The article makes no sense at all. All it tells me is that Katz has read some article by Giddens. I don't consider Giddens to be the authorative author on the topic, Katz keeps refering to Giddens and only giddens as if globalization is a Giddens discovery.
The Economist piece is worth reading, the economist usually is worth reading, Kats is usually not worth reading. So lets pretend that we just had a link to the articles in the Economist, BBC, etc. etc.
I have very little sympathy with either side of the slashdot 'debate'. The liberweenie 'corporations are the absolute good' view is infantile. Equally infantile is the 'corporations are absolute evil view'. These are not two poles of the argument, they are actually the same argument which really has more to do with the ego of the person making the statement. There really is no difference between most of the Libertarians, Trotskyites or 'anti-globalists', any more than there is a difference between different varieties of religious bigott. All beliefs in absolute revealled truth are bogus and as Karl Popper pointed out are the enemies of the open society.
The policies of the third world countries are no different at the topmost level of abstraction than those of the West, their priority is to do the best for their country. To that end various ideological dogmas may be used as rhetoric, the reality is for the most part more pragmatic.
Immediately after the second world war the whole of the West was a command economy. There was simply no other alternative, if the war was to be won 40% of the GNP had to be redirected towards military spending. The US was no different to Europe in this, the only rhetorical difference was that the word 'socialism' was never used.
It took the West something like 20 years to dismantle most of the command economy. A command economy is only efficient in the short term and then for only very narrow short term goals.
The leaders of the third world are not the morons that many posters appear to believe. Empirically it takes a lot more brains to become the leader of the average Third world or post-communist european country than President of the US.
There is no real disagreement that the ideal for the third world would be to establish a free market system supported by a modern idustrial base. The problem is that you can't get there by simply declaring your country to be a free market. You have to achieve a certain level of prosperity before the surplus capital is available to make the free market work.
Last month the US government gave its airline industry a $15 billion government handout. The 'stimulus' (i.e. pork) bill that just passed the house gives $25 billion in backdated tax cuts to large corporations, in particular Texan oil companies. It is therefore somewhat rich for the US to go preaching the wonders of the free market.
The third world has been complaining about the vast cost of AIDs drugs for five years. The US has been insisting that the rights of the patent holders come before the lives of Aids victims in the third world. But when the US and Canada decide that they need to build a stockpile of Cipro the threat of voiding Bayer's patent rights is made within days.
Before the war on terror Unilateralism was the policy of the day. The Bush administration did not think it needed foreign support. The US army could crush any other and the ABM shield would shortly eliminate any threat of nuclear blackmail. To the extent the US had a foreign policy it was determined by campaign contribution bribes.
Now the world is very different. The US suddenly needs friends in places it did not care existed. The national interest is suddenly more important than the narrow corporate interest.
I'd just like to point out that Nike does not in fact *own* any of these sweatshops that people enjoy complaining about.
An entirely irrelevant point, they are morally responsible for the conditions in the factories that make their products.
Nike is an image company, they charge $80 for a pair of shoes that costs them less than $1.50 to make. The way that they do that is to pay people such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods vast sums of money ($20 million plus) to endorse their product.
I don't think it is unreasonable to point to the conditions in which the goods are made and assert that wearing Nike shoes should be considered as socially unacceptable as wearing a fur coat.
That is the free market in action. The sophomoric liberweenie view of 'me me me' is not transitive.
You can read atlas shrugged and decide that as an ubermench you are only going to work for yourself, you are going to be a taker from society and give as little as you can possibly get away with.
But if that is your philosophy then don't complain when I decide to apply your own philosophy to you, I don't see why liberweenies should not pay higher taxes, I don't see why they should not be conscripted into the army and sent off to Afghanistan, I don't see why they should not be discriminated against in college admissions. I am simply applying their own philosophy against them.
The problem with electing people who only believe in self interest is that when in office their self interest tends to be different to the self interest of most everyone else.
What you conveniently ignore is the circumstances in which the loans were made to the third world and the colonialism that preceeded it. The typical heavily indebted country was first a colony of some western power, then given nominal 'independence' in the 50's after which the West continued to meddle.
In most cases the loans were made for political reasons, to buy influence in the cold war. They were made in the full knowledge that the criminals running the country that nominaly received the loan would steal most if not all of the money.
Banks don't lend money to companies run by crooks because they know that they risk loosing their capital. However when they loan money to a government the loan is in effect underwritten by the people of that country.
Meanwhile several of the banks that are demanding the repayment of the loans are the same banks that helped the dictators steal the money and are currently keeping it safe for them in hidden accounts.
One of the checks and balances of capitalism is that you lose your money if you make a bad investment. The old adage is still true, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars you have a problem, if you owe the bank a million dollars the bank has a problem, if you owe the bank a billion dollars you own the bank. All the third world debtor countries are doing is using the legitimate leverage of owing a vast sum of money. If the banks did not want to be exposed to that threat they should have exercised more care in their lending decisions.
The HP gear is close to what I want but almost certain to be compromised with DRM restrictions.
What I really want is something that is a larger equivalent of my Archos device. I want it to appear on the network as a PC with a large shared hard drive.
I would want a minimum of 100Gb of storage.
Alternatively a completely diskless pod with about 16Mb ram, an 802.11b network access point, sound output and some sorta TV interface would serve the same purpose. It could pull the toones off my PC server. With a larger buffer (128Mb or more) it could do video as well.
Yes, all actual NP complete problems can be converted to each other in polynomial time.
Yes, that is by definition, it is NP complete if you can convert it into a member of the set 'NP Complete'.
But that is not the point I was trying to make, there are lots of NP complete problems that are no use as cryptographic systems because there are heuristics that find an acceptable solution in polynomial time.
For example the travelling salesman problem is NP complete if the problem is finding the absolute best path, but you can get pretty good paths from Map quest.
The use of NP complete problems such as the knapsack were tried extensively in the early days of Public Key, they were all broken, many of them by Len.
Because that is what this country was founded on, its is what made this country great.
The right to sue anyone for anything is written into the constitution.
The way to win this case is to buy each member of the supreme court a Replay TV unit. They are not going to give it up once they hve used one.
This is not Napster Mk II. The replay unit is not designed for the primary purpose of infringement.
The Tivo unit is evil, it is yet another of those clueless dotcom scams where you buy something and then have to pay a monthly fee to make it work. Like AOL the designers look for sneaky opportunities to bombard you with ads.
I pay $60 a month for my satelite TV. That should be plenty to support the program makers.
it's been shown that the NP-complete problems all reduce to each other.
Err no, not even close. While there is a large class of NP complete problems which can be transformed into each other in polynomial time this is not the case for all NP complete problems.
Futhermore a compromise of a security algorithm is a much weaker condition than solving an NP complete problem for the general case. There are many NP complete problems that have subsets that can be solved in polynomial time. The superincreasing knapsack problem for example.
An attack that compromised only 5% of RSA keys would be very serious - a factoring algorithm that depended on smooth numbers or the like but it would not be a solution for all NP complete problems.
In fact the DSA algorithm can be shown to be slightly more secure than RSA in that it only depends on the discrete log problem for security while RSA depends on discrete log and factoring. This is not a particularly big problem however since most atacks on factoring also tend to be convertable to discrete log.
The whole story is cooked up on the basis of a conversation with a customer service rep. who quite obviously does not have much idea what is going on and has probably been trained not to make commitments for future service.
It would be somewhat surprising if AOL had trained their entire support staff to support XP within days of the launch.
What is more surprising is that so many slashdotters are jumping with glee because AOL is giving Microsoft the shaft, if AOL does not want to support Microsoft it is a dead certainty that it won't be supporting Linux. Say goodbye to the Internet and hello to pop-up ads.
Re:anthrax--careful, John
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2
The date at the top is in the format "9/11/01". Only Americans write dates this way (everyone else writes "11/9/01").
The date is actually written 09-11-01. That is a hybrid, in the US a slash us typically used.
The use of the 09-11 form is quite likely deliberate since the US media frequently refers to the "911" attack.
The note looks to me as if it was written by someone who was aware that it would be examined to identify the author and ws attempting to give as few clues as possible.
I don't agree with CNN that the evidence of planning points to domestic attacker. Al Qaeda have demonstrated that they can plan attacks in considerable detail.
The point of the 'warning' is quite obvious, the first attack was only discovered after the second letters were sent. The 'warning' in the second letters was to make sure that the attack was noticed. The message is not really a warning however since you only read it after you are infected and about to die.
The landlord of one of the hijackers worked for the tabloid that was attacked. It might have been in response to some sort of slight.
We know that the hijackers looked into hiring a crop dusting plane to drop some sort of agent on a city. They would not have done that if they did not expect to have the anthrax available.
I suspect that Al Qaeda overestimated the potency of the Anthrax. They probbly expected that it would kill everybody in the building and that the origin would be obvious.
What the Anthrax attacks mean is that there is no alternative other than bombing the crap out of Bin Laden and the Taleban until they are utterly destroyed. Otherwise it is only a matter of time before the loonies get hold of a nuke and try to use it.
Well, when I visited the mosque in question, I did not have to force my way. Not at all. It is (definitely, was) open for visitors... Why should Mr. Sharon have been excluded?
As you know full well he was excluded because he had stated his intention to join a bunch of fanatics who were laying the foundation for a third temple.
Sharon did not make his visit by invitation, he was accompanied by a bunch of thugs who beat up anyone in his path, including the somewhat elderly clergy who had tried to lock him out.
Sharon was not an innocent tourist making a visit out of curiosity. He was intentionally making a political statement with the express intention of inciting violence.
Sharon wanted violence and he got violence. He cannot now expect the rest of the world to have much sympathy for him, or for that matter to see the violence that he has deliberately incited to be any sort of justification for his responses.
Sharon has already taken Isreal into one war that has damaged it severely, now he wants to take it into a second. He is deliberately forcing the US to choose between support for Israel and building the coalition against the terrorist attacks on the US. He is singlehandedly destroying the political influence of the Israeli lobby in the US.
Sharon's policies are not only bad for Israel, they are a betrayal of the US. It is long since past the point where he should be replaced.
yes, west knows every thing and others are ignorant cus they don't watch CNN? right?
The Taleban are ignorant because they have intentionaly cut themselves off from all external information sources.
I would never rely on CNN alone, particularly given its recent post AOL acquisition decline. I have 5 US news channels, 4 foreign, I usually read the US and UK press, I also follow the Israeli press which despite the obvious problems of bias tends to be much more evenhanded than the US media. In addition I receive briefing papers from many groups in the region.
As a trained inteligence analyst I also know how to extract data from these sources.
If the Taleban were only slightly less ignorant they would not be currently having the crap bombed out of them.
So our asking for Osama was a death sentence in their system.
Don't be so naive.
Bin Laden's son is married to Omar's daughter. Al Qaeda is the Taleban, the Taleban are Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is just one of the factions that forms the Taleban, just as the US Marine corps is part of the US military.
Without Bin Laden's funds the Taleban would still be illiterate opium farmers. Without the Taleban Bin Laden would have been dancing on the end of a rope in Saud long ago.
The Taleban did not give up Bin Laden because he is an absolutely indispensable part of their military.
But above all the Taleban did not give up Bin Laden because they approve of and support his aims and his methods. The Taleban have murdered tens of thousands of their own people. They have started pointless wars with every one of their neighbors except for Pakistan. Why would they be reluctant to start a war against the great Satan - particularly when the great Satan is the other side of the world and you are a land locked country that the infidels can only reach through sacred Muslim soil?
These are the type of loonies who blow up all the ancient artifacts then complian that the tourist trade has died.
The Taleban were loosing their grip on power due to the famine their mismanagement has caused. Remembering that the soviet invasion caused the Mujahedin factions to unite they are hoping to see the same effect.
The Taleban have no knowledge of the West except their own propagnda. They have not seen the television pictures of the WTC collapsing. They believe we are evil fools and cowards. They have absolutely no understanding that the difference between US and soviet weapons is as great as that between the cannon and the spear.
Re:I know a few reasons
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2
But, this leads to what America's role in the world should be. From my perspective America just can't please anybody.
It is called diplomacy. Colin Powell and Madeline Allbright are good at it. George W. Bush and the Republican right are lousy at it. Fortunately Bush appears to have started to understand that there is a positive value to diplomacy and that unilateralism only damages US interests in the long term.
The US has the worlds largest arsenal, in fact with the latest increase the US spends more on arms than the rest of the world put together - including all the Nato allies.
There is a limit to what can be achieved by arms. Brains are much more effective. Bin Laden's strategy is actually very similar to that of Saddam and Castro. If you can survive despite the best efforts of the worlds only superpower to destroy you, you gain credibility, nobody will oppose you rule at home.
What Bin Laden does not understand is that Castro survived because he had the protection of another super power. Saddam survived because the cost of deposing him was too great for the dubious benefit of installing a different dictator. Bin Laden will be destroyed because he has antagonized every one of the major powers (US, UK, Russia, France) and every one of the local powers.
I'd like some opinion beyond the after the fact, 20-20, "that thing you just did was wrong." I want to know, what should are country be doing?
First, stop using rhetoric for domestic consumption when you are abroad. Foreigners do not like being told that the US is the inventor of freedom, the only country that believes in freedom or the only country that God lives in. The US has made significant contributions to the progress of liberty, it is not unique in doing so.
Second, do whatever it takes to settle the festering disputes with Cuba, Iran, North Korea, etc. The 40 year dispute with Cuba is simply demeaning to a great power. End the sanctions, open the boarders and Communism in Cuba will go the same way as the USSR. Iran has two governments, a democratically elected one that is moderate and progressive and a self perpetuate Shite version of the Taleban. The West has to seize the opportunity to support the democratic moderates. North and South Korea had already begun a reprochment under the Clinton Administration which the Bush administration choose to disrupt because they needed the spectre of a North Korean attack to push their stupid ABM scheme.
Third and most important, the US must become an advocate for democracy abroad and not just at home. Too often the US uses the rhetoric of democracy as no more than a cover for its own interests. In many cases the US has attacked and subverted democratically elected governments which it beleived threatened its interests.
The case for democracy that needs to be put is that it is a much more stable form of government than any of the alternatives. Political stability and an honest civil service are the two most important factors determining the economic situation of countries.
Jimmy Cater may have a limited reputation at home, but he is by far the US president most widely respected abroad since WWII. He had the bad luck to have to handle the oil price shocks and the Iranian Embassy seige but he was intelligent and honest. He achieved the first peace settlement in the Middle East. Since leaving office he has helped a large number of the countries that have made the transition to democracy.
Re:Actually...
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 5, Informative
And neither is Arafat. He is directly responsible for what is going on right now. This second Intifada was started by his failure to negotiate with Barak when a deal was on the table which would have brought peace and Palestinian statehood. The deal was rejected, the violence started, then Sharon was elected.
You miss out one important step. The violence started the day that Sharon forced his way into the Mosque on the temple mount.
Sharon's behaviour was a deliberate attempt to incite a violent reaction which he calculated would be to his personal political advantage.
Sharon's strategy worked, he became Prime Minister before Netanyahu managed to complete his political comeback from the corruption allegations that had caused him to loose office.
As for the settlements, I don't believe that they are being extended, nor is any land being taken to make room for them (certainly not now),
According to Haaretz the number of settlements has doubled since the Oslo accords were signed. Confiscations of land to build settlements have taken place without any pause since the Sharon government came to power.
The US has repeatedly demanded that Israel stop building settlements and withdraw from those built since Oslo. As always these demands have been ignored, the Israeli right being confident that they can get the Congress to vote them whatever subsidies Israel demands.
but it's not particularly more right to suggest the Israelis living there should be kicked out than anybody else at this point.
So if you come and take my house the fact you have taken it from me means that I have no rights whatsoever to demand its return?
The Israelis occupying the West Bank and Gaza know that they are living on stolen land, in many cases they stole the land themselves at the point of a gun. What possible objection can there be to demanding that the land be returned to the people it was stolen from? Why should the US subsidize the settlers occupation? In Bosnia the settler's type of behavior was called 'ethnic cleansing'.
The Barak peace plan was never a possibility, you only need to look at a map to see why. Israel would keep practically all the settlements and control all the borders of the Palestinian state.
Globalism is not a political movement
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As usual we have a buzz word laden piece by Katz that shows zero insight (and another part to come, God help us).
Globalism is not and has never been a political movement. It is no more than a social and political trend that began with the Industrial Revolution. Geography is less of a constraint than it was in past. Airline travel, the telephone, satelite TV and the Internet mean that you can live in one country and have the same communications access as if you lived in another country on a different continent.
Anti-globalism is a political movement of sorts. There is no real cohesion between the aims of the various factions however. In many cases the aims are completely opposed.
Bin Laden is not an anti-globalist in any meaningful sense, he is anti-US but his political aims are global. He wants to return the world to the middle ages one country at a time, starting with Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Palestein but continuing on to Andaloucia (Spain), Africa etc.
Some of the anti-globalists are anti-democratic tin pot nationalists who want to declare independence for their little fragment of a nation state so that they have a better chance of getting power themselves.
Other 'anti-globalists' are tin-pot union leaders looking for some form of protectionism that will discriminate against goods produced by foreign workers.
Most of the 'anti-globalists' are not protesting about the process of globalisation however but the limited form in which it is taking place. As they see it the West is busy exporting the working practices and political structures of the nineteenth century while trying to deter democratization that might threaten Western interests.
As a political critique it was far more accurate in the 1970s than today. The list of dictators supported by the West and in particular the US is very long. The US subverted democratic governments in Chile and the Congo and replaced them with mass murderers.
US administration policy since the cold war, and in particular since the Clinton administration has been to end support for most of the worst regimes. Marcos, Pinochet, Suharto and the rest have been consigned to the dustbin of history. It is therefore somewhat strange to start an unfocused 'the US can do no right' movement at this time. There are several areas where the US is standing on the wrong side of history, proping up the gulf dictatorships for example, however US foreign policy is much reformed.
The biggest problem of globalism is ex-patriate meddling in their former home countries, particularly in the second and third generations. Sean Connery's calls for an independent Scotland made from a Spanish golf course are ridiculous and harmless enough. The funding of the IRA by Irish Americans or the Sikh separatists in India by Bradford shopkeepers was not. The problem with ex-patriates is that they can believe all the propaganda they like, they can fund all the murder they like and live in perfect safety far from the consequences of their meddling.
The funding of Israeli settlements by US Jews and the funding of extreemist Madrasah schools in Pakistan by Saudis are just another example of a type of meddling from a long distance that is hated by the majority in the countries that are subjected to it.
Re:think globally, act locally
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2
It's only the liberals, who probably eschew some sort of higher power, that think twice about the killing part.
Unfortunately Conservatives appear unable to think once about killing people.
It was not a liberal who wrote 'war is diplomacy by other means'. The easiest thing to do is to start a war, the hardest is to stop one.
If you want to see what pig headed aggression achieves look at the result of Sharon's policies. Since taking power he has ordered the assasination of almost a hundred Palestinians. As a direct result the Palestinians are now assasinating cabinet ministers.
Re:I know a few reasons
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2
NO) The blockade was a UN program. (Notice that 'N' there isn't an 'S'.)
Hiding behind the UN security council is futile. The US and the UK have been responsible for rejecting any proposed changes to the blockade.
While the US position has some justification, pretending that the US is not the principle mover in the matter is the type of behaviour that discredits the US abroad.
The concern I have is that by insisting on continuing the blockade long after it has proved to be failure the US has made it much harder to get the security council to approve future actions.
The UN is very valuable tool for US foreign policy. It is the only organization that can deflect the criticism of the US acting as a rogue superpower, unaccountable to any authority.
Unfortunately some of the US right do not like the UN because they dislike the idea of any fetters on US power. So they have picked stupid quarrels with the UN and severely weakened US influence.
While it my make the US right feel good to wave their flags in other countries faces it is not the type of behvaiour they tollerate when other countries engage in it. The same senators that blocked payment of US dues to the UN lathered themselves up into a fury of self-righeous indignation when they lost their seat on the human rights panel to France. The statements made at the time were entirely ignorant of the fact that the term 'human rights' actually orginated in France based on the work of Voltaire, Rousseaux etc. Also conveniently ignored was the fact that the seats on the commissions are allocated geographically, the US was not eligible for the Africa seat taken by Sudan.
Desert storm was a success largely because the US took great care to operate behind the shield of UN resolutions. Even Bin Laden has not complained about the US driving Saddam out of Kewait, his complaint is that the troops remained in Saudi where they are propping up the regime against internal dissent.
Re:Actually...
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Interesting point: while our "observed" support of Israel (we actually are just about the only country actually actively trying to influence peace in that region)
The US gives over $5 billion a year to Israel in aid. Together with the $2 billion given to Egypt for signing the camp David accords that is over half the US aid budget.
This largess is given to a country whose idea opf promoting peace is to take land from the Palestinians to build 'settlements' that are intended to make their occupation permanent and whose thanks to the US is for their Prime Minister to cal President Bush 'an appeaser'.
aparently bin laden NEVER spoke of the palestinean/israeli conflict before september 11th
The statement is untrue. The declaration of war against the US issued by Bin Laden many years ago mentions Israel. Zawhiri, the man somewhat inaccurately refered to as Bin Laden's 'number 2' is actually the head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad who murdered Saddat for signing the camp David agreement. Israel has been the primary cause for Islamic Jihad for 20 years. Al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad have essentially been the same organization since Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan.
There is only one response that Sharon should be making at this time 'How can we help'. Instead Sharon ordered an invasion of the West Bank on the 12th September and the assasination of 20 odd Palestinians - causing the deths of another 40 civilians who were killed by the bombs planted to kill the terrorists. The fact that Sharon has gone out of his way to incite more violence during the time of America's need is absolutely dispicable.
Frans Kaashoek might be pretty annoyed to hear you say that.
Last I heard they were doing bespoke kernel design. There are plenty of faculty who work on O/S related research, but there is a huge difference between designing a component and designing a complete O/S
The email address for the article was hdunkirk@mit.edu which still doesn't exist when trying a finger. Also executing "vrfy hdunkirk@mit.edu" directly on their email server returns unknown user.
That means nothing, I never bothered to get an Athena account when I was at MIT except for a brief period when I had a student who I could not give a lab account to. LCS and AI accounts frequently have bizare names.
However an assistant to the lab director should be able to name him, there are only two labs in the building after all and both labs have only one director. The position of 'assistant' to the director is secretarial.
There was no such project when I was at the lab. Some of the project bears a passing resemblance to Oxygen, however that has long since been public.
There have been several O/S developed in the building. None was developed in secret. A secret project could not get students to work on it.
There have been non-public projects going on in the building. However those are effectively long term consulting for various (military) agencies.
An O/S is simply too large a project to be performed as a secret project. It is a packaging job, there is absolutely no value in an O/S developed in absolute secrecy.
There is no-one on the faculty who comes to mind as a specialist in O/S research. There are plenty who have made significant contributions to specific areas of O/S design. ITS, Multics, Genera were all open collaborative efforts.
Another point that leads me to doubt the story is the absence of any mention of security which has been the principle O/S related interest for the building in recent years.
Finally, LCS is not in the habit of announcing its projects in obscurantist web journals.
The whole thing smells bad. It is just not the way the lab has ever worked. The idea is to get your ideas 'stolen', that is another word for 'used'. If you don't want to share your ideas then join the NSA
Nobody ever claimed that XML is a major innovation in lexical encodings. Neither for that matter is LISP which is no more than Lambda calculus.
The reason why XML uses the notation it does is that it is somewhat more robust. The problem with S-Expressions is that one misplaced parenthesis can cause the entire semantics of the expression to be changed, or as we computer scientists say 'be fucked beyond recognition'.
Most major advances in computing are not major advances in computer science. There was absolutely nothing original in C, it was merely a version of B with a few additional features added back from BCPL which was itself merely a subset of CPL which was merely a revision of ALGOL and so on.
IMO they did a bad job. Probably SGML was specified before UTF was
Perhaps your opinion does not count for very much if you don't know enough about the subject you are prattling on about that you have to make such an inane statement.
SGML predated UTF by at least a decade. SGML also predated the fad for reading Chomsky in the compiler writing community. The original SGML 'standard' is more or less documentation of Goldfarb's original code (COBOL from the looks of the spec).
XML is a cleanup of SGML which removes the more demented parts of the original architecture. The DTDs are one such part.
Same with frames, or even pictures. Mosaic first couldn't display background pictures. Frames was another netscape invention that was accepted by almost everyone, but was left out the HTML standard for YEARS.
Actually I did the first bckground images, it was not a Netscape invention.
Netscape was at the time trying to work out how to implement tables. The problem being that they were trying to parse their HTML with a yacc parser which doesn't work because SGML is not an LR(1) grammar but that was all Rob and Lou had learn't in their undergrad Comp sci compilers course.
Frames might have been received with more enthusiasm by the rest of the Web community if the proposal for the standard had not been delivered in the manner of the Japaneese declaration of war prior to Pearl Harbour. By the time the spec had finished scrolling off the fax machine Netscape had already released the new browser.
Slashdot Mirror
The Economist piece is worth reading, the economist usually is worth reading, Kats is usually not worth reading. So lets pretend that we just had a link to the articles in the Economist, BBC, etc. etc.
I have very little sympathy with either side of the slashdot 'debate'. The liberweenie 'corporations are the absolute good' view is infantile. Equally infantile is the 'corporations are absolute evil view'. These are not two poles of the argument, they are actually the same argument which really has more to do with the ego of the person making the statement. There really is no difference between most of the Libertarians, Trotskyites or 'anti-globalists', any more than there is a difference between different varieties of religious bigott. All beliefs in absolute revealled truth are bogus and as Karl Popper pointed out are the enemies of the open society.
The policies of the third world countries are no different at the topmost level of abstraction than those of the West, their priority is to do the best for their country. To that end various ideological dogmas may be used as rhetoric, the reality is for the most part more pragmatic.
Immediately after the second world war the whole of the West was a command economy. There was simply no other alternative, if the war was to be won 40% of the GNP had to be redirected towards military spending. The US was no different to Europe in this, the only rhetorical difference was that the word 'socialism' was never used.
It took the West something like 20 years to dismantle most of the command economy. A command economy is only efficient in the short term and then for only very narrow short term goals.
The leaders of the third world are not the morons that many posters appear to believe. Empirically it takes a lot more brains to become the leader of the average Third world or post-communist european country than President of the US.
There is no real disagreement that the ideal for the third world would be to establish a free market system supported by a modern idustrial base. The problem is that you can't get there by simply declaring your country to be a free market. You have to achieve a certain level of prosperity before the surplus capital is available to make the free market work.
Last month the US government gave its airline industry a $15 billion government handout. The 'stimulus' (i.e. pork) bill that just passed the house gives $25 billion in backdated tax cuts to large corporations, in particular Texan oil companies. It is therefore somewhat rich for the US to go preaching the wonders of the free market.
The third world has been complaining about the vast cost of AIDs drugs for five years. The US has been insisting that the rights of the patent holders come before the lives of Aids victims in the third world. But when the US and Canada decide that they need to build a stockpile of Cipro the threat of voiding Bayer's patent rights is made within days.
Before the war on terror Unilateralism was the policy of the day. The Bush administration did not think it needed foreign support. The US army could crush any other and the ABM shield would shortly eliminate any threat of nuclear blackmail. To the extent the US had a foreign policy it was determined by campaign contribution bribes.
Now the world is very different. The US suddenly needs friends in places it did not care existed. The national interest is suddenly more important than the narrow corporate interest.
An entirely irrelevant point, they are morally responsible for the conditions in the factories that make their products.
Nike is an image company, they charge $80 for a pair of shoes that costs them less than $1.50 to make. The way that they do that is to pay people such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods vast sums of money ($20 million plus) to endorse their product.
I don't think it is unreasonable to point to the conditions in which the goods are made and assert that wearing Nike shoes should be considered as socially unacceptable as wearing a fur coat.
That is the free market in action. The sophomoric liberweenie view of 'me me me' is not transitive.
You can read atlas shrugged and decide that as an ubermench you are only going to work for yourself, you are going to be a taker from society and give as little as you can possibly get away with.
But if that is your philosophy then don't complain when I decide to apply your own philosophy to you, I don't see why liberweenies should not pay higher taxes, I don't see why they should not be conscripted into the army and sent off to Afghanistan, I don't see why they should not be discriminated against in college admissions. I am simply applying their own philosophy against them.
The problem with electing people who only believe in self interest is that when in office their self interest tends to be different to the self interest of most everyone else.
In most cases the loans were made for political reasons, to buy influence in the cold war. They were made in the full knowledge that the criminals running the country that nominaly received the loan would steal most if not all of the money.
Banks don't lend money to companies run by crooks because they know that they risk loosing their capital. However when they loan money to a government the loan is in effect underwritten by the people of that country.
Meanwhile several of the banks that are demanding the repayment of the loans are the same banks that helped the dictators steal the money and are currently keeping it safe for them in hidden accounts.
One of the checks and balances of capitalism is that you lose your money if you make a bad investment. The old adage is still true, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars you have a problem, if you owe the bank a million dollars the bank has a problem, if you owe the bank a billion dollars you own the bank. All the third world debtor countries are doing is using the legitimate leverage of owing a vast sum of money. If the banks did not want to be exposed to that threat they should have exercised more care in their lending decisions.
What I really want is something that is a larger equivalent of my Archos device. I want it to appear on the network as a PC with a large shared hard drive.
I would want a minimum of 100Gb of storage.
Alternatively a completely diskless pod with about 16Mb ram, an 802.11b network access point, sound output and some sorta TV interface would serve the same purpose. It could pull the toones off my PC server. With a larger buffer (128Mb or more) it could do video as well.
Yes, that is by definition, it is NP complete if you can convert it into a member of the set 'NP Complete'.
But that is not the point I was trying to make, there are lots of NP complete problems that are no use as cryptographic systems because there are heuristics that find an acceptable solution in polynomial time.
For example the travelling salesman problem is NP complete if the problem is finding the absolute best path, but you can get pretty good paths from Map quest.
The use of NP complete problems such as the knapsack were tried extensively in the early days of Public Key, they were all broken, many of them by Len.
The right to sue anyone for anything is written into the constitution.
The way to win this case is to buy each member of the supreme court a Replay TV unit. They are not going to give it up once they hve used one.
This is not Napster Mk II. The replay unit is not designed for the primary purpose of infringement.
The Tivo unit is evil, it is yet another of those clueless dotcom scams where you buy something and then have to pay a monthly fee to make it work. Like AOL the designers look for sneaky opportunities to bombard you with ads.
I pay $60 a month for my satelite TV. That should be plenty to support the program makers.
Err no, not even close. While there is a large class of NP complete problems which can be transformed into each other in polynomial time this is not the case for all NP complete problems.
Futhermore a compromise of a security algorithm is a much weaker condition than solving an NP complete problem for the general case. There are many NP complete problems that have subsets that can be solved in polynomial time. The superincreasing knapsack problem for example.
An attack that compromised only 5% of RSA keys would be very serious - a factoring algorithm that depended on smooth numbers or the like but it would not be a solution for all NP complete problems.
In fact the DSA algorithm can be shown to be slightly more secure than RSA in that it only depends on the discrete log problem for security while RSA depends on discrete log and factoring. This is not a particularly big problem however since most atacks on factoring also tend to be convertable to discrete log.
It would be somewhat surprising if AOL had trained their entire support staff to support XP within days of the launch.
What is more surprising is that so many slashdotters are jumping with glee because AOL is giving Microsoft the shaft, if AOL does not want to support Microsoft it is a dead certainty that it won't be supporting Linux. Say goodbye to the Internet and hello to pop-up ads.
The date is actually written 09-11-01. That is a hybrid, in the US a slash us typically used.
The use of the 09-11 form is quite likely deliberate since the US media frequently refers to the "911" attack.
The note looks to me as if it was written by someone who was aware that it would be examined to identify the author and ws attempting to give as few clues as possible.
I don't agree with CNN that the evidence of planning points to domestic attacker. Al Qaeda have demonstrated that they can plan attacks in considerable detail.
The point of the 'warning' is quite obvious, the first attack was only discovered after the second letters were sent. The 'warning' in the second letters was to make sure that the attack was noticed. The message is not really a warning however since you only read it after you are infected and about to die.
The landlord of one of the hijackers worked for the tabloid that was attacked. It might have been in response to some sort of slight.
We know that the hijackers looked into hiring a crop dusting plane to drop some sort of agent on a city. They would not have done that if they did not expect to have the anthrax available.
I suspect that Al Qaeda overestimated the potency of the Anthrax. They probbly expected that it would kill everybody in the building and that the origin would be obvious.
What the Anthrax attacks mean is that there is no alternative other than bombing the crap out of Bin Laden and the Taleban until they are utterly destroyed. Otherwise it is only a matter of time before the loonies get hold of a nuke and try to use it.
As you know full well he was excluded because he had stated his intention to join a bunch of fanatics who were laying the foundation for a third temple.
Sharon did not make his visit by invitation, he was accompanied by a bunch of thugs who beat up anyone in his path, including the somewhat elderly clergy who had tried to lock him out.
Sharon was not an innocent tourist making a visit out of curiosity. He was intentionally making a political statement with the express intention of inciting violence.
Sharon wanted violence and he got violence. He cannot now expect the rest of the world to have much sympathy for him, or for that matter to see the violence that he has deliberately incited to be any sort of justification for his responses.
Sharon has already taken Isreal into one war that has damaged it severely, now he wants to take it into a second. He is deliberately forcing the US to choose between support for Israel and building the coalition against the terrorist attacks on the US. He is singlehandedly destroying the political influence of the Israeli lobby in the US.
Sharon's policies are not only bad for Israel, they are a betrayal of the US. It is long since past the point where he should be replaced.
The Taleban are ignorant because they have intentionaly cut themselves off from all external information sources.
I would never rely on CNN alone, particularly given its recent post AOL acquisition decline. I have 5 US news channels, 4 foreign, I usually read the US and UK press, I also follow the Israeli press which despite the obvious problems of bias tends to be much more evenhanded than the US media. In addition I receive briefing papers from many groups in the region.
As a trained inteligence analyst I also know how to extract data from these sources.
If the Taleban were only slightly less ignorant they would not be currently having the crap bombed out of them.
Don't be so naive.
Bin Laden's son is married to Omar's daughter. Al Qaeda is the Taleban, the Taleban are Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is just one of the factions that forms the Taleban, just as the US Marine corps is part of the US military.
Without Bin Laden's funds the Taleban would still be illiterate opium farmers. Without the Taleban Bin Laden would have been dancing on the end of a rope in Saud long ago.
The Taleban did not give up Bin Laden because he is an absolutely indispensable part of their military.
But above all the Taleban did not give up Bin Laden because they approve of and support his aims and his methods. The Taleban have murdered tens of thousands of their own people. They have started pointless wars with every one of their neighbors except for Pakistan. Why would they be reluctant to start a war against the great Satan - particularly when the great Satan is the other side of the world and you are a land locked country that the infidels can only reach through sacred Muslim soil?
These are the type of loonies who blow up all the ancient artifacts then complian that the tourist trade has died.
The Taleban were loosing their grip on power due to the famine their mismanagement has caused. Remembering that the soviet invasion caused the Mujahedin factions to unite they are hoping to see the same effect.
The Taleban have no knowledge of the West except their own propagnda. They have not seen the television pictures of the WTC collapsing. They believe we are evil fools and cowards. They have absolutely no understanding that the difference between US and soviet weapons is as great as that between the cannon and the spear.
It is called diplomacy. Colin Powell and Madeline Allbright are good at it. George W. Bush and the Republican right are lousy at it. Fortunately Bush appears to have started to understand that there is a positive value to diplomacy and that unilateralism only damages US interests in the long term.
The US has the worlds largest arsenal, in fact with the latest increase the US spends more on arms than the rest of the world put together - including all the Nato allies.
There is a limit to what can be achieved by arms. Brains are much more effective. Bin Laden's strategy is actually very similar to that of Saddam and Castro. If you can survive despite the best efforts of the worlds only superpower to destroy you, you gain credibility, nobody will oppose you rule at home.
What Bin Laden does not understand is that Castro survived because he had the protection of another super power. Saddam survived because the cost of deposing him was too great for the dubious benefit of installing a different dictator. Bin Laden will be destroyed because he has antagonized every one of the major powers (US, UK, Russia, France) and every one of the local powers.
I'd like some opinion beyond the after the fact, 20-20, "that thing you just did was wrong." I want to know, what should are country be doing?
First, stop using rhetoric for domestic consumption when you are abroad. Foreigners do not like being told that the US is the inventor of freedom, the only country that believes in freedom or the only country that God lives in. The US has made significant contributions to the progress of liberty, it is not unique in doing so.
Second, do whatever it takes to settle the festering disputes with Cuba, Iran, North Korea, etc. The 40 year dispute with Cuba is simply demeaning to a great power. End the sanctions, open the boarders and Communism in Cuba will go the same way as the USSR. Iran has two governments, a democratically elected one that is moderate and progressive and a self perpetuate Shite version of the Taleban. The West has to seize the opportunity to support the democratic moderates. North and South Korea had already begun a reprochment under the Clinton Administration which the Bush administration choose to disrupt because they needed the spectre of a North Korean attack to push their stupid ABM scheme.
Third and most important, the US must become an advocate for democracy abroad and not just at home. Too often the US uses the rhetoric of democracy as no more than a cover for its own interests. In many cases the US has attacked and subverted democratically elected governments which it beleived threatened its interests.
The case for democracy that needs to be put is that it is a much more stable form of government than any of the alternatives. Political stability and an honest civil service are the two most important factors determining the economic situation of countries.
Jimmy Cater may have a limited reputation at home, but he is by far the US president most widely respected abroad since WWII. He had the bad luck to have to handle the oil price shocks and the Iranian Embassy seige but he was intelligent and honest. He achieved the first peace settlement in the Middle East. Since leaving office he has helped a large number of the countries that have made the transition to democracy.
You miss out one important step. The violence started the day that Sharon forced his way into the Mosque on the temple mount.
Sharon's behaviour was a deliberate attempt to incite a violent reaction which he calculated would be to his personal political advantage.
Sharon's strategy worked, he became Prime Minister before Netanyahu managed to complete his political comeback from the corruption allegations that had caused him to loose office.
As for the settlements, I don't believe that they are being extended, nor is any land being taken to make room for them (certainly not now),
According to Haaretz the number of settlements has doubled since the Oslo accords were signed. Confiscations of land to build settlements have taken place without any pause since the Sharon government came to power.
The US has repeatedly demanded that Israel stop building settlements and withdraw from those built since Oslo. As always these demands have been ignored, the Israeli right being confident that they can get the Congress to vote them whatever subsidies Israel demands.
but it's not particularly more right to suggest the Israelis living there should be kicked out than anybody else at this point.
So if you come and take my house the fact you have taken it from me means that I have no rights whatsoever to demand its return?
The Israelis occupying the West Bank and Gaza know that they are living on stolen land, in many cases they stole the land themselves at the point of a gun. What possible objection can there be to demanding that the land be returned to the people it was stolen from? Why should the US subsidize the settlers occupation? In Bosnia the settler's type of behavior was called 'ethnic cleansing'.
The Barak peace plan was never a possibility, you only need to look at a map to see why. Israel would keep practically all the settlements and control all the borders of the Palestinian state.
Globalism is not and has never been a political movement. It is no more than a social and political trend that began with the Industrial Revolution. Geography is less of a constraint than it was in past. Airline travel, the telephone, satelite TV and the Internet mean that you can live in one country and have the same communications access as if you lived in another country on a different continent.
Anti-globalism is a political movement of sorts. There is no real cohesion between the aims of the various factions however. In many cases the aims are completely opposed.
Bin Laden is not an anti-globalist in any meaningful sense, he is anti-US but his political aims are global. He wants to return the world to the middle ages one country at a time, starting with Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Palestein but continuing on to Andaloucia (Spain), Africa etc.
Some of the anti-globalists are anti-democratic tin pot nationalists who want to declare independence for their little fragment of a nation state so that they have a better chance of getting power themselves.
Other 'anti-globalists' are tin-pot union leaders looking for some form of protectionism that will discriminate against goods produced by foreign workers.
Most of the 'anti-globalists' are not protesting about the process of globalisation however but the limited form in which it is taking place. As they see it the West is busy exporting the working practices and political structures of the nineteenth century while trying to deter democratization that might threaten Western interests.
As a political critique it was far more accurate in the 1970s than today. The list of dictators supported by the West and in particular the US is very long. The US subverted democratic governments in Chile and the Congo and replaced them with mass murderers.
US administration policy since the cold war, and in particular since the Clinton administration has been to end support for most of the worst regimes. Marcos, Pinochet, Suharto and the rest have been consigned to the dustbin of history. It is therefore somewhat strange to start an unfocused 'the US can do no right' movement at this time. There are several areas where the US is standing on the wrong side of history, proping up the gulf dictatorships for example, however US foreign policy is much reformed.
The biggest problem of globalism is ex-patriate meddling in their former home countries, particularly in the second and third generations. Sean Connery's calls for an independent Scotland made from a Spanish golf course are ridiculous and harmless enough. The funding of the IRA by Irish Americans or the Sikh separatists in India by Bradford shopkeepers was not. The problem with ex-patriates is that they can believe all the propaganda they like, they can fund all the murder they like and live in perfect safety far from the consequences of their meddling.
The funding of Israeli settlements by US Jews and the funding of extreemist Madrasah schools in Pakistan by Saudis are just another example of a type of meddling from a long distance that is hated by the majority in the countries that are subjected to it.
Unfortunately Conservatives appear unable to think once about killing people.
It was not a liberal who wrote 'war is diplomacy by other means'. The easiest thing to do is to start a war, the hardest is to stop one.
If you want to see what pig headed aggression achieves look at the result of Sharon's policies. Since taking power he has ordered the assasination of almost a hundred Palestinians. As a direct result the Palestinians are now assasinating cabinet ministers.
Hiding behind the UN security council is futile. The US and the UK have been responsible for rejecting any proposed changes to the blockade.
While the US position has some justification, pretending that the US is not the principle mover in the matter is the type of behaviour that discredits the US abroad.
The concern I have is that by insisting on continuing the blockade long after it has proved to be failure the US has made it much harder to get the security council to approve future actions.
The UN is very valuable tool for US foreign policy. It is the only organization that can deflect the criticism of the US acting as a rogue superpower, unaccountable to any authority.
Unfortunately some of the US right do not like the UN because they dislike the idea of any fetters on US power. So they have picked stupid quarrels with the UN and severely weakened US influence.
While it my make the US right feel good to wave their flags in other countries faces it is not the type of behvaiour they tollerate when other countries engage in it. The same senators that blocked payment of US dues to the UN lathered themselves up into a fury of self-righeous indignation when they lost their seat on the human rights panel to France. The statements made at the time were entirely ignorant of the fact that the term 'human rights' actually orginated in France based on the work of Voltaire, Rousseaux etc. Also conveniently ignored was the fact that the seats on the commissions are allocated geographically, the US was not eligible for the Africa seat taken by Sudan.
Desert storm was a success largely because the US took great care to operate behind the shield of UN resolutions. Even Bin Laden has not complained about the US driving Saddam out of Kewait, his complaint is that the troops remained in Saudi where they are propping up the regime against internal dissent.
The US gives over $5 billion a year to Israel in aid. Together with the $2 billion given to Egypt for signing the camp David accords that is over half the US aid budget.
This largess is given to a country whose idea opf promoting peace is to take land from the Palestinians to build 'settlements' that are intended to make their occupation permanent and whose thanks to the US is for their Prime Minister to cal President Bush 'an appeaser'.
aparently bin laden NEVER spoke of the palestinean/israeli conflict before september 11th
The statement is untrue. The declaration of war against the US issued by Bin Laden many years ago mentions Israel. Zawhiri, the man somewhat inaccurately refered to as Bin Laden's 'number 2' is actually the head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad who murdered Saddat for signing the camp David agreement. Israel has been the primary cause for Islamic Jihad for 20 years. Al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad have essentially been the same organization since Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan.
There is only one response that Sharon should be making at this time 'How can we help'. Instead Sharon ordered an invasion of the West Bank on the 12th September and the assasination of 20 odd Palestinians - causing the deths of another 40 civilians who were killed by the bombs planted to kill the terrorists. The fact that Sharon has gone out of his way to incite more violence during the time of America's need is absolutely dispicable.
Sharon is not a friend of the US.
Don't be a typical slashdotter, read the whole of my original statement, not just the portion you selectively quote.
Last I heard they were doing bespoke kernel design. There are plenty of faculty who work on O/S related research, but there is a huge difference between designing a component and designing a complete O/S
Escaped encodings are fragile. Backwards compatibility with SGML was a major requirement for XML. DTDs are obsolete and have been replaced by schema.
If you don't like the result, tough.
That means nothing, I never bothered to get an Athena account when I was at MIT except for a brief period when I had a student who I could not give a lab account to. LCS and AI accounts frequently have bizare names.
However an assistant to the lab director should be able to name him, there are only two labs in the building after all and both labs have only one director. The position of 'assistant' to the director is secretarial.
There was no such project when I was at the lab. Some of the project bears a passing resemblance to Oxygen, however that has long since been public.
There have been several O/S developed in the building. None was developed in secret. A secret project could not get students to work on it.
There have been non-public projects going on in the building. However those are effectively long term consulting for various (military) agencies.
An O/S is simply too large a project to be performed as a secret project. It is a packaging job, there is absolutely no value in an O/S developed in absolute secrecy.
There is no-one on the faculty who comes to mind as a specialist in O/S research. There are plenty who have made significant contributions to specific areas of O/S design. ITS, Multics, Genera were all open collaborative efforts.
Another point that leads me to doubt the story is the absence of any mention of security which has been the principle O/S related interest for the building in recent years.
Finally, LCS is not in the habit of announcing its projects in obscurantist web journals.
The whole thing smells bad. It is just not the way the lab has ever worked. The idea is to get your ideas 'stolen', that is another word for 'used'. If you don't want to share your ideas then join the NSA
The reason why XML uses the notation it does is that it is somewhat more robust. The problem with S-Expressions is that one misplaced parenthesis can cause the entire semantics of the expression to be changed, or as we computer scientists say 'be fucked beyond recognition'.
Most major advances in computing are not major advances in computer science. There was absolutely nothing original in C, it was merely a version of B with a few additional features added back from BCPL which was itself merely a subset of CPL which was merely a revision of ALGOL and so on.
Packaging counts for an awful lot.
Perhaps your opinion does not count for very much if you don't know enough about the subject you are prattling on about that you have to make such an inane statement.
SGML predated UTF by at least a decade. SGML also predated the fad for reading Chomsky in the compiler writing community. The original SGML 'standard' is more or less documentation of Goldfarb's original code (COBOL from the looks of the spec).
XML is a cleanup of SGML which removes the more demented parts of the original architecture. The DTDs are one such part.
Actually I did the first bckground images, it was not a Netscape invention.
Netscape was at the time trying to work out how to implement tables. The problem being that they were trying to parse their HTML with a yacc parser which doesn't work because SGML is not an LR(1) grammar but that was all Rob and Lou had learn't in their undergrad Comp sci compilers course.
Frames might have been received with more enthusiasm by the rest of the Web community if the proposal for the standard had not been delivered in the manner of the Japaneese declaration of war prior to Pearl Harbour. By the time the spec had finished scrolling off the fax machine Netscape had already released the new browser.