Yep. I don't recall the exact numbers, but in the early ENIAC vacuum-tube-relay computer I think the mean time to failure was something like 20 minutes. I'm not sure how they could tell though - looking for tubes that weren't lit? maybe they had a sensing circuit that noticed when the current through the tube dropped.
And I read somewhere that at Google or one of the other zillion-computer facilities, there were folks who worked full time just walking round and replacing dead computing nodes.
It's worth noting that the Space Shuttle's navigation system had three identical computers who all 'voted' on the result, and if one disagreed it took itself out of the system. And there was a fourth computer made by a different company, using a different architecture and different programming language, that monitored the three. In retrospect, I think that's a pretty good idea. Having two different architectures makes having the same programming error occur in two different systems very unlikely.
Of course, as you add nodes to such a system, it gets more 'interesting' to figure out how to handle the set of possible differences. What constitutes a failure? What constitutes agreement?
But there is an infinite recursion of possible failures. For instance, what if one of the memory cells that contain the machine instructions for 'Try' is hit, and the jump address is now off by one, or 64, or 65536? That's a one bit error.
As I am working on a space-related proposal, even though it's not directly HW related, this info and the links will be very useful to me in the near future. Thanks!:)
A comment higher up noted that when a cosmic ray strikes the lead, it will cause an avalanche of scattered secondary particles. So some shielding may be worse than no shielding.
I dunno about space, but down here on earth, IIRC the probability of a bit flip in computer memory is fairly high. Per This, "back in 1996 IBM estimated you would see one a month for every 256MB of RAM.", so in my 3G laptop that's about 12 per month. And that's at the bottom of the atmospheric well, using much larger scale memory technology that is more robust with respect to this problem. Today's RAM is what - 100 times smaller in area per bit? Which makes it 100 times more susceptible, all other things being equal. If 100 is the right number, that's about 40 per day on my laptop.
You may be experiencing bit errors all the time, but many/most are occuring in memory blocks that are not in use just at that moment, or in data or code that your program doesn't happen to access for various reasons, or maybe that bit just isn't important. The more memory you have, the more likely it is that the bit error doesn't matter. But if you only have 16KiB RAM, one bit is much more likely to make a huge difference.
Not even necessarily low level. I once had a weird intermittent problem in a PHP driven web system. After a couple of weeks of diagnosing (largely trying to find a case the could more-or-less reliably tickle the bug), it turned out to be an interaction of a bug in the Redhat version of that day (2001) with a bug in the particular CPU we were using. PHP code just happened to trigger it under certain conditions. Since the box was at Level 3, we had to drive an hour down there and replace the machine.
And long ago I worked on Perq workstations, which had a stack-machine CPU (the CPU was a 15x15 inch board filled with TTL). The expression stack was four chips. The system was designed around the chip spec - NEVER DO THAT!!! Chips can not be depended to go at exactly the design spec - some are slow, some are fast. As a result, every CPU had to be tested at installation with those four chips inserted in different locations, essentially in order of speed. If a fast one came after a slow one in the slots, the CPU would barf. Basically someone just kept swapping chips around until it worked.
We were just discussing some of the remarkable repairs done in software to accommodate problems in various interplanetary probes - truly amazing stuff.
Naah. Somewhere between $1,000,000 and $50,000,000 buys a lot of anonymity. $50,000 just gets you started, after which you will have to spend your life being creative, staying on the run, living in odd and uncomfortable places, and never again seeing anyone you are related to or ever knew.
The unfortunate fact for those who want to vilify business, or any other group, is that just like any other group, only a very small percentage of that group actually does that stuff. The vast, vast majority of business people (both statistically and in my own mid-size experience over 40 years) try to do the right thing all the time. It's not always obvious what the right thing is, but they try. Most businesses would rather not mess with politics at all, and many donate token amounts of money to campaigns on both sides just to avoid the 'gentle' extortions that the Federal politicians and bureaucracy impose on them.
Just like in every other field, the stuff you hear about in the news is there for two reasons: It's unusual (i.e. it is 'news'), and it is shocking/depraved/bleeding/evil/ or whatever other form of titillation the media think will sell. If it were really common, it wouldn't be in the news.
A while back (1990s IIRC), the IRS did a line-by-line audit of a larger than usual number of small business owners - companies in the $5 million to $30 million range, just to see how much cheating was going on. Their finding was that the vast majority of said owners were paying an average of 5% more in taxes than they were required to, because it was less hassle and less risky to avoid taking questionable deductions.
I've worked with corporate heads of Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies as well, and the same is true there. Most, not all, are trying to do the right thing. Those who are willing to use shady means are often shunned because they can't be trusted within the organization either.
Up til now, extortion has never been their stated goal. The question is, if someone calling themselves 'Anonymous' hacks your servers, how do you know if it's the 'real' Anonymous or an impostor - or some rogue member(s) of the real Anonymous? After all, they are anonymous.
Obviously, there's no way to tell - unless one maintains the belief/fantasy that nobody who's really a part of Anonymous would do that. Unless Anonymous is a much smaller collection (group implies too much) than we've been led to believe, even the 'members' have no way of knowing. It's happened many times before, IRL as well as in movies and books. I would say it's even likely that such a thing will occur, if it hasn't already.
Perhaps there is one ten-year-old out there who sees this video, and as a result becomes a physical chemist with interests in rocket propulsion, and grows up to invent the critical element to make interplanetary travel possible. Looking at the Space Shuttle astronauts, more than one of them got started in similar ways, so the odds are pretty good that something similar will happen. Then this simple science experiment will have done as much for our growth into space as anything else the space program has done.
The Atomic Airplane project, besides being one of the worst managed, most snake-bit projects, did have one reasonable success - the GE direct-heat engines worked pretty well on the test stands. Those were only driving turbines so it's not directly comparable. But (not having seen any serious analysis of this application) I speculate that a Thorium-fueled (LTFR) atomic engine might well work. If so, then the risk of serious radioactive contamination in the event of rocket failure might well not be very serious, as Thorium is relatively benign as a raw material. There are beaches in India rich enough in Thorium to be a mining target if we ever get LTFReactors in operation, and people play on those beaches. IIRC Thorium emits quite small quantities of alpha particles, which can be shielded with aluminum foil (or so they say). There might be a risk of small amounts of more serious contamination from materials in the midst of the critical reaction, but that's all.
Of course one of the advantages of an atomic engine is that since the energy for the process does not take up a lot of mass and space, that leaves a lot more capacity for passive propellant, which means that it is not as necessary to achieve huge amounts of thrust at takeoff, which means the whole thing can be smaller as a steady lift over a longer period of time can get you there. Perhaps water would be a good propellant - I have no idea.
The big question would be whether an LFTR power plant could generate sufficient heat to propel the propellant fast enough to be useful, while not destroying itself in the process. Perhaps the last stage of a linear power chain would be a form of ion drive, turning the reaction mass into a plasma. I'm making this up as I go along, so hey.
It seems to me that Mac buyers are buying the software, and a machine that happens to run it, not the other way round. And it's not every machine in the store. So it's a slightly different proposition.
If you buy a refurbished machine, you may get by without supporting Microsoft, at least in the instant - refurbished machines might have had an MS license previously, but no more.
A few years ago I bought a refurbished Lenovo Z61m from Budget Computers in Beaverton OR. Since I was installing Linux on it, they gave me $50 off IIRC - they would have had to install and pay for a Windows license if I wanted Windows. Of course, they told me they could not support it beyond obvious hardware issues but that was OK with me. And they were helpful both by email and telephone at various times - good folks, no other connection than buying a machine.
One of the ploys that car makers are doing now is designing their crap radios into the system so that if you put an after-market radio into the car, it won't start or the headlights won't work, or various other things - not to mention that the dashboard doesn't allow an aftermarket radio to fit into the space so their designers can have fun styling the dashboard.
Both 'issues' that the car makers are presenting can be solved by a simple, existing technical solution - a standard radio front panel interface that includes additional connections for car functions - in fact many/most modern cars are already using CANBUS, so they would only have to support a CANBUS interface to the radio, and the radio makers would have to provide a set of common commands (like an API, only message passing interface). The radio makers probably already do that, since car makers don't build radios. So if I want to put in an aftermarket sound system, I would just have to open the dash, unplug the existing POS radio and insert my new hotness (and maybe add speakers, etc.)
IMHO this could be a candidate for antitrust, as the car makers are locking third party companies out of an effective monopoly with this action. It's a very similar situation to the original Carterfone decision, which opened the telephone system to third party equipment.
Actually general aviation is more safe per takeoff and landing (or used to be - haven't looked up the stats for 20 years), but commercial rules on safety per passenger miles.
OTOH, felony convictions can be soooo tiresome, although they do often come with free room and board. And then there's the question of whether a convicted, imprisoned felon is still liable for all the $million+ civil suits by every luser out there who thinks that your clean-up virus (which is what it is) has destroyed their porn collection. Hint - still liable.
Sorry for taking so long - I was sick over the weekend.
WRT your first paragraph, I am not one of those who think that all government regulation is bad - quite the contrary. (I would have to think about it, but aren't most laws a form of regulation? "Thou shalt not cross against the light." etc. But those who would intervene in markets by whatever means - regulation, lending, taxing for social purposes,..., must take the distortion into account - and that is very difficult to do as a planning exercise, especially when working for some social objective - increased hiring, or any of the monetary and fiscal manipulations.
The bit about technological advance being the only method of improving the standard of living really is one of the topics of Econ 101, or maybe 102. I forget. Before rejecting that idea, realize that an improvement in organizations is also considered a tech advance - companies were restricted in their rate of growth until the rise in the late 1800s and early 1900s of stock corporations and professional management hired by stockholders. And the present information and globalization revolutions have involved an almost unending series of tech advances since at least the 1960s, as has the ability of WalMart to schedule manufacturing of a pair of socks in Thailand within minutes of your purchase at the checkout counter. (WalMart and its ilk have created more 'middle class' jobs by world standards than any other institution in history. I don't have the reference handy, but it's true - just as the engineers that built sanitary sewer systems have saved more lives than all the doctors in history.)
There is not enough space to go into detail, but the mathematics of ecosystems, neural networks and essentially all living systems are similar - large numbers of highly-interconnected 'nodes' (neurons, creatures and plants in a forest, etc.) that are all taking inputs, performing an evaluation function, and generating outputs. So also economies. Just as a neuron in your brain has some 10,000 input synapses and 10,000 output synapses, if you count up all the ways that a chipmunk (for example) interacts with all the other living organisms of all types, it's probably a similar number. And a consumer, or a company, do the same - each is a node in a larger system. Now the interesting bit is that neural network (whether viewed as algorithms or living things) are basically complex sets of differential equations that are trying to converge toward a minimum error on an n-dimensional surface where n is on the order of the number of inputs times outputs. And, of course, being social institutions, the companies each contain a smaller such 'convergence network' as I'll call it, of the employees, customers, vendors, etc. - like most interesting systems, the boundaries are where you decide to put them for the moment. It (like all living systems) is a scale-free network.
So, economies and each of their components are easily viewed as a 'decision network' in a continuing process of converging toward some optimum. That optimum is very hard to nail down - it contains most of the great aphorisms like 'the greatest good for the greatest number' as well as simultaneously 'what's mine is mine'. It is unprincipled and amoral by nature (not 'immoral' - that's different.) In fact, one might argue that every 'ism' - capitalism, communism, egalitarianism, totalitarianism, are futile attempts to impose a rational structure on an inherently arational system - no living system can be squeezed into a rational / logical structure. I think the best approach is to take 'successful' biological systems as models for what works well with living entities, and try to encourage economic models that work similarly. Call it 'organic economics':) (Have you ever seen "Being There", Peter Sellers' last movie? Well worth seeing.) So I would have to say that I prefer an economic system that optimizes individual benefits (whatever that means), but not everyone would agree. The free
In 1996, President Bill Clinton personally signed an executive order transferring control of satellite technology to the Department of Commerce; thus releasing restraints on a wide variety of sophisticated space and missile technology which were then exported to China.
WASHINGTON (May 22) -- President Bill Clinton on Friday defended a controversial satellite deal with China, even as White House officials delivered documents to the House International Relations Committee about the arrangement.
The president said the deal to launch U.S. satellites on rockets owned by other nations was "correct" and "based on what I thought was in the national interest and supportive of our national security."
Newly declassified documents show that President Bill Clinton personally approved the transfer to China of advanced space technology that can be used for nuclear combat.
The documents show that in 1996 Clinton approved the export of radiation hardened chip sets to China. The specialized chips are necessary for fighting a nuclear war.
"Waivers may be granted upon a national interest determination," states a Commerce Department document titled "U.S. Sanctions on China."
"The President has approved a series of satellite related waivers in recent months, most recently in November, 1996 for export of radiation hardened chip sets for a Chinese meteorological satellite," noted the Commerce Department documents.
These special computer chips are designed to function while being bombarded by intense radiation. Radiation hardened chips are considered critical for atomic warfare and are required by advanced nuclear tipped missiles.
Judicial Watch obtained the documents through the Freedom of Information Act, a Washington-based political watchdog group.
As I recall from the time, a lot of folks in the military and intelligence communities who were 'in the loop' were really vocal about this. It's been a long time so I don't recall too many details, so this will have to do.
Haha. Look up Clinton selling the Chinese our missile guidance technology. It enabled the Chinese to build a space program, and provide cheaper launch services, and also gave them the essentials to build accurate ICBMs. Some folks considered it treasonous.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep.
I don't recall the exact numbers, but in the early ENIAC vacuum-tube-relay computer I think the mean time to failure was something like 20 minutes. I'm not sure how they could tell though - looking for tubes that weren't lit? maybe they had a sensing circuit that noticed when the current through the tube dropped.
And I read somewhere that at Google or one of the other zillion-computer facilities, there were folks who worked full time just walking round and replacing dead computing nodes.
This is on the order of oblig:
I just learned that there is a special version of Windows, Windows for Warships.
Random quote:
no longer write or read anything
Random reply: I think so too!
Random caveat: But on the other hand, maybe not.
Random embellishment: Eliza knows!
It's worth noting that the Space Shuttle's navigation system had three identical computers who all 'voted' on the result, and if one disagreed it took itself out of the system. And there was a fourth computer made by a different company, using a different architecture and different programming language, that monitored the three. In retrospect, I think that's a pretty good idea. Having two different architectures makes having the same programming error occur in two different systems very unlikely.
Of course, as you add nodes to such a system, it gets more 'interesting' to figure out how to handle the set of possible differences. What constitutes a failure? What constitutes agreement?
But there is an infinite recursion of possible failures. For instance, what if one of the memory cells that contain the machine instructions for 'Try' is hit, and the jump address is now off by one, or 64, or 65536? That's a one bit error.
As I am working on a space-related proposal, even though it's not directly HW related, this info and the links will be very useful to me in the near future. Thanks! :)
good info, thanks!
a hot and somewhat greasy fireball.
I knew her!
A comment higher up noted that when a cosmic ray strikes the lead, it will cause an avalanche of scattered secondary particles. So some shielding may be worse than no shielding.
I dunno about space, but down here on earth, IIRC the probability of a bit flip in computer memory is fairly high. Per This, "back in 1996 IBM estimated you would see one a month for every 256MB of RAM.", so in my 3G laptop that's about 12 per month. And that's at the bottom of the atmospheric well, using much larger scale memory technology that is more robust with respect to this problem. Today's RAM is what - 100 times smaller in area per bit? Which makes it 100 times more susceptible, all other things being equal. If 100 is the right number, that's about 40 per day on my laptop.
You may be experiencing bit errors all the time, but many/most are occuring in memory blocks that are not in use just at that moment, or in data or code that your program doesn't happen to access for various reasons, or maybe that bit just isn't important. The more memory you have, the more likely it is that the bit error doesn't matter. But if you only have 16KiB RAM, one bit is much more likely to make a huge difference.
Not even necessarily low level. I once had a weird intermittent problem in a PHP driven web system. After a couple of weeks of diagnosing (largely trying to find a case the could more-or-less reliably tickle the bug), it turned out to be an interaction of a bug in the Redhat version of that day (2001) with a bug in the particular CPU we were using. PHP code just happened to trigger it under certain conditions. Since the box was at Level 3, we had to drive an hour down there and replace the machine.
And long ago I worked on Perq workstations, which had a stack-machine CPU (the CPU was a 15x15 inch board filled with TTL). The expression stack was four chips. The system was designed around the chip spec - NEVER DO THAT!!! Chips can not be depended to go at exactly the design spec - some are slow, some are fast. As a result, every CPU had to be tested at installation with those four chips inserted in different locations, essentially in order of speed. If a fast one came after a slow one in the slots, the CPU would barf. Basically someone just kept swapping chips around until it worked.
We were just discussing some of the remarkable repairs done in software to accommodate problems in various interplanetary probes - truly amazing stuff.
Naah. Somewhere between $1,000,000 and $50,000,000 buys a lot of anonymity. $50,000 just gets you started, after which you will have to spend your life being creative, staying on the run, living in odd and uncomfortable places, and never again seeing anyone you are related to or ever knew.
The unfortunate fact for those who want to vilify business, or any other group, is that just like any other group, only a very small percentage of that group actually does that stuff. The vast, vast majority of business people (both statistically and in my own mid-size experience over 40 years) try to do the right thing all the time. It's not always obvious what the right thing is, but they try. Most businesses would rather not mess with politics at all, and many donate token amounts of money to campaigns on both sides just to avoid the 'gentle' extortions that the Federal politicians and bureaucracy impose on them.
Just like in every other field, the stuff you hear about in the news is there for two reasons: It's unusual (i.e. it is 'news'), and it is shocking/depraved/bleeding/evil/ or whatever other form of titillation the media think will sell. If it were really common, it wouldn't be in the news.
A while back (1990s IIRC), the IRS did a line-by-line audit of a larger than usual number of small business owners - companies in the $5 million to $30 million range, just to see how much cheating was going on. Their finding was that the vast majority of said owners were paying an average of 5% more in taxes than they were required to, because it was less hassle and less risky to avoid taking questionable deductions.
I've worked with corporate heads of Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies as well, and the same is true there. Most, not all, are trying to do the right thing. Those who are willing to use shady means are often shunned because they can't be trusted within the organization either.
Up til now, extortion has never been their stated goal. The question is, if someone calling themselves 'Anonymous' hacks your servers, how do you know if it's the 'real' Anonymous or an impostor - or some rogue member(s) of the real Anonymous? After all, they are anonymous.
Obviously, there's no way to tell - unless one maintains the belief/fantasy that nobody who's really a part of Anonymous would do that. Unless Anonymous is a much smaller collection (group implies too much) than we've been led to believe, even the 'members' have no way of knowing. It's happened many times before, IRL as well as in movies and books. I would say it's even likely that such a thing will occur, if it hasn't already.
Perhaps there is one ten-year-old out there who sees this video, and as a result becomes a physical chemist with interests in rocket propulsion, and grows up to invent the critical element to make interplanetary travel possible. Looking at the Space Shuttle astronauts, more than one of them got started in similar ways, so the odds are pretty good that something similar will happen. Then this simple science experiment will have done as much for our growth into space as anything else the space program has done.
The Atomic Airplane project, besides being one of the worst managed, most snake-bit projects, did have one reasonable success - the GE direct-heat engines worked pretty well on the test stands. Those were only driving turbines so it's not directly comparable. But (not having seen any serious analysis of this application) I speculate that a Thorium-fueled (LTFR) atomic engine might well work. If so, then the risk of serious radioactive contamination in the event of rocket failure might well not be very serious, as Thorium is relatively benign as a raw material. There are beaches in India rich enough in Thorium to be a mining target if we ever get LTFReactors in operation, and people play on those beaches. IIRC Thorium emits quite small quantities of alpha particles, which can be shielded with aluminum foil (or so they say). There might be a risk of small amounts of more serious contamination from materials in the midst of the critical reaction, but that's all.
Of course one of the advantages of an atomic engine is that since the energy for the process does not take up a lot of mass and space, that leaves a lot more capacity for passive propellant, which means that it is not as necessary to achieve huge amounts of thrust at takeoff, which means the whole thing can be smaller as a steady lift over a longer period of time can get you there. Perhaps water would be a good propellant - I have no idea.
The big question would be whether an LFTR power plant could generate sufficient heat to propel the propellant fast enough to be useful, while not destroying itself in the process. Perhaps the last stage of a linear power chain would be a form of ion drive, turning the reaction mass into a plasma. I'm making this up as I go along, so hey.
Minor point - OSX is derived from BSD, not Linux.
It seems to me that Mac buyers are buying the software, and a machine that happens to run it, not the other way round. And it's not every machine in the store. So it's a slightly different proposition.
If you buy a refurbished machine, you may get by without supporting Microsoft, at least in the instant - refurbished machines might have had an MS license previously, but no more.
A few years ago I bought a refurbished Lenovo Z61m from Budget Computers in Beaverton OR. Since I was installing Linux on it, they gave me $50 off IIRC - they would have had to install and pay for a Windows license if I wanted Windows. Of course, they told me they could not support it beyond obvious hardware issues but that was OK with me. And they were helpful both by email and telephone at various times - good folks, no other connection than buying a machine.
One of the ploys that car makers are doing now is designing their crap radios into the system so that if you put an after-market radio into the car, it won't start or the headlights won't work, or various other things - not to mention that the dashboard doesn't allow an aftermarket radio to fit into the space so their designers can have fun styling the dashboard.
Both 'issues' that the car makers are presenting can be solved by a simple, existing technical solution - a standard radio front panel interface that includes additional connections for car functions - in fact many/most modern cars are already using CANBUS, so they would only have to support a CANBUS interface to the radio, and the radio makers would have to provide a set of common commands (like an API, only message passing interface). The radio makers probably already do that, since car makers don't build radios. So if I want to put in an aftermarket sound system, I would just have to open the dash, unplug the existing POS radio and insert my new hotness (and maybe add speakers, etc.)
IMHO this could be a candidate for antitrust, as the car makers are locking third party companies out of an effective monopoly with this action. It's a very similar situation to the original Carterfone decision, which opened the telephone system to third party equipment.
Actually general aviation is more safe per takeoff and landing (or used to be - haven't looked up the stats for 20 years), but commercial rules on safety per passenger miles.
OTOH, felony convictions can be soooo tiresome, although they do often come with free room and board. And then there's the question of whether a convicted, imprisoned felon is still liable for all the $million+ civil suits by every luser out there who thinks that your clean-up virus (which is what it is) has destroyed their porn collection. Hint - still liable.
Other problem is: How to do that without essentially eliminating all illusions of privacy.
Sorry for taking so long - I was sick over the weekend.
WRT your first paragraph, I am not one of those who think that all government regulation is bad - quite the contrary. (I would have to think about it, but aren't most laws a form of regulation? "Thou shalt not cross against the light." etc. But those who would intervene in markets by whatever means - regulation, lending, taxing for social purposes, ..., must take the distortion into account - and that is very difficult to do as a planning exercise, especially when working for some social objective - increased hiring, or any of the monetary and fiscal manipulations.
The bit about technological advance being the only method of improving the standard of living really is one of the topics of Econ 101, or maybe 102. I forget. Before rejecting that idea, realize that an improvement in organizations is also considered a tech advance - companies were restricted in their rate of growth until the rise in the late 1800s and early 1900s of stock corporations and professional management hired by stockholders. And the present information and globalization revolutions have involved an almost unending series of tech advances since at least the 1960s, as has the ability of WalMart to schedule manufacturing of a pair of socks in Thailand within minutes of your purchase at the checkout counter. (WalMart and its ilk have created more 'middle class' jobs by world standards than any other institution in history. I don't have the reference handy, but it's true - just as the engineers that built sanitary sewer systems have saved more lives than all the doctors in history.)
There is not enough space to go into detail, but the mathematics of ecosystems, neural networks and essentially all living systems are similar - large numbers of highly-interconnected 'nodes' (neurons, creatures and plants in a forest, etc.) that are all taking inputs, performing an evaluation function, and generating outputs. So also economies. Just as a neuron in your brain has some 10,000 input synapses and 10,000 output synapses, if you count up all the ways that a chipmunk (for example) interacts with all the other living organisms of all types, it's probably a similar number. And a consumer, or a company, do the same - each is a node in a larger system. Now the interesting bit is that neural network (whether viewed as algorithms or living things) are basically complex sets of differential equations that are trying to converge toward a minimum error on an n-dimensional surface where n is on the order of the number of inputs times outputs. And, of course, being social institutions, the companies each contain a smaller such 'convergence network' as I'll call it, of the employees, customers, vendors, etc. - like most interesting systems, the boundaries are where you decide to put them for the moment. It (like all living systems) is a scale-free network.
So, economies and each of their components are easily viewed as a 'decision network' in a continuing process of converging toward some optimum. That optimum is very hard to nail down - it contains most of the great aphorisms like 'the greatest good for the greatest number' as well as simultaneously 'what's mine is mine'. It is unprincipled and amoral by nature (not 'immoral' - that's different.) In fact, one might argue that every 'ism' - capitalism, communism, egalitarianism, totalitarianism, are futile attempts to impose a rational structure on an inherently arational system - no living system can be squeezed into a rational / logical structure. I think the best approach is to take 'successful' biological systems as models for what works well with living entities, and try to encourage economic models that work similarly. Call it 'organic economics' :) (Have you ever seen "Being There", Peter Sellers' last movie? Well worth seeing.) So I would have to say that I prefer an economic system that optimizes individual benefits (whatever that means), but not everyone would agree. The free
A few quotes:
Some guy with an axe to grind about Obama doing the same thing:
In 1996, President Bill Clinton personally signed an executive order transferring control of satellite technology to the Department of Commerce; thus releasing restraints on a wide variety of sophisticated space and missile technology which were then exported to China.
CNN, 1998/05/22,
WASHINGTON (May 22) -- President Bill Clinton on Friday defended a controversial satellite deal with China, even as White House officials delivered documents to the House International Relations Committee about the arrangement.
The president said the deal to launch U.S. satellites on rockets owned by other nations was "correct" and "based on what I thought was in the national interest and supportive of our national security."
Newsmax, 2003/9/29 :
Newly declassified documents show that President Bill Clinton personally approved the transfer to China of advanced space technology that can be used for nuclear combat.
The documents show that in 1996 Clinton approved the export of radiation hardened chip sets to China. The specialized chips are necessary for fighting a nuclear war.
"Waivers may be granted upon a national interest determination," states a Commerce Department document titled "U.S. Sanctions on China."
"The President has approved a series of satellite related waivers in recent months, most recently in November, 1996 for export of radiation hardened chip sets for a Chinese meteorological satellite," noted the Commerce Department documents.
These special computer chips are designed to function while being bombarded by intense radiation. Radiation hardened chips are considered critical for atomic warfare and are required by advanced nuclear tipped missiles.
Judicial Watch obtained the documents through the Freedom of Information Act, a Washington-based political watchdog group.
As I recall from the time, a lot of folks in the military and intelligence communities who were 'in the loop' were really vocal about this. It's been a long time so I don't recall too many details, so this will have to do.
Haha. Look up Clinton selling the Chinese our missile guidance technology. It enabled the Chinese to build a space program, and provide cheaper launch services, and also gave them the essentials to build accurate ICBMs. Some folks considered it treasonous.