybe not; it encourages people to not notice the land they are passing through because they are driving too fast, and it has the side effect of encouraging them to not know their neighbors.
In the end, was it good or bad? Some of both, I think.
I can't see why highways are considered one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. It takes lots of materials, but the engineering is just about leveling ground and paving it.
And some of the places where they did that, the effort it must have taken was incredible. Considering that it took almost *ten years* to build the first railroad across the continent, and it took approximately ten years for the majority of the interstate highway system to be built...
And, compared with the roads in existence in the 30s and 40s, the interstate highways were an incredible improvement: well paved, and graded so as to allow as a normal thing speeds which would have been impossible on previous roads.
(Not to mention the comparison between US/Canadian/European highways and highways in places like, say, Bolivia).
This list, basically, covers every major engineering feat of the 20th century.
Sure: it's obvious from looking at it that it's not a list of the most technically innovative inventions, but rather a list of those technical innovations which in some way changed society.
I'm not sure that 1935-1945 is a reasonable basis for comparison to either the postwar (1945-1990) or modern (1990-) periods; it was historically unusual, the second half of the bloodiest period in modern western history (1914-1945).
A better comparison might be the political 19th century (1815-1900) which saw *two* major wars in Europe (one of them, the Crimean War, was viewed as being unusually bloody by contemporaries) but otherwise relative peace and harmony between nations.
One of the best arguments i've heard for *why* there was such an extended period of peace (the longest in modern European history, in fact) is that the industrial revolution had effectively given Britain a hegemonic position in Europe, which allowed it to more or less maintain the peace, until the hegemony broke down.
The reason this argument is interesting is that it's directly relevant today; the US is in a hegemonic position, the world is unusually devoid of major threats to stability... but assuming that that hegemony will last forever, and that stability is here to stay, is probably misguided.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd take this offline if I could ...
...
Oh, but it can, that's what the military, tear gas, intelligence organizations, high taxation, UTICA, CDMA, nukes, police, media monopolies, and closed source are for. To ensure the continued hegemony.
I guess this depends on who, or what, you consider to have hegemony. The interesting thing, though, is that almost all of those have valid reasons for existence which have nothing to do with repressing the citizenry, and little to do with the degeneration of representative democracy (and some of them, like "high taxation", don't even exist, at least not here --- US taxation rates are by far the lowest in the industrialized world).
In any event: no government can last indefinitely once it loses the support of its people --- force eventually stops working (as the Soviets found out). Misleading the people into supporting the government is a more effective tactic --- but, at least in this country, it's not *the government* doing that, but the companies which dominate the economy, and they are doing it(I suspect) largely without intent.
Still, the point remains that the popular legitimacy of the government of the United States is decreasing --- and that's disconcerting, as unless it is corrected in some fashion, we will end up either with (a) a government which is irrelevant and a society which effectively approaches anarcho-capitalism; (b) a repressive government desperate to remain in power; (c) a violent, and at times nasty, revolution. None of those are particularly *pleasant* outcomes
I want information on a candidate from *before* he became a senator.
...)
Sure --- but the amount of time it would take someone to compile this sort of information, going back to legislative records from as much as *30 years ago*, is immense; and who is going to pay for it?
(I'm not saying what you're looking for wouldn't be cool, just that it's unrealistic to expect it
many issues are far, far too complex to discuss in an online forum.
This is arguably one of the problems with direct democracy, and why representative democracy is a good thing: most issues decided by legislatures are immensely complicated, and expecting everyone to devote the time and energy to understanding them is absurd. Yet, at the same time, when nobody trusts their representatives, representative democracy can't work.
It's probably the most significant problem in modern political science: expecting people to devote the effort needed to make direct democracy work on a large scale is like expecting to discover alien life tomorrow, but lack of trust in representatives is undermining the legitimacy of the current system.
*sigh*
it's about private property. Most people don't own private property (most people just own personal possessions)
I'm a bit unclear about the distinciton you're making here between private property and personal possessions --- clearly a toothbrush is a personal possession, and a house is private property; but what about a computer?
Besides, what you are saying isn't true; more than half the people *in the United States* own a house (or are married to someone who does).
Voting for leaders is worthless. Why waste the time?
Even if that were true, many states have referenda or initiative systems in which the voters vote *on laws*. Yeah, the vote is often heavily influenced by misleading advertising paid for by powerful special interest groups --- but we're still voting directly on laws, and it's not that unusual for the voters to spit in the face of the interest groups, as it were. (California has many examples of this, one of the most recent being the legalization of use of medical marijuana, over the objections of almost every mainstream politician in the state).
Actually, I've always found that the biggest zealots, of any cause, are the converts.
...
...
...
This is actually a well-known precept in academic sociology and political science; I wish I could cite something, but it's been a number of years since school, so my memory of that level of specific is shot
As with any cultural minority, the only ones you ever notice are the ones you are least likely to like
Sort of says bad things about multiculturalism, doesn't it --- if the only members of "them" that you notice are the ones that are on the fringe, and doing things that irritate you, but you assume that those people are representative, there's never going to be a useful dialogue
There's an interesting series being run by the NYT right now about race relations (first article was about an integrated pentecostal church, and the second was about how race in miami is different than race in havana) which touches on this issue
People DO choose to become fundies, skinheads, etc. And there is nothing wrong with refusing service to such groups.
Sometimes, though, the 'choice' is a surface myth which doesn't really exist --- the vast majority of people who grow up in heavily fundamentalist families remain fundamentalist; did they 'choose' that? (This isn't a flame, really, but a serious question; the borders of the space defined by the word 'choice' are extremely fuzzy when analyzed philisophically).
I must disagree, though, with the second part of your statement: it is not true that 'there is nothing wrong with refusing service to such groups'; aside form being simply bad economics in most cases (Marriott's refusing to rent to non-married couples, for example, would be economically absurd), there really isn't that much difference between refusing to serve food to a black man and refusing to serve food to a christian fundamentalist: they are both arbitrary decisions based on characteristics of the person which are *irrelevant to the situation at hand*. The only difference is that race is *almost always* irrelevant, whereas religion is occasionally relevant.
If that wasn't in the contract s/he signed when they signed up with that ISP, then I would say (IANAL) that they could sue for damages.
Maybe not: sometimes law is perverse, and the ISP may have the legal power to discontinue service for this sort of thing *unless the contract explicitly denies them the power.*
Also by the same guy who did Grave of the Fireflies is Princess Mononoke, an incredible late-midieval fantasy about a kid going off to find the source of the magical disease which has infected him. Was out in the theatres last year (dubbed), with the translation done by Neil Gaiman, and one of the voices by Gillian Anderson.
windows will still execute it No it won't. uh ... there is *no* requirement that an executable file image be attached to a program with a .exe extension in any modern version of windows. I can create an executable named foo, and as long as windows detects the correct information in the header, it will execute it. Hell, I *have* done this, regularly. (It also is no longer true that .com files have to be under 64K in size or adhere to the compact memory model ... that was true in win31, but no more). Now, its possible that *outlook* wont invoke it, because a lot of the automagic file invocation stuff happens with checks through the registry to discover what should be used to open a particular file, and outlook might be stupid enough to not know that something not named .exe is actually an executable --- i dont know, as i havent run outlook more than once or twice. but theres no inherent windows limitation, and hasnt been for years. -- Robert West Delphi R&D
*sigh*. so what keeps someone from renaming foo.exe to foo? it remains an executable image, windows will still execute it, and outlook wont know that it should suppress it ....
Anonymous attacks are becoming more and more effective in the U.S.,
:) In the case Florida v. JL, handed down 28 March 2000, the Supreme Court ruled *unanimously* that "an anonymous tip that a person is carrying a gun is not, without more, sufficient to justify a police officer's stop and frisk of that person." The argument is that anonymous tips which are *predictive of behavior* can be trusted *when the predicted behavior manifests*, but tips which are merely *descriptive* cannot be --- otherwise you could call the police and accuse the otherwise innocent-looking black man standing at the bus stop of carrying a gun, and the police would be justified in searching him.
S .html
Yes and no.
For more information, including the text of the decision, see http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/98-1993.Z
Their methodology will have to come out, eventually.
Imagine (this isn't going to happen now, but something similar will someday) that Napster refuses to block the names on the list. Metallica sues, and the conversation in court looks like:
Metallica: "Napster won't block these known copyright violaters."
Napster: "This is a random list of names; there is no proof they are copyright violators."
Metallica: "Sure there is; NetPD told us they are."
Napster: "How did they get the list?" What proof do we have they aren't just random names?"
NetPD: "Trade secret, we can't tell you that."
Either NetPD's comment holds up in court, and *anonymous attacks* become acceptable legal practice (in which case we all ought to run to the nearest country with reasonable laws, as ours will cease to mean anything), or NetPD is forced to disclose their methodology to the court, or the list is thrown out as being invalid evidence in a court hearing.
Unfortunately, Shiller joins a long list of public figures who continue to be listened to, even after they've been proven wrong
*Proven* wrong? That's a slightly strong statement, isn't it? The thing is, we really don't *know* if we're experiencing a speculative bubble or not. Certainly it seems unlikely *to me* that the value of companies in the US increased by *500%* in the last ten years (based on the value of the DOW, you would assume that was true). But that doesn't mean we're experiencing a bubble; something else might be going on. Nobody knows for sure; most economists seem puzzled and confused.
One possible solution is for government regulation to mandate minimum values for trading, outside of the reach of small investors. Another solution could be to delay trading by 48 hours on small trades, minimizing the "herd" effects.
Thereby allowing only the "big boys" to play, and ensuring that if the stock market *does* take a dump, the small investors will get screwed the most.
I'd be more in favor of increasing the margin-backing requirement (you're only allowed to have a certain percentage of your portfolio out on margin; i'd decrease that percentage); this would protect people from the behavior most likely to hurt them if the market dumps.
Now, to Mr Katz and anyone else who really believes that the markets are valued wrong: why are you not out earning zillions?
Insufficient capital to play. I've got less than $10K in the bank at the moment; while I could earn some with that, it's not going to make me a millionaire.
Down as much as 35% of it's 52 week high, currently somewhat higher but still waaaayyyy down. Wait, hold on, I'm about to predict LAST YEAR's super bowl winner.... its, its, the RAMS!
... sure, NASDAQ is down from its high. But its PE ratio is still insane by historic standards, and the DOW isn't down significantly (although its PE ratio is insane as well).
Er
Maybe we're at the start of a "soft landing". But I wouldn't bet on it.
One need only to look at the Dutch tulip craze to see the pattern....
Do you know of a good book on that?
Hell, perhaps I should have when I invested in Corel.
Funny, i'm trying to *avoid* investing in Corel. Here's hoping the merger falls through *cross fingers*
Machine translation by its very nature sucks, and will continue to suck for the forseeable future.
The problem isn't the technology per se; it's that constructs in one language do not necessarily map particularly well into another.
Among western european languages, this is usually an overcomable obstacle, as they all have roughly similar grammars and vocabularies (although there are still subtleties; "embarassing" is a concept which doesn't translate well into German, for example). But when you get outside the germanic/romance languages, it gets harder; and a mechanistic mapping of word (a) in language (b) to word (c) in language (d) will often fail to render anything intelligible.
If you take an average web page, run it through babelfish into some other language, and then back into its original language, its meaning has often significantly degraded; do it a couple of times, and you frequently end up with something only a step above gibberish. This isn't because babelfish is lame; it's because translation is *hard*.
That's not to say that mechanical translation isn't useful --- it's *nice* to be able to know how to say "where is the bathroom" in any language, and machines can help with that. But they won't allow you to speak a language intelligently, or make sense of the conversations around you, any more than the tiny tourist dictionaries with hundreds of phrases that you can't pronounce correctly will.
the movie "A Walk in Tibet", staring Brad Pitt,
ObFlame: "Seven Years in Tibet", even.
Actually, the reason you can't shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre has nothing to do we free speech and everything to do with contract law
...
That is an interesting legal reasoning, but in *first amendment law*, "fire in a crowded theatre" has been used repeatedly as a metaphor for "speech which can be prohibited because failing to prohibit it would constitute a clear and present danger to innocent bystanders".
The total amount of speech which falls into this is fairly small, but it has been a recognized category of speech in first amendment jurisprudence for more than a century
This kind of praising of the so-called "benefits" of technology
I find your message disturbing *not* because it says that technology has negative effects, but because it seems to go as far in that direction as you accuse mindless technology boosters of going.
Some technologies have *horrible* effects on society (I would argue television to be one of them, because of the way it has contributed to isolating us from each other). Others come close to being unmitigated good (refrigeration comes to mind; I *like* the fact that I can eat healthy and safe food year-round, and that my eggs won't spoil in less than 24 hours during the summer, and I can't see how anyone is hurt by it particularly).
But most of them are ambiguous in their effects. Is the car a good thing? Maybe --- it allows people to travel, to experience more of the world; it means people who live in a boring flat hot dry farmland valley can drive to the beach, or the mountains, and see that there is more to the world. But maybe not; it encourages people to not notice the land they are passing through because they are driving too fast, and it has the side effect of encouraging them to not know their neighbors.
In the end, was it good or bad? Some of both, I think.
I can't see why highways are considered one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. It takes lots of materials, but the engineering is just about leveling ground and paving it.
...
And some of the places where they did that, the effort it must have taken was incredible. Considering that it took almost *ten years* to build the first railroad across the continent, and it took approximately ten years for the majority of the interstate highway system to be built
And, compared with the roads in existence in the 30s and 40s, the interstate highways were an incredible improvement: well paved, and graded so as to allow as a normal thing speeds which would have been impossible on previous roads.
(Not to mention the comparison between US/Canadian/European highways and highways in places like, say, Bolivia).
This list, basically, covers every major engineering feat of the 20th century.
Sure: it's obvious from looking at it that it's not a list of the most technically innovative inventions, but rather a list of those technical innovations which in some way changed society.
I'm not sure that 1935-1945 is a reasonable basis for comparison to either the postwar (1945-1990) or modern (1990-) periods; it was historically unusual, the second half of the bloodiest period in modern western history (1914-1945).
... but assuming that that hegemony will last forever, and that stability is here to stay, is probably misguided.
A better comparison might be the political 19th century (1815-1900) which saw *two* major wars in Europe (one of them, the Crimean War, was viewed as being unusually bloody by contemporaries) but otherwise relative peace and harmony between nations.
One of the best arguments i've heard for *why* there was such an extended period of peace (the longest in modern European history, in fact) is that the industrial revolution had effectively given Britain a hegemonic position in Europe, which allowed it to more or less maintain the peace, until the hegemony broke down.
The reason this argument is interesting is that it's directly relevant today; the US is in a hegemonic position, the world is unusually devoid of major threats to stability