There's a book called Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy, which describes (I think) seven seperate layers of information processing between the vibrations of the air entering the ear and the final state in which you are hearing music. So maybe you just need deeper and deeper neural nets.
(wow i just previed that and slashdot is making links now. neato.)
Or should I say, you must have deeper and deeper neural nets, and then you still need something more than that. But you're not gonna get anywhere without multiple layers of abstraction to build the approrpriate meaning(s) from a given input.
Writing this I thought of the 7-layer network model, here we are up at the top having this conversation. As we peel away the onion skin the meaning is lost but the mechanism is revealed.
To respond to your point, do you think your "classifier" would recognize letters from Korean or Persian or Sanskrit? How is it I often can't read my own handwriting?
I always get a laugh when an OCR package decides it makes sense to change fonts for one or two letters of a word, or maybe there's some text rotated 90 degrees which it dutifully parses into gibberish.
One of the best aspects of the computer field is how anarchic it is. You don't need a college degree, and you sure as hell don't have to put up with some Medieval Guild mentality just to get your foot in the door.
There's a theory which states that complex systems eventually end up working against the very purpose they were created to serve. I don't know if the big American unions have quite reached this point yet, but they sure don't have the teeth they once did.
The only memorable Union action I can recall in my lifetime, the only one with real teeth, was the UPS strike back in 97.
Look at the shitty deal teachers get in this country. The NEA and its state affiliates are a union that does more harm than good.
I support self-determination, though. What Wal-Mart does, closing down stores rather than let the workers vote on unionizing, is some bullshit. But on the flip side, why does the guy bagging my groceries at Safeway have to give a part of his paycheck to a union? Does he really get his money's worth out of that? To be fair I don't know, maybe he does.
I'm curious then, since Scrabble came out in 1948, that patent must be expired. I could make the same game, call it something else, and sell esesntially the same game.
If I was Jared, I'd just grep Scrabble and replace it with some other word, then he should be in the clear, right? Mabye he could call his "new" game Lindows or something.
Or is there some sort of overlap between patent and copyright laws? Say, the board is patented, but it's also copyrighted?
Even if what you say about the "missing link" is accurate, there's no evidence to support where your train of thought is headed, which seems to be Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design has no basis in science, rather it's rooted in your desire to believe that God created man.
As for spontaneous evolution, why do you think you need a new flu shot every year? Ever look at the fine print on a can of Raid! and see where it says "Formula 7 change 2?" There are strains of Hepatitis and other diseases which are now almost completely immune to antibiotics -- the same antibiotics against which they stood no chance 50 years ago.
The evidence is right in front of your face, you just don't want to see it.
Companies that exist for the sole purpose of patenting ideas and sitting on them disgust me.
Huh?
Burst didn't to that. Burst didn't do anything close to that. Burst is not Rambus, or SCO, or that company that claimed a patent on GIFs. They were trying to sell their technology to Microsoft, and then Microsoft stole it.
Correct, and Microsoft won't die the death of Enron, because while they do engage in sleazy business practices, there's no evidence they're cooking the books. The lawbreaking is real, but the profits are real too.
And let's not forget that MSFT's decision to start paying a divided came on the heels of renewed investor scrutiny about overvalued stocks, and enough people asking the pretty obvious question "why doesn't a company with 30 billion in the bank pay a dividend?"
Microsoft isn't a growth stock anymore, they're now an established blue chip, and as such they probably have even more latitude (if you can imagine that) to disregard the law as they see fit, so long as it's cost-effective to do so.
Well, I can see we have divergent opinions on this one. The UNSCOM weapons inspectors were infiltrated by CIA spies, setting up listening posts at military bases all across Iraq. Saddam got wind of this and kicked them out. Would you let spies back in your country? Fool me once...
But that's not really all that relevant. The whole point of intelligence is that we don't have to take these people at their word. And the intelligence we had was only a slam-dunk after Cheney's office got done with it. Neither State nor CIA (nor the British) had conclusive findings in their original reports. The reports were re-worked by an Administration that needed a "slam dunk" to sell this war.
In the wake of 9/11 the claim that our old enemy (and older ally) Saddam had WMD was just what the doctor ordered! It provided the justification to launch the PNAC war to reshape the Middle East in our image. (Though, I'm not sure why they went through all the fuss, Congress completely abdicated their responsibility shortly after 9/11.)
Remember that other claim? That Iraq had UAVs equipped with chemical weapons sprayers, capable of reaching NYC? Completely laughable. Yet peeople believed it. As one fictional character put it "Fear is the mind-killer." Fear of the WMD Boogey-Man named Saddam has made American minds pliant and susceptible to reprogramming in accord with the New World Order.
I kinda like the theory that Saddam actually believed he had the WMDs... I mean, would you want to be the general to tell him, ah, about those WMD you see, we're gonna need another five years...
I don't believe that's what happened, Saddam was intimately involved in the decision to abandon the WMD program after the Gulf War, but still it's a theory I've heard presented by apologists.
What exactly did Saddam do that made you think he had them? Deny that he had them? That sets up a bit of a Catch-22, don't you think? And in fact that's exactly how it played out before the invasion. If Saddam admits he has WMD, that's grounds for invasion. If he doesn't admit he has WMD, he's lying. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, circular logic at it's finest.
Isn't it interesting that everything Saddam said about his WMD program is true and everything Bush told us is a lie? Ushers in a whole new era of moral relativism.
The fact remains, there was no credible evidence establishing a WMD program in Iraq. It's well documented that the British dossier was "sexed up" and the American intelligence was cherry-picked to support the WMD conclusion. And when that wasn't enough, the CIA report was re-worded to be less "vague" on the point of WMD, despite the fact that the intelligence was, in fact, vague.
It looks like you've been fooled twice, first by Saddam, then by Bush.
Why exactly are we on a first name basis with Saddam, anyway? I've never understood that.
I don't mean in terms of computation power, I mean in a theoretical way. As in, it can be shown that Go can be solved, even if we cant='t solve it.
I don't know much about these sorts of things... practically nothing in fact. Now, we all learned as kids that tic-tac-toe (or Naughts and Crosses if you prefer) is closed or solved or whatever the right term is... whoever goes first always wins, so long as they go right in the middle.
It seems pretty clear to me that if the solution in the 5x5 case is to put the first stone right in the middle of the board, then my money's on the same move on a full-size board. Because of the way Go works, the center square has the highest "potential" for liberty in that it's equally capable of finding that liberty in any direction. (Conversely, the worst first move is the corner.) I have a hunch that going anywhere else is more of a dead-end move... just like in Tic-Tac-Toe, only we don't learn this, brute force, from the older kids on the schoolyard.
(Wait... Did I miss something? I thought the solution presented in the 5x5 game had black's first move at the center. If that's not the case, consider this an exercize in rationalization, facts notwithstanding)
It does become an angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin argument, when you consider that people are "natural" too. I guess my point is, the activity of phytoplankton seems more "natural" than, say, the Hoover Dam.
I'm one of those people who holds that people are "just animals." And like some animals, we sometimes behave in ways that seem counterproductive. Like the heron who poops all over the copse, poisoning the trees so they have to find a new nest. Or the ebola virus, which so effectively and thoroughly consumes its host that it will never flourish the way the rhinovirus will.
The thing about the salmon is pretty incredible too. Bringing nitrogen from the oceans to fertilize the forests... It seems the ecosystem is so intricately designed, much of it we likely can't perceive.
Obviously I think we should tread lightly. Obviously I don't see us doing that as much as we could.
I mean, who knows, was the adoption of agriculture a few millenia ago a "bad" thing? How about the invention of the atl-atl and the subsequent overhunting and extinctions? Is there a lesson there?
Could it be that, as Mao Tse Tung responded when asked about the impact of the French Revolution on Western civilization, "It's too early to tell."
Not that I'm in favor of analysis paralysis. These issues are challenging becuase of the timescale. How do we keep Chernobly sealed off for the next 30,000 years? Or is nuclear meltdown a "good" thing... maybe in ways we can't perceive yet.
The patient's lying on the table, her leg cut off. Your goal is to lessen the loss of blood and keep the patient alive.
Which arterty would you tie off first? I don't know about you, but I'd go for the big one, gushing blood like a geyser, not some smaller, relatively insignificant capillary.
In fact if you don't do something about that main artery, the patient will bleed out, even though you've stopped the blood flow in all the other places.
You're being pedantic. The animals that place 2nd and 3rd behind man in terms of altering the environment are the dam-building beaver and the bush-stomping elephant. Man's changes the environment are many, many orders of magnitude greater.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that damming a river or strip mining or clear-cutting forest can't be defined as "negative" to our surroundings, but I'd like to know. Positive to man's economy, sure. But positive to the environment? Are you for real?
What some BBC reporter wrote is completely irrelevant.
The essential fact is this: Cheney's office bypassed 30 years of established intelligence apparatus to get the information they so desperately wanted to justify their war. Information that was unverified and unverifiable, information from questionable sources, and information from informants who realistically wouldn't even have access to that sort of intelligence in the first place.
Maybe we should do a little reality check: Do you think invading Iraqi troops pulled Kuwaiti babies out of incubators in the hospital nursery too?
That story, which generated tremendous public support for the Gulf War, was delivered in un-sworn testimony before a special session of Congress by a "nurse" who turned out to be the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter living in Washington DC.
Cheney et. al. realized they'd need something more than a sob story to go after Iraq a second time, so they cherry-picked the raw, unvetted intelligence to come up with the "slam dunk."
Considering you still believe there's any sort of basis to the assertion that Iraq had WMD, I'd say they did a pretty good job.
If you truly believe that the rest of the world believed, as strongly as Bush wanted to, that Iraq had an active WMD program, including nuclear, then you must have blinders on.
The British report was sexed up, at Tony Blair's request. The American intel was completely un-vetted and cherry-picked by Cheney's office. It was common knowledge that the aluminum tubes were missile bodies, not parts of a nuclear-processing centrifuge. The Niger yellowcake uranium story was a complete phony.
I'll leave the Russian intel out of this (I'm assuming they're the final "major" intel agency in the world) since they didn't play a factor in Bush's rationalization. British intel did, and it's just as suspect as American intel on this issue.
Do you even realize what happened to the CIA report? Language like "evidence suggests Iraq may be pursuing WMD" was changed to "evidence shows Iraq is pursuing WMD." This was done by the Executive branch and it caused such a fuss that they had to put in a new Director of the CIA.
And I bet you already know all this. But if you dont, do yourself a favor and read "The Stovepipe" by Seymour Hirsch, The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/0 31027fa_ fact
You've been drinking the Kool-Aid this morning... but regardless: You're likening both Bush and the Environmentalists to Chicken Little. The difference is that the WMDs were a phony story concocted to drum up support for the war, global warming has a basis in science.
In other words: Were it not for the fact that the globe is indeed melting, you'd have a good argument there.
Still, I agree that any significant change to our resource habits will require more than the threat of looming (inevitable?) catastrophic climate change.
John Kerry tried the "new energy economy" tack in his run for President, he lost, and in Bush's mind, that gives him a mandate to continue Business As Usual.
Let's say the infrastructre to be built was the drinking water in your town, who would you want running it?
Heck, a corporation rolling out any service for a small town might not even have their headquarters in the same state or country. Why should they care if the stuff actually works? All they're interested in is the money -- preferrably in the form of a locked-in contract with a significant payout should the municipality be forced to change horses midstream.
Hello AC, you've completely missed my point. The threat isn't al qaeda per se, it's our own completely ridiculous response to al qaeda, which is to date is typified by (further) consolidation of power in the hands of a single Executive, abdication of Congressional responsibility, a spending spree that would make SDI proponents blush, a rollback on civil liberties, and furhter "scope-creep" of the military into the realm of "nation-building." Oh, and a perpetual "War on Terror," which unlike the Cold War is a shooting war, and unlike the Cold War isn't a conflict between States but a between State and an Ideology, with the victory condition not of one nation's demise but of democratizing the whole of the Middle East, which I daresay will be a sight harder.
And yes, this probably isn't a threat to the whole of Western Democracy, but if the US goes, that would certainly be a pretty huge chink in the armor, don't you think?
Slashdot Mirror
They already invented that, Dr. Who calls them Daleks.
There's a book called Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy, which describes (I think) seven seperate layers of information processing between the vibrations of the air entering the ear and the final state in which you are hearing music. So maybe you just need deeper and deeper neural nets.
(link to book: http://www.cymaticsource.com/brain.html )
(wow i just previed that and slashdot is making links now. neato.)
Or should I say, you must have deeper and deeper neural nets, and then you still need something more than that. But you're not gonna get anywhere without multiple layers of abstraction to build the approrpriate meaning(s) from a given input.
Writing this I thought of the 7-layer network model, here we are up at the top having this conversation. As we peel away the onion skin the meaning is lost but the mechanism is revealed.
To respond to your point, do you think your "classifier" would recognize letters from Korean or Persian or Sanskrit? How is it I often can't read my own handwriting?
I always get a laugh when an OCR package decides it makes sense to change fonts for one or two letters of a word, or maybe there's some text rotated 90 degrees which it dutifully parses into gibberish.
thank you , i wil have to check that out
also its only been 9 sec since i hit reply so you get this extra line for no real reason.
One of the best aspects of the computer field is how anarchic it is. You don't need a college degree, and you sure as hell don't have to put up with some Medieval Guild mentality just to get your foot in the door.
There's a theory which states that complex systems eventually end up working against the very purpose they were created to serve. I don't know if the big American unions have quite reached this point yet, but they sure don't have the teeth they once did.
The only memorable Union action I can recall in my lifetime, the only one with real teeth, was the UPS strike back in 97.
Look at the shitty deal teachers get in this country. The NEA and its state affiliates are a union that does more harm than good.
I support self-determination, though. What Wal-Mart does, closing down stores rather than let the workers vote on unionizing, is some bullshit. But on the flip side, why does the guy bagging my groceries at Safeway have to give a part of his paycheck to a union? Does he really get his money's worth out of that? To be fair I don't know, maybe he does.
Actually, nevermind my last post, it's kinda covered in your other posts later on in the thread. Stupid nesting order!
I'm curious then, since Scrabble came out in 1948, that patent must be expired. I could make the same game, call it something else, and sell esesntially the same game.
If I was Jared, I'd just grep Scrabble and replace it with some other word, then he should be in the clear, right? Mabye he could call his "new" game Lindows or something.
Or is there some sort of overlap between patent and copyright laws? Say, the board is patented, but it's also copyrighted?
I've yet to see any evidence of Creation. Care to provide some examples?
I just want to say, I'm an atheist and I oppose stem cell research. I hope this post has made someone ver, very confused.
Even if what you say about the "missing link" is accurate, there's no evidence to support where your train of thought is headed, which seems to be Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design has no basis in science, rather it's rooted in your desire to believe that God created man.
As for spontaneous evolution, why do you think you need a new flu shot every year? Ever look at the fine print on a can of Raid! and see where it says "Formula 7 change 2?" There are strains of Hepatitis and other diseases which are now almost completely immune to antibiotics -- the same antibiotics against which they stood no chance 50 years ago.
The evidence is right in front of your face, you just don't want to see it.
Companies that exist for the sole purpose of patenting ideas and sitting on them disgust me.
Huh?
Burst didn't to that. Burst didn't do anything close to that. Burst is not Rambus, or SCO, or that company that claimed a patent on GIFs. They were trying to sell their technology to Microsoft, and then Microsoft stole it.
Correct, and Microsoft won't die the death of Enron, because while they do engage in sleazy business practices, there's no evidence they're cooking the books. The lawbreaking is real, but the profits are real too.
And let's not forget that MSFT's decision to start paying a divided came on the heels of renewed investor scrutiny about overvalued stocks, and enough people asking the pretty obvious question "why doesn't a company with 30 billion in the bank pay a dividend?"
Microsoft isn't a growth stock anymore, they're now an established blue chip, and as such they probably have even more latitude (if you can imagine that) to disregard the law as they see fit, so long as it's cost-effective to do so.
Well, I can see we have divergent opinions on this one. The UNSCOM weapons inspectors were infiltrated by CIA spies, setting up listening posts at military bases all across Iraq. Saddam got wind of this and kicked them out. Would you let spies back in your country? Fool me once...
But that's not really all that relevant. The whole point of intelligence is that we don't have to take these people at their word. And the intelligence we had was only a slam-dunk after Cheney's office got done with it. Neither State nor CIA (nor the British) had conclusive findings in their original reports. The reports were re-worked by an Administration that needed a "slam dunk" to sell this war.
In the wake of 9/11 the claim that our old enemy (and older ally) Saddam had WMD was just what the doctor ordered! It provided the justification to launch the PNAC war to reshape the Middle East in our image. (Though, I'm not sure why they went through all the fuss, Congress completely abdicated their responsibility shortly after 9/11.)
Remember that other claim? That Iraq had UAVs equipped with chemical weapons sprayers, capable of reaching NYC? Completely laughable. Yet peeople believed it. As one fictional character put it "Fear is the mind-killer." Fear of the WMD Boogey-Man named Saddam has made American minds pliant and susceptible to reprogramming in accord with the New World Order.
I kinda like the theory that Saddam actually believed he had the WMDs... I mean, would you want to be the general to tell him, ah, about those WMD you see, we're gonna need another five years...
I don't believe that's what happened, Saddam was intimately involved in the decision to abandon the WMD program after the Gulf War, but still it's a theory I've heard presented by apologists.
What exactly did Saddam do that made you think he had them? Deny that he had them? That sets up a bit of a Catch-22, don't you think? And in fact that's exactly how it played out before the invasion. If Saddam admits he has WMD, that's grounds for invasion. If he doesn't admit he has WMD, he's lying. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, circular logic at it's finest.
Isn't it interesting that everything Saddam said about his WMD program is true and everything Bush told us is a lie? Ushers in a whole new era of moral relativism.
The fact remains, there was no credible evidence establishing a WMD program in Iraq. It's well documented that the British dossier was "sexed up" and the American intelligence was cherry-picked to support the WMD conclusion. And when that wasn't enough, the CIA report was re-worded to be less "vague" on the point of WMD, despite the fact that the intelligence was, in fact, vague.
It looks like you've been fooled twice, first by Saddam, then by Bush.
Why exactly are we on a first name basis with Saddam, anyway? I've never understood that.
I don't mean in terms of computation power, I mean in a theoretical way. As in, it can be shown that Go can be solved, even if we cant='t solve it.
I don't know much about these sorts of things... practically nothing in fact. Now, we all learned as kids that tic-tac-toe (or Naughts and Crosses if you prefer) is closed or solved or whatever the right term is... whoever goes first always wins, so long as they go right in the middle.
It seems pretty clear to me that if the solution in the 5x5 case is to put the first stone right in the middle of the board, then my money's on the same move on a full-size board. Because of the way Go works, the center square has the highest "potential" for liberty in that it's equally capable of finding that liberty in any direction. (Conversely, the worst first move is the corner.) I have a hunch that going anywhere else is more of a dead-end move... just like in Tic-Tac-Toe, only we don't learn this, brute force, from the older kids on the schoolyard.
(Wait... Did I miss something? I thought the solution presented in the 5x5 game had black's first move at the center. If that's not the case, consider this an exercize in rationalization, facts notwithstanding)
I'm guessing the first use of that arm was to fling a whole lot of feces.
Good points, nice story about the coal mine.
It does become an angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin argument, when you consider that people are "natural" too. I guess my point is, the activity of phytoplankton seems more "natural" than, say, the Hoover Dam.
I'm one of those people who holds that people are "just animals." And like some animals, we sometimes behave in ways that seem counterproductive. Like the heron who poops all over the copse, poisoning the trees so they have to find a new nest. Or the ebola virus, which so effectively and thoroughly consumes its host that it will never flourish the way the rhinovirus will.
The thing about the salmon is pretty incredible too. Bringing nitrogen from the oceans to fertilize the forests... It seems the ecosystem is so intricately designed, much of it we likely can't perceive.
Obviously I think we should tread lightly. Obviously I don't see us doing that as much as we could.
I mean, who knows, was the adoption of agriculture a few millenia ago a "bad" thing? How about the invention of the atl-atl and the subsequent overhunting and extinctions? Is there a lesson there?
Could it be that, as Mao Tse Tung responded when asked about the impact of the French Revolution on Western civilization, "It's too early to tell."
Not that I'm in favor of analysis paralysis. These issues are challenging becuase of the timescale. How do we keep Chernobly sealed off for the next 30,000 years? Or is nuclear meltdown a "good" thing... maybe in ways we can't perceive yet.
Dance, angels, dance.
Analogy time!
The patient's lying on the table, her leg cut off. Your goal is to lessen the loss of blood and keep the patient alive.
Which arterty would you tie off first? I don't know about you, but I'd go for the big one, gushing blood like a geyser, not some smaller, relatively insignificant capillary.
In fact if you don't do something about that main artery, the patient will bleed out, even though you've stopped the blood flow in all the other places.
Get it?
You're being pedantic. The animals that place 2nd and 3rd behind man in terms of altering the environment are the dam-building beaver and the bush-stomping elephant. Man's changes the environment are many, many orders of magnitude greater.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that damming a river or strip mining or clear-cutting forest can't be defined as "negative" to our surroundings, but I'd like to know. Positive to man's economy, sure. But positive to the environment? Are you for real?
Why should the Emipre care what those in the hinterlands think?
(Obviously, for many reasons, including it's own preservation, the Emipre should care. But that's the attitude I encounter.)
What some BBC reporter wrote is completely irrelevant.
The essential fact is this: Cheney's office bypassed 30 years of established intelligence apparatus to get the information they so desperately wanted to justify their war. Information that was unverified and unverifiable, information from questionable sources, and information from informants who realistically wouldn't even have access to that sort of intelligence in the first place.
Maybe we should do a little reality check: Do you think invading Iraqi troops pulled Kuwaiti babies out of incubators in the hospital nursery too?
That story, which generated tremendous public support for the Gulf War, was delivered in un-sworn testimony before a special session of Congress by a "nurse" who turned out to be the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter living in Washington DC.
Cheney et. al. realized they'd need something more than a sob story to go after Iraq a second time, so they cherry-picked the raw, unvetted intelligence to come up with the "slam dunk."
Considering you still believe there's any sort of basis to the assertion that Iraq had WMD, I'd say they did a pretty good job.
If you truly believe that the rest of the world believed, as strongly as Bush wanted to, that Iraq had an active WMD program, including nuclear, then you must have blinders on.
0 31027fa_ fact
The British report was sexed up, at Tony Blair's request. The American intel was completely un-vetted and cherry-picked by Cheney's office. It was common knowledge that the aluminum tubes were missile bodies, not parts of a nuclear-processing centrifuge. The Niger yellowcake uranium story was a complete phony.
I'll leave the Russian intel out of this (I'm assuming they're the final "major" intel agency in the world) since they didn't play a factor in Bush's rationalization. British intel did, and it's just as suspect as American intel on this issue.
Do you even realize what happened to the CIA report? Language like "evidence suggests Iraq may be pursuing WMD" was changed to "evidence shows Iraq is pursuing WMD." This was done by the Executive branch and it caused such a fuss that they had to put in a new Director of the CIA.
And I bet you already know all this. But if you dont, do yourself a favor and read "The Stovepipe" by Seymour Hirsch, The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/
There are a lot of other good arguments for Iraq?
You've been drinking the Kool-Aid this morning... but regardless: You're likening both Bush and the Environmentalists to Chicken Little. The difference is that the WMDs were a phony story concocted to drum up support for the war, global warming has a basis in science.
In other words: Were it not for the fact that the globe is indeed melting, you'd have a good argument there.
Still, I agree that any significant change to our resource habits will require more than the threat of looming (inevitable?) catastrophic climate change.
John Kerry tried the "new energy economy" tack in his run for President, he lost, and in Bush's mind, that gives him a mandate to continue Business As Usual.
Let's say the infrastructre to be built was the drinking water in your town, who would you want running it?
Heck, a corporation rolling out any service for a small town might not even have their headquarters in the same state or country. Why should they care if the stuff actually works? All they're interested in is the money -- preferrably in the form of a locked-in contract with a significant payout should the municipality be forced to change horses midstream.
Hello AC, you've completely missed my point. The threat isn't al qaeda per se, it's our own completely ridiculous response to al qaeda, which is to date is typified by (further) consolidation of power in the hands of a single Executive, abdication of Congressional responsibility, a spending spree that would make SDI proponents blush, a rollback on civil liberties, and furhter "scope-creep" of the military into the realm of "nation-building." Oh, and a perpetual "War on Terror," which unlike the Cold War is a shooting war, and unlike the Cold War isn't a conflict between States but a between State and an Ideology, with the victory condition not of one nation's demise but of democratizing the whole of the Middle East, which I daresay will be a sight harder.
And yes, this probably isn't a threat to the whole of Western Democracy, but if the US goes, that would certainly be a pretty huge chink in the armor, don't you think?