I don't necessarily understand the objections to face scanning technology. To be sure, I don't want computers flagging people to be arrested. But computers sift through enormous amounts of information, making them ideal for a first pass. If they are used to flag people to be scrutinized by humans, I don't have any objections. In fact, if a computer can flag 20 of the hundreds of thousands of faces so that human experts can give a closer look, so much the better.
Incidentally, by this reasoning, it is in fact the false negatives that are more important. False positives can presumably be discarded by humans providing closer scrutiny. False negatives in this scenario, however, present a major difficulty.
Face scanning technology isn't innately evil. Like everything else, if we use it wisely, it can help. If we use it irresponsibly, it can hurt. No surprises there.
I agree. I would only add that if I find an advertisement informative, I am likely to watch it--even to look out for it and tell others about it. I think Best Buy is onto something with the program mentioned in the article; they can use the features of a DVR to let me *choose* to get information I want. As they say, they're going to have to come up with some new advertising methods.
The argument that corporations are understood to exist for the public benefit is abstracted one step too far. Lawmakers felt that a legal entity shielding individuals from liability would be beneficial, hence they created the idea of a corporations. This much is true, that the general idea of a corporation was deemed to have public benefit.
However, it does not seem to me that any specific corporation need have public benefit. Reading through the Massachusetts General Laws governing corporations, I find nothing to suggest that Massachusetts corporations are understood to have any requirement to act in anything other than their own interests. This may be different in your state. However, in Massachusetts, no such requirement seems to exist. The relevant laws appear in the Massachusetts General Laws Chapters 156 and 156B; I'd be interested to know if I am missing something.
I've never heard that incorporation was offered as a quid pro quo in exchange for doing something for the public good. I'll be interested to investigate if it did in fact start that way. In any event, it has (d)evolved from that intent.
I run an LLC, and I guarantee you that when we filed with the state, there was no understanding that we had any duty to see to the public good. In fact, most of the communication consisted of a stamp on our Certificate of Organization. Hence, it is difficult for me to see what duty I have to act for the public good from a legal standpoint relating to our filing with the state. Clearly there are ethical reasons to act for the public good, but if you were to threaten to take me to court because I wasn't fulfilling an implied agreement to act primarily in the public's best interest, frankly, I don't think I'd lose much sleep.
Do you have a reference for the implied agreement to act in the public interest? I'm interested to know more.
I think a lot of what you need to do is be a communicator and translator. Management gets a bad rap, often, because they do not have the training to understand software engineering. To be fair, however, most coders couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper bag (see also: dot come bust). The two groups speak different languages, and one primary task of any middle manager has to be to translate for both groups.
This goes beyond merely translating language; you also have to interfere with ideas. From managements standpoint, everything needs to have a hard deadline, a solid budget, etc. In engineering this is impossible. Similarly, (one of the most amusing things about programming, in my opinion), for coders, my way is best. It doesn't matter who I am or what I am doing, my way is best, management's way is stupid. Neither management nor the engineers are entirely correct. If you can successfully filter ideas so that management learns to build in some flexibility and the coders understand when seemingly Dilbert-esque requirements are unavoidable, you will be respected, valued, and trusted by both groups.
For what it's worth, I think you're making a good decision. The idea of having coders managed by people who have never written any themselves seems awfully silly to me. The CEO probably hasn't written any, and probably doesn't need to. But someone sure needs to explain how it works.
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Re:Only Trillian v0.7x affected?
on
AOL vs. Trillian
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· Score: 3, Insightful
IMHO, this is all about a minority of users wanting free beer, and dressing it up in free speech rhetoric. Don't forget that ICQ was a small company once... if you really need IM functionality and don't want to use a commercial service... implement your own for internal use.
I disagree. For me, and I suspect this is true of the majority of Trillian users, it comes down to the number of clients running. I've got a pretty quick Windows box, but I tend to stress it pretty much every day. I also happen to have some old friends on ICQ, several cousins, friends, and my sister on AIM, and a college roommate on MSN. No one will switch, and I can't run three clients all day every day. Hence, Trillian. Now, I don't really care if it shows ads or not; that had nothing to do with my decision. If AOL will come out with a client that can talk to MSN and ICQ, fine, I'll probably go back (they need to work on their logging, too).
This isn't about free beer or free speech. It's about free RAM and free processor cycles.
While I disagree with most of this post (in particular the glib asertion that "The operation had nothing to do with humanitarianism or Africa-love on the part of Bush or Clinton" and the entire supporting paragraph that doesn't bother with a shred of evidence), it doesn't seem productive to argue matters of opinion. I'm not going to convince you, nor you me.
However, I will take issue with one particular point: "But even Bowden's gung-ho account makes no bones about provocative American attacks that ultimately led to the decisive defeat in Mogadishu" (emphasis added). Which decisive defeat? No Ranger will tell you that the mission in Mogadishu failed. Likewise for Delta and the 160th SOG. The mission that day was to capture two Aidid lieutenants; they were captured. To be sure, there were casualties on the mission, but the mission itself succeeded. It was a victory. Of course, it was a political defeat; the politicians (Bush at first, but then Clintion, whose administration also denied Task Force Ranger armor and airborne fire support) had tied their soldiers' hands and spent eighteen lives. It ultimately led to the pullout of all US forces from the region.
Nevertheless, the definition of "defeat" that says that any mission in which friendly soldiers die is a failure is frought with danger. It leads towards a brand of isolationism that, in the current world, will lead us to a disastrous inability to defend ourselves. Moreover, it simply makes no sense. After all, by this definition, D-Day, Stalingrad, Gettysburg, are some of the greatest defeats of friendly forces in all of history.
The post automatically assumes that Microsoft is doing this just for the positive publicity. But let's step back for a moment and assume that they're serious. After all, their commitment to features was real. Microsoft products are nothing if not overflowing with features (some of which even work!).
Microsoft has the human capital to make good software--and secure software. They just don't. Their software is by and large unreliable and insecure. If they resolve these problems, open source is going to have a very difficult battle ahead convincing people that it is the better path. After all, to date, open source has been superior in functionality, security and reliability, while Microsoft has been the superior business. If Microsoft learns to do security (and reliability), open source is going to need to learn to do business.
Personally, I'm not so impressed. Apple's already been there. I suspect that no matter how over-engineered the joint might be, anybody with a new iMac and a five year-old in the house will soon have a machine with a flat LCD that conveniently detaches from its base for easy portability around the house. Of course, Apple's doesn't have the wireless link yet...
You are partly correct. WWI was in fact characterized by trench warfare and enormous casualties. However, the brass recognized the relative weakness of their armies on the attack. Hence, the early stages of the war were characterized by massive flanking maneuvers as armies tried to outflank each other to the north and northwest, into the Low Countries and towards the sea. It is once the armies reached the sea that the trench warfare really bogged down.
Similarly, you are partly correct on Blitzkrieg. Von Clausewitz didn't actually invent it; he was a Prussian strategist (famous for his book On War and the quotation "War is a continuation of politics by other means") who died in 1831. In fact, Hans von Seeckt, along with the famous generals von Moltke and Schliefen, is generally credited with the original concept. It is not so revolutionary as it seems at first, but is an evolution of tactics and strategies developed in the trenches (and is not, as is commonly misconceived, strictly linked to tanks or aircraft). In fact, by the middle of WWI, the German army and, to a lesser extent, the French army had developed very effective tactics for breaching trenches and taking ground. These tactics centered on "stormtroopers" operating in small units with integral fire support (machine guns, mortars, and hand grenades). For a variety of reasons, the concept did not always penetrate to the top brass, however. What von Seeckt really did was cause the ideas behind these tactics to become the standard doctrines taught at the German military acadamies; by the eve of war in 1939, the students from the 20s had become the leaders at OKW and OKL (German army and Air Force commands) and were in a position to implement blitzkrieg with their new weapons.
Absolutely true. Another example would be the "race to the sea" in WWI, when literally entire armies essentially tried to outflank each other towards the Atlantic/North Sea shores of Europe. I knew I was lying when I posted it, but I was trying to achieve some sense of the relative importance of that maneuver to the war's outcome. While the numerically larger maneuvers occurred in WWI and WWII (at least; probably examples in many, many other wars...Civil War, Napoleonic Wars, etc), I might argue (after more thought) that this was the "most meaningful" large flanking maneuver.
And that, probably, is what I should have said. Cheers for calling me out on it...
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Re:They're wrong
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Gulf was won by siege. They sufocated Iraq by preventing them from buying weapons and _food_. when Iraq's soldiers came to the point of choosing between death and surender, they surended.
This is not correct. The Gulf War was won due to a miscalculation on the part of the Iraqis. They assumed that in a featureless desert that even they could not navigate, the US could not mount an attack. Thanks to GPS, this was totally inaccurate; in fact, Barry McCaffrey's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division mounted what may be the largest flanking maneuver in military history. Matched by a tenacious advance by the Marines in the south, the allies simply blasted the Iraqis out of Kuwait, under a huge umbrella of coalition aircraft. An interesting analysis of what went right--and what went wrong--appears in The General's War by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (ISBN: 0316321001).
in certain environments (Afghanistan specially) you can't win or even fight a drone war, because THEY DON'T HAVE DRONES. the only thing they have is AK-47 and some grenades. their bases are almost all in the underground in a mountain landscape.
...
ask pentagon about fighting in tropical jungles like vietnam or amazon. ask them if drones are efective in such places. if they say YES, they don't know theyr jobs.
Similarly incorrect. This is like saying that because you brought a knife to a gunfight, I can't use my gun. We very much can and have used drones in Afghansitan, to great effect. Our various drones carry a variety of sensors for seeing at night and in poor weather (or through jungle canopies, which don't, in fact, do much to block IR signatures), and are fully capable of spotting a guy with an AK-47 and letting the nearest aircraft unload a JDAM on the guy. They are also capable of tremendous loiter times and can hang around much longer than, say a Navy F-18, which is on and off a tanker three times on every mission over Afghanistan
Predators were used as far back as the Persian Gulf for targeting naval gunfire (and naval gunfire is effective in jungle, too.). To be sure, Katz overstates the uses of drones at present. The "guided missiles" are isolated firings of Hellfire antitank missiles, a program which was sped up for this conflict, and Global Hawk, which will have many more uses than Predators, is still getting the kinks out, as evidenced by the one that crashed a few days ago. I don't know anything about the 'oxygen-sucking hyperbaric bombs' (am assuming he means fuel-air explosives), but if any drones are carrying bombs, it's news to me.
Nevertheless, you've understated the usefullness of drones. They've been instrumental in the war effort in Afghanistan, and will continue to be in our wars in the near future. Unwittingly, though, you've highlighted perhaps the fatal flaw in Katz's argument (beyond the fact that it's ten years too soon): no numbers of drones will ever change one fundamental premise of warfare, namely that aircraft can never capture or hold territory. Until drones can walk, attack and defend, infantry and armor will still be the mainstays of armed forces.
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Re:You Believe This??
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'll bite. I don't for one second believe that any SEAL teams were in Afghanistan on September 12th. For one thing, even had they been ordered to stand-to at 10 a.m. on September 11th (unlikely; remember, even the President wasn't sure what was going on at 10 a.m.), they would have only barely made it to Afghanistan by the 12th, with the time change. Moreover, with no airstrip available, your SEALS are making a combat drop--into where? For what purpose? Recall that as of September 12th (and ultimately for that entire week), three groups were considered capable of pulling off the strikes on the 11th: Al Quaida, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Iraq. I submit that we did not send SEALS jumping out of planes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria "just in case."
I am nitpicking, of course, and your point is very well taken; it is unreasonable to believe that there were no soldiers on the ground before the media knew about it, but it is equally unreasonable to believe that they were thrown in pell-mell with absolutely no objective and no hope of accomplishing anything at all.
Moreover, your assertion to me sounds more like post-Vietnam hysteria of government distrust than informed opinion. Remember the clamor that arose about the report that the Ranger/Delta raid on Mullah Omar's compound was a disastrous firefight that severely wounded 7 Delta troopers? Remember how it turned out to be bogus, and exposed as such when it turned out that the scenario it suggested hinged on the Delta Force having a mission plan that could have been bettered by most armchair generals, including me (I, for example, would have left sentries at the door, for one, and brought some snipers, both of which the Deltas apparently forgot). The bottom line is that the United States military is, man for man, the most powerful fighting force in the world, and occasionally, even the worst naysayer has to give them credit for doing things correctly.
Now, of course there are casualties on classified missions, casualties that are not reported. But those missions and the forces that conduct them, by their very nature, are small; to suggest that they might suffer substantial (in numbers) casualties is incorrect. After all, even if you were to wipe out a SEAL boat team (which would rank as an historic tragedy in SEAL history), you would only add 8 casualties to your total. I don't doubt that some casualties were classified in the Persian Gulf. If I recall, the official tally was 338 dead. If you were to suggest that more than a handful are classified and unreported, I'd want documentation.
Your final claim rankles me as well; exactly what were these SEALs doing when they died before we declared war (N.B.: For those who may be out of the loop, we still haven't declared war)? Stand-up, knock-down firefights? Sorry, that's not the way SEALs undertake missions. In fact, the mission before we started bombing turns out to have been liasing with neo-friendly forces, forging the alliances that we would use later to break the back of the Taliban in record time. Unless you think Northern Alliance soldiers were knifing Rangers in their sleep, I submit that probably only very small numbers ever saw combat before the bombing started.
I also suggest that the Afghans are way out of their element fighting American and British special forces, while those forces are exactly in their element. People forget that the major successes the Afghans had against Soviet occupation forces involved shooting down helicopters (with American-supplied Stingers) and ambushing heavy armor (which we do not have in theater). Soviet SPETSNAZ commandos were enormously successful, last I heard; so too are SEALs, Rangers, SAS, SBS, Delta, and Marine Recon Forces likely to be.
It may still be en vogue to suggest that the military lies about everything it does, and does much of it wrong (though I would suggest that it no longer is). But just making the loud claim doesn't necessarily mean you have your facts straight.
Moreover, Justice O' Connor pointed out that the test under the ADA is whether or not a person's disability affects his or her to perform normal daily tasks--not his or her ability to perform a specific job.
In fact, the ADA specifically states that this is the test. As Justice O'Connor wrote, "Repetitive work with hands and arms extended at or above shoulder levels for extended periods is not an important part of most people's daily lives," O'Connor wrote. "Household chores, bathing and brushing one's teeth, in contrast, are among the types of manual tasks of central importance to people's daily lives." In sharp contrast to the rather extreme and dire view suggested by the story posting <rant>(which, in my view, is either misleading and downright shameful or simply reflects a total lack of understanding of the decision and the governing laws)</rant>, the Justices did not rule on the validity of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome; they simply verified the intention of the ADA as written and asked the lower court to reconsider its decision.
In this case, the court held that the woman was not impaired in normal daily tasks, in spite of the fact that she was impaired in her job. There is a critical distinction here, and I firmly agree with the limitations placed on the ADA by the court here.
I think the analysis is a bit more subtle than that. By this same argument, preventing Boeing from selling -C and -E model F-15 Eagles to Pakistan and China does nothing but weaken Boeing against foreign competitors. After all, the United States is not the world's only source for high-performance combat aircraft.
Of course, this too is an oversimplification, as computers are not exactly analogous to fighter planes. Nevertheless, the issue at hand is to what extent raw computing power is a defense technology, and to what extent its export should therefore be restricted. The "they're going to get it anyhow, we may as well give it to them" argument is an insufficient answer.
It is critically important to differentiate between those who do not "give a damn" and those who do, but disagree with the espoused viewpoint. I, for one, fit into the latter category. This debate--one of huge importance to this country at the moment--unfortunately is marked by incredible intolerance and divisiveness both from the right and the left; witness the suggestions that anyone who doesn't support Ashcroft's views is abetting terrorism, but anyone who does is a fascist pig. In fact, as in most arguments, there is a broad middle ground, and that's where I find myself.
With all do respect to the posted interview, it is long on sound, short on sense. I would like, for example, to see more about the unease beneath the "veneer" of public support. The latest Gallup data suggests that only 10% of the populace thinks that the government has gone too far; 60% think it is about right, and 26% think that the government has not gone far enough. Approval ratings for Bush are historically high, and given my perception of John Ashcroft's views and character (I'm a Missouri refugee), his approval rating of 76% seems absurdly high. My views aside, to suggest that this is a veneer is either to suggest that Gallup's methodology is flawed or people are outright lying to the pollsters. Either suggestion, in my opinion, requires more backing than a vehement assertion.
Steinhardt also makes a clever reference to the "slippery slope" argument in his first response, suggesting that as we are now on a "war footing" (which I regard as blatantly untrue), and "apply[ing] the laws of war domestically, civil liberties will become a thing of the past as this war goes on "without an end." Though convenient, I don't really think this holds water; the only effort to apply the laws of war resulting from September 11th are the military tribunals, and they explicitly do not apply to U.S. citizens (and, lest anyone suggest that non-citizens receive the same Constitutional protections as citizens, that position is at best debatable even when the circumstances in question occur in U.S. territory, which it looks like they will ordinarily not here). And it largely goes unnoted by the left that the original order establishing the military tribunals has been gutted from its original draconian form, and now conforms much more closely to the UCMJ, and will include a right to appeal. It also goes unnoticed that in the first instance in which they could have invoked the military tribunals, the government did not; Zacarias Moussaoui was arraigned in Federal Court in Alexandria, VA.
My own politics are left-of-center, but I consider myself a liberal in the classical sense rather than in the post-Vietnam, anti-government, anti-military, anti-corporate sense. Unfortunately, the pundits whom I once considered to be my voice, or at least a useful voice of reason, have abandoned me, adopting a terribly hypocritical position that I regard as scarcely less dangerous to me and my rights than the equally ridiculous position of the far right. My concern is tempered, somewhat, by the knowledge that similar fights have occurred every time this country has gone to war. We--and our rights--have survived more serious conflicts than this; we will survive this one too.
I couldn't agree more. I think the KDE/Gnome debate is emblematic of everything that's wrong with OSS--in spite of the claims that it is a beautiful example of what's right with it. Rather than putting all of the community's resources behind generating the best software possible, the resources are divided into a conflict that is essentially ego-driven.
Could I set up my box to do exactly what I want? Of course. But I have other, better ways to spend my time, and I don't want to. So I use my Linux boxes for the things that I like doing in Linux, and my Win98 box for things I find convenient to do in Windows. Anyone who wants to say that I am not a "real geek" because of that is welcome to; I would simply encourage them to think about that very hard the next time he or she laments the difficulty Linux has in making real inroads onto the desktop.
The resources of the OSS community are limited, and too few to waste. Gnome and KDE would set a terrific example if they would get together, rationally and unemotionally select the most desirable features from each, and include them in the one frontrunning Linux desktop. It should be aimed squarely at Windows and at demonstrating that Linux is in fact ready for the desktop.
Anyone who doesn't like Linux emulating Windows, well, the beauty of OSS is, I suppose, that he can go make his own.
This is very cool. But it is only one component that I need alongside my Leatherman. When they can put my 21 inch monitor on my keychain, then I'll be impressed.
You have described the situation exactly. Lately, say over the past 12-18 months, Microsoft has made several decisions that I regard as outstanding business moves, reminiscent more of the vision of a PC on every desk than of the "what Internet" debacle.
And not only is this a sensible business decision, but also I'd rather have one login and set of user data, all else being equal. Of course, all else is not equal. A single point of failure demands a level of planning, care, and skill that Microsoft does not have or has not demonstrated in the recent past.
It is the track record of their implementations of ideas that makes me terribly nervous, not necessarily the ideas and decisions themselves.
I think the article is half on-target. Integration of media in the home seems a desirable goal for any company in the media industry. It opens the door not only to horizontal expansion, but also to cooperation with others that can enable a variety of features simply unavailable when the computer and the tv are in a different room.
But I don't think the tv is coming into the computer room; I think the computer is going to the tv room. Personally, it would not surprise me if Microsoft's 10 year plan were to become a media giant as well as a software company--a sort of uber-AOL-Time Warner. The writing, I think, is on the wall, and for once, I have to credit Microsoft for their vision (regardless of how much I may despise their business practices). Xbox is way too much to be a gaming console; it embraces a variety of media and connections that suggest that it may soon evolve into something that could lay claim to be the only box between the wall and your tv (Zapstation anyone?). Coupled with XP and.NET, Microsoft could become a ubiquitous presence not only on your desktop, but also in your living room.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Unfortunately, knowledge of whether she's the person with the headache or the person with the problem is difficult to come by in advance. I'll spare the gory details, but suffice it to say that this isn't a runny nose.
Ultimately, they didn't ask her to come in, but they didn't tell her she was ridiculous and also suggested that they would notify her if their opinion changed. I also believe you have misdiagnosed the issue; several EMTs with whom I am friendly warn of how dangerous a phony or unwarranted 911 call can be, but I've never really heard of a phone call to the emergency room costing lives, certainly not in the numbers you suggest.
Your post interests me, but I am afraid I don't quite understand the link between it and "human cost." My sole point was that in the face of something which may kill dozens or hundreds of people, a jump in the number of emails seems unimportant to me.
I don't mean to sound like a troll or one of the incessant writers of flamebait, but I'm a little disappointed in Slashdot for this one. If this anthrax is an honest attempt at an attack, and it succeeds even in part, a lot more than snail mail is in serious danger.
I just told a good friend who told me she had flu symptoms to phone the ER and see if she should go in, so I apologize if a dip in snail mail seems a bit on the trivial side at this moment.
Make no mistake about it, the US/IS/ going to, attempt at least, to remove the Taliban from power. Despite whether or not you or I believe it to be the prudent thing to do, it is the course of action that has been set in motion by the US government.
This is your interpretation of what the government has set in motion. Mine is different; I have seen few preparations for all out war. What I have seen is the rapid development of an effective and sustainable air bridge, able to ferry troops and planes overseas in a hurry. The moves of strike fighters to the Gulf area are insufficient to conduct large-scale offensive operations at this point; I suggest that they may be an attempt to relieve the carrier USS Carl Vinson and her battlegroup, currently responsible for enforcing the no-fly zones over Iraq. This would allow the Navy to withdraw her to the relative safety of the Arabian Sea or simply to free up her air wing for other action. It is difficult to conceal large-scale troop movements, and if we are preparing to use force to remove the Taliban, it is not imminent (last I heard, the 82nd Airborne is still training and has not staged anywhere and no nation has yet granted permissions that would give the Army and Marine Corps a route to Kabul).
Before we all assume that they're going to do it wrong, let's give them a chance to do it right. After all, it is those in the military who are going into harm's way, and the United States military remains the most capable force in the world.
I have read the Guardian article that you sight, and I don't regard it as evidence of anything. It reports only that the US is "keen to hear allied views" on overthrowing the Taliban. And it doesn't even bother to quote the cable. I regard the Guardian's coverage of this event as leftist and in pursuit of a specific agenda, rather than a simple report of the news. My brother in London reports that the other British news sources are starting to turn against them for their slanted coverage. I at this point don't regard the Guardian's interpretation of anything as a sufficiently reliable source. And I haven't seen this story corroborated.
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Re:there's an argument to be made....
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2
I am sorry. You are wrong. I know that to be a pigheaded, knee-jerk response. I know that it suggests that I am thoughtless and unwilling to compromise. That is not the case. I understand your points, and I agree with some of them.
But the logical bankruptcy of your argument stems from the fact that absolutely nothing, not even a powerful attack on a foreign military, justifies a premeditated attack targeting civilians.
We did not bring it upon ourselves simply because nothing we could have ever done would have warranted this kind of attack.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't necessarily understand the objections to face scanning technology. To be sure, I don't want computers flagging people to be arrested. But computers sift through enormous amounts of information, making them ideal for a first pass. If they are used to flag people to be scrutinized by humans, I don't have any objections. In fact, if a computer can flag 20 of the hundreds of thousands of faces so that human experts can give a closer look, so much the better.
Incidentally, by this reasoning, it is in fact the false negatives that are more important. False positives can presumably be discarded by humans providing closer scrutiny. False negatives in this scenario, however, present a major difficulty.
Face scanning technology isn't innately evil. Like everything else, if we use it wisely, it can help. If we use it irresponsibly, it can hurt. No surprises there.
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I agree. I would only add that if I find an advertisement informative, I am likely to watch it--even to look out for it and tell others about it. I think Best Buy is onto something with the program mentioned in the article; they can use the features of a DVR to let me *choose* to get information I want. As they say, they're going to have to come up with some new advertising methods.
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The argument that corporations are understood to exist for the public benefit is abstracted one step too far. Lawmakers felt that a legal entity shielding individuals from liability would be beneficial, hence they created the idea of a corporations. This much is true, that the general idea of a corporation was deemed to have public benefit.
However, it does not seem to me that any specific corporation need have public benefit. Reading through the Massachusetts General Laws governing corporations, I find nothing to suggest that Massachusetts corporations are understood to have any requirement to act in anything other than their own interests. This may be different in your state. However, in Massachusetts, no such requirement seems to exist. The relevant laws appear in the Massachusetts General Laws Chapters 156 and 156B; I'd be interested to know if I am missing something.
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I've never heard that incorporation was offered as a quid pro quo in exchange for doing something for the public good. I'll be interested to investigate if it did in fact start that way. In any event, it has (d)evolved from that intent.
I run an LLC, and I guarantee you that when we filed with the state, there was no understanding that we had any duty to see to the public good. In fact, most of the communication consisted of a stamp on our Certificate of Organization. Hence, it is difficult for me to see what duty I have to act for the public good from a legal standpoint relating to our filing with the state. Clearly there are ethical reasons to act for the public good, but if you were to threaten to take me to court because I wasn't fulfilling an implied agreement to act primarily in the public's best interest, frankly, I don't think I'd lose much sleep.
Do you have a reference for the implied agreement to act in the public interest? I'm interested to know more.
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I think a lot of what you need to do is be a communicator and translator. Management gets a bad rap, often, because they do not have the training to understand software engineering. To be fair, however, most coders couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper bag (see also: dot come bust). The two groups speak different languages, and one primary task of any middle manager has to be to translate for both groups.
This goes beyond merely translating language; you also have to interfere with ideas. From managements standpoint, everything needs to have a hard deadline, a solid budget, etc. In engineering this is impossible. Similarly, (one of the most amusing things about programming, in my opinion), for coders, my way is best. It doesn't matter who I am or what I am doing, my way is best, management's way is stupid. Neither management nor the engineers are entirely correct. If you can successfully filter ideas so that management learns to build in some flexibility and the coders understand when seemingly Dilbert-esque requirements are unavoidable, you will be respected, valued, and trusted by both groups.
For what it's worth, I think you're making a good decision. The idea of having coders managed by people who have never written any themselves seems awfully silly to me. The CEO probably hasn't written any, and probably doesn't need to. But someone sure needs to explain how it works.
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IMHO, this is all about a minority of users wanting free beer, and dressing it up in free speech rhetoric. Don't forget that ICQ was a small company once... if you really need IM functionality and don't want to use a commercial service... implement your own for internal use.
I disagree. For me, and I suspect this is true of the majority of Trillian users, it comes down to the number of clients running. I've got a pretty quick Windows box, but I tend to stress it pretty much every day. I also happen to have some old friends on ICQ, several cousins, friends, and my sister on AIM, and a college roommate on MSN. No one will switch, and I can't run three clients all day every day. Hence, Trillian. Now, I don't really care if it shows ads or not; that had nothing to do with my decision. If AOL will come out with a client that can talk to MSN and ICQ, fine, I'll probably go back (they need to work on their logging, too).
This isn't about free beer or free speech. It's about free RAM and free processor cycles.
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But we'll all need very small televisions to see them.
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While I disagree with most of this post (in particular the glib asertion that "The operation had nothing to do with humanitarianism or Africa-love on the part of Bush or Clinton" and the entire supporting paragraph that doesn't bother with a shred of evidence), it doesn't seem productive to argue matters of opinion. I'm not going to convince you, nor you me.
However, I will take issue with one particular point: "But even Bowden's gung-ho account makes no bones about provocative American attacks that ultimately led to the decisive defeat in Mogadishu" (emphasis added). Which decisive defeat? No Ranger will tell you that the mission in Mogadishu failed. Likewise for Delta and the 160th SOG. The mission that day was to capture two Aidid lieutenants; they were captured. To be sure, there were casualties on the mission, but the mission itself succeeded. It was a victory. Of course, it was a political defeat; the politicians (Bush at first, but then Clintion, whose administration also denied Task Force Ranger armor and airborne fire support) had tied their soldiers' hands and spent eighteen lives. It ultimately led to the pullout of all US forces from the region.
Nevertheless, the definition of "defeat" that says that any mission in which friendly soldiers die is a failure is frought with danger. It leads towards a brand of isolationism that, in the current world, will lead us to a disastrous inability to defend ourselves. Moreover, it simply makes no sense. After all, by this definition, D-Day, Stalingrad, Gettysburg, are some of the greatest defeats of friendly forces in all of history.
Anyone for some revisionism?
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The post automatically assumes that Microsoft is doing this just for the positive publicity. But let's step back for a moment and assume that they're serious. After all, their commitment to features was real. Microsoft products are nothing if not overflowing with features (some of which even work!).
Microsoft has the human capital to make good software--and secure software. They just don't. Their software is by and large unreliable and insecure. If they resolve these problems, open source is going to have a very difficult battle ahead convincing people that it is the better path. After all, to date, open source has been superior in functionality, security and reliability, while Microsoft has been the superior business. If Microsoft learns to do security (and reliability), open source is going to need to learn to do business.
Let the flames begin...
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Personally, I'm not so impressed. Apple's already been there. I suspect that no matter how over-engineered the joint might be, anybody with a new iMac and a five year-old in the house will soon have a machine with a flat LCD that conveniently detaches from its base for easy portability around the house. Of course, Apple's doesn't have the wireless link yet...
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You are partly correct. WWI was in fact characterized by trench warfare and enormous casualties. However, the brass recognized the relative weakness of their armies on the attack. Hence, the early stages of the war were characterized by massive flanking maneuvers as armies tried to outflank each other to the north and northwest, into the Low Countries and towards the sea. It is once the armies reached the sea that the trench warfare really bogged down.
Similarly, you are partly correct on Blitzkrieg. Von Clausewitz didn't actually invent it; he was a Prussian strategist (famous for his book On War and the quotation "War is a continuation of politics by other means") who died in 1831. In fact, Hans von Seeckt, along with the famous generals von Moltke and Schliefen, is generally credited with the original concept. It is not so revolutionary as it seems at first, but is an evolution of tactics and strategies developed in the trenches (and is not, as is commonly misconceived, strictly linked to tanks or aircraft). In fact, by the middle of WWI, the German army and, to a lesser extent, the French army had developed very effective tactics for breaching trenches and taking ground. These tactics centered on "stormtroopers" operating in small units with integral fire support (machine guns, mortars, and hand grenades). For a variety of reasons, the concept did not always penetrate to the top brass, however. What von Seeckt really did was cause the ideas behind these tactics to become the standard doctrines taught at the German military acadamies; by the eve of war in 1939, the students from the 20s had become the leaders at OKW and OKL (German army and Air Force commands) and were in a position to implement blitzkrieg with their new weapons.
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Absolutely true. Another example would be the "race to the sea" in WWI, when literally entire armies essentially tried to outflank each other towards the Atlantic/North Sea shores of Europe. I knew I was lying when I posted it, but I was trying to achieve some sense of the relative importance of that maneuver to the war's outcome. While the numerically larger maneuvers occurred in WWI and WWII (at least; probably examples in many, many other wars...Civil War, Napoleonic Wars, etc), I might argue (after more thought) that this was the "most meaningful" large flanking maneuver.
And that, probably, is what I should have said. Cheers for calling me out on it...
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Gulf was won by siege. They sufocated Iraq by preventing them from buying weapons and _food_. when Iraq's soldiers came to the point of choosing between death and surender, they surended.
This is not correct. The Gulf War was won due to a miscalculation on the part of the Iraqis. They assumed that in a featureless desert that even they could not navigate, the US could not mount an attack. Thanks to GPS, this was totally inaccurate; in fact, Barry McCaffrey's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division mounted what may be the largest flanking maneuver in military history. Matched by a tenacious advance by the Marines in the south, the allies simply blasted the Iraqis out of Kuwait, under a huge umbrella of coalition aircraft. An interesting analysis of what went right--and what went wrong--appears in The General's War by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (ISBN: 0316321001).
in certain environments (Afghanistan specially) you can't win or even fight a drone war, because THEY DON'T HAVE DRONES. the only thing they have is AK-47 and some grenades. their bases are almost all in the underground in a mountain landscape.
...
ask pentagon about fighting in tropical jungles like vietnam or amazon. ask them if drones are efective in such places. if they say YES, they don't know theyr jobs.
Similarly incorrect. This is like saying that because you brought a knife to a gunfight, I can't use my gun. We very much can and have used drones in Afghansitan, to great effect. Our various drones carry a variety of sensors for seeing at night and in poor weather (or through jungle canopies, which don't, in fact, do much to block IR signatures), and are fully capable of spotting a guy with an AK-47 and letting the nearest aircraft unload a JDAM on the guy. They are also capable of tremendous loiter times and can hang around much longer than, say a Navy F-18, which is on and off a tanker three times on every mission over Afghanistan
Predators were used as far back as the Persian Gulf for targeting naval gunfire (and naval gunfire is effective in jungle, too.). To be sure, Katz overstates the uses of drones at present. The "guided missiles" are isolated firings of Hellfire antitank missiles, a program which was sped up for this conflict, and Global Hawk, which will have many more uses than Predators, is still getting the kinks out, as evidenced by the one that crashed a few days ago. I don't know anything about the 'oxygen-sucking hyperbaric bombs' (am assuming he means fuel-air explosives), but if any drones are carrying bombs, it's news to me.
Nevertheless, you've understated the usefullness of drones. They've been instrumental in the war effort in Afghanistan, and will continue to be in our wars in the near future. Unwittingly, though, you've highlighted perhaps the fatal flaw in Katz's argument (beyond the fact that it's ten years too soon): no numbers of drones will ever change one fundamental premise of warfare, namely that aircraft can never capture or hold territory. Until drones can walk, attack and defend, infantry and armor will still be the mainstays of armed forces.
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I'll bite. I don't for one second believe that any SEAL teams were in Afghanistan on September 12th. For one thing, even had they been ordered to stand-to at 10 a.m. on September 11th (unlikely; remember, even the President wasn't sure what was going on at 10 a.m.), they would have only barely made it to Afghanistan by the 12th, with the time change. Moreover, with no airstrip available, your SEALS are making a combat drop--into where? For what purpose? Recall that as of September 12th (and ultimately for that entire week), three groups were considered capable of pulling off the strikes on the 11th: Al Quaida, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Iraq. I submit that we did not send SEALS jumping out of planes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria "just in case."
I am nitpicking, of course, and your point is very well taken; it is unreasonable to believe that there were no soldiers on the ground before the media knew about it, but it is equally unreasonable to believe that they were thrown in pell-mell with absolutely no objective and no hope of accomplishing anything at all.
Moreover, your assertion to me sounds more like post-Vietnam hysteria of government distrust than informed opinion. Remember the clamor that arose about the report that the Ranger/Delta raid on Mullah Omar's compound was a disastrous firefight that severely wounded 7 Delta troopers? Remember how it turned out to be bogus, and exposed as such when it turned out that the scenario it suggested hinged on the Delta Force having a mission plan that could have been bettered by most armchair generals, including me (I, for example, would have left sentries at the door, for one, and brought some snipers, both of which the Deltas apparently forgot). The bottom line is that the United States military is, man for man, the most powerful fighting force in the world, and occasionally, even the worst naysayer has to give them credit for doing things correctly.
Now, of course there are casualties on classified missions, casualties that are not reported. But those missions and the forces that conduct them, by their very nature, are small; to suggest that they might suffer substantial (in numbers) casualties is incorrect. After all, even if you were to wipe out a SEAL boat team (which would rank as an historic tragedy in SEAL history), you would only add 8 casualties to your total. I don't doubt that some casualties were classified in the Persian Gulf. If I recall, the official tally was 338 dead. If you were to suggest that more than a handful are classified and unreported, I'd want documentation.
Your final claim rankles me as well; exactly what were these SEALs doing when they died before we declared war (N.B.: For those who may be out of the loop, we still haven't declared war)? Stand-up, knock-down firefights? Sorry, that's not the way SEALs undertake missions. In fact, the mission before we started bombing turns out to have been liasing with neo-friendly forces, forging the alliances that we would use later to break the back of the Taliban in record time. Unless you think Northern Alliance soldiers were knifing Rangers in their sleep, I submit that probably only very small numbers ever saw combat before the bombing started.
I also suggest that the Afghans are way out of their element fighting American and British special forces, while those forces are exactly in their element. People forget that the major successes the Afghans had against Soviet occupation forces involved shooting down helicopters (with American-supplied Stingers) and ambushing heavy armor (which we do not have in theater). Soviet SPETSNAZ commandos were enormously successful, last I heard; so too are SEALs, Rangers, SAS, SBS, Delta, and Marine Recon Forces likely to be.
It may still be en vogue to suggest that the military lies about everything it does, and does much of it wrong (though I would suggest that it no longer is). But just making the loud claim doesn't necessarily mean you have your facts straight.
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Moreover, Justice O' Connor pointed out that the test under the ADA is whether or not a person's disability affects his or her to perform normal daily tasks--not his or her ability to perform a specific job.
In fact, the ADA specifically states that this is the test. As Justice O'Connor wrote, "Repetitive work with hands and arms extended at or above shoulder levels for extended periods is not an important part of most people's daily lives," O'Connor wrote. "Household chores, bathing and brushing one's teeth, in contrast, are among the types of manual tasks of central importance to people's daily lives." In sharp contrast to the rather extreme and dire view suggested by the story posting <rant>(which, in my view, is either misleading and downright shameful or simply reflects a total lack of understanding of the decision and the governing laws)</rant>, the Justices did not rule on the validity of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome; they simply verified the intention of the ADA as written and asked the lower court to reconsider its decision.
In this case, the court held that the woman was not impaired in normal daily tasks, in spite of the fact that she was impaired in her job. There is a critical distinction here, and I firmly agree with the limitations placed on the ADA by the court here.
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I think the analysis is a bit more subtle than that. By this same argument, preventing Boeing from selling -C and -E model F-15 Eagles to Pakistan and China does nothing but weaken Boeing against foreign competitors. After all, the United States is not the world's only source for high-performance combat aircraft.
Of course, this too is an oversimplification, as computers are not exactly analogous to fighter planes. Nevertheless, the issue at hand is to what extent raw computing power is a defense technology, and to what extent its export should therefore be restricted. The "they're going to get it anyhow, we may as well give it to them" argument is an insufficient answer.
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It is critically important to differentiate between those who do not "give a damn" and those who do, but disagree with the espoused viewpoint. I, for one, fit into the latter category. This debate--one of huge importance to this country at the moment--unfortunately is marked by incredible intolerance and divisiveness both from the right and the left; witness the suggestions that anyone who doesn't support Ashcroft's views is abetting terrorism, but anyone who does is a fascist pig. In fact, as in most arguments, there is a broad middle ground, and that's where I find myself.
With all do respect to the posted interview, it is long on sound, short on sense. I would like, for example, to see more about the unease beneath the "veneer" of public support. The latest Gallup data suggests that only 10% of the populace thinks that the government has gone too far; 60% think it is about right, and 26% think that the government has not gone far enough. Approval ratings for Bush are historically high, and given my perception of John Ashcroft's views and character (I'm a Missouri refugee), his approval rating of 76% seems absurdly high. My views aside, to suggest that this is a veneer is either to suggest that Gallup's methodology is flawed or people are outright lying to the pollsters. Either suggestion, in my opinion, requires more backing than a vehement assertion.
Steinhardt also makes a clever reference to the "slippery slope" argument in his first response, suggesting that as we are now on a "war footing" (which I regard as blatantly untrue), and "apply[ing] the laws of war domestically, civil liberties will become a thing of the past as this war goes on "without an end." Though convenient, I don't really think this holds water; the only effort to apply the laws of war resulting from September 11th are the military tribunals, and they explicitly do not apply to U.S. citizens (and, lest anyone suggest that non-citizens receive the same Constitutional protections as citizens, that position is at best debatable even when the circumstances in question occur in U.S. territory, which it looks like they will ordinarily not here). And it largely goes unnoted by the left that the original order establishing the military tribunals has been gutted from its original draconian form, and now conforms much more closely to the UCMJ, and will include a right to appeal. It also goes unnoticed that in the first instance in which they could have invoked the military tribunals, the government did not; Zacarias Moussaoui was arraigned in Federal Court in Alexandria, VA.
My own politics are left-of-center, but I consider myself a liberal in the classical sense rather than in the post-Vietnam, anti-government, anti-military, anti-corporate sense. Unfortunately, the pundits whom I once considered to be my voice, or at least a useful voice of reason, have abandoned me, adopting a terribly hypocritical position that I regard as scarcely less dangerous to me and my rights than the equally ridiculous position of the far right. My concern is tempered, somewhat, by the knowledge that similar fights have occurred every time this country has gone to war. We--and our rights--have survived more serious conflicts than this; we will survive this one too.
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I couldn't agree more. I think the KDE/Gnome debate is emblematic of everything that's wrong with OSS--in spite of the claims that it is a beautiful example of what's right with it. Rather than putting all of the community's resources behind generating the best software possible, the resources are divided into a conflict that is essentially ego-driven.
Could I set up my box to do exactly what I want? Of course. But I have other, better ways to spend my time, and I don't want to. So I use my Linux boxes for the things that I like doing in Linux, and my Win98 box for things I find convenient to do in Windows. Anyone who wants to say that I am not a "real geek" because of that is welcome to; I would simply encourage them to think about that very hard the next time he or she laments the difficulty Linux has in making real inroads onto the desktop.
The resources of the OSS community are limited, and too few to waste. Gnome and KDE would set a terrific example if they would get together, rationally and unemotionally select the most desirable features from each, and include them in the one frontrunning Linux desktop. It should be aimed squarely at Windows and at demonstrating that Linux is in fact ready for the desktop.
Anyone who doesn't like Linux emulating Windows, well, the beauty of OSS is, I suppose, that he can go make his own.
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This is very cool. But it is only one component that I need alongside my Leatherman. When they can put my 21 inch monitor on my keychain, then I'll be impressed.
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You have described the situation exactly. Lately, say over the past 12-18 months, Microsoft has made several decisions that I regard as outstanding business moves, reminiscent more of the vision of a PC on every desk than of the "what Internet" debacle.
And not only is this a sensible business decision, but also I'd rather have one login and set of user data, all else being equal. Of course, all else is not equal. A single point of failure demands a level of planning, care, and skill that Microsoft does not have or has not demonstrated in the recent past.
It is the track record of their implementations of ideas that makes me terribly nervous, not necessarily the ideas and decisions themselves.
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I think the article is half on-target. Integration of media in the home seems a desirable goal for any company in the media industry. It opens the door not only to horizontal expansion, but also to cooperation with others that can enable a variety of features simply unavailable when the computer and the tv are in a different room.
.NET, Microsoft could become a ubiquitous presence not only on your desktop, but also in your living room.
But I don't think the tv is coming into the computer room; I think the computer is going to the tv room. Personally, it would not surprise me if Microsoft's 10 year plan were to become a media giant as well as a software company--a sort of uber-AOL-Time Warner. The writing, I think, is on the wall, and for once, I have to credit Microsoft for their vision (regardless of how much I may despise their business practices). Xbox is way too much to be a gaming console; it embraces a variety of media and connections that suggest that it may soon evolve into something that could lay claim to be the only box between the wall and your tv (Zapstation anyone?). Coupled with XP and
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Hindsight is always 20/20. Unfortunately, knowledge of whether she's the person with the headache or the person with the problem is difficult to come by in advance. I'll spare the gory details, but suffice it to say that this isn't a runny nose.
Ultimately, they didn't ask her to come in, but they didn't tell her she was ridiculous and also suggested that they would notify her if their opinion changed. I also believe you have misdiagnosed the issue; several EMTs with whom I am friendly warn of how dangerous a phony or unwarranted 911 call can be, but I've never really heard of a phone call to the emergency room costing lives, certainly not in the numbers you suggest.
Your post interests me, but I am afraid I don't quite understand the link between it and "human cost." My sole point was that in the face of something which may kill dozens or hundreds of people, a jump in the number of emails seems unimportant to me.
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I don't mean to sound like a troll or one of the incessant writers of flamebait, but I'm a little disappointed in Slashdot for this one. If this anthrax is an honest attempt at an attack, and it succeeds even in part, a lot more than snail mail is in serious danger.
I just told a good friend who told me she had flu symptoms to phone the ER and see if she should go in, so I apologize if a dip in snail mail seems a bit on the trivial side at this moment.
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This is your interpretation of what the government has set in motion. Mine is different; I have seen few preparations for all out war. What I have seen is the rapid development of an effective and sustainable air bridge, able to ferry troops and planes overseas in a hurry. The moves of strike fighters to the Gulf area are insufficient to conduct large-scale offensive operations at this point; I suggest that they may be an attempt to relieve the carrier USS Carl Vinson and her battlegroup, currently responsible for enforcing the no-fly zones over Iraq. This would allow the Navy to withdraw her to the relative safety of the Arabian Sea or simply to free up her air wing for other action. It is difficult to conceal large-scale troop movements, and if we are preparing to use force to remove the Taliban, it is not imminent (last I heard, the 82nd Airborne is still training and has not staged anywhere and no nation has yet granted permissions that would give the Army and Marine Corps a route to Kabul).
Before we all assume that they're going to do it wrong, let's give them a chance to do it right. After all, it is those in the military who are going into harm's way, and the United States military remains the most capable force in the world.
I have read the Guardian article that you sight, and I don't regard it as evidence of anything. It reports only that the US is "keen to hear allied views" on overthrowing the Taliban. And it doesn't even bother to quote the cable. I regard the Guardian's coverage of this event as leftist and in pursuit of a specific agenda, rather than a simple report of the news. My brother in London reports that the other British news sources are starting to turn against them for their slanted coverage. I at this point don't regard the Guardian's interpretation of anything as a sufficiently reliable source. And I haven't seen this story corroborated.
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But the logical bankruptcy of your argument stems from the fact that absolutely nothing, not even a powerful attack on a foreign military, justifies a premeditated attack targeting civilians.
We did not bring it upon ourselves simply because nothing we could have ever done would have warranted this kind of attack.
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