Let's start counting how many countries China has invaded since the present government got control in 1949, and then count how many countries the US has invaded since the same year....
Uh, oh, maybe that's why the rest of the world is a bit worried about the US keeping a hegemony in areas such as this.
And exactly what IS China doing to "democratic Taiwan" (FYI, Taiwan was until few years ago controlled by the military, and still isn't exactly a model of multi party representative democracy, though at least they allow more than one party to take part in elections now)? Yes, they are not on happy terms, but would the US be happy if a state, say California, broke away from the Union, and proceeded to insist that it was the rightful USA, armed itself to the teeth, and made it clear to anyone who cared to ask that it would very much like to take over?
I'm not saying I like the current government of China - I don't. But with regards to Taiwan, Taiwan has through most of it's history been extremely confrontational considering that the Chinese government still see them more or less as an occupation force occupying a Chinese province. It's not exactly a great way of ensuring stability.
As for firewalling an entire continent - look at a bloody map. China is far from a continent. Yes, the firewalling is bad, but as for being "infected" by ideas like ownership, think again. If you spoke of China pre Deng Xiaoping, then yes, probably. But China started embracing limited market economy in the 80's, and has a quite large group of people that own significant amounts of property and shares.
As for equality - what equality? The US grant equal legal rights, but thanks to inheritance and tax legislation, it certainly doesn't grant equal opportunity, unless you believe the reason the percentage of kids who end up going to great schools and getting great jobs is so much higher from rich families than poor is that poor people are stupid. I certainly hope that you're not that stupid.
China certainly has a class based society too (soo much for being "communist" - and FYI, a state can't be communist, that's a contradiction in terms), but if you're going to extoll the virtues of the US government over China at least try to choose arguments that can't equally well be used against the US.
Media control and censorship is a good one - I agree with you there.
One thing that has always interested me though, is WHO cares about political oppression. Fact is, for ordinary people in developing countries, whether or not they can elect their own government is much less interesting than whether or not they get food on the table. The reason you're seeing little opposition in China is that the opposition is relatively confined to students and the urban population, who can afford to spend time on it. That's a pattern that is common. As long as the current government is delivering economic growth at a far higher rate than most democratic regimes, they'll sit safely, at least until the Chinese population get wealthy enough that political freedom would make a difference.
As for sharing technology, what makes you think China needs European technology to achieve this? Russia has had GLONASS up and running for a decade. You don't exactly need cutting edge technology to do this. And it's well documented that China has been getting a LOT of help from Russia on their space program - the capsule they're going to use for their first manned mission is a modified Soyuz design, for instance.
Newsflash, China's space program is way more aggressive than Europe's - if they wanted to get a satellite up just to block the frequencies, they would likely have done so long ago.
I think China has more to gain from cooperation in this case - joint control with Europe will 1) mean that China actually has a say in whether or not the system gets shut down instead of having to just accept whatever Europe does, 2) means that Europe is a lot less likely to be able to give in to US pressure to shut the system down whenever the US feels like another illegal invasion.
Europe has no reason to be directly concerned about a US invasion, no. But Europe has every reason to fear US invasions or coup attempts, or just sanctions again, countries the EU has no interest in destabilisation of. In that case, anything that may counteract the US will lessen the chance of the US acting in the first place or the impact of US actions in the case they choose what to do.
You yourself say that any alternative to GPS is a major threat to the US. If that is the case, then NOT having an alternative to GPS is a major threat for everyone else.
Face it, most of the world is worried about lunatics like Bush being in charge of a war machine that is yearly being funded as much as the next 25 countries, especially given the long range of wars, invasions and coups the US has started, staged or supported over the last few decades - including several actions in clear violation of international law (at least one of which the US was convicted of - mining harbours that had civilian traffic in Nicaragua), and several that involved the overthrow of democratically elected governments (Chile and Indonesia to name two).
If people worldwide are being threatened, I for one support any measure that will make it easier for people to defend themselves against US aggression.
In which case the spammer will likely find himself in front of a crown court with a jury that like spam so much they wish they could have used the death penalty... The unlimited part is what's interesting...
What "convenience in size"? Solid state storage is nowhere near achieving the densities of hard disks. I also doubt they provide an energy consumption advantage, especially if you use DRAM based solid state storage solutions (which, btw. are usually delivered in the form of large rack mounted boxes full of DIMMs with a tiny little corner occupied with a harddisk used to dump the data to if the box switches to UPS or for other reason may soon loose power).
Sure, they may eventuelly catch up, but the attractive part of solid state storage devices today is access speeds, not size or energy consumption.
That said, access speeds can be adressed by striping (unless latency is a big issue) over a large number of disks, as you usually have big data sets if you need high IO throughput (if not, just cache everything in RAM...).
However, IO bandwidth of typical servers is low, and you'll often find that the problem isn't pure disk bandwidth, but making sure you don't have IO bottlenecks throughout your installation (everywhere from bus, to networking infrastructure, to good enough storage controllers). Servers these days are usually optimized for processing power, not IO - and that even goes for lots of servers being sold as file servers...
You can easily buy bandwidth in the sub $1 pr gigabyte when buying bandwidth per gigabyte transferred to a colo. If you need to lease physical lines to your office, the cost may end up a bit higher. $41 per GB sounds like someone has been smoking crack.
The reason there's a gap for your DSL, though, is exactly as you mention - that most users only utilize a fraction, so you're only paying for the average amount transferred per user plus some contingency.
All they currently need to do is ask for SOA or NS records instead of A records, and fail if they don't get SOA or NS records, or if they get a failure when asking the delegated server (when there is one)
Ah, after reading your documentation, I realised that the explanation you give is wrong.
What the patch does is saying that if I query server Foo, running this version of Bind, and Foo has to go and ask Bar about it, Foo will only consider delegation data from Bar, not other resources.
So if Bar sends NS and SOA records back, all is well, and Foo happily tries to ask the delegated servers to resolve the name. If Bar sends an A record back, Foo will ignore it, and report a failure to the client.
Problem with this is that if it gets widespread, Verisign might decide to serve these A records from other nameservers and add SOA and NS records for all the unregistered names as well, essentially fully delegating the names.
The end result of that would be even more bandwidth wasted.
How will this help? Verisign is hardly going to be running installing that software on the.com DNS servers, now, are they? And if another server tries to look up a.com name, it will first either ask the root servers for the "com" servers or pull it from a cache. It will then ask the.com DNS servers for "some-nonexistant-name.com", and the.com DNS server will happily give it the A record in question back.
From the point of view of the clients resolver, wildcard records doesn't exist.
SBC have two reasons to fight this: Customers want to be able to use P2P, regardless of whether it's legal or not, AND it will cost SBC a lot if they keep having to spend resources on dealing with RIAA requests all the time. If they make it hard for the RIAA now, it can only be a PR win for them at the same time as it might make RIAA decide it's better to concentrate their efforts elsewhere. Also, if SBC had cooperated now, you can be the RIAA will start pushing for fun stuff like mandatory log retention etc. to make it easier for them to gather evidence. No ISP in their right mind would like to have something like that forced down their throats.
No, they don't KNOW it's a problem. It's far from obvious that the interference from consumer electronics would cause these problems. Presumably most of the electronics in a plane is pretty well shielded to start with, or it would interfere with eachother. I would hope the systems in a plane is better shielded than your average consumer electronics gadget. Yet consumers see relatively few interference problems.
I for one would love to know why a plane, where there should be every incentive to shield the systems properly, seem to be more likely to be disrupted by (to lift stuff from the article) an electronic dictionary - a gadget that in most incarnations aren't exactly high powered.
And if it is so easy to disrupt airplane systems this way, WHY am I allowed to bring electronic gadgets aboard a plane, but not tweezers (ooh, look a shiny sharp object, he's probably planning to jam it in the pilots eyes) or other objects that would be no competition for the plastic knives served with the in flight food when it comes to sharpness.
If an electronic dictionary can really seriously interfere with their systems, imagine what a reasonably powerful tunable intentional transmitter could achieve.
Why do you assume all RAID systems have some single point of failure? Ever locked at IBM's ESS/Shark? Multiple power supplies. Two independent AIX servers acting as storage controllers. At least two separate bays of SCSI or fibrechannel controller cards (if you connect your server to both bays, you can hotswap controllers in one of the bays without taking your system offline). A large number of hot swappable disks, raid'ed. Both AIX servers can access all drives, and will take over all access if one AIX server fails.
And to guard you against catastrophic failures of the entire ESS it can replicate the entire dataset over fiber to a second ESS in a different location.
It's all a question of what price you're willing to pay.
Caldera bought the SCO Server Software and Professional Services division and merged it into Caldera, and renamed itself SCO Group. The remainder of SCO renamed itself Tarantella. So quite a few SCO employes are part of the merged SCO Group. You're right that referring to it as Santa Cruz Operation is misleading though, since neither of the parts of the original SCO are called that anymore.
I sort of agree with you, but presumably it IS easier to change jobs than moving to a different country. Usually at least.
I'd suggest thought, that it's too early to start blacklisting SCO employees - the job market is tough, and many people at SCO who may want to leave might not have much option (not everyone have enough savings to take the chance of quitting in this job climate). So instead, I'd think it would be more productive to ENCOURAGE disgruntled SCO people that don't agree with their management to apply. Make it easy for the remaining good guys at SCO to jump ship before they're overrun by the rats...
My strategy for the Cold War would have been to back up democratically elected regimes, such as Allendes, with massive economical aid if they were willing to turn their back to and limit trade with dicatorships. However, the US foreign policy was much more led by protecting the interests of US companies abroad. For instance, the US outrage against Castro came mostly from the nationalisation of various industries which led to large losses from the US companies that had cosied up to the previous, US friendly, dicator Batista.
If the US instead of isolating Castro had offered to accept that and help the Cuban economy, or negotiated with Castro, he would have been a lot less likely to turn to the Soviets for help - while there were certainly Soviet friendly elements in Castro's revolutionary movement, he himself weren't particularly radical until it became a necessity for survival.
Much the same was the case before the CIA supported coup in Indonesia in the 60's, where the democratically elected leader was turning more and more towards the Soviet Union for help after it became increasingly clear that he was unpopular with the US, with the result that he became even more unpopular and the CIA decided it was safest to get rid of him.
Many of the dictatorships that plagued the cold war era could have been avoided if the US was less concerned about the welfare of US companies, and more concerned about supporting democracy, and it would have made things much tougher for the Soviet Union - the steady stream of new dirty tactics by the US strengthened support for the Soviet Union in a wide range of rebel movements worldwide as it allowed the Soviet Union to maintain an image as supporting the underdogs and the poor with many people despite it's appalling human rights record.
Not to mention how much easier it would be to simply have informers in place. You don't need realtime information to decide whether or not to imprison or kill someone. Particularly not when that realtime information is stats input by someone that might possibly not like you. You need someone to talk to people and listen in on conversations.
Saying this system was a "Big brother" like system is like saying that e-mail is a Big brother like system because it can help information flow to an authoritarian system.
Somone have to provide the data - it's not as if this system was collecting information automatically. If that someone is sympathetic to you, you don't NEED a Big brother system. If that someone don't like you, they're not bloody well going to snitch on themselves, so unless they don't expect you to be monitoring the data (which would be kind of stupid, considering they're sending it to you), it will do you no good without actual people on the ground feeding in the data or monitoring it.
If so, then why didn't the opposition arrange demonstrations, arrange strikes without massive CIA intervention and actually manage to keep the strikes going, and demand changes?
Fact is, Allende was democratically elected, and the opposition, even with CIA help, didn't manage to raise enough support in the population to get anywhere near overthrowing his government before they decided to start murdering innocent people.
If Allende was so bad for Chile, why couldn't the CIA stay out of it and let Chileans decide for themselves and throw him out of power?
And why did they support a fascist dictator if the goal was to "save" the Chilean people from suffering?
You try to justify it by pointing to Khmer Rouge, but "forget" that Khmer Rouge and Allende had wildly differing political platforms. You also conveniently "forget" that the "communist" Khmer Rouge was finally stopped not by the US, or any of it's cronies, but by "communist" Vietnam.
Allendes regime was different from either in that it didn't murder the opposition or anyone that ever looked like they might consider possibly opposing them, and was democratically elected. If you want to equate Allende and Pol Pot, I would submit that Mother Theresa was really Stalin in drag, and claim that it is just as plausible.
Try telling the hundreds of thousands of people that had close friends or relatives killed because of Pinochet that the coup was "necessary", and that you think the CIA and a small group of military officers, none elected officials, had a right to take that decision on behalf of the Chilean people.
If you truly believe that, then would you also support the removal of the US government if some small group, say Al Quaeda, decides that they think it is necessary to do so on behalf of the American people?
If not, then who do you think have the right to decide that it is "right" to overthrow a foreign democratically elected government?
There was also the little incident of US support for the 2002 attempted coup in Venezuela, which I do assume rattled quite a few left wing democratically elected governments.
Expansion, yes. But consider the average British person during the empire's height - were they likely to be aware of the viewpoints of other subjects of the empire outside Britain, or those officially sanctioned by the British elite, and by extension the British media of the day?
That is the point. The US is very much in a position today were only a relatively small minority of US citizens are exposed to any degree to foreign opinions of them except as digested by US media, whereas in most smaller nations that is much less likely to happen.
Poverty can do it - you'll likely find many third world nations where the majority of citizens are largely unaware of the politics of the rest of the world, but then most of these countries have little impact on the world.
Apart from the US, there are perhaps a handful of countries where the general populace are so isolated from foreign culture and viewpoints and that have anywhere near the influence on the world. Russia doesn't really apply - while powerful, it is also politically and culturally extremely influenced by a lot of surrounding countries and the West. China, possibly, given that the majority of the populace is relatively isolated from surrounding countries or any influence from the west. India certainly not - it's a melting pot of a wide variety of political and cultural influences, drawing both on the West and influence from a variety of it's neighbours.
I'm not sure how much I agree with the idea of US isolationism, but it's an intriguing idea, and superficially it would seem to explain a lot of why US opinion generally seem so completely unfazed and unaware of what happens internationally
Musharraf is still in power. It's not the CIA that's his closests friends in the US at the moment, but the elected parts of the governments.
True, the CIA was nice enough to help fund the build up of the Taliban, but it's the elected US government that continue to ignore the fact that Musharraf is a dictator in a country with a massive WMD program, an intelligence service that supports terrorists (both in Afghanistan and in Kashmir), and that would seem to embody what the US is officially against these days.
If he had failed and it looks like he was going to a strong arm Marxist with ties to the USSR could very have been the one to replace him.
First of all, Allende wouldn't have had nearly as many economical problems if it hadn't been for the massive CIA interference in the form of support for strikes etc. to help the right wing movements trying to overthrow him.
Secondly, Soviet support would have been very unlikely, as Allende was unpopular with the Soviet Union because of his commitment to democracy and freedom.
If anything, the best way to have kept Chile free would have been to support Allende so that he wouldn't have any reason to go to the Soviet Union for help, as Castro did before him
(for those who are unaware: Castro didn't start getting openly pro Soviet until well AFTER it became clear that the US would do their best to get rid of him - Castro was quite apolitical, and for a long time even withstood a lot of pressure from more radical elements in his initial government, such as Che Guevara, to radicalise the revolution, until it became clear that Soviet support was his best shot at keeping the US away.)
People may like American individuals. However I believe the original poster makes more sense if you replace "them" above with "the US government". Americans seem to keep on questioning international resentment towards the US government, despite the numerous reasons people can list that would explain why.
The support for the Pinochet coups is one of the most blatant examples, because it is not disputed that the CIA was involved - CIA people have even boasted about it in documentaries about their involvement -, and because it led to one of the most murderous and oppressive dictatorships in Latin American history.
It's far from the most serious though, but fairly typical from CIA destabilisation efforts up until destabilisation of foreign government wasn't official policy any more. The coup that plunged Indonesia into decades of military dictatorship and thus indirectly led to the genocide on East Timor (more than half a million dead) was one of the more serious ones.
They are serious because they are not only cases where US involvement have led to immense suffering, but even more so because they are cases where US involvement directly caused the overthrow of democratically elected governments to install long lived oppressive military dictatorships instead.
As opposed to how CIA and Pinochet turned Chile into a fascist wet dream?
Did you read the part of the article about how the Pinochet regime destroyed the system because they didn't like the principles of freedom and egalitarianism it was based on? Then proceeded on their quest to murder as much as possible of the opposition?
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, oh, maybe that's why the rest of the world is a bit worried about the US keeping a hegemony in areas such as this.
And exactly what IS China doing to "democratic Taiwan" (FYI, Taiwan was until few years ago controlled by the military, and still isn't exactly a model of multi party representative democracy, though at least they allow more than one party to take part in elections now)? Yes, they are not on happy terms, but would the US be happy if a state, say California, broke away from the Union, and proceeded to insist that it was the rightful USA, armed itself to the teeth, and made it clear to anyone who cared to ask that it would very much like to take over?
I'm not saying I like the current government of China - I don't. But with regards to Taiwan, Taiwan has through most of it's history been extremely confrontational considering that the Chinese government still see them more or less as an occupation force occupying a Chinese province. It's not exactly a great way of ensuring stability.
As for firewalling an entire continent - look at a bloody map. China is far from a continent. Yes, the firewalling is bad, but as for being "infected" by ideas like ownership, think again. If you spoke of China pre Deng Xiaoping, then yes, probably. But China started embracing limited market economy in the 80's, and has a quite large group of people that own significant amounts of property and shares.
As for equality - what equality? The US grant equal legal rights, but thanks to inheritance and tax legislation, it certainly doesn't grant equal opportunity, unless you believe the reason the percentage of kids who end up going to great schools and getting great jobs is so much higher from rich families than poor is that poor people are stupid. I certainly hope that you're not that stupid.
China certainly has a class based society too (soo much for being "communist" - and FYI, a state can't be communist, that's a contradiction in terms), but if you're going to extoll the virtues of the US government over China at least try to choose arguments that can't equally well be used against the US.
Media control and censorship is a good one - I agree with you there.
One thing that has always interested me though, is WHO cares about political oppression. Fact is, for ordinary people in developing countries, whether or not they can elect their own government is much less interesting than whether or not they get food on the table. The reason you're seeing little opposition in China is that the opposition is relatively confined to students and the urban population, who can afford to spend time on it. That's a pattern that is common. As long as the current government is delivering economic growth at a far higher rate than most democratic regimes, they'll sit safely, at least until the Chinese population get wealthy enough that political freedom would make a difference.
As for sharing technology, what makes you think China needs European technology to achieve this? Russia has had GLONASS up and running for a decade. You don't exactly need cutting edge technology to do this. And it's well documented that China has been getting a LOT of help from Russia on their space program - the capsule they're going to use for their first manned mission is a modified Soyuz design, for instance.
I think China has more to gain from cooperation in this case - joint control with Europe will 1) mean that China actually has a say in whether or not the system gets shut down instead of having to just accept whatever Europe does, 2) means that Europe is a lot less likely to be able to give in to US pressure to shut the system down whenever the US feels like another illegal invasion.
You yourself say that any alternative to GPS is a major threat to the US. If that is the case, then NOT having an alternative to GPS is a major threat for everyone else.
Face it, most of the world is worried about lunatics like Bush being in charge of a war machine that is yearly being funded as much as the next 25 countries, especially given the long range of wars, invasions and coups the US has started, staged or supported over the last few decades - including several actions in clear violation of international law (at least one of which the US was convicted of - mining harbours that had civilian traffic in Nicaragua), and several that involved the overthrow of democratically elected governments (Chile and Indonesia to name two).
If people worldwide are being threatened, I for one support any measure that will make it easier for people to defend themselves against US aggression.
In which case the spammer will likely find himself in front of a crown court with a jury that like spam so much they wish they could have used the death penalty... The unlimited part is what's interesting...
Sure, they may eventuelly catch up, but the attractive part of solid state storage devices today is access speeds, not size or energy consumption.
That said, access speeds can be adressed by striping (unless latency is a big issue) over a large number of disks, as you usually have big data sets if you need high IO throughput (if not, just cache everything in RAM...).
However, IO bandwidth of typical servers is low, and you'll often find that the problem isn't pure disk bandwidth, but making sure you don't have IO bottlenecks throughout your installation (everywhere from bus, to networking infrastructure, to good enough storage controllers). Servers these days are usually optimized for processing power, not IO - and that even goes for lots of servers being sold as file servers...
You can easily buy bandwidth in the sub $1 pr gigabyte when buying bandwidth per gigabyte transferred to a colo. If you need to lease physical lines to your office, the cost may end up a bit higher. $41 per GB sounds like someone has been smoking crack.
The reason there's a gap for your DSL, though, is exactly as you mention - that most users only utilize a fraction, so you're only paying for the average amount transferred per user plus some contingency.
All they currently need to do is ask for SOA or NS records instead of A records, and fail if they don't get SOA or NS records, or if they get a failure when asking the delegated server (when there is one)
What the patch does is saying that if I query server Foo, running this version of Bind, and Foo has to go and ask Bar about it, Foo will only consider delegation data from Bar, not other resources.
So if Bar sends NS and SOA records back, all is well, and Foo happily tries to ask the delegated servers to resolve the name. If Bar sends an A record back, Foo will ignore it, and report a failure to the client.
Problem with this is that if it gets widespread, Verisign might decide to serve these A records from other nameservers and add SOA and NS records for all the unregistered names as well, essentially fully delegating the names.
The end result of that would be even more bandwidth wasted.
From the point of view of the clients resolver, wildcard records doesn't exist.
SBC have two reasons to fight this: Customers want to be able to use P2P, regardless of whether it's legal or not, AND it will cost SBC a lot if they keep having to spend resources on dealing with RIAA requests all the time. If they make it hard for the RIAA now, it can only be a PR win for them at the same time as it might make RIAA decide it's better to concentrate their efforts elsewhere. Also, if SBC had cooperated now, you can be the RIAA will start pushing for fun stuff like mandatory log retention etc. to make it easier for them to gather evidence. No ISP in their right mind would like to have something like that forced down their throats.
I for one would love to know why a plane, where there should be every incentive to shield the systems properly, seem to be more likely to be disrupted by (to lift stuff from the article) an electronic dictionary - a gadget that in most incarnations aren't exactly high powered.
And if it is so easy to disrupt airplane systems this way, WHY am I allowed to bring electronic gadgets aboard a plane, but not tweezers (ooh, look a shiny sharp object, he's probably planning to jam it in the pilots eyes) or other objects that would be no competition for the plastic knives served with the in flight food when it comes to sharpness.
If an electronic dictionary can really seriously interfere with their systems, imagine what a reasonably powerful tunable intentional transmitter could achieve.
Of course we all produce CO2...
Maybe he thought your credit rating wouldn't let him get away with much else :-)
And to guard you against catastrophic failures of the entire ESS it can replicate the entire dataset over fiber to a second ESS in a different location.
It's all a question of what price you're willing to pay.
Caldera bought the SCO Server Software and Professional Services division and merged it into Caldera, and renamed itself SCO Group. The remainder of SCO renamed itself Tarantella. So quite a few SCO employes are part of the merged SCO Group. You're right that referring to it as Santa Cruz Operation is misleading though, since neither of the parts of the original SCO are called that anymore.
I'd suggest thought, that it's too early to start blacklisting SCO employees - the job market is tough, and many people at SCO who may want to leave might not have much option (not everyone have enough savings to take the chance of quitting in this job climate). So instead, I'd think it would be more productive to ENCOURAGE disgruntled SCO people that don't agree with their management to apply. Make it easy for the remaining good guys at SCO to jump ship before they're overrun by the rats...
If the US instead of isolating Castro had offered to accept that and help the Cuban economy, or negotiated with Castro, he would have been a lot less likely to turn to the Soviets for help - while there were certainly Soviet friendly elements in Castro's revolutionary movement, he himself weren't particularly radical until it became a necessity for survival.
Much the same was the case before the CIA supported coup in Indonesia in the 60's, where the democratically elected leader was turning more and more towards the Soviet Union for help after it became increasingly clear that he was unpopular with the US, with the result that he became even more unpopular and the CIA decided it was safest to get rid of him.
Many of the dictatorships that plagued the cold war era could have been avoided if the US was less concerned about the welfare of US companies, and more concerned about supporting democracy, and it would have made things much tougher for the Soviet Union - the steady stream of new dirty tactics by the US strengthened support for the Soviet Union in a wide range of rebel movements worldwide as it allowed the Soviet Union to maintain an image as supporting the underdogs and the poor with many people despite it's appalling human rights record.
Saying this system was a "Big brother" like system is like saying that e-mail is a Big brother like system because it can help information flow to an authoritarian system.
Somone have to provide the data - it's not as if this system was collecting information automatically. If that someone is sympathetic to you, you don't NEED a Big brother system. If that someone don't like you, they're not bloody well going to snitch on themselves, so unless they don't expect you to be monitoring the data (which would be kind of stupid, considering they're sending it to you), it will do you no good without actual people on the ground feeding in the data or monitoring it.
This is no more Big brother than the internet is.
If so, then why didn't the opposition arrange demonstrations, arrange strikes without massive CIA intervention and actually manage to keep the strikes going, and demand changes?
Fact is, Allende was democratically elected, and the opposition, even with CIA help, didn't manage to raise enough support in the population to get anywhere near overthrowing his government before they decided to start murdering innocent people.
If Allende was so bad for Chile, why couldn't the CIA stay out of it and let Chileans decide for themselves and throw him out of power?
And why did they support a fascist dictator if the goal was to "save" the Chilean people from suffering?
You try to justify it by pointing to Khmer Rouge, but "forget" that Khmer Rouge and Allende had wildly differing political platforms. You also conveniently "forget" that the "communist" Khmer Rouge was finally stopped not by the US, or any of it's cronies, but by "communist" Vietnam.
Allendes regime was different from either in that it didn't murder the opposition or anyone that ever looked like they might consider possibly opposing them, and was democratically elected. If you want to equate Allende and Pol Pot, I would submit that Mother Theresa was really Stalin in drag, and claim that it is just as plausible.
Try telling the hundreds of thousands of people that had close friends or relatives killed because of Pinochet that the coup was "necessary", and that you think the CIA and a small group of military officers, none elected officials, had a right to take that decision on behalf of the Chilean people.
If you truly believe that, then would you also support the removal of the US government if some small group, say Al Quaeda, decides that they think it is necessary to do so on behalf of the American people?
If not, then who do you think have the right to decide that it is "right" to overthrow a foreign democratically elected government?
There was also the little incident of US support for the 2002 attempted coup in Venezuela, which I do assume rattled quite a few left wing democratically elected governments.
That is the point. The US is very much in a position today were only a relatively small minority of US citizens are exposed to any degree to foreign opinions of them except as digested by US media, whereas in most smaller nations that is much less likely to happen.
Poverty can do it - you'll likely find many third world nations where the majority of citizens are largely unaware of the politics of the rest of the world, but then most of these countries have little impact on the world.
Apart from the US, there are perhaps a handful of countries where the general populace are so isolated from foreign culture and viewpoints and that have anywhere near the influence on the world. Russia doesn't really apply - while powerful, it is also politically and culturally extremely influenced by a lot of surrounding countries and the West. China, possibly, given that the majority of the populace is relatively isolated from surrounding countries or any influence from the west. India certainly not - it's a melting pot of a wide variety of political and cultural influences, drawing both on the West and influence from a variety of it's neighbours.
I'm not sure how much I agree with the idea of US isolationism, but it's an intriguing idea, and superficially it would seem to explain a lot of why US opinion generally seem so completely unfazed and unaware of what happens internationally
Musharraf is still in power. It's not the CIA that's his closests friends in the US at the moment, but the elected parts of the governments.
True, the CIA was nice enough to help fund the build up of the Taliban, but it's the elected US government that continue to ignore the fact that Musharraf is a dictator in a country with a massive WMD program, an intelligence service that supports terrorists (both in Afghanistan and in Kashmir), and that would seem to embody what the US is officially against these days.
First of all, Allende wouldn't have had nearly as many economical problems if it hadn't been for the massive CIA interference in the form of support for strikes etc. to help the right wing movements trying to overthrow him.
Secondly, Soviet support would have been very unlikely, as Allende was unpopular with the Soviet Union because of his commitment to democracy and freedom.
If anything, the best way to have kept Chile free would have been to support Allende so that he wouldn't have any reason to go to the Soviet Union for help, as Castro did before him
(for those who are unaware: Castro didn't start getting openly pro Soviet until well AFTER it became clear that the US would do their best to get rid of him - Castro was quite apolitical, and for a long time even withstood a lot of pressure from more radical elements in his initial government, such as Che Guevara, to radicalise the revolution, until it became clear that Soviet support was his best shot at keeping the US away.)
The support for the Pinochet coups is one of the most blatant examples, because it is not disputed that the CIA was involved - CIA people have even boasted about it in documentaries about their involvement -, and because it led to one of the most murderous and oppressive dictatorships in Latin American history.
It's far from the most serious though, but fairly typical from CIA destabilisation efforts up until destabilisation of foreign government wasn't official policy any more. The coup that plunged Indonesia into decades of military dictatorship and thus indirectly led to the genocide on East Timor (more than half a million dead) was one of the more serious ones.
They are serious because they are not only cases where US involvement have led to immense suffering, but even more so because they are cases where US involvement directly caused the overthrow of democratically elected governments to install long lived oppressive military dictatorships instead.
Did you read the part of the article about how the Pinochet regime destroyed the system because they didn't like the principles of freedom and egalitarianism it was based on? Then proceeded on their quest to murder as much as possible of the opposition?