Almost makes you wonder if our typical portrayal of old powers (say, in colonial times) and their attrocities as, basically, a work of their elite isn't a convenient self-deception.
Well heck, both the French Revolution and the American Civil War should have taught us that the mass public aren't necessarily any more squeamish about war than the elites. Get a good righteous cause going and ordinary people can easily kill each other.
Realising this should both disturb us, and make us ask 'how do I personally armour myself against taking part in an atrocity?'
Don't bother telling me that you "voted" against it and so it is not your fault. That kind of rationalization simply proves how thoughtless you really are.
I wasn't American, but I voted AND I marched and protested, way back in 2001 when it was obvious GWB was spinning out of control and was creating exactly this kind of situation.
Some of my distant colleagues took the next logical step and committed trespass and vandalism to disable American military assets. I wasn't involved in that, but I did lend a little moral support. Not nearly as much as they needed, but I'm seriously glad they were acquitted.
Are you saying that I should have escalated my response to the point of actual physical violence against the architects of this war? Because I'm not sure I could agree with that. I actually stepped down my involvement in the peace scene when it became obvious some of the Marxist types were getting a bit rowdy. Good thing actually as it turns out there were agent provocateurs inside the scene pushing for criminal actions.
But yes, around 2003 I was seriously asking the question 'how much jail time am I willing to face, and how much loss of civilian life am I willing to cause, in order to make a probably ineffectual symbolic protest against massive loss of civilian life in Iraq'.
Turns out the answer is 'not much', so maybe I'm a bit gutless. But I showed up, and I did something. Were you there? What would your answer have been?
It's interesting that they do call in the wounded journalist's daughter (who did get saved) even though they killed the guys. Apparently there was some discrimination operating. Kill possible civilian adults == acceptable losses, but even then children are beyond the pale.
Better to be wrong rather than letting them fire an RPG at our guys on the ground.
For values of 'better' equating to 'just sacrificed years of hard-fought street credibility with the locals', yes. This is what happens when you prioritise protecting your troops (at ridiculously high multiplication factors) above protecting the lives and dignity of locals. It doesn't play all that well.
Heck, if it were me on the ground in a scene like that, I'd instantly start hating and fearing all US warfighters and start edging towards being recruited by the insurgency. Better to fight back with a jacket and an IED than just lie down and get shafted from miles away by trigger-drunk sky gods who have their feet on your neck, right? It's not just the unnecessary civilian death, it's the utter total humiliation of being hunted from afar like deer, seeing your loved ones stepped on and not being able to do a thing about it.
This behaviour would really piss me off if I were a local. Multiply that by a few hundred thousand, and I can't see how these rules of engagement generate military victory for the Coalition.
Poor leadership killed these people and, if you believe in this sort of thing, damned a few kids' immortal souls.
I'm not sure I'd go as far to say 'damned' but I wouldn't want these kids running a daycare right now, if you know what I mean. What's the current psych invalid rate coming out of Iraq? Pretty high last time I read a report.
War messes people up, urban warfare even more so, and I don't even know how you guys are preparing to handle these guys' reentry into civilian society.
You do not win a war by giving in to demands of the enemy and you do not win a war by making it an even score.
Perhaps not in a full-on all-out metal storm. But police action and counterinsurgency isn't at all the same kind of beast, it's a kind of diplomacy, and that's where the USA has been getting their international butts kicked all through the GW Bush presidency. Heck, they got the same thing handed to them in Vietnam and didn't even realise that 'overcoming the Vietnam syndrome' just meant 'forgetting - or not even attempting to learn - some very important lessons'.
It is perfectly possible to 'win a war' by killing lots of civilians and yet lose the hearts and minds of the populace. When those hearts and minds determine how many suicide bombers are coming at you, yeah, you're not gonna win by just killing more people.
Basic maths: If every monster you kill creates two more, perhaps there comes a point when it's counterproductive to keep firing? And that's the kind of situation the USA is in. Sometimes you have to get out of the hole by stopping digging.
And you think the UK-USA Security Agreement nations don't already read your government's mail?
Sure, but at least then they have to work for it, so maybe they'll be a bit selective about what they choose to monitor. Why up and give them the keys to your Gmail account on a silver platter?
Look, it doesn't matter who or where you are. The government has bigger guns than you.
Technically speaking, it's the defense contractors who actually have the bigger guns and the government which pays their bills.
If it came down to a showdown between McDonnell-Douglas and the Pentagon I'm not sure how long the Pentagon would hold out without replacement explosive #42 widgets.
Occam's razor does not say, "These were murderous thugs," Occam's Razor says, "This was a sad situation that occurred in the 'fog of war'.""
Or perhaps "These are indeed murderous thugs, in the same sense as investment bankers are economy-destroying thieves, but it's nothing personal, just a job where they have to push buttons or get yelled at (or killed). And they didn't start out that way - they joined the US military as nice kids thinking they were doing a heroic thing with their lives, and this is what military culture and urban counterinsurgency have turned them into. They'll need years of counseling to get over this and they most likely won't get it. By the way, counseling or not, these guys are coming back to a shopping mall near you as security guards or police. Feel safe and secure!"
A guns entire purpose is to accelerate a projectile. What the purpose of this acceleration is rests entirely upon the user.
Well yes.... but exactly how many practical uses are there for a precisely targeted, rapidly moving small-arms caliber projectile are there which don't involve wounding or killing a carbon-based lifeform? Or practicing and training to do such?
And as soon as you can give me another practical use of a firearm, for the average citizen (as I doubt most people have a need to set off avalanches or some other obscure use), other than to harm living animals, then you can start comparing them to knives or other tools that can be used to harm.
Sure! You can use them to:
* open grates * clear jungle weeds * start fires * fry eggs * trim your beard * light your way in a cave * make emergency access doors in AT-AT walkers
Wait, sorry, I'm thinking about lightsabers.
Firearms? Not so many alternate uses actually. You *might* be able to use one as a very clumsy and crude hammer, perhaps...
(if you want to play the '101 non-limb-slicing uses for a deadly weapon' game, I highly recommend the Timothy Zahn Star Wars novels. He's very inventive.)
Am I a bad person if I'm seriously considering going to watch those?
Not the prequels, but the originals 3D-ised... maybe.
Mostly just to see just how a 2D movie could be dimensionalised. I don't know how well it could be done, but that technical stuff is the sort of thing Lucas is good at. Just not writing.
So how many people are going to pay $200K to ride in this thing, and then ask for their money back because they spent the flight puking their guts out?
None, because iiiiiiin spaaaaaaaace! even being sick is awesome.
I mean, yes, it would all fit into an Olympic swimming pool. For about a millisecond. Then it would go critical, and your swimming pool would be an area the size of texas covered in a very thin layer of radioactive waste, plus a big glass pit in the middle.
But for that millisecond, you'd have the most awesomely radical Olympic swim meet in the history of mankind.
c itself isn't aware of concurrency, but so what? that doesn't mean that a program written in c can't be aware of concurrency.
It doesn't mean it can't be aware, but it does mean that it will be fighting the language's inclination to be unaware, and that means the programmer is likely to make many more mistakes. It would be nice to have tools that we didn't have to fight.
A big problem is the event-driven model of most user interfaces. Almost anything that needs to be done is placed on a serial event queue, which is then processed one event at a time.
This is an intriguing comment, so... In your opinion, how could we improve that? Some kind of 'event queue pipelining' feature which quickly scans events, guesses which ones might impact later ones which which ones won't, and then demultiplexes parallelisable events appropriately?
Or would it be possible to block, say, graphical update events up into large chunks and feed them into a GPU vector processor?
One thing which bugs me about the event-driven model in modern GUI frameworks is that for user code, it's next to impossible to get access to the raw event stream. You can create classes and signals/slots and register callbacks, and the framework 'does it all' for you. But I don't think these frameworks do nearly enough (or rather, they do too much; they don't allow themselves to be replaced by user code).
It seems to me that to implement parallelism, we'd need to have software components which are able to do just that: parse the core event stream and reprocess or optimise them into parallel streams. We do this on a case-by case basis in, say, databases (where the query processor will optimise the query) - is it possible to provide this as a fundamental language feature?
My impression is that we could achieve this with a very simple change: make the core event stream something like just a Lisp list. A sequence that can contain arbitrarily structured data. And then let all user code manipulate the event stream just like a stack language would manipulate the stack. Read huge blocks of it, put sub-streams into it, etc.
At the moment about all a GUI object can do is grab an event or pass it on to a parent or delegate. But if we could upgrade our code to let it send events about events...
Same thing with C/C++/Java having all these source-code-level modifiers and metadata markups which aren't readable or settable at runtime. I think this is a dead end; eventually all networked systems will end up as message-passing dynamic systems. All roads lead back to Lisp (or Smalltalk), but we're taking a lot of byways to get there.
If you are trying to tell me there's no way using the current abstractions to implement this I say you're mad.
That's between me and my psychiatrist... but I suspect current abstractions do have quite a bit to do with the 'overzealous locking' problem you're describing.
The current abstractions promote the idea that sequential operation should be the norm and parallel operation is something you have to manually program for. And that manual programming (processes and threads) is done in a number of incompatible ways derived from different models, and at least one of them (threads) is really, really unsafe and practically impossible to do correctly.
So programmers being lazy and smart, do as little work as they need to, and they tend to lock things in large chunks, because that's simple and it works and can be tested roughly okay.
I believe that if we had finegrained instruction-level parallelism as the paradigm, the opposite state of affairs would hold: things would naturally be done in parallel, and it would take work to create global synchronisation. Programmers would still be lazy, but you wouldn't have the 'gah why did doing one thing lock up a bunch of others' issue - you'd have the 'gah why is my one big task still waiting on lots of little tasks to complete'.
Which I think would be a better world and slightly less broken than the current one.
Admittedly finegrained parallelism does mean the potential for a lot of speed loss in context switching if it's done dumbly, so I think making it work would require highly dynamic languages able to 'recompile' or reallocate code on the fly. Current thinking in language design doesn't favour highly introspective dynamism but is still hung up on compile-time optimisation and hard-coded typing. It would also require a complete ground-up rewrite of code merging language and OS into one abstraction, and nobody's keen to do that.
But in a perfect world, that's where I'd like to go. Parallel everything, and serial as a system-generated local optimisation.
In the 1980s there was lots of academic interest in parallel computing. Unfortunately a lot of it seemed to be driven merely by the quest for speed- once single CPUs got fast enough in the early 90s and everyone went 'whee C is good enough also objects are neat!', a whole generation of parallel language work was lost to the new&shiny.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost makes you wonder if our typical portrayal of old powers (say, in colonial times) and their attrocities as, basically, a work of their elite isn't a convenient self-deception.
Well heck, both the French Revolution and the American Civil War should have taught us that the mass public aren't necessarily any more squeamish about war than the elites. Get a good righteous cause going and ordinary people can easily kill each other.
Realising this should both disturb us, and make us ask 'how do I personally armour myself against taking part in an atrocity?'
Don't bother telling me that you "voted" against it and so it is not your fault. That kind of rationalization simply proves how thoughtless you really are.
I wasn't American, but I voted AND I marched and protested, way back in 2001 when it was obvious GWB was spinning out of control and was creating exactly this kind of situation.
Some of my distant colleagues took the next logical step and committed trespass and vandalism to disable American military assets. I wasn't involved in that, but I did lend a little moral support. Not nearly as much as they needed, but I'm seriously glad they were acquitted.
Are you saying that I should have escalated my response to the point of actual physical violence against the architects of this war? Because I'm not sure I could agree with that. I actually stepped down my involvement in the peace scene when it became obvious some of the Marxist types were getting a bit rowdy. Good thing actually as it turns out there were agent provocateurs inside the scene pushing for criminal actions.
But yes, around 2003 I was seriously asking the question 'how much jail time am I willing to face, and how much loss of civilian life am I willing to cause, in order to make a probably ineffectual symbolic protest against massive loss of civilian life in Iraq'.
Turns out the answer is 'not much', so maybe I'm a bit gutless. But I showed up, and I did something. Were you there? What would your answer have been?
It's interesting that they do call in the wounded journalist's daughter (who did get saved) even though they killed the guys. Apparently there was some discrimination operating. Kill possible civilian adults == acceptable losses, but even then children are beyond the pale.
Thank God for that at least.
Better to be wrong rather than letting them fire an RPG at our guys on the ground.
For values of 'better' equating to 'just sacrificed years of hard-fought street credibility with the locals', yes. This is what happens when you prioritise protecting your troops (at ridiculously high multiplication factors) above protecting the lives and dignity of locals. It doesn't play all that well.
Heck, if it were me on the ground in a scene like that, I'd instantly start hating and fearing all US warfighters and start edging towards being recruited by the insurgency. Better to fight back with a jacket and an IED than just lie down and get shafted from miles away by trigger-drunk sky gods who have their feet on your neck, right? It's not just the unnecessary civilian death, it's the utter total humiliation of being hunted from afar like deer, seeing your loved ones stepped on and not being able to do a thing about it.
This behaviour would really piss me off if I were a local. Multiply that by a few hundred thousand, and I can't see how these rules of engagement generate military victory for the Coalition.
Poor leadership killed these people and, if you believe in this sort of thing, damned a few kids' immortal souls.
I'm not sure I'd go as far to say 'damned' but I wouldn't want these kids running a daycare right now, if you know what I mean. What's the current psych invalid rate coming out of Iraq? Pretty high last time I read a report.
War messes people up, urban warfare even more so, and I don't even know how you guys are preparing to handle these guys' reentry into civilian society.
You do not win a war by giving in to demands of the enemy and you do not win a war by making it an even score.
Perhaps not in a full-on all-out metal storm. But police action and counterinsurgency isn't at all the same kind of beast, it's a kind of diplomacy, and that's where the USA has been getting their international butts kicked all through the GW Bush presidency. Heck, they got the same thing handed to them in Vietnam and didn't even realise that 'overcoming the Vietnam syndrome' just meant 'forgetting - or not even attempting to learn - some very important lessons'.
It is perfectly possible to 'win a war' by killing lots of civilians and yet lose the hearts and minds of the populace. When those hearts and minds determine how many suicide bombers are coming at you, yeah, you're not gonna win by just killing more people.
Basic maths: If every monster you kill creates two more, perhaps there comes a point when it's counterproductive to keep firing? And that's the kind of situation the USA is in. Sometimes you have to get out of the hole by stopping digging.
And you think the UK-USA Security Agreement nations don't already read your government's mail?
Sure, but at least then they have to work for it, so maybe they'll be a bit selective about what they choose to monitor. Why up and give them the keys to your Gmail account on a silver platter?
Look, it doesn't matter who or where you are. The government has bigger guns than you.
Technically speaking, it's the defense contractors who actually have the bigger guns and the government which pays their bills.
If it came down to a showdown between McDonnell-Douglas and the Pentagon I'm not sure how long the Pentagon would hold out without replacement explosive #42 widgets.
Occam's razor does not say, "These were murderous thugs," Occam's Razor says, "This was a sad situation that occurred in the 'fog of war'.""
Or perhaps "These are indeed murderous thugs, in the same sense as investment bankers are economy-destroying thieves, but it's nothing personal, just a job where they have to push buttons or get yelled at (or killed). And they didn't start out that way - they joined the US military as nice kids thinking they were doing a heroic thing with their lives, and this is what military culture and urban counterinsurgency have turned them into. They'll need years of counseling to get over this and they most likely won't get it. By the way, counseling or not, these guys are coming back to a shopping mall near you as security guards or police. Feel safe and secure!"
How dare you, sir! Blue catgirls on flying dinosaurs fighting Nick Fury's Helicarrier and a squadron of Space Marines is very serious business indeed!
C is a great systems language, it lets you get great performance, interact directly with the hardware and still stay fairly portable.
And without C's blindingly fast array (not) checking, we wouldn't have those lovely buffer overflows that make our Internet so secure.
C is fast, yes. But is fast all we should have asked for?
And you end up with a fifth colon paid by the very IT user.
Is that sort of like tearing someone a new one, only four times worse?
A guns entire purpose is to accelerate a projectile. What the purpose of this acceleration is rests entirely upon the user.
Well yes.... but exactly how many practical uses are there for a precisely targeted, rapidly moving small-arms caliber projectile are there which don't involve wounding or killing a carbon-based lifeform? Or practicing and training to do such?
I'll wait while you list them all off, shall I?
And as soon as you can give me another practical use of a firearm, for the average citizen (as I doubt most people have a need to set off avalanches or some other obscure use), other than to harm living animals, then you can start comparing them to knives or other tools that can be used to harm.
Sure! You can use them to:
* open grates
* clear jungle weeds
* start fires
* fry eggs
* trim your beard
* light your way in a cave
* make emergency access doors in AT-AT walkers
Wait, sorry, I'm thinking about lightsabers.
Firearms? Not so many alternate uses actually. You *might* be able to use one as a very clumsy and crude hammer, perhaps...
(if you want to play the '101 non-limb-slicing uses for a deadly weapon' game, I highly recommend the Timothy Zahn Star Wars novels. He's very inventive.)
Or as Han Solo said:
"I dunno, I can imagine quite a bit."
Am I a bad person if I'm seriously considering going to watch those?
Not the prequels, but the originals 3D-ised... maybe.
Mostly just to see just how a 2D movie could be dimensionalised. I don't know how well it could be done, but that technical stuff is the sort of thing Lucas is good at. Just not writing.
So how many people are going to pay $200K to ride in this thing, and then ask for their money back because they spent the flight puking their guts out?
None, because iiiiiiin spaaaaaaaace! even being sick is awesome.
Being in a space suite is as close as we'll ever come to enjoying a 1 on 1 with good ole father space.
A space en-suite, perhaps? With a nice space opera playing on the monolith - perhaps some Ligeti.
If positions of power are detrimental to human mental health then it should be illegal to put people in or allow people to attain positions of power.
And that in a nutshell is the political philosophy called democracy.
I mean, yes, it would all fit into an Olympic swimming pool. For about a millisecond. Then it would go critical, and your swimming pool would be an area the size of texas covered in a very thin layer of radioactive waste, plus a big glass pit in the middle.
But for that millisecond, you'd have the most awesomely radical Olympic swim meet in the history of mankind.
c itself isn't aware of concurrency, but so what? that doesn't mean that a program written in c can't be aware of concurrency.
It doesn't mean it can't be aware, but it does mean that it will be fighting the language's inclination to be unaware, and that means the programmer is likely to make many more mistakes. It would be nice to have tools that we didn't have to fight.
A big problem is the event-driven model of most user interfaces. Almost anything that needs to be done is placed on a serial event queue, which is then processed one event at a time.
This is an intriguing comment, so... In your opinion, how could we improve that? Some kind of 'event queue pipelining' feature which quickly scans events, guesses which ones might impact later ones which which ones won't, and then demultiplexes parallelisable events appropriately?
Or would it be possible to block, say, graphical update events up into large chunks and feed them into a GPU vector processor?
One thing which bugs me about the event-driven model in modern GUI frameworks is that for user code, it's next to impossible to get access to the raw event stream. You can create classes and signals/slots and register callbacks, and the framework 'does it all' for you. But I don't think these frameworks do nearly enough (or rather, they do too much; they don't allow themselves to be replaced by user code).
It seems to me that to implement parallelism, we'd need to have software components which are able to do just that: parse the core event stream and reprocess or optimise them into parallel streams. We do this on a case-by case basis in, say, databases (where the query processor will optimise the query) - is it possible to provide this as a fundamental language feature?
My impression is that we could achieve this with a very simple change: make the core event stream something like just a Lisp list. A sequence that can contain arbitrarily structured data. And then let all user code manipulate the event stream just like a stack language would manipulate the stack. Read huge blocks of it, put sub-streams into it, etc.
At the moment about all a GUI object can do is grab an event or pass it on to a parent or delegate. But if we could upgrade our code to let it send events about events...
Same thing with C/C++/Java having all these source-code-level modifiers and metadata markups which aren't readable or settable at runtime. I think this is a dead end; eventually all networked systems will end up as message-passing dynamic systems. All roads lead back to Lisp (or Smalltalk), but we're taking a lot of byways to get there.
If you are trying to tell me there's no way using the current abstractions to implement this I say you're mad.
That's between me and my psychiatrist... but I suspect current abstractions do have quite a bit to do with the 'overzealous locking' problem you're describing.
The current abstractions promote the idea that sequential operation should be the norm and parallel operation is something you have to manually program for. And that manual programming (processes and threads) is done in a number of incompatible ways derived from different models, and at least one of them (threads) is really, really unsafe and practically impossible to do correctly.
So programmers being lazy and smart, do as little work as they need to, and they tend to lock things in large chunks, because that's simple and it works and can be tested roughly okay.
I believe that if we had finegrained instruction-level parallelism as the paradigm, the opposite state of affairs would hold: things would naturally be done in parallel, and it would take work to create global synchronisation. Programmers would still be lazy, but you wouldn't have the 'gah why did doing one thing lock up a bunch of others' issue - you'd have the 'gah why is my one big task still waiting on lots of little tasks to complete'.
Which I think would be a better world and slightly less broken than the current one.
Admittedly finegrained parallelism does mean the potential for a lot of speed loss in context switching if it's done dumbly, so I think making it work would require highly dynamic languages able to 'recompile' or reallocate code on the fly. Current thinking in language design doesn't favour highly introspective dynamism but is still hung up on compile-time optimisation and hard-coded typing. It would also require a complete ground-up rewrite of code merging language and OS into one abstraction, and nobody's keen to do that.
But in a perfect world, that's where I'd like to go. Parallel everything, and serial as a system-generated local optimisation.
++.
In the 1980s there was lots of academic interest in parallel computing. Unfortunately a lot of it seemed to be driven merely by the quest for speed- once single CPUs got fast enough in the early 90s and everyone went 'whee C is good enough also objects are neat!', a whole generation of parallel language work was lost to the new&shiny.
It's depressing.
Hardware in today's computers is serial: You access one device, then another, then another.
So you don't have packets coming in/out on sound, network, multiple screens, mouse, keyboard, USB drive, webcam, and hard drive simultaneously?