All of which I said?... Or didn't voice an opinion on. (Of course the war time secrecy was to prevent the enemy from knowing you're knowing. Anything else would have been daft beyond belief, and I didn't say anything else.)
Yes, there is much truth in that. (Though you discount the rapid advances in computational power just after the war. Even though the computational effort is "massive" that only spurred the various signals intelligence organisations to buy more computers).
However, as no-one thought the Enigma had been broken to the extent that it had, no-one put that much effort in to perfect crypto hygiene, not reusing or reordering rotors (the Germans famously got that completely wrong, thinking that the strength was increased by changing rotor order), etc.
So while a properly configured and expanded Enigma could have been the basis of a sound and secure means of communication, that wasn't how it was typically used.
I mean, even the Germans had somewhat proper cryptographic procedures, but since they didn't believe that their crypto could be broken, they developed a very lackadaisical attitude in practice. Not so the allies, where their own knowledge of the fallibility of such systems made them stress proper procedure at all times to a much greater degree.
(There's a famous example from Beurlings Gehimschreiber break in Sweden. We can surmise that there was an order that all messages should start with a random word, to avoid stereotypical cribs at the start of a message. All good and well so far. But then the order probably continued "for example Sonnenschein".
You guessed it. All of a sudden more than 95% or so of all messages started with the word "Sonnenschein". The odd bright young spark managed "Mondschein" and a jester put "Donaudampfschiffsfhartskapitaensmuetze". So, while the intention was good, in actual practice messages got easier to break after that...)
Don't buy this. It's all part of a GCHQ conspiracy to foist weak encryption on the populace. The Enigma has been cracked. I repeat, the Enigma HAS been cracked! You have been warned.
All joking aside, historically that's exactly what happened! The crack of the Enigma in particular and German/Axis crypto in general, was kept very secret just to foist broken encryption onto the world. Winston Churchill himself actually ordered the plans for the Colossus electronic computer (built to crack the Geheimschreiber) was to be destroyed and the machines (there were several at that time) to be broken up, no piece to be bigger than a man's fist.
It was kept secret with the expressed intent of luring, in particular, South American countries to adopt German, esp. Enigma technology, so that all the work that had gone into the break could be reused. And it worked. Many countries adopted variations of the Enigma after the war and the break was kept a closely guarded secret. These machines were then used for diplomatic and other communication for years. It wasn't until 1967 that it was mentioned in one off hand sentence, and that was it. The full(er) story didn't come out until much later, with the publication of David Kahn's seminal "The Code Breakers" if memory serves, where it's all documented.
Winston Churchill even kept up the farce when writing his master work on the history of the English speaking peoples. He "retconned" many important events and facts to look like they weren't informed of what the allies knew of German plans from actual intercepted communications, instead keeping up the faÃade that their decisions had been governed by other factors, and other information than the true one. Of course, one shouldn't exaggerate the impact of the breaks on higher level decision making, but it's of course a fabrication to discount it. After all it was considered so valuable that they allies went to great lengths to deceive the Germans as to where they allies got their information from. Sending out "fake" reconnaissance missions to "happen upon" German convoys to North Africa to take just one example.
The secrecy of course, however relevant at the time, make problems for the historians. I remember when the curator of the Bletchely park museum held a talk about the reconstruction of the Colossus, and quipped, that "Well, of course all the plans weren't destroyed, engineers always squirrel away what they consider their best work. So bits and pieces ended up at the bottom of drawers and in attics everwhere." (Paraphrase). He then went around to all the old-timers and collected bits and bobs here and there, bread borded what he thought a particular piece would look like and came back and presented it to the original designers (the ones that were still alive). That was often sufficient to further jog their memory: "No, now that you mention it, that wasn't quite how it worked."
Does it have good Linux drivers? I.e. that have the same performance, memory requirements etc. that the windows counterpart? Doesn't have to be free, only good.
...and news of patterns of significant crimes taking place outside of parts of town where they're expected.
That doesn't really cover local politics, the "taking place outside of parts of town where they're expected", i.e. city hall, so you probably want to add that.
Local politics, e.g. major building projects etc., often have a greater direct effect on you than state-wide politics, so local's actually more important to keep track of. (But its even more boring, for the most part, so people don't bother, unfortunately.)
Reminds me of the time some smartypants European country tried to take over the world, ended up deep in Russia with nothing but snow to eat or wear, having won every battle but with no supply chain. The enemy doesn't need to shoot you if you're dying of starvation/exposure.
Yes. It's happened at least three times on a major scale. All attempts ended the same way. The principal difficulty of invading Russia are the vast distances over a largely featureless landscape with little of value to sustain the advance. The vast steppes are like the ocean, only you can't sail ships on them, and the roads and rail roads (depending time period) were and are bad or incompatible on purpose.
Hitler in particular had the problem that since he promised a short and quick campaign, he couldn't send proper supplies (e.g. winter gear) with the units at the start, and when it became necessary he could get it to the large rail way depots in Russia (the German army's corps of engineers re-laid the rail roads to standard gauge, a herculean task), but he couldn't get it to the troops. He had a major "last mile" problem.:-) (Well, several miles, but still.)
So, it's an interesting military problem in that fighting in Russia is easy. It's like the place was made for mobile warfare. But it's so bloody big, with infrastructure that's either poor on purpose, or easily destroyed by the retreating forces, that it's a logisticians nightmare. The faster you advance the further away from your (long and vulnerable) supply train you get. All three that tried were lucky to get out of there alive, and of course, in all three cases, most of their troops actually didn't.
Well, I don't really have a dog in this race, and I don't want to get into a semantic quibble about the meaning of "junk," but according to Wikipedia, these countries do rate as "junk" investments.
The "junk" rating is surprisingly (to me at least) high considering the name of the rating. S&P for example considers BB+ and below to be "junk" rated, and all the rest seem to concur.
Norway and Sweden's success has nothing to do with political models and entirely to do with geography. If the Aegean had oil fields, Greece would be a socialist paradise too.
Not even close. Sweden doesn't have one drop of oil, we have industry. And adding to that, the social programmes of Sweden are more expansive than our Norwegian brethren, who have oil. You see the Norwegians fund almost all their oil income into the world's largest and most well managed oil fund that is set up to last "indefinitely". They're most certainly not burning it. (The money. The majority of the oil most certainly burns).
Also, the oil is a recent thing, barely thirty years old. (I am old enough to remember when Norway was "poor" and we used to go shopping for cheaper staples there), and guess what, Sweden's social programmes were even further ahead than the rest of Europe in particular, and the world in general.
Now, of course, people don't have additive printers using the laser sintred process at home just yet. But I don't see anything fundamentally difficult about getting those to market at a reasonable cost in the future. And neither does the experts aparently.
So, forget the plastic pop-gun crap. "Real" guns are just around the corner. The first are already here.
It blew up for *political* reasons, not for *technical* reasons.
Yes. And since we live in a political world where technology always have to bend to political realities, they cannot and should not be ignored.
Great thinkers, like Stallman, recognise this, and hence does "over the top" things like starting writing a free compiler and invent the very concept of software freedom, i.e. they focus on the political, that which out nothing much can exist. Lesser thinkers, like Linus Torvalds, doesn't, instead thinking that technology and the development of complex technical systems can exist in a vacuum, and hence puts himself, and the whole kernel community in difficult situations, that, like we guessed at the time, ended in tears.
Only the technology that can garner political support, can succeed. Because politics is what results when many people have to work together towards a common goal. It is in fact the very definition of politics.
Apparently Linus learned from this though, as git has the same license as the kernel, and hence arbitrary (political) restrictions like "you can't reverse engineer the protocol" (illegal in Europe I might add), or "you can't work on mercurial while working with Bitkeeper" (questionable in Europe) will not, and can not become an issue. And re: bitkeepers arbitrary licensing, Talk about letting your politics get in the way of technology...
It has been called "climate change" since before 1988, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed. Today, people act like the name is some kind of knee-jerk defense against the switch between "global cooling" and "global warming" when in fact, there was no name change at all, nor was there ever a switch.
Especially as the gist of the theory is: anthropogenic global warming leading to climate change. (And the shift is sensible. If the global average temperature increase didn't lead to climate change, we wouldn't be that concerned with it).
That we don't use that mouthful all the time is no different than you lot calling para-acetylaminophenol, acetaminophen, and we calling it paracetamol. The full thing is just too much. It's just basically a name. The underlying "thing" is still the same. In both cases.
I agree that Torvalds isn't the authoritative god of all that makes up a distribution and as such his opinion is one to be considered, but no the only one.
True. Those of us who were "there" remember when he didn't think it was that big a deal to develop the kernel using proprietary tools, esp. source code control systems (can you say "Bitkeeper"), and couldn't understand why everybody was whining about the risks.
We all know how that ended. It blew up all in the kernel developers faces. However, it also meant that he sat down and started writing git, and as a result we're all now better off than where we started.
So have faith. Either he's right, and systemd will not turn out to be that bad, or his faith in systemd will end in tears, and then, he'll sit down and write a new startup management system that will kick everybody else's collective asses!
Of course it has effect. There's such a thing as being too easy. Now, Jan Freese, the former head of the Swedish data inspection authority wrote a very good book on the subject, many, many years ago (in the mid eighties if memory serves), which unfortunately is in Swedish, so it won't do you much good. But one of his main points was that the existence of information isn't the main problem, but that manual barriers to its processing is.
It is my opinon that its become too bloody easy to find out too much about people today, for no good reason. In the important cases (not hiring child molesters at the day care) the data is still there, and still accessible for the concerned parties. That's not a problem. That everybody else should have access to the same data at the drop of a hat, needs to be argued. "Just because we can" isn't much of an argument.
So no. My original argument still stands. The data is there, no-one is arguing that is should be redacted. But that's not to say that the barriers to automatic processing should necessarily be as low as humanly possible. There aren't just benefits, there are risks as well.
P.S. And "information doesn't want to be free". If it wants anything it's to be $4.95, but even that is giving it much too much credit.
This is about history being erased from public record. Don't you see the implications?
No its not. No-one is suggesting that the officially archived court proceedings be retroactively redacted. (Or the officially archived copy of the newspaper in question be redacted either, for that matter).
With current start-up management I meant "as it's defined by history and hence the system we've got to work with". Systemd is, as you say, trying to change that, and hence, have to change everything around it to suit. (And that's not popular, to put it mildly.:-) ) So they're going outside the current scope as what they're trying to achieve can't effectively be addressed within it. If it could be, and they hadn't try to expand the scope, there wouldn't be nearly as much wailing and gnashing of teeth, don't you agree?
I didn't mean to be unfair to the British. They knew how to run an empire but they didn't uplift nations in their spheres for the mutual profit of those peoples. They invested in those countries to profit the empire or make controlling the territory easier.
Sure, don't get me wrong, I didn't say they did. However, they were much better than most of the "competition".
No one ran a global empire better or more benevolently than the British until the Americans came along.
That is up for debate I think.:-) I even said as much during your past and current debacle in Iraq. "You even had the British with you, the best imperialists there have ever been, and you still couldn't take their advice and do the smart thing." (They moved to have Abu Ghraib bombed for example, it being such a powerful symbol for Saddam's oppressive rule. Did you? No instead you made it a symbol of your oppressive rule. It's such a rookie mistake it's painful to see.
And then sending his army complete with political leadership home? WTF? You didn't even do that to the Nazis until after several months. German army units and US units even patrolled together all through the summer of '45, to ensure a stable and peaceful transition. It wasn't until after that was secured that you started hunting Nazis in earnest. So analogously, following your own example, in Iraq you should have rounded up the republican guard in short order and left the rest to simmer until done. Then dealt with it. You didn't and ended up with Iraq a vassal state of Iran, and the bloody Isis in the north.
So, I understand that you try and sell the current US as the empire that thwarts all other empires, but from outside I (and many with me) just can't see it. We see business acumen, and nothing else. No knowledge of actual facts on the ground, no sense or knowledge of history (local or otherwise), no shrewdness, no long term plan or direction. And by your own explanation, that's perhaps not surprising as the US leadership almost guarantees that there can be none of the above. To be a skilled imperialist, you need knowledge, direction, and being in it for the long haul. The US system, with everybody changing all the time, as you point out guarantees that that won't happen.
And hence you get the many messes that you get yourself involved in. Half heartedly and haphazardly. You can't seem to neither shit, nor get off the pot. From Vietnam to Iraq the symptoms and outcome are the same. And everybody else knows this, beating the Americans is easy. Just bleed them until they lose interest, as they inevitably will. The US have no staying power. (Compare that with the British if you will.) Even two-bit Somali war lords understood this, and managed to pull it off without much effort.
Now, why the US as imperialists are a failure, is a good question, and one we could write books on (as others have), but let me end with saying that of course this isn't all bad, or even overwhelmingly so. I'd absolutely hate for the current US to start behaving like the British, even as late as the late nineteenth century, don't get me wrong. I'd rather see an inept US that doesn't really want to be imperialist, than one that would and started doing that competently. But I'd also rather see a US that took an even more complete step in that direction and avoided clumsiness like Iraq altogether.
No, that doesn't really count, as it's outside the scope of the current start-up management. It's not something that could be done with start-up management alone today.
Now of course, if we're allowed to fix the infrastructure, with hindsight there's a lot of things we could/should/would have done differently. But the world being what it is, that's unfortunately often not an option. I mean, Unix isn't that great, we could do a lot better today if we were allowed to start over. But again unfortunately we're not. So sd_notify while being "obvious" also falls far short.
Not that I'm married to SysV startup, it's a bit of a kludge. Likewise I'm not impressed with systemd either, it's arguably worse than the problem it's trying to solve. But again, that's not saying that SysV starup wasn't due for replacement.
The British empire believed in the more traditional "win-lose" system.
That may be a bit harsh. I would say it was more a "we win, we don't care particularly what happens to you". If you look at e.g. the African nations that won independence from their European masters the former British ones usually did OK. The Brits had taught the natives how to actually run a country, as they needed the country to be run and didn't want to waste their own manpower on it.
You can contrast this to many of the smaller players, like Portugal or, horror of horrors, Belgium. They were more likely to just abuse the locals for sheer short sighted profit taking and to hell with everything, and everyone else. "The heart of darkness" was after all written as an argument against the abuses of King Leopold of Belgium.
You're chock full of long lived isotopes today, and you manage to ignore them. Where do you think the "14" comes from in carbon-14 dating, aka radio carbon dating?
Now, it's still a nice conservative model, and we don't know what to replace it with, or even if it should be replaced (being conservative and all), so everything is based on that. That has the nice side effect that we tend to err on the side of caution, but the downside is that people believe that "ultimately" there will be scores of cancers etc. from very low level dosages received by very large populations. That won't happen, we know that by now. If it did, then it would have already happened in the aforementioned instances and many more.
So, smart money is on basically no extra cases of cancer from long term exposure from Fukushima.
Oh yes, there were plenty of ulterior motives. You see, the Swedish government in about 1670 before Charles XII realised that in order for Sweden to survive we had to have peace with the Russians. So the deal was made that we would help open the old silk road. We would help the Russians build canals etc. for a transport route that would take gods from India and China via Persia, across the Kaspian via Volga to Narva via Moscow. The endpoint would be where present day St Petersburg is, i.e. with handy access to the Baltic (Swedens "Mare nostrum" at the time as Finland and the Baltic were Swedish), Sweden and the world.
BUT, this of course pissed off the naval powers that had a lock on that trade royally. So they schemed and schemed to have war between Russia and Sweden, and with a new Peter the Great, who listened too much to the Dutch (another of the two great eastern sea/trading powers at the time) and a Charles the XII who listened to the Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill (yes an ancestor of that Churchill), who at Sachsen/Saxony persuaded the young king to not join the Saxony/English against the French, but instead keep at the war with Russia! (He thought it better in the long run for Sweden and Russia to bleed each other dry, rather than having the extra help against the French. And this at the time when the war against the French was a very closely run affair, and not at all certain. He later professed this to be his most prominent achievement). This against the protestations of the Saxony/Hannoverian government official Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (yes that Leibniz!)
And of course the plans of Marlborough worked. Sweden lost at Poltava 1709, (which marked the end of the Swedish empire and the rise of the Russian), and then the king fell at Halden in Norway in 1718 and in hindsight that was all she wrote. Sweden was too tired of war to even try and continue, and little by little the "empire" collapsed. The Russians hit the final nail in the coffin in 1809 when the took Finland (which had been Swedish for 600 years by that time). We basically haven't been to war since.
So, definitely not a win-win scenario. And as you point out, like everything important, based on trade. We wanted it, the Dutch, English, (and Portuguese, and Spanish) didn't want to lose it, and they took steps to prevent that from happening, and we and the Russians fell for it. Hindsight 20-20 and all that...:-)
That's a distinction without meaning. First, you're not talking about modern sweden but about 17th century Sweden which had a very different character and nature than the modern Sweden. Compare the US morally and ethically against 17th century Sweden, and it is unlikely the modern US would look worse.
No argument, it was you how brought up the comparison with empires of yore, and then mentioned Sweden in the next breath.
Whether you'd look worse... Good question. "We" were pretty bad, so I'm not sure that's aiming very high. However, the world has also changed, we're much more peaceful now, so an absolute comparison is fraught with difficulty anyway.
Second, while Sweden might have been threatening to their immediate neighbors, they had no where near the projection of true empires. I grant they were formidable. But only within their region.
Well, by that token, so were many others on your list. Also, those that covered lots of land, often ruled vast "empires" of no-one, as many of the areas where they ruled didn't have much of a population to begin with (the Mongols come to mind here).
The British ambasador of the time did after all tell the Swedish monarch that Sweden's natural border in the east ought to be considered to stop at the shores of the black sea. The crown didn't think the Swedes had any natural claim beyond that (and schemed to start another war with Russia to put a stop to that). So, "our" influences well beyond the local region were considerable at the time.
So, in short, I'm not really arguing with your basic premises, just picking a nit regarding comparisons between "empires" and "Sweden" being invalid. Historically it's not a stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
All of which I said? ... Or didn't voice an opinion on. (Of course the war time secrecy was to prevent the enemy from knowing you're knowing. Anything else would have been daft beyond belief, and I didn't say anything else.)
Yes, there is much truth in that. (Though you discount the rapid advances in computational power just after the war. Even though the computational effort is "massive" that only spurred the various signals intelligence organisations to buy more computers).
However, as no-one thought the Enigma had been broken to the extent that it had, no-one put that much effort in to perfect crypto hygiene, not reusing or reordering rotors (the Germans famously got that completely wrong, thinking that the strength was increased by changing rotor order), etc.
So while a properly configured and expanded Enigma could have been the basis of a sound and secure means of communication, that wasn't how it was typically used.
I mean, even the Germans had somewhat proper cryptographic procedures, but since they didn't believe that their crypto could be broken, they developed a very lackadaisical attitude in practice. Not so the allies, where their own knowledge of the fallibility of such systems made them stress proper procedure at all times to a much greater degree.
(There's a famous example from Beurlings Gehimschreiber break in Sweden. We can surmise that there was an order that all messages should start with a random word, to avoid stereotypical cribs at the start of a message. All good and well so far. But then the order probably continued "for example Sonnenschein".
You guessed it. All of a sudden more than 95% or so of all messages started with the word "Sonnenschein". The odd bright young spark managed "Mondschein" and a jester put "Donaudampfschiffsfhartskapitaensmuetze". So, while the intention was good, in actual practice messages got easier to break after that...)
Don't buy this. It's all part of a GCHQ conspiracy to foist weak encryption on the populace. The Enigma has been cracked. I repeat, the Enigma HAS been cracked! You have been warned.
All joking aside, historically that's exactly what happened! The crack of the Enigma in particular and German/Axis crypto in general, was kept very secret just to foist broken encryption onto the world. Winston Churchill himself actually ordered the plans for the Colossus electronic computer (built to crack the Geheimschreiber) was to be destroyed and the machines (there were several at that time) to be broken up, no piece to be bigger than a man's fist.
It was kept secret with the expressed intent of luring, in particular, South American countries to adopt German, esp. Enigma technology, so that all the work that had gone into the break could be reused. And it worked. Many countries adopted variations of the Enigma after the war and the break was kept a closely guarded secret. These machines were then used for diplomatic and other communication for years. It wasn't until 1967 that it was mentioned in one off hand sentence, and that was it. The full(er) story didn't come out until much later, with the publication of David Kahn's seminal "The Code Breakers" if memory serves, where it's all documented.
Winston Churchill even kept up the farce when writing his master work on the history of the English speaking peoples. He "retconned" many important events and facts to look like they weren't informed of what the allies knew of German plans from actual intercepted communications, instead keeping up the faÃade that their decisions had been governed by other factors, and other information than the true one. Of course, one shouldn't exaggerate the impact of the breaks on higher level decision making, but it's of course a fabrication to discount it. After all it was considered so valuable that they allies went to great lengths to deceive the Germans as to where they allies got their information from. Sending out "fake" reconnaissance missions to "happen upon" German convoys to North Africa to take just one example.
The secrecy of course, however relevant at the time, make problems for the historians. I remember when the curator of the Bletchely park museum held a talk about the reconstruction of the Colossus, and quipped, that "Well, of course all the plans weren't destroyed, engineers always squirrel away what they consider their best work. So bits and pieces ended up at the bottom of drawers and in attics everwhere." (Paraphrase). He then went around to all the old-timers and collected bits and bobs here and there, bread borded what he thought a particular piece would look like and came back and presented it to the original designers (the ones that were still alive). That was often sufficient to further jog their memory: "No, now that you mention it, that wasn't quite how it worked."
Does it have good Linux drivers? I.e. that have the same performance, memory requirements etc. that the windows counterpart? Doesn't have to be free, only good.
No? Then I'm not interested...
...and news of patterns of significant crimes taking place outside of parts of town where they're expected.
That doesn't really cover local politics, the "taking place outside of parts of town where they're expected", i.e. city hall, so you probably want to add that.
Local politics, e.g. major building projects etc., often have a greater direct effect on you than state-wide politics, so local's actually more important to keep track of. (But its even more boring, for the most part, so people don't bother, unfortunately.)
Reminds me of the time some smartypants European country tried to take over the world, ended up deep in Russia with nothing but snow to eat or wear, having won every battle but with no supply chain. The enemy doesn't need to shoot you if you're dying of starvation/exposure.
Yes. It's happened at least three times on a major scale. All attempts ended the same way. The principal difficulty of invading Russia are the vast distances over a largely featureless landscape with little of value to sustain the advance. The vast steppes are like the ocean, only you can't sail ships on them, and the roads and rail roads (depending time period) were and are bad or incompatible on purpose.
Hitler in particular had the problem that since he promised a short and quick campaign, he couldn't send proper supplies (e.g. winter gear) with the units at the start, and when it became necessary he could get it to the large rail way depots in Russia (the German army's corps of engineers re-laid the rail roads to standard gauge, a herculean task), but he couldn't get it to the troops. He had a major "last mile" problem. :-) (Well, several miles, but still.)
So, it's an interesting military problem in that fighting in Russia is easy. It's like the place was made for mobile warfare. But it's so bloody big, with infrastructure that's either poor on purpose, or easily destroyed by the retreating forces, that it's a logisticians nightmare. The faster you advance the further away from your (long and vulnerable) supply train you get. All three that tried were lucky to get out of there alive, and of course, in all three cases, most of their troops actually didn't.
Well, I don't really have a dog in this race, and I don't want to get into a semantic quibble about the meaning of "junk," but according to Wikipedia, these countries do rate as "junk" investments.
The "junk" rating is surprisingly (to me at least) high considering the name of the rating. S&P for example considers BB+ and below to be "junk" rated, and all the rest seem to concur.
Norway and Sweden's success has nothing to do with political models and entirely to do with geography. If the Aegean had oil fields, Greece would be a socialist paradise too.
Not even close. Sweden doesn't have one drop of oil, we have industry. And adding to that, the social programmes of Sweden are more expansive than our Norwegian brethren, who have oil. You see the Norwegians fund almost all their oil income into the world's largest and most well managed oil fund that is set up to last "indefinitely". They're most certainly not burning it. (The money. The majority of the oil most certainly burns).
Also, the oil is a recent thing, barely thirty years old. (I am old enough to remember when Norway was "poor" and we used to go shopping for cheaper staples there), and guess what, Sweden's social programmes were even further ahead than the rest of Europe in particular, and the world in general.
...same credit rating as Portugal, Croatia or Hungary...
All paragons of financial solvency, for sure...
So go ahead and print your barrel (that should be interesting...)
Not really. It's old news by now in fact.
Now, of course, people don't have additive printers using the laser sintred process at home just yet. But I don't see anything fundamentally difficult about getting those to market at a reasonable cost in the future. And neither does the experts aparently.
So, forget the plastic pop-gun crap. "Real" guns are just around the corner. The first are already here.
It blew up for *political* reasons, not for *technical* reasons.
Yes. And since we live in a political world where technology always have to bend to political realities, they cannot and should not be ignored.
Great thinkers, like Stallman, recognise this, and hence does "over the top" things like starting writing a free compiler and invent the very concept of software freedom, i.e. they focus on the political, that which out nothing much can exist. Lesser thinkers, like Linus Torvalds, doesn't, instead thinking that technology and the development of complex technical systems can exist in a vacuum, and hence puts himself, and the whole kernel community in difficult situations, that, like we guessed at the time, ended in tears.
Only the technology that can garner political support, can succeed. Because politics is what results when many people have to work together towards a common goal. It is in fact the very definition of politics.
Apparently Linus learned from this though, as git has the same license as the kernel, and hence arbitrary (political) restrictions like "you can't reverse engineer the protocol" (illegal in Europe I might add), or "you can't work on mercurial while working with Bitkeeper" (questionable in Europe) will not, and can not become an issue. And re: bitkeepers arbitrary licensing, Talk about letting your politics get in the way of technology...
It has been called "climate change" since before 1988, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed. Today, people act like the name is some kind of knee-jerk defense against the switch between "global cooling" and "global warming" when in fact, there was no name change at all, nor was there ever a switch.
Especially as the gist of the theory is: anthropogenic global warming leading to climate change. (And the shift is sensible. If the global average temperature increase didn't lead to climate change, we wouldn't be that concerned with it).
That we don't use that mouthful all the time is no different than you lot calling para-acetylaminophenol, acetaminophen, and we calling it paracetamol. The full thing is just too much. It's just basically a name. The underlying "thing" is still the same. In both cases.
I agree that Torvalds isn't the authoritative god of all that makes up a distribution and as such his opinion is one to be considered, but no the only one.
True. Those of us who were "there" remember when he didn't think it was that big a deal to develop the kernel using proprietary tools, esp. source code control systems (can you say "Bitkeeper"), and couldn't understand why everybody was whining about the risks.
We all know how that ended. It blew up all in the kernel developers faces. However, it also meant that he sat down and started writing git, and as a result we're all now better off than where we started.
So have faith. Either he's right, and systemd will not turn out to be that bad, or his faith in systemd will end in tears, and then, he'll sit down and write a new startup management system that will kick everybody else's collective asses!
In either case, we win! :-)
Of course it has effect. There's such a thing as being too easy. Now, Jan Freese, the former head of the Swedish data inspection authority wrote a very good book on the subject, many, many years ago (in the mid eighties if memory serves), which unfortunately is in Swedish, so it won't do you much good. But one of his main points was that the existence of information isn't the main problem, but that manual barriers to its processing is.
It is my opinon that its become too bloody easy to find out too much about people today, for no good reason. In the important cases (not hiring child molesters at the day care) the data is still there, and still accessible for the concerned parties. That's not a problem. That everybody else should have access to the same data at the drop of a hat, needs to be argued. "Just because we can" isn't much of an argument.
So no. My original argument still stands. The data is there, no-one is arguing that is should be redacted. But that's not to say that the barriers to automatic processing should necessarily be as low as humanly possible. There aren't just benefits, there are risks as well.
P.S. And "information doesn't want to be free". If it wants anything it's to be $4.95, but even that is giving it much too much credit.
Of course you can find them. What do you think libraries are for? Just a place to get free WiFi?
I swear, kids today wouldn't have survived fifteen minutes in the eighties...
This is about history being erased from public record. Don't you see the implications?
No its not. No-one is suggesting that the officially archived court proceedings be retroactively redacted. (Or the officially archived copy of the newspaper in question be redacted either, for that matter).
The public records are sacrosanct and still preserved.
Ah, by "current" you mean "historical". :-)
Yes, if you will. History is after all that which happened just before "now"... :-)
With current start-up management I meant "as it's defined by history and hence the system we've got to work with". Systemd is, as you say, trying to change that, and hence, have to change everything around it to suit. (And that's not popular, to put it mildly. :-) ) So they're going outside the current scope as what they're trying to achieve can't effectively be addressed within it. If it could be, and they hadn't try to expand the scope, there wouldn't be nearly as much wailing and gnashing of teeth, don't you agree?
I didn't mean to be unfair to the British. They knew how to run an empire but they didn't uplift nations in their spheres for the mutual profit of those peoples. They invested in those countries to profit the empire or make controlling the territory easier.
Sure, don't get me wrong, I didn't say they did. However, they were much better than most of the "competition".
No one ran a global empire better or more benevolently than the British until the Americans came along.
That is up for debate I think. :-) I even said as much during your past and current debacle in Iraq. "You even had the British with you, the best imperialists there have ever been, and you still couldn't take their advice and do the smart thing." (They moved to have Abu Ghraib bombed for example, it being such a powerful symbol for Saddam's oppressive rule. Did you? No instead you made it a symbol of your oppressive rule. It's such a rookie mistake it's painful to see.
And then sending his army complete with political leadership home? WTF? You didn't even do that to the Nazis until after several months. German army units and US units even patrolled together all through the summer of '45, to ensure a stable and peaceful transition. It wasn't until after that was secured that you started hunting Nazis in earnest. So analogously, following your own example, in Iraq you should have rounded up the republican guard in short order and left the rest to simmer until done. Then dealt with it. You didn't and ended up with Iraq a vassal state of Iran, and the bloody Isis in the north.
So, I understand that you try and sell the current US as the empire that thwarts all other empires, but from outside I (and many with me) just can't see it. We see business acumen, and nothing else. No knowledge of actual facts on the ground, no sense or knowledge of history (local or otherwise), no shrewdness, no long term plan or direction. And by your own explanation, that's perhaps not surprising as the US leadership almost guarantees that there can be none of the above. To be a skilled imperialist, you need knowledge, direction, and being in it for the long haul. The US system, with everybody changing all the time, as you point out guarantees that that won't happen.
And hence you get the many messes that you get yourself involved in. Half heartedly and haphazardly. You can't seem to neither shit, nor get off the pot. From Vietnam to Iraq the symptoms and outcome are the same. And everybody else knows this, beating the Americans is easy. Just bleed them until they lose interest, as they inevitably will. The US have no staying power. (Compare that with the British if you will.) Even two-bit Somali war lords understood this, and managed to pull it off without much effort.
Now, why the US as imperialists are a failure, is a good question, and one we could write books on (as others have), but let me end with saying that of course this isn't all bad, or even overwhelmingly so. I'd absolutely hate for the current US to start behaving like the British, even as late as the late nineteenth century, don't get me wrong. I'd rather see an inept US that doesn't really want to be imperialist, than one that would and started doing that competently. But I'd also rather see a US that took an even more complete step in that direction and avoided clumsiness like Iraq altogether.
sd_notify.
No, that doesn't really count, as it's outside the scope of the current start-up management. It's not something that could be done with start-up management alone today.
Now of course, if we're allowed to fix the infrastructure, with hindsight there's a lot of things we could/should/would have done differently. But the world being what it is, that's unfortunately often not an option. I mean, Unix isn't that great, we could do a lot better today if we were allowed to start over. But again unfortunately we're not. So sd_notify while being "obvious" also falls far short.
Not that I'm married to SysV startup, it's a bit of a kludge. Likewise I'm not impressed with systemd either, it's arguably worse than the problem it's trying to solve. But again, that's not saying that SysV starup wasn't due for replacement.
The British empire believed in the more traditional "win-lose" system.
That may be a bit harsh. I would say it was more a "we win, we don't care particularly what happens to you". If you look at e.g. the African nations that won independence from their European masters the former British ones usually did OK. The Brits had taught the natives how to actually run a country, as they needed the country to be run and didn't want to waste their own manpower on it.
You can contrast this to many of the smaller players, like Portugal or, horror of horrors, Belgium. They were more likely to just abuse the locals for sheer short sighted profit taking and to hell with everything, and everyone else. "The heart of darkness" was after all written as an argument against the abuses of King Leopold of Belgium.
"that we can ignore them." - The error.
You're chock full of long lived isotopes today, and you manage to ignore them. Where do you think the "14" comes from in carbon-14 dating, aka radio carbon dating?
Whether the estimate is correct or not
It's not. It's based on the LNT-Linear No Threshold-model, that we today know is too conservative. Tjernobyl, Iran and Taiwan among others, have taught us as much.
Now, it's still a nice conservative model, and we don't know what to replace it with, or even if it should be replaced (being conservative and all), so everything is based on that. That has the nice side effect that we tend to err on the side of caution, but the downside is that people believe that "ultimately" there will be scores of cancers etc. from very low level dosages received by very large populations. That won't happen, we know that by now. If it did, then it would have already happened in the aforementioned instances and many more.
So, smart money is on basically no extra cases of cancer from long term exposure from Fukushima.
Oh yes, there were plenty of ulterior motives. You see, the Swedish government in about 1670 before Charles XII realised that in order for Sweden to survive we had to have peace with the Russians. So the deal was made that we would help open the old silk road. We would help the Russians build canals etc. for a transport route that would take gods from India and China via Persia, across the Kaspian via Volga to Narva via Moscow. The endpoint would be where present day St Petersburg is, i.e. with handy access to the Baltic (Swedens "Mare nostrum" at the time as Finland and the Baltic were Swedish), Sweden and the world.
BUT, this of course pissed off the naval powers that had a lock on that trade royally. So they schemed and schemed to have war between Russia and Sweden, and with a new Peter the Great, who listened too much to the Dutch (another of the two great eastern sea/trading powers at the time) and a Charles the XII who listened to the Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill (yes an ancestor of that Churchill), who at Sachsen/Saxony persuaded the young king to not join the Saxony/English against the French, but instead keep at the war with Russia! (He thought it better in the long run for Sweden and Russia to bleed each other dry, rather than having the extra help against the French. And this at the time when the war against the French was a very closely run affair, and not at all certain. He later professed this to be his most prominent achievement). This against the protestations of the Saxony/Hannoverian government official Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (yes that Leibniz!)
And of course the plans of Marlborough worked. Sweden lost at Poltava 1709, (which marked the end of the Swedish empire and the rise of the Russian), and then the king fell at Halden in Norway in 1718 and in hindsight that was all she wrote. Sweden was too tired of war to even try and continue, and little by little the "empire" collapsed. The Russians hit the final nail in the coffin in 1809 when the took Finland (which had been Swedish for 600 years by that time). We basically haven't been to war since.
So, definitely not a win-win scenario. And as you point out, like everything important, based on trade. We wanted it, the Dutch, English, (and Portuguese, and Spanish) didn't want to lose it, and they took steps to prevent that from happening, and we and the Russians fell for it. Hindsight 20-20 and all that... :-)
That's a distinction without meaning. First, you're not talking about modern sweden but about 17th century Sweden which had a very different character and nature than the modern Sweden. Compare the US morally and ethically against 17th century Sweden, and it is unlikely the modern US would look worse.
No argument, it was you how brought up the comparison with empires of yore, and then mentioned Sweden in the next breath.
Whether you'd look worse... Good question. "We" were pretty bad, so I'm not sure that's aiming very high. However, the world has also changed, we're much more peaceful now, so an absolute comparison is fraught with difficulty anyway.
Second, while Sweden might have been threatening to their immediate neighbors, they had no where near the projection of true empires. I grant they were formidable. But only within their region.
Well, by that token, so were many others on your list. Also, those that covered lots of land, often ruled vast "empires" of no-one, as many of the areas where they ruled didn't have much of a population to begin with (the Mongols come to mind here).
The British ambasador of the time did after all tell the Swedish monarch that Sweden's natural border in the east ought to be considered to stop at the shores of the black sea. The crown didn't think the Swedes had any natural claim beyond that (and schemed to start another war with Russia to put a stop to that). So, "our" influences well beyond the local region were considerable at the time.
So, in short, I'm not really arguing with your basic premises, just picking a nit regarding comparisons between "empires" and "Sweden" being invalid. Historically it's not a stretch.