England is the cradle of the Anglo-Saxon world.:) Obviously. Press in France or India -- I am not sure about it. I think that what's happening is that in US the political mainstream is fairly narrow. You do get all kinds of publications, very critical of govt, but the mainstream publications tend to be bland copies of one another (e.g Time and Newsweek). In Europe the mainstream is wider, especially towards the left. Socialist and even communist publications (especially in Italy, France) are considered to be part of mainstream. That's why people argue that the press in Europe is more free, but they are wrong. The press is actually more free in the US (mostly because of First Amendment), but the European mainstream press is more diverse and tends to present more points of view. However if you want a different point of view in the US it's easy to find one, it just will not be a 'mainstream' publication. As to the press in the developing countries (e.g. India) I have a feeling that it's more rude than free.
First, get your Latin straight: it's "a priori", not "a priora". Second, Kaa's Law is empirically derived -- I formulated it based on my own personal observations. With regard to your superset of the law (er.. do you know what a superset is?), I, at least, do not recall meeting anybody who called himself an Anonymous Coward.
For your information, UN Charter has no sections. It is divided into Chapters and Articles. I assume you refer to Article 2, which reads, in part:
The Organization and its Members, in pursuit of the Purposes stated in Article 1, shall act in accordance with the following Principles (italics mine, so that you pay attention to this word).
1.The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.
2.All Members, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership, shall fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter.
3.All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
4.All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
...etc.
These are *principles* which are not legal obligations and are not binding on the members. Phrases like "All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means" clearly describe how the world *should* work, but, again, do not prohibit anyone from going to war against another state.
And if you want to be lawyerly, you can even argue that the NATO war against Serbia is not "against the territorial integrity or political independence" since all NATO claims it wants (it is lying) is to enforce the unsigned Rambouillet Agreement. This, of course, doesn't make any sense, but NATO didn't come up publicly with a resonable goal for this war.
I live in America. It is so scary how much the media and the government control the people's thoughts. Well, obviously they don't control yours all that well:) But really, there is nothing specific to US here. A majority of people in any country in the world are likely to belive whatever the media/government wants them to believe, if the propaganda is done skillfully enough. You might argue that this is a regrettable aspect of human nature, but still this has nothing to do with US. If anything, the Anglo-Saxon world (UK and US) has a much deeper distrust of the government than the rest of the world. So be glad you live in US, otherwise you probably would not be thinking these thoughts at all.
Re NATO hiding losses: did the Serbs produce any pieces of shot-down warplanes (except for that F-117)? No? And why not if they shot them down? Serb AA forces the NATO planes to stay above 5km and that radically reduces their effeciveness. Basically the NATO planes are flying high up where they are safe but cannot do much.
Re bombing civilian vehicles: break the will of the Serbian people by bombing convoys of Kosovar refugees?? Boggle. Come on, you can do better than that. Besides it's not like Milosevic (and the leaders of Vietnam and Iraq) care much about what the people think or feel.
Re attack on the Chinese embassy: To rally the ultra-right behind the President???? Hey, man, I want some of that stuff that you're smoking...
Re international law: are you saying that a country cannot wage war on another country without the UN approval? I don't think so. Regarding the Geneva convention, I don't think NATO *targets* schools and hospitals. It hits them occasionally, sure, but specifically targeting them? Again, I don't think so.
Re KLA starting the fight: before you weren't talking about who fired the first shot, you were implying that Serbs have a *right* to this piece of land because its "ancient Serb territory". This doesn't really have anything to do with who started the current fight.
I just deplore this illegal, immoral, and ineptly-executed war
Illegal -- I don't think so, you'll have to prove it.
Immoral -- depends on what your morals are. Mine are OK with this particular war.
Ineptly-executed -- sure. I'm in complete agreement with you here. If that's the best NATO can do, it's time to start learning Chinese...
I'm not saying US media is lily-white. But I want to point out that:
(1) Media lives and dies by its reputation. Tabloids aside, any publication that was caught intentionally lying is in big, big trouble. Everybody knows it and it is a good incentive to avoid blatant misinformation (but not subtle/clever one, of course).
(2) Published photos are routinely tweaked using PhotoShop and similar editors. It's normal to remove a bit of extra waistline from model pictured on the cover. Make her legs longer? Sure. Hide the unsighty mole? No problem. Done every day. Given this I wouldn't be surprised to see Clinton artificially "elongated", but so what? Besides, I suspect most of the effect comes from the perspective of the shot (if you are closer to the camera, you seem larger than the people behind you; also taller if the photographer is standing lower than Clinton). Intentionally faked satellite shots is another matter, but I haven't heard much about it outside of paranoid conspiracy theories.
Just because nobody knows for sure how many people were killed in Kosovo this year doesn't mean that nobody was killed. We just don't know now. It may turn out that a couple of hundred were killed, it may turn out that several thousand were killed -- it's too early to tell.
Besides, does driving people off their land, looting, burning, raping, etc. count for anything?
You are mixing up "powerful" and "having a lot of mostly very poor population". The countries you listed are populous, but not powerful. Also, governments in countries like China are not known for expressing the views of their people.
Besides, since when the majority view has anything to do with what is the right thing to do and what is not?
Even leaving aside the propaganda that comes out of Milosevic's camp (didn't the Serbs shoot down the whole NATO air force by now?)...
Bombing many many civilian vehicles, and then telling the people "oops" Are you saying NATO does this intentionally, on purpose? If so, could you tell us all what that purpose might be?
eradicating civilian journalists (Serb and Chinese) Do you want to say that US intentionally targeted the Chinese embassy in order to kill Chinese journalists? Really?
Not to mention the sheer audacity of flouting all international law in order to maintain one's "credibility" International law is very vague with regard to waging war, for obvious reasons. Could you specifically tell us exactly which law is NATO breaking?
trying to reconquer ancient Serb territory from the neo-nazi KLA KLA are not angels, but they have are fighting for survival. And "ancient Serb territory" -- how about Germany trying to recover ancient German territory -- Prussia -- from Poland and Russia? Or Poland recovering traditional Polish lands from Ukraine and Belorussia? Or Azerbaijanis recovering their land from Iran? I could go on and on...
Consider this: last time the genocide was attempted (in Rwanda) the West sat on its hands and did nothing. The results were horrible. This does make you sensitive to other attempts at ethnic cleansing, doesn't it?
"Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it". To effective isolate Foonia you need to make sure that *every single connection* to the net is disabled, which requires massive cooperation from everybody.
Let's say there is another country, Quxia, which is not all that enthusiastic about the embargo of Foonia. If Foonia has a connection to Quxia, you would not be able to lock out Foonia without locking out Quxia as well. Yes, you can try to block based on originating host, but there are many counters possible. And don't forget plain-vanilla dial-out over POTS.
Er, dude, you're somewhat confused. The idea that ethnic cleansing (and its bigger brother, genocide) is bad is a fairly recent concept. Only in the XIX century people began to think that exterminating entire populations isn't necessarily a moral thing to do. Before that what we call ethnic cleansing was called a successful war. All civilizations practiced it and there is nothing special about the US. The understanding of right and wrong changes over time, so don't be too quick to judge people and countries over what they did centuries ago.
A lot of people around here seem to have doubts about whether source code is REALLY speech. Well, this subject is probably worth a discussion of its own, but the point here is that the court held that for the purposes of the US legal system source code is speech. That does not imply any observations on whether it makes any sense in other context to treat source code as speech.
For example, one quite famous case from last century said that underground oil deposits are a wild animal. Don't ask.
Re-read the original post. Did it say that Linux is the greatest? No. Did it even say that Linux is better than Solaris? No. Did it say that everybody (or even anybody) should/must run Linux? No. Did it say that Sun/Solaris/McNealy should die slowly and painfully? No again.
The point of the post was that Linux is rapidly spreading in the small-server market (this happens to be a fact). Sun happens to currently be a competitor in the same market. Given this I would not expect an unbiased view from Sun on the merits of Linux. Maybe you would, I don't know.
The other point was that Sun exhibits a fair amount of large-corporation behaviour that I tend to view with suspicion. Again, I'm not saying that that's evil of them, or even unexpected or unusual. It's just that Sun is a large corporation the primary goal of which is to make money. It's wise to keep this in mind when evaluating Sun's actions.
And I still don't see where all that "True Believer" stuff comes in.
Well, first of all Sun boxes may be "pushing towards the large scalable server area", but currently they are selling an awful lot of plain-vanilla workstations. The place where I work is full of Ultra 1s, 2s, 10s, etc. and I believe this is typical. They all could, in principle, be replaced with Linux boxes. Think about it: three years ago if you needed a small- to medium-scale UNIX server you basically had to buy a Sun -- they were the cheapest. Today, if you are strapped for cash, you buy a PC and load Linux on it. Does this situation hurt Sun? You bet!
As to world domination plans, you got mixed up a little. Think again: who (and what) has world domination plans? Publicly announced? As the goal of the whole thing? I'll give you a hint: it was not Scott McNealy. Once you've straightened this out, re-read the original paragraph again.
Regarding Java, all I said was IMHO and all you said was IYHO, so we can disagree. I still think you are a bit naive if you think that all Sun cares about is Java not being "co-opted and corrupted.
And my law doesn't need proof. It's self-evident.:)
The article is a journalistic take on the pure PC world. All UNIX notables (except for Linus, who happened to be flavor-of-the-day) are missing. All PARC people who invented modern computing (mouse, bitmapped screen, object-oriented languages, etc.) are missing as well. Hardware people, Internet people, etc., etc. -- none present.
As it should. People who are running Linux tend to do such nasty things as migrating to low-cost Intel-based hardware. People who are running Solaris find this a very painful exercise, so they tend to stay with Sun hardware and its bloated prices.
Linux is a direct competitor to Solaris. Naturally McNealy is unhappy about the world domination plans, and he expresses it just a bit more graciously than that unnamed individual.
Again, just because Sun is not MS does not mean it wears a white hat. Sun would be quite happy to squash Linux and have Solaris running on all Unix boxes out there. It is less successful at this than Microsoft with PCs, but it surely wants this to happen.
I would be quite suspicious of Sun. Given their recent Java moves ("this language belongs to US!"), the famous McNealy privacy remark ("Get over it"), and other signs, I'm detecting a certain darkening of their headware.
Nothing new here, really, but people who find this subject interesting should look around the Edge site (www.edge.com). That's a collection of VERY interesting people, Danny Hillis being one of them, and they come up with very interesting ideas. I'm almost tempted to say that Kaa's Law does not apply to them, but then again, I only looked at the site:)
Isn't it funny how many people had their troll detector offline and took the trouble to post what they consider to be their serious responses... Kaa's law in action!
Slashdot Mirror
England is the cradle of the Anglo-Saxon world. :) Obviously. Press in France or India -- I am not sure about it. I think that what's happening is that in US the political mainstream is fairly narrow. You do get all kinds of publications, very critical of govt, but the mainstream publications tend to be bland copies of one another (e.g Time and Newsweek). In Europe the mainstream is wider, especially towards the left. Socialist and even communist publications (especially in Italy, France) are considered to be part of mainstream. That's why people argue that the press in Europe is more free, but they are wrong. The press is actually more free in the US (mostly because of First Amendment), but the European mainstream press is more diverse and tends to present more points of view. However if you want a different point of view in the US it's easy to find one, it just will not be a 'mainstream' publication. As to the press in the developing countries (e.g. India) I have a feeling that it's more rude than free.
Kaa
First, get your Latin straight: it's "a priori", not "a priora". Second, Kaa's Law is empirically derived -- I formulated it based on my own personal observations. With regard to your superset of the law (er.. do you know what a superset is?), I, at least, do not recall meeting anybody who called himself an Anonymous Coward.
Kaa
I'm glad you like the argument :)
For your information, UN Charter has no sections. It is divided into Chapters and Articles. I assume you refer to Article 2, which reads, in part:
The Organization and its Members, in pursuit of the Purposes stated in Article 1, shall act in accordance with the following Principles (italics mine, so that you pay attention to this word).
1.The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.
2.All Members, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership, shall fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter.
3.All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
4.All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
...etc.
These are *principles* which are not legal obligations and are not binding on the members. Phrases like "All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means" clearly describe how the world *should* work, but, again,
do not prohibit anyone from going to war against another state.
And if you want to be lawyerly, you can even argue that the NATO war against Serbia is not "against the territorial integrity or political independence" since all NATO claims it wants (it is lying) is to enforce the unsigned Rambouillet Agreement. This, of course, doesn't make any sense, but NATO didn't come up publicly with a resonable goal for this war.
Kaa
I live in America. It is so scary how much the media and the government control the people's thoughts. :) But really, there is nothing specific to US here. A majority of people in any country in the world are likely to belive whatever the media/government wants them to believe, if the propaganda is done skillfully enough. You might argue that this is a regrettable aspect of human nature, but still this has nothing to do with US. If anything, the Anglo-Saxon world (UK and US) has a much deeper distrust of the government than the rest of the world. So be glad you live in US, otherwise you probably would not be thinking these thoughts at all.
Well, obviously they don't control yours all that well
Kaa
Re NATO hiding losses: did the Serbs produce any pieces of shot-down warplanes (except for that F-117)? No? And why not if they shot them down? Serb AA forces the NATO planes to stay above 5km and that radically reduces their effeciveness. Basically the NATO planes are flying high up where they are safe but cannot do much.
Re bombing civilian vehicles: break the will of the Serbian people by bombing convoys of Kosovar refugees?? Boggle. Come on, you can do better than that. Besides it's not like Milosevic (and the leaders of Vietnam and Iraq) care much about what the people think or feel.
Re attack on the Chinese embassy: To rally the ultra-right behind the President? ??? Hey, man, I want some of that stuff that you're smoking...
Re international law: are you saying that a country cannot wage war on another country without the UN approval? I don't think so. Regarding the Geneva convention, I don't think NATO *targets* schools and hospitals. It hits them occasionally, sure, but specifically targeting them? Again, I don't think so.
Re KLA starting the fight: before you weren't talking about who fired the first shot, you were implying that Serbs have a *right* to this piece of land because its "ancient Serb territory". This doesn't really have anything to do with who started the current fight.
I just deplore this illegal, immoral, and ineptly-executed war
Illegal -- I don't think so, you'll have to prove it.
Immoral -- depends on what your morals are. Mine are OK with this particular war.
Ineptly-executed -- sure. I'm in complete agreement with you here. If that's the best NATO can do, it's time to start learning Chinese...
Kaa
I'm not saying US media is lily-white. But I want to point out that:
(1) Media lives and dies by its reputation. Tabloids aside, any publication that was caught intentionally lying is in big, big trouble. Everybody knows it and it is a good incentive to avoid blatant misinformation (but not subtle/clever one, of course).
(2) Published photos are routinely tweaked using PhotoShop and similar editors. It's normal to remove a bit of extra waistline from model pictured on the cover. Make her legs longer? Sure. Hide the unsighty mole? No problem. Done every day. Given this I wouldn't be surprised to see Clinton artificially "elongated", but so what? Besides, I suspect most of the effect comes from the perspective of the shot (if you are closer to the camera, you seem larger than the people behind you; also taller if the photographer is standing lower than Clinton). Intentionally faked satellite shots is another matter, but I haven't heard much about it outside of paranoid conspiracy theories.
Kaa
Just because nobody knows for sure how many people were killed in Kosovo this year doesn't mean that nobody was killed. We just don't know now. It may turn out that a couple of hundred were killed, it may turn out that several thousand were killed -- it's too early to tell.
Besides, does driving people off their land, looting, burning, raping, etc. count for anything?
Kaa
You are mixing up "powerful" and "having a lot of mostly very poor population". The countries you listed are populous, but not powerful. Also, governments in countries like China are not known for expressing the views of their people.
Besides, since when the majority view has anything to do with what is the right thing to do and what is not?
Kaa
Even leaving aside the propaganda that comes out of Milosevic's camp (didn't the Serbs shoot down the whole NATO air force by now?)...
Bombing many many civilian vehicles, and then telling the people "oops"
Are you saying NATO does this intentionally, on purpose? If so, could you tell us all what that purpose might be?
eradicating civilian journalists (Serb and Chinese)
Do you want to say that US intentionally targeted the Chinese embassy in order to kill Chinese journalists? Really?
Not to mention the sheer audacity of flouting all international law in order to maintain one's "credibility"
International law is very vague with regard to waging war, for obvious reasons. Could you specifically tell us exactly which law is NATO breaking?
trying to reconquer ancient Serb territory from the neo-nazi KLA
KLA are not angels, but they have are fighting for survival. And "ancient Serb territory" -- how about Germany trying to recover ancient German territory -- Prussia -- from Poland and Russia? Or Poland recovering traditional Polish lands from Ukraine and Belorussia? Or Azerbaijanis recovering their land from Iran? I could go on and on...
Kaa
AFAIK the Serbs officially declared war on NATO.
Kaa
Consider this: last time the genocide was attempted (in Rwanda) the West sat on its hands and did nothing. The results were horrible. This does make you sensitive to other attempts at ethnic cleansing, doesn't it?
Kaa
"Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it". To effective isolate Foonia you need to make sure that *every single connection* to the net is disabled, which requires massive cooperation from everybody.
Let's say there is another country, Quxia, which is not all that enthusiastic about the embargo of Foonia. If Foonia has a connection to Quxia, you would not be able to lock out Foonia without locking out Quxia as well. Yes, you can try to block based on originating host, but there are many counters possible. And don't forget plain-vanilla dial-out over POTS.
Kaa
Er, dude, you're somewhat confused. The idea that ethnic cleansing (and its bigger brother, genocide) is bad is a fairly recent concept. Only in the XIX century people began to think that exterminating entire populations isn't necessarily a moral thing to do. Before that what we call ethnic cleansing was called a successful war. All civilizations practiced it and there is nothing special about the US. The understanding of right and wrong changes over time, so don't be too quick to judge people and countries over what they did centuries ago.
Kaa
the export administration regulations {
operate as a prepublication licensing scheme that burdens scientific expression,
vest boundless discretion in government officials,
and lack adequate procedural safeguards,"
}
Kaa
A lot of people around here seem to have doubts about whether source code is REALLY speech. Well, this subject is probably worth a discussion of its own, but the point here is that the court held that for the purposes of the US legal system source code is speech. That does not imply any observations on whether it makes any sense in other context to treat source code as speech.
For example, one quite famous case from last century said that underground oil deposits are a wild animal. Don't ask.
Kaa
Those being the guys that filed briefs in support of the plaintiff (Bernstein). Selected bits:
Electronic Privacy Information Center
American Civil Liberties Union
...
Dr. Whitfield Diffie
Dr. Peter Neumann
Dr. Ronald Rivest
D. James Bidzos
...
Kaa
...that people who make Kaa's Law work do not like to be reminded of it.
.sig.
But really, I'm almost sure I've been moderated both up and down only because of my
Kaa
Re-read the original post. Did it say that Linux is the greatest? No. Did it even say that Linux is better than Solaris? No. Did it say that everybody (or even anybody) should/must run Linux? No. Did it say that Sun/Solaris/McNealy should die slowly and painfully? No again.
The point of the post was that Linux is rapidly spreading in the small-server market (this happens to be a fact). Sun happens to currently be a competitor in the same market. Given this I would not expect an unbiased view from Sun on the merits of Linux. Maybe you would, I don't know.
The other point was that Sun exhibits a fair amount of large-corporation behaviour that I tend to view with suspicion. Again, I'm not saying that that's evil of them, or even unexpected or unusual. It's just that Sun is a large corporation the primary goal of which is to make money. It's wise to keep this in mind when evaluating Sun's actions.
And I still don't see where all that "True Believer" stuff comes in.
Kaa
Well, first of all Sun boxes may be "pushing towards the large scalable server area", but currently they are selling an awful lot of plain-vanilla workstations. The place where I work is full of Ultra 1s, 2s, 10s, etc. and I believe this is typical. They all could, in principle, be replaced with Linux boxes. Think about it: three years ago if you needed a small- to medium-scale UNIX server you basically had to buy a Sun -- they were the cheapest. Today, if you are strapped for cash, you buy a PC and load Linux on it. Does this situation hurt Sun? You bet!
:)
As to world domination plans, you got mixed up a little. Think again: who (and what) has world domination plans? Publicly announced? As the goal of the whole thing? I'll give you a hint: it was not Scott McNealy. Once you've straightened this out, re-read the original paragraph again.
Regarding Java, all I said was IMHO and all you said was IYHO, so we can disagree. I still think you are a bit naive if you think that all Sun cares about is Java not being "co-opted and corrupted.
And my law doesn't need proof. It's self-evident.
Kaa
The article is a journalistic take on the pure PC world. All UNIX notables (except for Linus, who happened to be flavor-of-the-day) are missing. All PARC people who invented modern computing (mouse, bitmapped screen, object-oriented languages, etc.) are missing as well. Hardware people, Internet people, etc., etc. -- none present.
Kaa
As it should. People who are running Linux tend to do such nasty things as migrating to low-cost Intel-based hardware. People who are running Solaris find this a very painful exercise, so they tend to stay with Sun hardware and its bloated prices.
Kaa
Linux is a direct competitor to Solaris. Naturally McNealy is unhappy about the world domination plans, and he expresses it just a bit more graciously than that unnamed individual.
Again, just because Sun is not MS does not mean it wears a white hat. Sun would be quite happy to squash Linux and have Solaris running on all Unix boxes out there. It is less successful at this than Microsoft with PCs, but it surely wants this to happen.
I would be quite suspicious of Sun. Given their recent Java moves ("this language belongs to US!"), the famous McNealy privacy remark ("Get over it"), and other signs, I'm detecting a certain darkening of their headware.
Kaa
Nothing new here, really, but people who find this subject interesting should look around the Edge site (www.edge.com). That's a collection of VERY interesting people, Danny Hillis being one of them, and they come up with very interesting ideas. I'm almost tempted to say that Kaa's Law does not apply to them, but then again, I only looked at the site :)
Kaa
Pleeeeez?
Kaa
Isn't it funny how many people had their troll detector offline and took the trouble to post what they consider to be their serious responses... Kaa's law in action!
Kaa