There were substantial responses- not wholesale invasions, so they had little effect, and possibly made things worse.
In response to the bombings of the WTC and African Embassies, the US funded multiple assasination attempts against Osama bin Laden and his friends.
They also launched airstrikes and cruise missile attacks at him (including one on the night of Clinton's impeachment, which killed nothing but innocent civilians). The USS Cole attack was in self-defense, since it had been launching those missiles. The Sept.11 airplane attacks were probably invented as a way to duplicate the US's cruise-missiles on the cheap.
Hitler in Europe or anywhere, we'd be there dying to stop him.
You mean like the Russians and British did? For each US soldier killed in WW2, 2 British and 50 Russian ones died.
Those two countries contained & attritted Germany so that the US could spend a few years ramping up for a triumphant knockout punch. America paid in dollars, not blood.
So, technically, the U.S. government is wrong. It's "official acknowledgements" don't change the truth. That "police action" in Vietnam was thousands of times more violent and costly than the 1991 Iraq conflict.
Conversely, there is no such thing as a "War on Terrorism" or a "War on Drugs", whatever the government says.
It might be entrapment, but its not as if that is illegal- cops do it all the time. What I mean is, American police can get away with committing the English definition of "entrapment", if they don't meet the strict legal definition of entrapment.
Basically, when they take you to court, the prosecutors have an additional burden to show that you had a pre-existing inclination to commit the crime, before the undercover cops spoke with you. That's not very hard if they can find evidence of prior violations when searching your home & computer after the arrest.
If cops want to, they can use entrapment to get you arrested and have some search warrants made. If fruits of those searches are enough to indict you, then the District Attorney can completely ignore the entrapped offense, and just focus on the earlier violations.
Fortunately for you, today's undercover cops aren't interested in puny busts like this. Someday that could change...
Spliced it? A blatant hardware mod like that is begging to be detected. These days we have off the shelf solutions.
Probably not illegal, only grounds for termination. (Won't stop hyperactive prosecutors from going after you if your ex-boss complains enough, though. This is America, after all)
You're not safe at all. The sysadmin owns the computer you're running ssh on; he can install a modified ssh to log keys elsewhere. Even if you run your own ssh executable from a floppy too, he can decide to log all removable media-accesses or whatever else he wants. (In many situations, sysadmins should lock down employee's computers so that only a select list of approved programs is executable)
The ONLY way to run a safe encrypted session from someone else's computer is to use a constantly-expiring key. Like one generated by a smartcard with an LCD readout. (That is the standard used by many big high-tech corporations)
Even if you do this, you're still not 100% secure. They can't log your ssh key and use it later, but if the ssh executable on the box is trojaned, it could read data during your session, and even send extra data without your knowledge (prehaps even enough to change your password, or install a security hole on your remote machine).
Running your own ssh off of a floppy might help, but that's STILL not immune to corruption. You have no guarantee that the operating system is really running the code you asked for. I could imagine installing a special check in the executable loader that, when told to run "a:/putty.exe", secretly calls up a bugged version.
Trust no one!
I expect that in the future, people whose data is very important (and those who think it is) will carry powerful PDAs to use when connecting to their network from an untrusted site (which will include all "Internet Cafes" and airport/hotel workspaces). They'll plug into TCP via USB or RJ45 or something, because only if you have physical control over the encrypting application can you trust it.
(But then, you also have to watch for high-resolution ceiling cameras monitoring your stylus-strokes...)
I got a logitech optical mouse with the extra blue LED- and I hated it! Why? Two reasons: it increases the device's power draw for no good effect, and as a non-red light, it ruins your night-vision if its plugged in in a dark room (the underside light dims when not in use, but not the tail-light). That thing is bright!
Some Microsoft mice also have a useless extra light on their rear, but at least its red, and at least its a simple ovoid shape, and not a sharply defined logo.
"reason to believe that a piece of software was going to Iran"
And do you have any reason to belive that someone in Iran or North Korea or Taliban-controlled Afganistan will download anything? No, you absolutely don't. In fact, given the state of their technology, its awesomely unlikely that they ever will.
True, maybe kernel.org could implement a reverse ip lookup system to check for this, but it would be easily surpassed (few users in an impoverished rogue state will have real ip addresses). But since there's no penalty unless you know where the downloader is, then why would they ever want to check? That would be consistent with other legal protection policies used by Linux developers- for instance, they never check to see if they're violating patents, because that puts them at risk of greater legal punishment.
Maybe you're talking more about theoretical laws, and I'm discussing ones that have a prayer of ever being enforced. US Congressmen went to Iraq 2 months ago, and they spent money while there. That's "exporting a good". But we know they'll never be arrested for it.
US citizens are occasionally fined (not arrested) for traffic with Iraq- the decision to do that is based on the dollar value of the goods exported. Less than $10,000 and they won't even care. The fine is typically 400% or 500% of the cost of the goods. Now, what's the market price of the source code to any piece of free software source code?
Zero dollars. "I'll get out my checkbook, officer!"
For any major game cartridge, there are millions and millions of people with a license to play it: every one of the original customers. And its these people, drawn by nostalgia, who will most enjoy playing the emulated version (rather than trying to repair their clunky old 8-bit Nintendo hardware)
Software publishers want to have it both ways: you're not buying a copy of the game, but a license to it, which they can restrict in arbitrary ways. And yet they desire the licenses to be bound to the physical hardware, so that they can re-release the same software for newer, smaller platforms every decade.
: it is illegal for anyone in a bunch of countries the US has decreed sufficiently bad (North Korea, Iraq, Iran, etc.) to download linux off a US server.
Nope. Software with much more than 64 bits of encryption is forbidden, but Linux doesn't include that yet, does it?
And if you fix a security flaw in linux, you can't document what you did, but you can still pass out the uncommented code.
But the point still stands that one cannot write something that is merely an application and call it an 'OS Replacement'.
Its possible for a piece of software to be simultaneously both an application and an OS. Look at something like User-Mode Linux. It's a variant of Linux, which is undeniably an operating system. The same Linux interface is provided to programs running on top of it, yet you ran it within some other operating system- like an application.
There are many other examples, not all of them perfect like that. Java environments, VMware. Microsoft Windows(tm) prior to 1995 was a DOS application, and yet already an OS for other programs in most ways.
Microsoft was so scared by Netscape's 1998 popularity because they were afraid someone would implement an OS ontop of their OS, leading to Windows(tm) becoming invisible to the users. (Mozilla is somewhat still trying this today)
Its not cheating to implement your new operating system on top of another one- its a way to conserve resources early on. All OSes have a top and bottom part- the interfaces to the applications to run on it, and the hardware it runs on. For a newly developed OS (or OS replacement) like this, the interesting part is the stuff that's visible to programs running on it, not how it detects and allocates hardware.
If it becomes popular running on top of Microsoft Windows(tm), then eventually some coders can try to port it to Linux, or extend it out into a full hardware-controlling OS, or something.
(The word "Operating System" is nearly content-free. Arguing about something meeting the definition of "OS" is fruitless. "System" can mean anything, and the fact that people can use it to work tells you it "Operates". If you take a restrictive definition of OS from some computer-science disciplines, then its only a bootup/hardware abstraction layer. If you listen to RMS, then its "everything you need to use your computer". The reality can be in between.)
He's asking for a more balanced, flexible solution than a big boolean "Install Flash (yes/no)".
Two big problems with your "just don't install it advice"
0. If Flash isn't installed, then every time mozilla opens a page with embedded SWF files you get a dialog box "Click here to install the plugin". A painful interference, one that can happen several times per page if they are heavy on the Flash banner + Flash navbar + Flash mouseover miniad.
1. Most Flash is for ads, but some sites present their actual content in Flash (web-cartoons), and many more work it into the intro-page or navigational frame so that Flash becomes a barrier to reaching the content. In both those cases, you'd desire a toggle-switch to quickly enable/disable Flash depending on whether you need to see it at the moment. (The zap-embeds bookmarklet trick is good, but not quite optimal)
Just to give you an idea, typically something like 1 in 100 bullets fired ever effectively hits a target.
100:1 is an underestimate. In one carefully-studied conflict, there was a 700:1 mass ratio between anti-infantry munitions and the troops it killed.
You're not really disagreeing with me here, we both know that this kind of laser defense isn't appropriate against aircraft. If the IAF detect a bandit on radar, they'll want to intercept it with jets and long range air-air missiles before it ever gets into range of stationary ground defenses.
In comparison to the fighter jet or helicopters, missiles aren't expensive at all. Individual planes can cost $40,000,000 each (although US opponents would tend to use cheaper, refurbished units in the $1,500,000 range)
If you destroy a hostile MiG, the enemy takes an enormous loss (financially, not just militarily). $50,000 / $1,500,000 isn't very much.
In fact, unless US enemies get an enormous influx of aircraft, lasers would never be a cost effective way to destroy planes (unless it is better for other reasons, like range, ROF, or Pk. But we're just looking at price). Missiles already exist today, they're a known technology. To buy more of them, you basically pay per missile.
Lasers will need $50,000,000+ worth of R&D and factory spin-up costs before they can start to deploy. For that outlay you could get lots more missiles that are known to work against all concievable threat aircraft (our threats don't have much R&D budget to improve the survivablity of their craft, so old-reliables will continue to work)
A more extreme form of your argument would be to claim that infantry should carry laser weapons, to conserve bullets. That shows even more strongly that compared to their targets, the price of ammunition rarely matters.
Ben & Jerrys is a Vermont company- where you incorporate determines the laws that applies to your company. Depending on how they plan to do business, many corporations (if they don't just file where their headquarters is) will choose to get a Nevada or New Jersey corporate charter, because each has a different set of very advantageous laws.
The corporate law in Vermont is different, however. Vermont is the only state where corporations have a greatly reduced obligation to their shareholders. Normally a corp's board or CEO can be sued if he acts against the financial interests of the stockholders. However, Vermont companies are allowed to balance shareholder responsibility against the public welfare.
Thus, Vermont is an attractive state for a company whose image focuses on social issues.
Is there such a thing as a GPLed demo of a commercial program? I've never heard of one, unless you count companies (id software and mySql) who release old versions of their code as GPL. Or maybe there's things like Sourceforge and TuxRacer, where the authors all agreed to re-license their software as proprietary before adding new features (leaving the old free version as a "demo").
If you did want to release a GPL demo of code you've written and plan to later sell, that's fine. If you want to keep some features out of the free version, that's fine too. Just make sure you actually delete them, and don't just conditional it out.
(The procedure would be: take a copy of commerical program, delete the sections that should stay proprietary, then add the GPL license to the source code, and distribute it. The code you keep was never in the file at the same time as the GPL, so its absolutely fine. You don't even have to do this physically, only notionally)
And if you're distributing a GPL copy of something you wrote, then preprocessed output is OK (but rather pointless- you won't get anyone excited about working on your code that way).
The situation where distributing preprocessed or partially-compiled code is NOT ok is if you took an existing GPL program as readable source, and then added some changes. You're future distributions have to be in the same kind of source code you got it in (not obfuscated, if it wasn't already). You can make changes necessary to implementing your features, of course, but not something that's only to make it harder for others to read/modify.
If the GPL impels you to distribute source code, it must be code in the format that YOU prefer for making changes.
If someone passes out while flying a plane, the Air Force is quite willing to blow him up if it wanders near a populated area. Fighter jets with missiles ready were following Payne Stewart until he crashed, ready to protect Kansas City from his aerial assault.
(The CONUS air control still has negligible ability to locate a lost plane, but if they were to find one, there'd be little compunction about shooting down an unresponsive craft that's aiming at something expensive)
Plenty of companies hold back on selling new products that will undercut their existing sales. If I sell $200 vacumn cleaners that need replacing every 4 years, I don't want to market a new $500 model that lasts 20.
An industrial interest may choose to withhold a great new product, even if its expensive, if it will reduce their total profits.
"Speed up ending a battle and you sell some fighter jets. Speed up ending war and you lose a customer"
(I didn't say that the banned weapons were expensive either- the difference between a few kinds of bullets is minimal. In many cases, the loss of a banned weapon can spur expensive R&D into acceptable alternatives. Anthrax canisters are cheaper than atomic warheads.)
in 1899. I doubt that "military-industrial complexes" even existed
Oh yes they did. There's no such thing as "Military Industrial Complex" in formal terms of course- its no more real than a "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy". Both are amusing names that describe an emergent behavior of powerful groups: quasi-organizations that perform in a cohesive way without centralized control. (A collective unconcious)
The military has always been a profit center for nation-states. With today's technology, the wealth comes from "Defense" contracts for weapon systems. 100 years ago, it came from the prestige and position afforded to military leaders in society. (Societies that were more and more aristocratic and even feudal the further east you got into Europe).
The leaderships were built on a structure of occasional terrortorial squabbles with neighbors to enforce the insularity of their countries and strengthen their rule. The self-esteem of the Warrior-Kings and Dashing Archdukes were defined in terms of bravery in battle, and if a generation passed without a good war or two to impress their valor onto the poplace, they'd risk being discarded by a society that no longer valued them.
And that's what was happening as technology started to accelerate 150 years ago. Population density, transportation, and firearms had all advanced to the point where it could no longer be denied that a major battle was a horrible, disgusting affair that reflected poorly on all involved- skill and prowess were meaningless in the raw carnage of 10,000 opposing riflemen tearing each other to pieces through a ruined city.
It is this increasing vileness and blatant cruelty that the Geneva Convention was passed to address. (In 1864 btw- 1899 was an extension). You may think that this was a good thing- that it eased the suffering of poor soliders. And prehaps it did. But by making war more tolerable, you extend the time that it will be tolerated. That is, it is because of "Rules of War" like the Geneva Convention that it was possible for 1st world nations to wage war with frequency up until 1950.
Otherwise, the prospect of going into battle would've been that much less appealing, and even successful agressors would suffer so much in international opinion (such as Iraq suffers today) that violence would be less common.
By ameliorating the damage of war, the Geneva Protocol encouraged the fighting of them.
The IRC's noble efforts gave us another century of nationalistic bloodshed, encouraged by heads-of-state whose position as Commanders-In-Chief was legitimized by the realistic threat of war.
Lets finish up by going back to that link you provided, and reading between the lines. The only text of substance amoung the treaty boilerplate is
"abstain from the use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body"
Now, why would any army willingly surrender the use of a weapon in combat? It can't be because the weapon is ineffective; otherwise they wouldn't want it anyway. So there must be some situations when a flattenable bullet is tactically superior to a hard one.
(For example, expending more effort from the medics who have to fish out several fragments from a wound, instead of removing a whole round. This reduces enemy mobility by slowing their evacuations.)
(I shall use you as if you were a military leader of a Geneva Signatory)
So if this weapon is effective, then by willingly forgoing it you are reducing your troop's performance. They won't fight as well, and more of them will die. More of your own people will die! in exchange for the comfort of a enemy group who you've already declared is to be shot on sight.
The whole point of war should be that it is the final extreme- the breakdown of all considerate communication and diplomatic recourse. "All's fair!" But yet, even in war, to uphold a promise written hundreds of miles away, the leadership sent their own young men to death. Your own gentlemanly honor, over the lives of the little people. The Geneva Signatories applied Law even to War- conveying upon War the status of an acceptable activity.
The effect of the bullet-regulation was a cosmetic one. If it applied to both sides, then it fairly degraded both's performance and the victor was the same- so why even bother? Because it made war "cleaner". Less messy. Not so many corpses lying splattered about. More clean kills, fewer crippled survivors. A genteel bandaid covering a festering fatal wound. More proud men marching home in the avenues, fewer being dragged in ambulances. A way to keep on with the parades and speeches and memorial ceremonies twice per year, but not needing to work all year round feeding a disillusioned ghost whose body survived where his soul died.
War is horrible. No one can change that, and if humanitarianism hides that then it is lying to conceal a crime. </RANT>
That's why the white house has SAM sites and marines equipped with Stingers.
That's a silly myth. If the Whitehouse had air defense, why do you think airplanes can impudently crash into it? Sure, maybe when Bush gets scared he orders up a heavily-armed security blanket, but there's no way a man with a rocket would stop anything unless a rotary-wing gunboat starts strafing them.
And if the Whitehouse had missiles and some sensors to target with, surely the Pentagon (a target of more tactical import in a crisis) would've had something to throw at the airliner that smashed it up too.
Air-Defense wise, the District of Columbia is a tiny space. Any blip from Reagan airport turns hostile and you've got all of 2 seconds to fire on it before the Captial explodes. Even if you hit something, the wreckage will still land on its target.
I never said the Geneva made much sense, but these are its rules. Shotguns are also banned (except against buildings- whatever that means), because of the chance someone will catch a just a few pellets and survive with a wound.
And my whole point was that technology is surpassing the treaty.
Now, if you did start to target infantry with lasers, you'll be hitting them in the center of mass or limbs, not the head. As soon as the painful, burning sensation starts they'll hit the ground, and you'll probably move onto another target. Just like if you were hurling bullets at them.
But unlike bullet wounds, he's not laying there bleeding to death, he's just flaking ash from a charred hole. And maybe the rest of his skin is on fire too. The survivors of an attack like that will be just the kinds of pathetic, twisted hulk of a productive young man that the Rules of War are intended to avoid.
If you call Hikaru No Go "free", then I can show you some usenet groups with great free games and movies too!
The Toriyamaworld site is a copyright violator, just like Napster was. The fact that the book they reproduce has zero commercial prospects in the US makes their activities marginally more moral, but doesn't make them legal.
And thus, since any US missiles in silos will already have launched before being hit, the enemy may as well never target them at all. They should just concentrate on vulnerable seaboard cities to maximimze their threat.
Why isn't this +5 Funny yet? (I never seem to have mod points...)
The goal that's the same for all people is to have more children like yourself (both genetically and memetically, which includes religion). Everyone can peacefully pursue this goal for a while, and inevitably exhaust their resources. And then there's war, or starvation. ALL wars are essentially started by "young males looking for resources to attract and retain a mate".
(True, this planet has resources enough for many more humans than their already are, but no one waits until hitting the point of true exhaustion to start a war. There's a threshold of diminishing returns for your peaceful gathering operations where violently seizing your needs becomes an attractive proposition, despite the risks)
I hope some day it will be _Star Trek_ too. And I think it's plausible- trillions of people living in nonviolent harmony, distributed across the entire galaxy. Of course we might not call them human anymore, since they'd spent all day processing digital information from a small alcove aboard a giant grey cube, but that's the best future we can reasonably expect. The lives of the "Federation" just don't make sense.
It'll be a long time before the R&D cost of the defensive missile is absorbed, so they'll be much more costly for a long time. In the long run the price goes down, but its still a precision instrument (with serious maintenance and C4I infrastructure needs) in comparison to a dummy ICBM which only needs to hit the right continent. And labor is cheaper in some of these hostile-states.
Each defensive rocket will have at best Probabilty-Kill 90%, so you'll want to use more than one per incoming agressor. If the attacker is a manuverable cruise missle and not just ballistic, you'll want more. (Submarine-launched cruise missles are really a whole different problem than ICBM interception. And a harder one). Or if there's a MIRV, then that's another multiplier on the target count.
The cost advantage of the defense missiles is that they have less distance to travel, and need less metal and fuel. I can't say for sure how much that'll reduce the overall cost, though. And you'll want protectors to engage at the longest range you can (so that if one fails, you have time to fire more). The price war is no slam dunk.
Remember the Missile Commmand game? It wasn't much fun, you could never win...
More likely than wanting to really be able to neutralize an aresnal the size of Russia's, we'd just want 50 missiles on each coast that could go forth in groups of 5 against "rogue madman" warheads.
now they can hit hijacked planes with... no, it doesn't help that situation.
Oh, it might help. Assume that hijacked planes will be used to target big cities. Big cities with lots of electricity and tall buildings- it sounds like science fiction, but I can imagine a policy of installing larger versions of these things atop skyscrapes in NYC and DC to head off rogue airliners and ICBMs too.
(The scary flaw with that scheme is 4 terrorists with guns who hijack the laser and carve holes all over Manhattan. But buildings are much more resilient to laser heating than airframes are. They'd use up the fuel before killing too many people.)
Slashdot Mirror
There were substantial responses- not wholesale invasions, so they had little effect, and possibly made things worse.
In response to the bombings of the WTC and African Embassies, the US funded multiple assasination attempts against Osama bin Laden and his friends.
They also launched airstrikes and cruise missile attacks at him (including one on the night of Clinton's impeachment, which killed nothing but innocent civilians). The USS Cole attack was in self-defense, since it had been launching those missiles. The Sept.11 airplane attacks were probably invented as a way to duplicate the US's cruise-missiles on the cheap.
But remember, we help everyone.
Tell that to Rwandans or Kurds.
Hitler in Europe or anywhere, we'd be there dying to stop him.
You mean like the Russians and British did? For each US soldier killed in WW2, 2 British and 50 Russian ones died.
Those two countries contained & attritted Germany so that the US could spend a few years ramping up for a triumphant knockout punch. America paid in dollars, not blood.
So, technically, the U.S. government is wrong. It's "official acknowledgements" don't change the truth. That "police action" in Vietnam was thousands of times more violent and costly than the 1991 Iraq conflict.
Conversely, there is no such thing as a "War on Terrorism" or a "War on Drugs", whatever the government says.
It might be entrapment, but its not as if that is illegal- cops do it all the time. What I mean is, American police can get away with committing the English definition of "entrapment", if they don't meet the strict legal definition of entrapment.
Basically, when they take you to court, the prosecutors have an additional burden to show that you had a pre-existing inclination to commit the crime, before the undercover cops spoke with you. That's not very hard if they can find evidence of prior violations when searching your home & computer after the arrest.
If cops want to, they can use entrapment to get you arrested and have some search warrants made. If fruits of those searches are enough to indict you, then the District Attorney can completely ignore the entrapped offense, and just focus on the earlier violations.
Fortunately for you, today's undercover cops aren't interested in puny busts like this. Someday that could change...
Spliced it? A blatant hardware mod like that is begging to be detected. These days we have off the shelf solutions.
Probably not illegal, only grounds for termination. (Won't stop hyperactive prosecutors from going after you if your ex-boss complains enough, though. This is America, after all)
You're not safe at all. The sysadmin owns the computer you're running ssh on; he can install a modified ssh to log keys elsewhere.
Even if you run your own ssh executable from a floppy too, he can decide to log all removable media-accesses or whatever else he wants. (In many situations, sysadmins should lock down employee's computers so that only a select list of approved programs is executable)
The ONLY way to run a safe encrypted session from someone else's computer is to use a constantly-expiring key. Like one generated by a smartcard with an LCD readout. (That is the standard used by many big high-tech corporations)
Even if you do this, you're still not 100% secure. They can't log your ssh key and use it later, but if the ssh executable on the box is trojaned, it could read data during your session, and even send extra data without your knowledge (prehaps even enough to change your password, or install a security hole on your remote machine).
Running your own ssh off of a floppy might help, but that's STILL not immune to corruption. You have no guarantee that the operating system is really running the code you asked for. I could imagine installing a special check in the executable loader that, when told to run "a:/putty.exe", secretly calls up a bugged version.
Trust no one!
I expect that in the future, people whose data is very important (and those who think it is) will carry powerful PDAs to use when connecting to their network from an untrusted site (which will include all "Internet Cafes" and airport/hotel workspaces). They'll plug into TCP via USB or RJ45 or something, because only if you have physical control over the encrypting application can you trust it.
(But then, you also have to watch for high-resolution ceiling cameras monitoring your stylus-strokes...)
I got a logitech optical mouse with the extra blue LED- and I hated it! Why? Two reasons: it increases the device's power draw for no good effect, and as a non-red light, it ruins your night-vision if its plugged in in a dark room (the underside light dims when not in use, but not the tail-light). That thing is bright!
Some Microsoft mice also have a useless extra light on their rear, but at least its red, and at least its a simple ovoid shape, and not a sharply defined logo.
"reason to believe that a piece of software was going to Iran"
And do you have any reason to belive that someone in Iran or North Korea or Taliban-controlled Afganistan will download anything? No, you absolutely don't. In fact, given the state of their technology, its awesomely unlikely that they ever will.
True, maybe kernel.org could implement a reverse ip lookup system to check for this, but it would be easily surpassed (few users in an impoverished rogue state will have real ip addresses). But since there's no penalty unless you know where the downloader is, then why would they ever want to check? That would be consistent with other legal protection policies used by Linux developers- for instance, they never check to see if they're violating patents, because that puts them at risk of greater legal punishment.
Maybe you're talking more about theoretical laws, and I'm discussing ones that have a prayer of ever being enforced. US Congressmen went to Iraq 2 months ago, and they spent money while there. That's "exporting a good". But we know they'll never be arrested for it.
US citizens are occasionally fined (not arrested) for traffic with Iraq- the decision to do that is based on the dollar value of the goods exported. Less than $10,000 and they won't even care. The fine is typically 400% or 500% of the cost of the goods. Now, what's the market price of the source code to any piece of free software source code?
Zero dollars. "I'll get out my checkbook, officer!"
For any major game cartridge, there are millions and millions of people with a license to play it: every one of the original customers. And its these people, drawn by nostalgia, who will most enjoy playing the emulated version (rather than trying to repair their clunky old 8-bit Nintendo hardware)
Software publishers want to have it both ways: you're not buying a copy of the game, but a license to it, which they can restrict in arbitrary ways. And yet they desire the licenses to be bound to the physical hardware, so that they can re-release the same software for newer, smaller platforms every decade.
: it is illegal for anyone in a bunch of countries the US has decreed sufficiently bad (North Korea, Iraq, Iran, etc.) to download linux off a US server.
Nope. Software with much more than 64 bits of encryption is forbidden, but Linux doesn't include that yet, does it?
And if you fix a security flaw in linux, you can't document what you did, but you can still pass out the uncommented code.
But the point still stands that one cannot write something that is merely an application and call it an 'OS Replacement'.
Its possible for a piece of software to be simultaneously both an application and an OS. Look at something like User-Mode Linux. It's a variant of Linux, which is undeniably an operating system. The same Linux interface is provided to programs running on top of it, yet you ran it within some other operating system- like an application.
There are many other examples, not all of them perfect like that. Java environments, VMware. Microsoft Windows(tm) prior to 1995 was a DOS application, and yet already an OS for other programs in most ways.
Microsoft was so scared by Netscape's 1998 popularity because they were afraid someone would implement an OS ontop of their OS, leading to Windows(tm) becoming invisible to the users. (Mozilla is somewhat still trying this today)
Its not cheating to implement your new operating system on top of another one- its a way to conserve resources early on. All OSes have a top and bottom part- the interfaces to the applications to run on it, and the hardware it runs on. For a newly developed OS (or OS replacement) like this, the interesting part is the stuff that's visible to programs running on it, not how it detects and allocates hardware.
If it becomes popular running on top of Microsoft Windows(tm), then eventually some coders can try to port it to Linux, or extend it out into a full hardware-controlling OS, or something.
(The word "Operating System" is nearly content-free. Arguing about something meeting the definition of "OS" is fruitless. "System" can mean anything, and the fact that people can use it to work tells you it "Operates". If you take a restrictive definition of OS from some computer-science disciplines, then its only a bootup/hardware abstraction layer. If you listen to RMS, then its "everything you need to use your computer". The reality can be in between.)
He's asking for a more balanced, flexible solution than a big boolean "Install Flash (yes/no)".
Two big problems with your "just don't install it advice"
0. If Flash isn't installed, then every time mozilla opens a page with embedded SWF files you get a dialog box "Click here to install the plugin". A painful interference, one that can happen several times per page if they are heavy on the Flash banner + Flash navbar + Flash mouseover miniad.
1. Most Flash is for ads, but some sites present their actual content in Flash (web-cartoons), and many more work it into the intro-page or navigational frame so that Flash becomes a barrier to reaching the content. In both those cases, you'd desire a toggle-switch to quickly enable/disable Flash depending on whether you need to see it at the moment.
(The zap-embeds bookmarklet trick is good, but not quite optimal)
Just to give you an idea, typically something like 1 in 100 bullets fired ever effectively hits a target.
100:1 is an underestimate. In one carefully-studied conflict, there was a 700:1 mass ratio between anti-infantry munitions and the troops it killed.
You're not really disagreeing with me here, we both know that this kind of laser defense isn't appropriate against aircraft. If the IAF detect a bandit on radar, they'll want to intercept it with jets and long range air-air missiles before it ever gets into range of stationary ground defenses.
In comparison to the fighter jet or helicopters, missiles aren't expensive at all. Individual planes can cost $40,000,000 each (although US opponents would tend to use cheaper, refurbished units in the $1,500,000 range)
If you destroy a hostile MiG, the enemy takes an enormous loss (financially, not just militarily).
$50,000 / $1,500,000 isn't very much.
In fact, unless US enemies get an enormous influx of aircraft, lasers would never be a cost effective way to destroy planes (unless it is better for other reasons, like range, ROF, or Pk. But we're just looking at price). Missiles already exist today, they're a known technology. To buy more of them, you basically pay per missile.
Lasers will need $50,000,000+ worth of R&D and factory spin-up costs before they can start to deploy. For that outlay you could get lots more missiles that are known to work against all concievable threat aircraft (our threats don't have much R&D budget to improve the survivablity of their craft, so old-reliables will continue to work)
A more extreme form of your argument would be to claim that infantry should carry laser weapons, to conserve bullets. That shows even more strongly that compared to their targets, the price of ammunition rarely matters.
Ben & Jerrys is a Vermont company- where you incorporate determines the laws that applies to your company. Depending on how they plan to do business, many corporations (if they don't just file where their headquarters is) will choose to get a Nevada or New Jersey corporate charter, because each has a different set of very advantageous laws.
The corporate law in Vermont is different, however. Vermont is the only state where corporations have a greatly reduced obligation to their shareholders. Normally a corp's board or CEO can be sued if he acts against the financial interests of the stockholders. However, Vermont companies are allowed to balance shareholder responsibility against the public welfare.
Thus, Vermont is an attractive state for a company whose image focuses on social issues.
Is there such a thing as a GPLed demo of a commercial program? I've never heard of one, unless you count companies (id software and mySql) who release old versions of their code as GPL. Or maybe there's things like Sourceforge and TuxRacer, where the authors all agreed to re-license their software as proprietary before adding new features (leaving the old free version as a "demo").
If you did want to release a GPL demo of code you've written and plan to later sell, that's fine. If you want to keep some features out of the free version, that's fine too. Just make sure you actually delete them, and don't just conditional it out.
(The procedure would be: take a copy of commerical program, delete the sections that should stay proprietary, then add the GPL license to the source code, and distribute it. The code you keep was never in the file at the same time as the GPL, so its absolutely fine. You don't even have to do this physically, only notionally)
And if you're distributing a GPL copy of something you wrote, then preprocessed output is OK (but rather pointless- you won't get anyone excited about working on your code that way).
The situation where distributing preprocessed or partially-compiled code is NOT ok is if you took an existing GPL program as readable source, and then added some changes. You're future distributions have to be in the same kind of source code you got it in (not obfuscated, if it wasn't already). You can make changes necessary to implementing your features, of course, but not something that's only to make it harder for others to read/modify.
If the GPL impels you to distribute source code, it must be code in the format that YOU prefer for making changes.
If someone passes out while flying a plane, the Air Force is quite willing to blow him up if it wanders near a populated area. Fighter jets with missiles ready were following Payne Stewart until he crashed, ready to protect Kansas City from his aerial assault.
(The CONUS air control still has negligible ability to locate a lost plane, but if they were to find one, there'd be little compunction about shooting down an unresponsive craft that's aiming at something expensive)
Plenty of companies hold back on selling new products that will undercut their existing sales. If I sell $200 vacumn cleaners that need replacing every 4 years, I don't want to market a new $500 model that lasts 20.
An industrial interest may choose to withhold a great new product, even if its expensive, if it will reduce their total profits.
"Speed up ending a battle and you sell some fighter jets. Speed up ending war and you lose a customer"
(I didn't say that the banned weapons were expensive either- the difference between a few kinds of bullets is minimal. In many cases, the loss of a banned weapon can spur expensive R&D into acceptable alternatives. Anthrax canisters are cheaper than atomic warheads.)
in 1899. I doubt that "military-industrial complexes" even existed
Oh yes they did. There's no such thing as "Military Industrial Complex" in formal terms of course- its no more real than a "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy". Both are amusing names that describe an emergent behavior of powerful groups: quasi-organizations that perform in a cohesive way without centralized control. (A collective unconcious)
The military has always been a profit center for nation-states. With today's technology, the wealth comes from "Defense" contracts for weapon systems. 100 years ago, it came from the prestige and position afforded to military leaders in society. (Societies that were more and more aristocratic and even feudal the further east you got into Europe).
The leaderships were built on a structure of occasional terrortorial squabbles with neighbors to enforce the insularity of their countries and strengthen their rule. The self-esteem of the Warrior-Kings and Dashing Archdukes were defined in terms of bravery in battle, and if a generation passed without a good war or two to impress their valor onto the poplace, they'd risk being discarded by a society that no longer valued them.
And that's what was happening as technology started to accelerate 150 years ago. Population density, transportation, and firearms had all advanced to the point where it could no longer be denied that a major battle was a horrible, disgusting affair that reflected poorly on all involved- skill and prowess were meaningless in the raw carnage of 10,000 opposing riflemen tearing each other to pieces through a ruined city.
It is this increasing vileness and blatant cruelty that the Geneva Convention was passed to address. (In 1864 btw- 1899 was an extension). You may think that this was a good thing- that it eased the suffering of poor soliders. And prehaps it did. But by making war more tolerable, you extend the time that it will be tolerated. That is, it is because of "Rules of War" like the Geneva Convention that it was possible for 1st world nations to wage war with frequency up until 1950.
Otherwise, the prospect of going into battle would've been that much less appealing, and even successful agressors would suffer so much in international opinion (such as Iraq suffers today) that violence would be less common.
By ameliorating the damage of war, the Geneva Protocol encouraged the fighting of them.
The IRC's noble efforts gave us another century of nationalistic bloodshed, encouraged by heads-of-state whose position as Commanders-In-Chief was legitimized by the realistic threat of war.
Lets finish up by going back to that link you provided, and reading between the lines. The only text of substance amoung the treaty boilerplate is
"abstain from the use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body"
Now, why would any army willingly surrender the use of a weapon in combat? It can't be because the weapon is ineffective; otherwise they wouldn't want it anyway. So there must be some situations when a flattenable bullet is tactically superior to a hard one.
(For example, expending more effort from the medics who have to fish out several fragments from a wound, instead of removing a whole round. This reduces enemy mobility by slowing their evacuations.)
(I shall use you as if you were a military leader of a Geneva Signatory)
So if this weapon is effective, then by willingly forgoing it you are reducing your troop's performance. They won't fight as well, and more of them will die. More of your own people will die! in exchange for the comfort of a enemy group who you've already declared is to be shot on sight.
The whole point of war should be that it is the final extreme- the breakdown of all considerate communication and diplomatic recourse. "All's fair!" But yet, even in war, to uphold a promise written hundreds of miles away, the leadership sent their own young men to death. Your own gentlemanly honor, over the lives of the little people. The Geneva Signatories applied Law even to War- conveying upon War the status of an acceptable activity.
The effect of the bullet-regulation was a cosmetic one. If it applied to both sides, then it fairly degraded both's performance and the victor was the same- so why even bother? Because it made war "cleaner". Less messy. Not so many corpses lying splattered about. More clean kills, fewer crippled survivors. A genteel bandaid covering a festering fatal wound. More proud men marching home in the avenues, fewer being dragged in ambulances. A way to keep on with the parades and speeches and memorial ceremonies twice per year, but not needing to work all year round feeding a disillusioned ghost whose body survived where his soul died.
War is horrible. No one can change that, and if humanitarianism hides that then it is lying to conceal a crime.
</RANT>
That's why the white house has SAM sites and marines equipped with Stingers.
That's a silly myth. If the Whitehouse had air defense, why do you think airplanes can impudently crash into it? Sure, maybe when Bush gets scared he orders up a heavily-armed security blanket, but there's no way a man with a rocket would stop anything unless a rotary-wing gunboat starts strafing them.
And if the Whitehouse had missiles and some sensors to target with, surely the Pentagon (a target of more tactical import in a crisis) would've had something to throw at the airliner that smashed it up too.
Air-Defense wise, the District of Columbia is a tiny space. Any blip from Reagan airport turns hostile and you've got all of 2 seconds to fire on it before the Captial explodes. Even if you hit something, the wreckage will still land on its target.
I never said the Geneva made much sense, but these are its rules. Shotguns are also banned (except against buildings- whatever that means), because of the chance someone will catch a just a few pellets and survive with a wound.
And my whole point was that technology is surpassing the treaty.
Now, if you did start to target infantry with lasers, you'll be hitting them in the center of mass or limbs, not the head. As soon as the painful, burning sensation starts they'll hit the ground, and you'll probably move onto another target. Just like if you were hurling bullets at them.
But unlike bullet wounds, he's not laying there bleeding to death, he's just flaking ash from a charred hole. And maybe the rest of his skin is on fire too. The survivors of an attack like that will be just the kinds of pathetic, twisted hulk of a productive young man that the Rules of War are intended to avoid.
If you call Hikaru No Go "free", then I can show you some usenet groups with great free games and movies too!
The Toriyamaworld site is a copyright violator, just like Napster was. The fact that the book they reproduce has zero commercial prospects in the US makes their activities marginally more moral, but doesn't make them legal.
And thus, since any US missiles in silos will already have launched before being hit, the enemy may as well never target them at all. They should just concentrate on vulnerable seaboard cities to maximimze their threat.
Why isn't this +5 Funny yet? (I never seem to have mod points...)
The goal that's the same for all people is to have more children like yourself (both genetically and memetically, which includes religion). Everyone can peacefully pursue this goal for a while, and inevitably exhaust their resources. And then there's war, or starvation. ALL wars are essentially started by "young males looking for resources to attract and retain a mate".
(True, this planet has resources enough for many more humans than their already are, but no one waits until hitting the point of true exhaustion to start a war. There's a threshold of diminishing returns for your peaceful gathering operations where violently seizing your needs becomes an attractive proposition, despite the risks)
I hope some day it will be _Star Trek_ too. And I think it's plausible- trillions of people living in nonviolent harmony, distributed across the entire galaxy. Of course we might not call them human anymore, since they'd spent all day processing digital information from a small alcove aboard a giant grey cube, but that's the best future we can reasonably expect. The lives of the "Federation" just don't make sense.
It'll be a long time before the R&D cost of the defensive missile is absorbed, so they'll be much more costly for a long time. In the long run the price goes down, but its still a precision instrument (with serious maintenance and C4I infrastructure needs) in comparison to a dummy ICBM which only needs to hit the right continent. And labor is cheaper in some of these hostile-states.
Each defensive rocket will have at best Probabilty-Kill 90%, so you'll want to use more than one per incoming agressor. If the attacker is a manuverable cruise missle and not just ballistic, you'll want more. (Submarine-launched cruise missles are really a whole different problem than ICBM interception. And a harder one). Or if there's a MIRV, then that's another multiplier on the target count.
The cost advantage of the defense missiles is that they have less distance to travel, and need less metal and fuel. I can't say for sure how much that'll reduce the overall cost, though. And you'll want protectors to engage at the longest range you can (so that if one fails, you have time to fire more). The price war is no slam dunk.
Remember the Missile Commmand game? It wasn't much fun, you could never win...
More likely than wanting to really be able to neutralize an aresnal the size of Russia's, we'd just want 50 missiles on each coast that could go forth in groups of 5 against "rogue madman" warheads.
now they can hit hijacked planes with... no, it doesn't help that situation.
Oh, it might help. Assume that hijacked planes will be used to target big cities. Big cities with lots of electricity and tall buildings- it sounds like science fiction, but I can imagine a policy of installing larger versions of these things atop skyscrapes in NYC and DC to head off rogue airliners and ICBMs too.
(The scary flaw with that scheme is 4 terrorists with guns who hijack the laser and carve holes all over Manhattan. But buildings are much more resilient to laser heating than airframes are. They'd use up the fuel before killing too many people.)