What you are saying is that censorship is OK, as long as the government does not behave as a dictatorship in other respects.
What I am saying is that censorship is bad, a government actually murdering its opponents is a heck of a lot worse.
What you are trying to say is that you are the big enchilada, the guy who gets it and that anyone who deviates from the hard line you propose is a supporter of dictators.
I have been in a lot of movements with folk such as yourself. A complete liability, spend their time trying to build their own position by idiotic posturing and the movement is merely a vehicle for self promotion.
"Free speech" means the right to write or say anything, anything at all, with no exceptions. Even if what you write can be compiled into binary code that has been declared illegal. Free speech is free, independent of any interpretation.
Freedom of speech is a protector of human rights, it is not the only human right. Mugabwe's crimes go way beyond stopping journalists from speaking. He has murdered political opponents, looted the country's finance and is directly responsible for the famine caused by his confiscations of farmland.
The overblown comparisons to the situation in the US with respect to code are utterly facile. The 'code is speech' issue was merely a legal tactic in the crypto wars. I don't accept that people have the right to write malicious code or viruses. I do believe that they have the right to engage in political activity without being spied upon by the Louis Freehs, Hoovers and John Ashcrofts of the world.
Many of us who were fighting that battle were doing so because we knew what an utter failure Freeh had been in his job. He spent the first five years in office trying to get crypto controls and his attacks on the administration after were largely revenge for being thwarted. In the meantime they failled to make use of the inteligence that was available to them.
The issue that everyone manages to miss here is that the Guardian and the journalist in question do not have staying out of jail as their primary concern. The real issue is getting rid of Mugabwe and it is worth risking two years in jail to do that.
Mugabwe is currently isolated internationally. He is within a whisker of being kicked out of the Comonwealth. He has been given a public dressing down by Tutu and Mandela. Everyone knows that the recent election was stolen by fraud. Meanwhile Mugabwe is bankrupting the country by financing military expeditions in the Congo whose principal objective is to allow the military to enrich themselves through plunder.
In these circumstances the risk of extradition to Zimbabwe to stand trial for what you write in Slashdot is none too great. What is really going on here is a trial of strength. The problem with sending people to jail for criticism is that it tends not to work in the long run, as the dictators of eastern europe found out. Mugabwe can send critics to jail but in doing so he loses the thin veneer of democratic legitimacy on which his power ultimately rests.
The Skylarof case was completely insignificant on the scale of global politics. The issue in Zimbabwe is democracy or dictatorship.
I bet browsers did run really well on your 1992 workstations, since the first graphical browser [uiuc.edu] wasn't released until late 1993
I wrote a browser in 1992.
Marc's was not the first by a long shot, it was the first browser for motif that used the motif look and feel. Before Mosaic there were browsers but they mostly looked awful.
The big innovation in Mosaic was not the images, it was the forms. Images were cute but at the time there wasn't that much bandwidth (The whole of CERN had a T1). It was adding the forms that opened up a whole new area of capability.
I have Opera running on my Zaurus. Now granted that 32Mb is not very much memory these days the damn thing crashes after about three pages. Now back in 1992 we used to use X11 workstations with 32 Mb of memory and a browser would run just fine. Granted the Zaurus has a few problems wih being a first release but there is no way that Microsoft would have released such bloatware for a handheld device...
Problem is that there is no way to turn off all the bloatware features that have been added to browsers. Like javashit and CSS (OK can't expect Hakon not to do CSS on his browser...)
As for netscape, only reason I ever use it is because MIT libraries don't support IE for the journals online my wife uses (she being a perpertual (sorry tenured) student there).
This is no compitition, Linux wins for stability and security issues,
Only if your security needs can be met by an uncertified O/S that does not support Mandatory Access Controls an an Email client that does not support Security Labels.
UNIX was not designed as a secure O/S. In fact the majority of the changes from Multics to UNIX involved removing security mechanisms that Thomson and co thought were not necessary for a smaller, lighter environment.
Government security requirements tend to be requirements for security features and for passing of exhaustive (but usually irrelevant) certification criteria. 'B2 equivalent' is not the same as 'B2 certified'.
Overall I tend to think that Jamie is overstating the case. Very few large institutions have a monolithic IT infrastructure and governments almost never. In general IT decisions are taken by the executive branch, legislative initiatives over choice of software are most likely motivated by ideology rather than reason.
The other dimension is that government spending on desktop and O/S software is typically much less than is racked up by consultants on a major IT overhaul. The UK government has been bringing Microsoft into a whole rack of projects that have been previously botched to the tune of hundreds of millions by big 5 (soon to be 4) consulting firms and the dregs of the mainframe industry.
In most cases the issue is not Linux or.NET, its keeping an obsolete system coded in COBOL or moving to something modern. Desktop software is a small part of overall enterprise spending, the big costs are racked up by ERP type systems.
To take one example, anyone who takes a flight on US Airways will notice that the check in desk assistant takes a vveeerrrrry looooonnnggg time to do the simplest tasks. This is because the SABRE booking system she is using was written thirty five years ago and is technically obsolete in every posible way. US Air don't switch even though keeping SABRE costs them hundreds of millions a year. This is partly upper management ignorance, but it is also due to an IT dept. that is only world class in smug complacency. The deeper problem though is that people who run clapped out IT systems don't know enough to build a better one. Their most likely attempt would be to go to a big 5 consulting firm and give them a lot of money to write an report which would conclude that they needed to spend a huge amount on consultants.
I would like to see government funded software projects to be used by anyone, from students to universites, to corporations that create jobs and stimulate the economy. Thats what Keynesian economics is all about - you pump tax dollars into the economy, which in turn provides more jobs and a better economy for everyone.
Err no, who told you that? Keynes's big idea was that the peaks and troughs of the business cycle could be ironed out by compensating government action. In the 1930s the world economy was in a depression due to a lack of demand (but not need). So at that time the cure for that particular problem was for the government to create demand, first by inflating the money supply and secondly if that failed by pumping money into the economy directly.
We are not in that situation at present. In fact according to strict Keynsean economics we should have been cutting back on government spending and paying down the debt.
That does not mean that there are not other reasons to adopt the policy you suggest, but you are describing the straw man put up by the monetarists rather than the ideas of the man himself.
The specific problem in the US is that because the US has historically rejected anything that could be called 'socialism' it had to perform state spending under cover of national defense. The interstate highway network was justified as national defense, as are most govt. research projects outside biology.
This is a problem now that many programs of that type have gone out of fashion in most of the West. Nobody believes in command economies any more and in any case most of the controls employed in the UK or Germany were instigated under the war recovery program. Except of course for the US where the population pay in full for their welfare state but find it supports corporations rather than citizens.
You need better admins, plain and simple. I can't remember the last time my Win2k workstation crashed.
Most likely the guy has a hardware problem. I upgraded to WindowsXP because I had a major problem with the system crashing under 98. Only to upgrade I had to ditch the 3DFX VooDoo card which was not supported by XP (company gone under).
There was a gap of about six weeks between installing the new video card and moving to XP. The system did not go down once in that time which makes me think that the 3DFX driver was the problem all along. I haven't had any problem with XP, only crashes I have ever had are due to the (unsigned) Archos device driver which brings the machine down if the device is plugged in and the batteries run down while it is in use. The crash is complegtely repeatable and I suspect will shortly be fixed by Archos.
I used to see the same thing at the AI lab. People there would suffer crashes every 3 to 4 hours on their MACs.
the CLS runtime is a cheap knockoff of the JVM, take a look at the API and its obvious.
The CLR assembly code is based on the intermediate code from the Microsoft C++ compiler that existed several years before Java was made public. The byte code format of the Java VM and CLR are completely different. Java is a virtual machine and CLR is an intemediate code format of an object oriented compiler.
C# is essentially a wrapper for the CLS API.
Which is what you would expect from a modern programming language, remove all unnecessary inconsistencies you can.
C# does have features that no other mainstream programming environment has had since the Lisp machine. All managed objects can be querried to examine the metadata, the programmer can define attributes of their own to be included in the metadata.
What this means is that you can write a new data structure foo and then call XMLSerialize (foo) without having to do any more code. If you want to serialize to a specific schema you decorate the data structure definition with attributes. There is also a tool that does this for you.
The really cool thing about.NET for language developers however is that you get access to all the tools of a high quality programming environment without a lot of work. You get the debugger, the class browser, access to the.NET libraries, and the language sensitive editing.
It would be pretty easy to knock up your own version of the chair with some plywood, vinyl seat cloth, a pot of grey paint and some repro car dashboard switches from the 1960s.
Of course you would know it was fake and you could even tell your friends it was fake but they would all think it was really genuine (unless you let them see you build it) and you were really telling lies to avoid the house being targetted by burglars.
Main reason not to do so of course is the seat looks uncomfy as heck.
I have a bunch of 'Jackson Pollocks' , a 'Rothko' and a Mondrian on my walls. If they were genuine they would be worth several million, all they cost me were a few hundred dollars for the canvas, paint and a couple of art books.
My experience is that in the 1990s when we ran an all DEC shop we got our DEC prices on hardware down by 10% when we bought a sun box. At another institute we saw a similar effect with SGI.
The price advantage you see is likely to depend very much on the type of computing you do and the volume. If you only buy 5 machines a year I doubt that the price break you get by going to a multivendor environment is going to be worth loosing binary compatibility for, let alone the admin hassle. If on the other hand you buy 100 machines a year you should definitely get a second vendor in place.
The other issue is that the price gap from Sun to Intel is huge. Comparing machines of like performance Intel boxes can be up to a third of the cost. Unless you have a real definite need for the features of a non-Intel platform (and I can't think of many offhand) the cost saving of Linux or BSD can be great.
I can't think offhand of any reason to have six vareties of Linux arround unless you are a masochist of some sort.
I hate to break it to you, but Congress is explicitly empowered by the Constitution to decide whether there shall be copyrights and patents, and the extent of them.
The US has also instigated numerous international treaties that establish the concept of copyright independent of the US Constitution. Furthermore the US Constitution also prohibits the Congress from passing a bill of atainder which any bill to nationalize Microsoft Office would amount to.
If Microsoft was attacked as Nader suggests any action the US government took would be limited to its own territory. Microsoft already has close links with the UK government and if the US was stupid enough to pass the Nader bill much of Microsoft's R&D would be the other side of the Atlantic.
The Nader scheme is ridiculous for many reasons, not least being that none of the Democrats on the Hill will let him into their office these days. Since Nader helped Bush win the election the Dems are not going to do anything to further Nader's schemes. He probably shouldn't count on help from the GOP either since (1) he isn't paying them anything and (2) the GOP is about the protection of corporate interests.
I can't even see Sun and Oracle cheering this scheme on since it would set a precedent under which the government can appropriate software property it happens to want. Given Oracle's recent fleecing of the state of California Larry E. is not going to be supporting condign measures for errant software cos.
The idea that the federal government could buy the source to Office and put it into the public domain is somewhat whacky. One reason that the US govt uses so much Microsoft software is that Microsoft is one of the few suppliers who implement the non-standard standards the US govt. demands. Look at your copy of Outlook 2002 and ask yourself why the label based security is there for email messaging... thats right it was written to meet a federal requirement. Lotus Notes does not support that mechanism, nor does Eudora. The federal government needs that label based stuff because of FOIA (amongst others) but FOIA only applies to USG. There is a whole rack of PKI technology in Windows XP that was written for the sole purpose of meeting federal requirements.
The US govt does use its leverage to force Microsoft to do certain things that it wants. However the leverage is somewhat less than total and frequently applied in contradictory ways.
The real problem for Nader however is that compared to most software suppliers to the USGovt Microsoft has delivered magnificently. If you listened to the FBI testimony this afternoon you would know that the FBI centralized criminal database is next to useless. They can't search for 'Aviation Schools', they only have one word search. The mandatory access controls are primative in the extreeme. Technologically the system is in the early 50s, however you can be sure that some prime contractor got many $100 million to write the thing and make it good enough for government work.
The real rip offs for enterprise software are not in the commodity desktop packages such as Microsoft sells. It the software sold by the Oracles, EDSs, SAPs etc. of the world that is rotten value for money and that is expensive because it is all bespoke one off affairs which are typoically deployed in a small number of locations so the bugs are never really worked out etc.
You have to distinguish between true capitalism and the mongrel form we have in place today.
No we don't. Idealogues like yourself always start off with the line 'you have to distinguish...'. It was bunk when the Marxists tried to explain away the soviet union and it is equally bunk when republicans and libertarians try to explain away out current society.
The problem is not any particular ideology, it is ideology itself. Blinkered libertarians seeking Libertopia are every bit as dangerous as their ideological predecesors.
The idea for a national health figure did not come from Marx, it came from Nye Bevan, and was endorsed by Winston Churchill. The Labour manifesto that promised to establish the NHS was written by George Orwell, so before you try to conflate Socialism and Stalism go check your facts out.
As for Marx not being politically correct, political corectness has been used and is used by the right every bit as much as by the left. The McArthy hearings were a political corectness witchunt. When Bob Dole wagged his finger at Bill Clinton calling him a Liberal he was using the strategy of political correctness. When Bush and his stooges call critics 'unpatriotic' he is using the strategy of political corectness.
And of course when right wing pundits attempt to intimidate reporters with talk of 'the liberal media' they are using the strategy of political corectness.
What right wing comentators complain of as 'political corectness' is most often rejection of bigotry. The fact is that these days the media is not exclusively white male protestants. So if a comentator wants to publish a piece that is racist, homophobic, mysogenistic, anti-semitic or contains some other type of bigotry the chances are pretty good that doing so is going to be a career limiting move since blacks, hispanics, gays, lesbians, women, catholics, jews etc now have positions of power in the media industry and are unlikely to look favorably on a bigot of any kind and especially a reporter whose bigotry is aimed at them.
Some bigots do manage to survive in the mainstream media. Pat Buchanan and David Horowitz for example. But they are forced to disguise their hatred in code to retain access to the media. When Buchanan adopted an overtly racist platform in his second Presidential campaign it ended his CNN career.
Marx was convinced that the great masses would never have the resources to own captial. Thus he reasoned that the masses would rise up and over throw the extreamly wealthy.
I actually wonder if he really believed that. Although he tries very hard to persuade people that the revolution is at hand he also said that philosophers have analysed the world in many ways, the real task is to change it.
I think that Marx's prophecy of a revolution should be considered in the same light as 1984, not primarily prophecy but instead a means of effecting change. Victorian Britain was scared of revolution above all else, revolution meant the horrors of the French reign of terror and the Bonapartist attempt to establish dictatorship across Europe.
Victorian society did change, they may have changed in part because Marx's prophecy meant that liberal reformers were listened to and the elites accepted gradual change rather than risk revolution.
What he didnt count on was publicly held stock, wide spread education, and that the investment of the extremely wealthy would make the whole country more wealthy.
I think that Marx's ideas reached their sell by date long before we got to the point where the middle class was the majority of the population and most people owned stock. Certainly after WWI with the Bolshevick coup the forces of reactionism are doing their utmost to reform social conditions before the revolution sweeps them away.
Incidentally, the term 'Bolshevick revolution' is a misnomer, actually the Tzar was removed from power in a relatively peaceful revolution led by the Menchevicks who tried to establish a liberal democratic state. The mistake they made was not announcing an end to the war which is what gave Lenin and Stalin an opportunity. The proletariat cared more about ending the war than the promise of a democratic society.
so, yes... the Soviet Union may have crumbled as a result of internal pressure, this pressure existed within the global context of the cold war. I suppose this may be semantic to you, but it is significant enough not to disregard external influences.
Semantics means 'meaning', so debates about semantics are not trivial.
While the USSR spent a great deal on its military it never spent anywhere near as much as the US military claimed it did. Much of the Soviet war machine was badly maintained relics from WWII but for purposes of war games etc it was asserted that a USSR tank was equivalent to a NATO tank. Result lots of think tank studies that concluded that the US needed to arm itself more heavily.
A similar process was at work during the 19th century with Britain. Despite the fact that its navy outnumbered that of any two of the other great powers and moreover Britain controlled the six key strategic ports the press and polity regularly fell victim of invasion fever.
The cure for thinking that external pressures caused the USSR to collapse is to look at it. Whatever the USSR military machine consumed the beuracracy wasted five times as much.
The one significant external event was Afghanistan during which the USSR discovered that it was not a military superpower.
If the diversion of resources was the most significant factor the change would have happened first in the USSR itself where the diversion was greatest. In fact the change began in Chezekslovakia and Poland, countries that were not building nuclear missiles or anti-star wars shields. In fact the original Solidarity protests were sparked because the Gdansk shipyard was getting fewer orders for ships and wages were being cut.
Could you elaborate on the "US" part? I don't remember that from my high-school history books
Could that be because they were US history books? Try reading 'Lies my teacher told me'..
During the Teddy Roosevelt administration the US adopted an 'open door' policy to China. What that meant was that China was going to accept goods from the US regardless of whether they wanted to or not.
The Chineese were at the time about 100 years behind the West in military technology. However in most other respects they were equally civilized. But as Belloc observed 'Whatever else we have got, the Maxim gun, and they have not'.
The US helped the other great powers to dismember China into a collection of 'spheres of influence' then later on helped Japan invade most of the country. Despite the fact that China had not been a beligerent power in WWI the US imposed peace conditions that gave Japan control of much of the country.
The US even continued to do so after WWII by recognising the anexation by Japan of islands that before US and Japanese meddling had been part of China for over 500 years.
Capitalism is the system where the state's ONLY function is to protect individual rights.
Actually the term Capitalism is Marxist in origin and originally refered to an economic system in which control of the means of production are controlled by means of control of capital.
In Das Kapital Marx wrote about capitalism almost all the time, the bits about the communist system to replace it are little more than an afterthought in comparison. What is somewhat hillarious for European readers is the way that many of Marx's arguments have since been adopted by the right as a defense of capitalism. This is not suprising since Marx was one of the first economists to really explain how capitalism worked and he was not completely against it. What he wanted was a means of harnessing the productivity of capitalism with a social settlement that did not mean that 95% of the population lived in dire poverty. However since Marx is not a politically correct figure to praise the good ideas that Marx had are usually ascribed to Adam Smith.
The political system we live in today is neither capitalist, nor socialist by 19th century definitions. This is something that should have really upset the Marxist idealogues since acording to the theory that is not meant to happen.
Capital is far more broadly distributed than ever before and access to capital is no longer restricted to a tiny class of plutocrats. The type of capitalism that Marx wrote about is practically dead.
Apart that is from in countries like China where control of capital and control of the state are both restricted to a tiny governing elite.
Hate to break it to you - but the ideas of the west provided a source of inspiration to the peoples of Iron Cutain.
If it is ideas that you want to measure then remember that Karl Marx wrote Das Capital in the Reading room of the British Library.
What you appear to be unable to grasp is that whatever was done from the outside had mush less effect than what went on on the inside. The attempt by the idiotic right to claim the credit for destroying the Soviet Union is pure self delusion. The people of Eastern Europe took their own freedom, whatever we did amounted to a small effect on the margins.
That is why there has been little change in the example you cite - Saudi Arabia and Eastern Africa. Those areas have been exposed to Western ideas for far longer than Russia ever was, including the experience of British colonial rule.
The BBC World Service is certainly an effective propaganda tool. I can't say the same for Voice of America which is all propaganda all the time and about as interesting to listen to as Radio Moscow was and for about the same reason.
If you want to effect change then there are much more effective ways to do so than by puffing yourself up with self importance. The US claim to be the torchbearer of human rights is not generally accepted in the rest of the world. The practice of seggragation was only recently abolished in the south, during the cold war the US regularly conived to replace democratically elected regimes with brutal murderers who would do Washington's bidding. It is a great pity that the current administration cheered on the attempted coup in Venezuela rather than condemning it instantly as the rest of the free world did.
Perhaps this will help in the human rights debates that have been rampant in China over the past years.
The point which is missed in 90% of the posts on this board is that the information most damaging to the communist party comes from inside china, not from outside. External events have a much lesser effect on a country the size of China than internal.
The Soviet Union did not fall because of Reagan, or any policy of the West. It fell because its own people rejected it, first in the satelite states, finally in Moscow. Solidarity, the Polish trade union brought down the USSR in the end. The Berlin wall fell when a bunch of students attacket it en masse and the guards in the watch towers disobeyed orders and refused to shoot.
The issues in China are complex, they are no longer a Stalinist communist regime, they are not democratic, they have adopted a 19th century model of capitalism in which the actual role of the state is to protect the oligarchs and exploiters. The gerantocracy that runs the country is largely in its 80s and their principle driving principle is fear. In particular fear of a return to the days of the cultural revolution of Mao and fear of partition into separate states that are dominated by foreign powers as happened at the turn of the century when the US, Germany, France, Britain and Japan each carved out spheres of influence.
China is rapidly industrializing and output is rising fast. Economically China will be one of the maor powers within ten years. Already the Chineese middle class is larger than the US middle class. As with India, China is a first world power whose strength is obscured by a vast third world hinterland.
Change is comming, but it isn't going to be driven by external forces. In fact external forces are more likely to be counterproductive. The critical mistake made by the Tiannanen Square protesters was building the statue of liberty. Up to that point the communist party was affraid to crush the protests, in particular they were affraid that the soldiers would refuse to fire. However the statue of liberty was a symbol of an alliance with a foreign power and the troops could be sent in to crush that.
Obviously, the Orwellian Prophecy has come partially true in this part of the world.
It wasn't a prophecy and the comparison to the West, in particular the relationship of the UK and the US was quite deliberate.
Orwell's objective was to make people realise that the USSR was a totalitarian regime and Stalin a tyrant. This was not something that many people wanted to hear in 1948 just after the Russians had done most of the fighting to stop Hitler. The Nazi-Soviet pact had been largely forgotten by this time.
1984 is full of ironic and sarcastic references to the BBC where Orwell (Eric Blair) worked during the war, manipulating truth in exactly the same way that Smith does. Two majot themes in the book are the erasure of history (suppression of the Nazi-Soviet pact) and the shifting aliances between the 3 great powers.
Incidentally Orwell was not anti-socialist, he was anti-communist. He was a member of the Labour party and wrote the 1945 Labour manifesto.
"To use the technology was too risky. Industry dropped gopher like a hot potato."
Tim is certainly right that this was a factor, however the MN policy change came after HTTP had passed gopher in terms of usage (as measured on the NSF backbone).
The Web was winning largely because Gopher had a very puritanical outlook. They wanted to hold the net back in the era of VT100 terminals, fixed width fonts and the only formatting being normal, bold and inverse font.
Another problem was that they really had their heads up their asses when it came to URLs. Their idea of muiltimedia content was that a file could be a text file or a picture. The idea of pictures in the text was anathema.
Now there have been claims made by the Netscape FUD dept. that there was also opposition to images in the Web community. Actually nothing could be further from the truth. There were a lot of complaints about the botched design of the IMG tag. To be fair to Marc he did give the world 8 hours to comment on his proposal, two of which were actually business hours in Europe (none of which were business hours in the US however).
By the time the university tried to cash in gopher was already on a downturn. The university action was simply the coup de grace. If it had come when gopher was more popular someone would have forked the source tree or developed an open version.
Today a lot of the 'gopher' servers are actually Web servers that have the ability to serve multiple protocols.
I believe Zienfeld is right. The USSR never invested any money in star wars or anti-star wars research and development other than to investigate aluminium starburst deploying decoys and false warhead decoys which would coonfuse the star wars software. Aside from a few successful tests they did not spend much to counter a non-existant threat.
We can calibrate the cost of that research sincthe UK faced a similar issue in the 70s when the USSR deployed an ABM system around Moscow. The system was not sufficient to stop an attack by the US since they only had 50 missiles by treaty. However it was sufficient to block the UK nuclear force (perhaps).
The Moscow criterion was a major issue in UK defense circles, the thepry being that you had to have the capability of decapitating the USSR command and control located in Moscow. So to respond to the ABM system Britain upgraded its nukes with Chavalene waheads which deploy mylar ballon decoys. None of the Pentagon tests to date show any evidence that the US has a system that would work against Chevalene. The decoy 'tests' done so far have all been rigged, the missile has been programmed to hit a specific target (the middle one, the one that is heated to a few thousand degrees above the decoys..).
The star wars theory is just FUD devised after the fact to try to claim that the US defeated the USSR rather than the Polish trade unionists, East German students, Chzech protestors etc. with the aid of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the unintended effects of a botched coup led by the old guard.
You are aware, are you not, that the Reagan administration's emphasis on missile defense technology forced the Soviets to spend billions on research into their own missile defense systems? And that that level of unsustainable spending contributed directly to the collapse of the Soviet economy, and the eventual dissolution of the USSR as a political entity?
A theory that was only advanced as a strategy after the fact. There is no reason to believe that we were being lied to in the 1980s when we were told that NATO believed that it could only hold off a USSR invasion of Western Europe for 4 days before being forced to resort to nuclear weapons. The generals who I discussed the strategy with in the 1980s believed that they were acting to defend against a real threat, not to break an already beaten enemy.
The theory is in any case bunk if you happen to look at Soviet economic history. To first order the Soviet economy never really recovered from the second world war. The economy was already stagnant when Breshniev took over. By the time start wars was proposed Gorbachev was already redirecting resources from the military economy to the civilian economy. The USSR never responded to star wars, therefore the theory that proposing star wars brought down the USSR is false.
As for anyone having disolving the USSR as a political objective, I don't think that was ever a US policy objective of any kind (with the exception of the Baltic states). Better to have all those missiles under control rather than have a Balkan situation with nuclear weapons.
This may be "urban legend", but it was said that director Stanly Kubrick would go to movie theatres that were playing his films to make sure that they had the projection lighting turned up to "spec". Apparently threatre owners would turn the brightness down to save money!
Actually it was the reverse, why I projected Barry Lyndon the film came with a note from Kubrik about how the film should be shown with no more than 350 ft lamders of illumination or something.
What happened is that after the Xeon arc lamps came out a lot of theatres were throwing so much light at the screen the colors were washing out.
However changing the output on a Xeon arc is not a particularly easy thing to do with a lot of light boxes. Also we didn't have a measurement device calibrated in ft lambders or whatever so we folded the note up neatly and put it back in the box.
Slashdot Mirror
What I am saying is that censorship is bad, a government actually murdering its opponents is a heck of a lot worse.
What you are trying to say is that you are the big enchilada, the guy who gets it and that anyone who deviates from the hard line you propose is a supporter of dictators.
I have been in a lot of movements with folk such as yourself. A complete liability, spend their time trying to build their own position by idiotic posturing and the movement is merely a vehicle for self promotion.
Freedom of speech is a protector of human rights, it is not the only human right. Mugabwe's crimes go way beyond stopping journalists from speaking. He has murdered political opponents, looted the country's finance and is directly responsible for the famine caused by his confiscations of farmland.
The overblown comparisons to the situation in the US with respect to code are utterly facile. The 'code is speech' issue was merely a legal tactic in the crypto wars. I don't accept that people have the right to write malicious code or viruses. I do believe that they have the right to engage in political activity without being spied upon by the Louis Freehs, Hoovers and John Ashcrofts of the world.
Many of us who were fighting that battle were doing so because we knew what an utter failure Freeh had been in his job. He spent the first five years in office trying to get crypto controls and his attacks on the administration after were largely revenge for being thwarted. In the meantime they failled to make use of the inteligence that was available to them.
Mugabwe is currently isolated internationally. He is within a whisker of being kicked out of the Comonwealth. He has been given a public dressing down by Tutu and Mandela. Everyone knows that the recent election was stolen by fraud. Meanwhile Mugabwe is bankrupting the country by financing military expeditions in the Congo whose principal objective is to allow the military to enrich themselves through plunder.
In these circumstances the risk of extradition to Zimbabwe to stand trial for what you write in Slashdot is none too great. What is really going on here is a trial of strength. The problem with sending people to jail for criticism is that it tends not to work in the long run, as the dictators of eastern europe found out. Mugabwe can send critics to jail but in doing so he loses the thin veneer of democratic legitimacy on which his power ultimately rests.
The Skylarof case was completely insignificant on the scale of global politics. The issue in Zimbabwe is democracy or dictatorship.
I wrote a browser in 1992.
Marc's was not the first by a long shot, it was the first browser for motif that used the motif look and feel. Before Mosaic there were browsers but they mostly looked awful.
The big innovation in Mosaic was not the images, it was the forms. Images were cute but at the time there wasn't that much bandwidth (The whole of CERN had a T1). It was adding the forms that opened up a whole new area of capability.
Problem is that there is no way to turn off all the bloatware features that have been added to browsers. Like javashit and CSS (OK can't expect Hakon not to do CSS on his browser ...)
As for netscape, only reason I ever use it is because MIT libraries don't support IE for the journals online my wife uses (she being a perpertual (sorry tenured) student there).
Only if your security needs can be met by an uncertified O/S that does not support Mandatory Access Controls an an Email client that does not support Security Labels.
UNIX was not designed as a secure O/S. In fact the majority of the changes from Multics to UNIX involved removing security mechanisms that Thomson and co thought were not necessary for a smaller, lighter environment.
Government security requirements tend to be requirements for security features and for passing of exhaustive (but usually irrelevant) certification criteria. 'B2 equivalent' is not the same as 'B2 certified'.
Overall I tend to think that Jamie is overstating the case. Very few large institutions have a monolithic IT infrastructure and governments almost never. In general IT decisions are taken by the executive branch, legislative initiatives over choice of software are most likely motivated by ideology rather than reason.
The other dimension is that government spending on desktop and O/S software is typically much less than is racked up by consultants on a major IT overhaul. The UK government has been bringing Microsoft into a whole rack of projects that have been previously botched to the tune of hundreds of millions by big 5 (soon to be 4) consulting firms and the dregs of the mainframe industry.
In most cases the issue is not Linux or .NET, its keeping an obsolete system coded in COBOL or moving to something modern. Desktop software is a small part of overall enterprise spending, the big costs are racked up by ERP type systems.
To take one example, anyone who takes a flight on US Airways will notice that the check in desk assistant takes a vveeerrrrry looooonnnggg time to do the simplest tasks. This is because the SABRE booking system she is using was written thirty five years ago and is technically obsolete in every posible way. US Air don't switch even though keeping SABRE costs them hundreds of millions a year. This is partly upper management ignorance, but it is also due to an IT dept. that is only world class in smug complacency. The deeper problem though is that people who run clapped out IT systems don't know enough to build a better one. Their most likely attempt would be to go to a big 5 consulting firm and give them a lot of money to write an report which would conclude that they needed to spend a huge amount on consultants.
Err no, who told you that? Keynes's big idea was that the peaks and troughs of the business cycle could be ironed out by compensating government action. In the 1930s the world economy was in a depression due to a lack of demand (but not need). So at that time the cure for that particular problem was for the government to create demand, first by inflating the money supply and secondly if that failed by pumping money into the economy directly.
We are not in that situation at present. In fact according to strict Keynsean economics we should have been cutting back on government spending and paying down the debt.
That does not mean that there are not other reasons to adopt the policy you suggest, but you are describing the straw man put up by the monetarists rather than the ideas of the man himself.
The specific problem in the US is that because the US has historically rejected anything that could be called 'socialism' it had to perform state spending under cover of national defense. The interstate highway network was justified as national defense, as are most govt. research projects outside biology.
This is a problem now that many programs of that type have gone out of fashion in most of the West. Nobody believes in command economies any more and in any case most of the controls employed in the UK or Germany were instigated under the war recovery program. Except of course for the US where the population pay in full for their welfare state but find it supports corporations rather than citizens.
Most likely the guy has a hardware problem. I upgraded to WindowsXP because I had a major problem with the system crashing under 98. Only to upgrade I had to ditch the 3DFX VooDoo card which was not supported by XP (company gone under).
There was a gap of about six weeks between installing the new video card and moving to XP. The system did not go down once in that time which makes me think that the 3DFX driver was the problem all along. I haven't had any problem with XP, only crashes I have ever had are due to the (unsigned) Archos device driver which brings the machine down if the device is plugged in and the batteries run down while it is in use. The crash is complegtely repeatable and I suspect will shortly be fixed by Archos.
I used to see the same thing at the AI lab. People there would suffer crashes every 3 to 4 hours on their MACs.
To soak the rich of course
The CLR assembly code is based on the intermediate code from the Microsoft C++ compiler that existed several years before Java was made public. The byte code format of the Java VM and CLR are completely different. Java is a virtual machine and CLR is an intemediate code format of an object oriented compiler.
C# is essentially a wrapper for the CLS API.
Which is what you would expect from a modern programming language, remove all unnecessary inconsistencies you can.
C# does have features that no other mainstream programming environment has had since the Lisp machine. All managed objects can be querried to examine the metadata, the programmer can define attributes of their own to be included in the metadata.
What this means is that you can write a new data structure foo and then call XMLSerialize (foo) without having to do any more code. If you want to serialize to a specific schema you decorate the data structure definition with attributes. There is also a tool that does this for you.
The really cool thing about .NET for language developers however is that you get access to all the tools of a high quality programming environment without a lot of work. You get the debugger, the class browser, access to the .NET libraries, and the language sensitive editing.
Of course you would know it was fake and you could even tell your friends it was fake but they would all think it was really genuine (unless you let them see you build it) and you were really telling lies to avoid the house being targetted by burglars.
Main reason not to do so of course is the seat looks uncomfy as heck.
I have a bunch of 'Jackson Pollocks' , a 'Rothko' and a Mondrian on my walls. If they were genuine they would be worth several million, all they cost me were a few hundred dollars for the canvas, paint and a couple of art books.
The price advantage you see is likely to depend very much on the type of computing you do and the volume. If you only buy 5 machines a year I doubt that the price break you get by going to a multivendor environment is going to be worth loosing binary compatibility for, let alone the admin hassle. If on the other hand you buy 100 machines a year you should definitely get a second vendor in place.
The other issue is that the price gap from Sun to Intel is huge. Comparing machines of like performance Intel boxes can be up to a third of the cost. Unless you have a real definite need for the features of a non-Intel platform (and I can't think of many offhand) the cost saving of Linux or BSD can be great.
I can't think offhand of any reason to have six vareties of Linux arround unless you are a masochist of some sort.
The US has also instigated numerous international treaties that establish the concept of copyright independent of the US Constitution. Furthermore the US Constitution also prohibits the Congress from passing a bill of atainder which any bill to nationalize Microsoft Office would amount to.
If Microsoft was attacked as Nader suggests any action the US government took would be limited to its own territory. Microsoft already has close links with the UK government and if the US was stupid enough to pass the Nader bill much of Microsoft's R&D would be the other side of the Atlantic.
The Nader scheme is ridiculous for many reasons, not least being that none of the Democrats on the Hill will let him into their office these days. Since Nader helped Bush win the election the Dems are not going to do anything to further Nader's schemes. He probably shouldn't count on help from the GOP either since (1) he isn't paying them anything and (2) the GOP is about the protection of corporate interests.
I can't even see Sun and Oracle cheering this scheme on since it would set a precedent under which the government can appropriate software property it happens to want. Given Oracle's recent fleecing of the state of California Larry E. is not going to be supporting condign measures for errant software cos.
The idea that the federal government could buy the source to Office and put it into the public domain is somewhat whacky. One reason that the US govt uses so much Microsoft software is that Microsoft is one of the few suppliers who implement the non-standard standards the US govt. demands. Look at your copy of Outlook 2002 and ask yourself why the label based security is there for email messaging... thats right it was written to meet a federal requirement. Lotus Notes does not support that mechanism, nor does Eudora. The federal government needs that label based stuff because of FOIA (amongst others) but FOIA only applies to USG. There is a whole rack of PKI technology in Windows XP that was written for the sole purpose of meeting federal requirements.
The US govt does use its leverage to force Microsoft to do certain things that it wants. However the leverage is somewhat less than total and frequently applied in contradictory ways.
The real problem for Nader however is that compared to most software suppliers to the USGovt Microsoft has delivered magnificently. If you listened to the FBI testimony this afternoon you would know that the FBI centralized criminal database is next to useless. They can't search for 'Aviation Schools', they only have one word search. The mandatory access controls are primative in the extreeme. Technologically the system is in the early 50s, however you can be sure that some prime contractor got many $100 million to write the thing and make it good enough for government work.
The real rip offs for enterprise software are not in the commodity desktop packages such as Microsoft sells. It the software sold by the Oracles, EDSs, SAPs etc. of the world that is rotten value for money and that is expensive because it is all bespoke one off affairs which are typoically deployed in a small number of locations so the bugs are never really worked out etc.
No we don't. Idealogues like yourself always start off with the line 'you have to distinguish...'. It was bunk when the Marxists tried to explain away the soviet union and it is equally bunk when republicans and libertarians try to explain away out current society.
The problem is not any particular ideology, it is ideology itself. Blinkered libertarians seeking Libertopia are every bit as dangerous as their ideological predecesors.
The idea for a national health figure did not come from Marx, it came from Nye Bevan, and was endorsed by Winston Churchill. The Labour manifesto that promised to establish the NHS was written by George Orwell, so before you try to conflate Socialism and Stalism go check your facts out.
As for Marx not being politically correct, political corectness has been used and is used by the right every bit as much as by the left. The McArthy hearings were a political corectness witchunt. When Bob Dole wagged his finger at Bill Clinton calling him a Liberal he was using the strategy of political correctness. When Bush and his stooges call critics 'unpatriotic' he is using the strategy of political corectness.
And of course when right wing pundits attempt to intimidate reporters with talk of 'the liberal media' they are using the strategy of political corectness.
What right wing comentators complain of as 'political corectness' is most often rejection of bigotry. The fact is that these days the media is not exclusively white male protestants. So if a comentator wants to publish a piece that is racist, homophobic, mysogenistic, anti-semitic or contains some other type of bigotry the chances are pretty good that doing so is going to be a career limiting move since blacks, hispanics, gays, lesbians, women, catholics, jews etc now have positions of power in the media industry and are unlikely to look favorably on a bigot of any kind and especially a reporter whose bigotry is aimed at them.
Some bigots do manage to survive in the mainstream media. Pat Buchanan and David Horowitz for example. But they are forced to disguise their hatred in code to retain access to the media. When Buchanan adopted an overtly racist platform in his second Presidential campaign it ended his CNN career.
I actually wonder if he really believed that. Although he tries very hard to persuade people that the revolution is at hand he also said that philosophers have analysed the world in many ways, the real task is to change it.
I think that Marx's prophecy of a revolution should be considered in the same light as 1984, not primarily prophecy but instead a means of effecting change. Victorian Britain was scared of revolution above all else, revolution meant the horrors of the French reign of terror and the Bonapartist attempt to establish dictatorship across Europe.
Victorian society did change, they may have changed in part because Marx's prophecy meant that liberal reformers were listened to and the elites accepted gradual change rather than risk revolution.
What he didnt count on was publicly held stock, wide spread education, and that the investment of the extremely wealthy would make the whole country more wealthy.
I think that Marx's ideas reached their sell by date long before we got to the point where the middle class was the majority of the population and most people owned stock. Certainly after WWI with the Bolshevick coup the forces of reactionism are doing their utmost to reform social conditions before the revolution sweeps them away.
Incidentally, the term 'Bolshevick revolution' is a misnomer, actually the Tzar was removed from power in a relatively peaceful revolution led by the Menchevicks who tried to establish a liberal democratic state. The mistake they made was not announcing an end to the war which is what gave Lenin and Stalin an opportunity. The proletariat cared more about ending the war than the promise of a democratic society.
Semantics means 'meaning', so debates about semantics are not trivial.
While the USSR spent a great deal on its military it never spent anywhere near as much as the US military claimed it did. Much of the Soviet war machine was badly maintained relics from WWII but for purposes of war games etc it was asserted that a USSR tank was equivalent to a NATO tank. Result lots of think tank studies that concluded that the US needed to arm itself more heavily.
A similar process was at work during the 19th century with Britain. Despite the fact that its navy outnumbered that of any two of the other great powers and moreover Britain controlled the six key strategic ports the press and polity regularly fell victim of invasion fever.
The cure for thinking that external pressures caused the USSR to collapse is to look at it. Whatever the USSR military machine consumed the beuracracy wasted five times as much.
The one significant external event was Afghanistan during which the USSR discovered that it was not a military superpower.
If the diversion of resources was the most significant factor the change would have happened first in the USSR itself where the diversion was greatest. In fact the change began in Chezekslovakia and Poland, countries that were not building nuclear missiles or anti-star wars shields. In fact the original Solidarity protests were sparked because the Gdansk shipyard was getting fewer orders for ships and wages were being cut.
Could that be because they were US history books? Try reading 'Lies my teacher told me'..
During the Teddy Roosevelt administration the US adopted an 'open door' policy to China. What that meant was that China was going to accept goods from the US regardless of whether they wanted to or not.
The Chineese were at the time about 100 years behind the West in military technology. However in most other respects they were equally civilized. But as Belloc observed 'Whatever else we have got, the Maxim gun, and they have not'.
The US helped the other great powers to dismember China into a collection of 'spheres of influence' then later on helped Japan invade most of the country. Despite the fact that China had not been a beligerent power in WWI the US imposed peace conditions that gave Japan control of much of the country.
The US even continued to do so after WWII by recognising the anexation by Japan of islands that before US and Japanese meddling had been part of China for over 500 years.
Actually the term Capitalism is Marxist in origin and originally refered to an economic system in which control of the means of production are controlled by means of control of capital.
In Das Kapital Marx wrote about capitalism almost all the time, the bits about the communist system to replace it are little more than an afterthought in comparison. What is somewhat hillarious for European readers is the way that many of Marx's arguments have since been adopted by the right as a defense of capitalism. This is not suprising since Marx was one of the first economists to really explain how capitalism worked and he was not completely against it. What he wanted was a means of harnessing the productivity of capitalism with a social settlement that did not mean that 95% of the population lived in dire poverty. However since Marx is not a politically correct figure to praise the good ideas that Marx had are usually ascribed to Adam Smith.
The political system we live in today is neither capitalist, nor socialist by 19th century definitions. This is something that should have really upset the Marxist idealogues since acording to the theory that is not meant to happen.
Capital is far more broadly distributed than ever before and access to capital is no longer restricted to a tiny class of plutocrats. The type of capitalism that Marx wrote about is practically dead.
Apart that is from in countries like China where control of capital and control of the state are both restricted to a tiny governing elite.
If it is ideas that you want to measure then remember that Karl Marx wrote Das Capital in the Reading room of the British Library.
What you appear to be unable to grasp is that whatever was done from the outside had mush less effect than what went on on the inside. The attempt by the idiotic right to claim the credit for destroying the Soviet Union is pure self delusion. The people of Eastern Europe took their own freedom, whatever we did amounted to a small effect on the margins.
That is why there has been little change in the example you cite - Saudi Arabia and Eastern Africa. Those areas have been exposed to Western ideas for far longer than Russia ever was, including the experience of British colonial rule.
The BBC World Service is certainly an effective propaganda tool. I can't say the same for Voice of America which is all propaganda all the time and about as interesting to listen to as Radio Moscow was and for about the same reason.
If you want to effect change then there are much more effective ways to do so than by puffing yourself up with self importance. The US claim to be the torchbearer of human rights is not generally accepted in the rest of the world. The practice of seggragation was only recently abolished in the south, during the cold war the US regularly conived to replace democratically elected regimes with brutal murderers who would do Washington's bidding. It is a great pity that the current administration cheered on the attempted coup in Venezuela rather than condemning it instantly as the rest of the free world did.
The point which is missed in 90% of the posts on this board is that the information most damaging to the communist party comes from inside china, not from outside. External events have a much lesser effect on a country the size of China than internal.
The Soviet Union did not fall because of Reagan, or any policy of the West. It fell because its own people rejected it, first in the satelite states, finally in Moscow. Solidarity, the Polish trade union brought down the USSR in the end. The Berlin wall fell when a bunch of students attacket it en masse and the guards in the watch towers disobeyed orders and refused to shoot.
The issues in China are complex, they are no longer a Stalinist communist regime, they are not democratic, they have adopted a 19th century model of capitalism in which the actual role of the state is to protect the oligarchs and exploiters. The gerantocracy that runs the country is largely in its 80s and their principle driving principle is fear. In particular fear of a return to the days of the cultural revolution of Mao and fear of partition into separate states that are dominated by foreign powers as happened at the turn of the century when the US, Germany, France, Britain and Japan each carved out spheres of influence.
China is rapidly industrializing and output is rising fast. Economically China will be one of the maor powers within ten years. Already the Chineese middle class is larger than the US middle class. As with India, China is a first world power whose strength is obscured by a vast third world hinterland.
Change is comming, but it isn't going to be driven by external forces. In fact external forces are more likely to be counterproductive. The critical mistake made by the Tiannanen Square protesters was building the statue of liberty. Up to that point the communist party was affraid to crush the protests, in particular they were affraid that the soldiers would refuse to fire. However the statue of liberty was a symbol of an alliance with a foreign power and the troops could be sent in to crush that.
It wasn't a prophecy and the comparison to the West, in particular the relationship of the UK and the US was quite deliberate.
Orwell's objective was to make people realise that the USSR was a totalitarian regime and Stalin a tyrant. This was not something that many people wanted to hear in 1948 just after the Russians had done most of the fighting to stop Hitler. The Nazi-Soviet pact had been largely forgotten by this time.
1984 is full of ironic and sarcastic references to the BBC where Orwell (Eric Blair) worked during the war, manipulating truth in exactly the same way that Smith does. Two majot themes in the book are the erasure of history (suppression of the Nazi-Soviet pact) and the shifting aliances between the 3 great powers.
Incidentally Orwell was not anti-socialist, he was anti-communist. He was a member of the Labour party and wrote the 1945 Labour manifesto.
Tim is certainly right that this was a factor, however the MN policy change came after HTTP had passed gopher in terms of usage (as measured on the NSF backbone).
The Web was winning largely because Gopher had a very puritanical outlook. They wanted to hold the net back in the era of VT100 terminals, fixed width fonts and the only formatting being normal, bold and inverse font.
Another problem was that they really had their heads up their asses when it came to URLs. Their idea of muiltimedia content was that a file could be a text file or a picture. The idea of pictures in the text was anathema.
Now there have been claims made by the Netscape FUD dept. that there was also opposition to images in the Web community. Actually nothing could be further from the truth. There were a lot of complaints about the botched design of the IMG tag. To be fair to Marc he did give the world 8 hours to comment on his proposal, two of which were actually business hours in Europe (none of which were business hours in the US however).
By the time the university tried to cash in gopher was already on a downturn. The university action was simply the coup de grace. If it had come when gopher was more popular someone would have forked the source tree or developed an open version.
Today a lot of the 'gopher' servers are actually Web servers that have the ability to serve multiple protocols.
We can calibrate the cost of that research sincthe UK faced a similar issue in the 70s when the USSR deployed an ABM system around Moscow. The system was not sufficient to stop an attack by the US since they only had 50 missiles by treaty. However it was sufficient to block the UK nuclear force (perhaps).
The Moscow criterion was a major issue in UK defense circles, the thepry being that you had to have the capability of decapitating the USSR command and control located in Moscow. So to respond to the ABM system Britain upgraded its nukes with Chavalene waheads which deploy mylar ballon decoys. None of the Pentagon tests to date show any evidence that the US has a system that would work against Chevalene. The decoy 'tests' done so far have all been rigged, the missile has been programmed to hit a specific target (the middle one, the one that is heated to a few thousand degrees above the decoys..).
The star wars theory is just FUD devised after the fact to try to claim that the US defeated the USSR rather than the Polish trade unionists, East German students, Chzech protestors etc. with the aid of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the unintended effects of a botched coup led by the old guard.
A theory that was only advanced as a strategy after the fact. There is no reason to believe that we were being lied to in the 1980s when we were told that NATO believed that it could only hold off a USSR invasion of Western Europe for 4 days before being forced to resort to nuclear weapons. The generals who I discussed the strategy with in the 1980s believed that they were acting to defend against a real threat, not to break an already beaten enemy.
The theory is in any case bunk if you happen to look at Soviet economic history. To first order the Soviet economy never really recovered from the second world war. The economy was already stagnant when Breshniev took over. By the time start wars was proposed Gorbachev was already redirecting resources from the military economy to the civilian economy. The USSR never responded to star wars, therefore the theory that proposing star wars brought down the USSR is false.
As for anyone having disolving the USSR as a political objective, I don't think that was ever a US policy objective of any kind (with the exception of the Baltic states). Better to have all those missiles under control rather than have a Balkan situation with nuclear weapons.
Actually it was the reverse, why I projected Barry Lyndon the film came with a note from Kubrik about how the film should be shown with no more than 350 ft lamders of illumination or something.
What happened is that after the Xeon arc lamps came out a lot of theatres were throwing so much light at the screen the colors were washing out.
However changing the output on a Xeon arc is not a particularly easy thing to do with a lot of light boxes. Also we didn't have a measurement device calibrated in ft lambders or whatever so we folded the note up neatly and put it back in the box.