Editor has probably just played the game, because this is definitely noteworthy for people who have, or people who care about innovative and fun gameplay.
Amen.... the Milkman level was pure brilliance. I'd even go so far as to say that this was the best game released on the XBox. What the oblivious posters above don't understand is that backwards compatibility with this game just made me and probably a lot of other people 360 owners. There are plenty of FPS game designers. Sadly, there is apparently only one Tim Schafer.
No kidding. I can download movies with a right-click on the link and then a "Save As". But as soon as Quicktime opens the same link in a browser window it becomes magically unsavable unless I pay for the commercial version.
Gore was incredibly active in the 1980s promoting the development of a national research network. He was a proponent of funding a national "data highway" as early as 1986, and proposed legislation in 1988 that among other things funded a 3GB/sec fiber optic national network backbone, pushed additional money to CS research and funded institutional supercomputing and database development. As his proposal stated:
CAN WE RELY ON THE MARKET SYSTEM TO PROVIDE THIS KIND OF INFRASTRUCTURE? WE CERTAINLY COULDN'T WHERE THE INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM WAS CONCERNED, ALTHOUGH PRIVATE INDUSTRY ULTIMATELY BENEFITED A GREAT DEAL FROM THE GOVERNMENT'S LEADERSHIP AND INVESTMENT. I BELIEVE THAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT MUST AGAIN BE A CATALYST, TO GET COMPANIES INTERESTED IN THOSE INFORMATION NETWORKS AND SHOW THEM THAT THERE IS A MARKET OUT THERE. CLEARLY, THE TECHNOLOGICAL SPINOFFS AND PRODUCTIVITY GAINS WOULD BE ENORMOUS, FROM A NETWORK THAT WOULD COST THE GOVERNMENT LESS THAN ONE STEALTH BOMBER.
This basically guaranteed what is today known as Network Neutrality -- business built on a technically non-discriminating data network. And if you don't consider it progressive you might want to remember that even by the early 1990s the market was still banking on online connectivity being offered to consumers through "walled gardens" like Compuserve/Sierra Online/AOL.
More details here if you are ever interested in taking those blinders off. Anyone who imagined Gore passing himself off as a hacker is either an idiot, or content to pass themselves off as one.
Perhaps you should have judged her by the act of giving rather than the gift. Rather than being condescending and judgmental (way to make her feel good, champ), you could have scored points and broadened her horizons by thinking about what she gave you and suggesting some other books she might have liked. Sounds like she likes shorter, punchier thrillers.
I'd have given her Gaston Leroux's "Phantom of the Opera", the collected short stories and cartoons of James Thurber, and maybe something short by literary like Ondatjee's "Running in the Family". How on earth can you know she won't like what you like unless you let her read it?
Isn't the CDDB data still available? Multiple posters here claim to have downloaded it so I'm not sure what you are complaining about.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but I really don't understand this controversy at all. As long as Gracenote specified that they were assuming the copyright over contributions their terms of use were no different than pretty much ANY online forum or corporate website. And it isn't as if they tried to revoke their earlier license, they just changed the way they treated new contributions after a certain point.
If people feel that contributing data to a commercial project is somehow abusing them, that is their perogative. But then they should either not contribute, or put their money where their mouths are and contribute their own cash and labour to create the infrastructure necessary to enable alternate collaboration. If it isn't already happening, this is probably because it is unreasonable to expect someone to do it all free of charge.
Personally, I'm really happy every time a free software product or service manages to produce a commercial application which earns the people who started it enough to feed themselves, and continue to produce materials I can use. Bagging on a guy who contributed a lot to a free project because he doesn't want to continuously work for free is selfish. If Linus wanted to work on a commercial Unix, I wouldn't hold it against the man simply because he has been a major force in the open source world.
(1) Depends on the country (US is more permissive, EU is more protective as far as sweat of the brow compilations are concerned) (2) If the arrangement or selection process is creative then there is usually protection as well.
Hire someone in the developing world to monitor your blog and clear it of spam. If the cost is insignificant to them it is insignificant to you. And as the cost of labour rises with competition the problem naturally goes away.
Not sure about Arabic which is probably where the moeny is right now, but speech recognition is much less of a problem in languages like Chinese than in romance languages like English which conjugation, inflection and the sort.
On the other hand, text translation is much harder in Chinese than in romance languages, in large part because of the lack of conjugation, etc.
Considering that I've personally handled documents that the US embassy has "outsourced" for Chinese-English translation in Beijing, I think your confidence that the US has enough skilled translators in-house is grossly misplaced. Chinese is my second language and I am good at it, but I am not even an American citizen. And although I can't speak for military training, I have met people who have been trained by the State Department and found that very few of them have pushed beyond middling Chinese despite having serious advantages in time and funding for training.
That being said, let me praise as exceptions those people I've met who trained at IUP when it was in Taiwan, and less so in Beijing. With those few exceptions, everyone I've met who is remotely decent at Chinese has spent considerable time in China and mops the floor with those who have studied abroad.
As far as the tech goes, I'd respectfully suggest you're wrong on the need for more and better tools. The problem is that translation is really a small and limited domain for the use of bilingual NLP systems. I run an educational project which is doing something the private sector simply is not: developing Chinese-English machine annotation and translation technology with a focus on providing educational annotations for students. The technology itself is quite cool and if you are still studying Chinese you should actually check it out. We are currently the only place on the web where you can get word-by-word explanations of everything from newspapers to excepts from classic novels like Dream of the Red Chamber.
Getting back to the point.... the market that is emerging for this sort of technology is happening in places like enterprise search, contextual analysis of Chinese documents for search and other areas where there is a need for massive data analysis and you simply cannot rely on human translators. The real tragedy is that the market is not here yet, and the money is all going into closed research programs like those cited in the article. Seeing the US government simply stuffing millions and millions of dollars into closed research consortiums does not help what we are doing one bit. Nor does the status quo is a situation through which NIST holds "open" machine translation competitions where the results are not even made available for public comparison. More's the pity....
Bach himself actually heavily reused his own compositions. During his time in Leipzig the man would write shorter pieces regularly for weekly church services, and incorporate the music into his various passions, concertos and other longer pieces. He would often change the instruments and experiment in other ways, but the melodies and themes would stay the same.
This is actually one of the major techniques used to authenticate the pieces Bach himself wrote from those he merely copied or transcribed by hand. I actually believe this is one of the reasons the authorship of the famous Toccata and Fugue is D minor is in doubt. It is such an original piece sharing so little in common with his other work that there are reasonably claims to be made that Bach merely transcribed the piece (he did so for a lot of other works, including those from family), even though the only copy we have of the music is in Bach's handwriting.
This is a thoughtful post. Three comments however from someone working in China:
(1) Workers in the west are already benefiting from the low costs of imported products, and there is still room for prices to fall in many areas. Wage adjustments in the west are simply lagging behind adjustments to consumer prices. This doesn't mean that falling product costs are unconnected with changing job stability. You can't have one without the other.
(2) The factors which make American employees uncompetitive wage-wise are largely tied to local markets (rent) and government policy (health care). If housing costs are a concern... well you guys should be complaining to your government about its imposition of import restrictions on Canadian timber in violation of NAFTA, lack of urban planning for high-density housing (everyone buys cars). If clothing costs are a concern... stop extending import quotas for foreign produced textiles (decent jeans here cost less than $7). If health costs are a concern... stop voting Republican and get decent nationalized health care plan like every other civilized western nation.
(3) Nationalism is immoral and one doesn't need to be Marxist to be an internationalist. I know a lot of college graduates here in Beijing whose monthly wages are around $250 USD a month. It is damn hard to find a place to rent, feed yourself and survive in this city on that salary -- the implication that people have it easy in countries where living standards lag behind the US is patently wrong.
To blame globalization for problems with the domestic economy is cheap and easy. But it is also wrong. The reason life is getting more difficult for Americans has a lot to do with government policy (try raising the minimum wage, guys). And things like the Iraq War and your government's plundering of social security and tax cuts to the rich are only making it worse.
Since it is funded by NIST, I imagine that the database is not available. This is the same organization that manages to conduct "open" testing of machine translation systems without making the actual translations public.
Hmmmm.... I paid about $40 USD for the last phone I purchased here in China. This was a low-market Motorola with a black and white screen. While slightly cheaper phones were available they weren't much cheaper. Most of the market here involves sales of pre-paid phones that retail for around $100 USD. No-one was taking a loss selling me that phone -- the phone service uses pre-paid cards and can be used with either the China Telecom or China Unicom networks.
Assume you will get lower costs because this stuff is all being manufactured in China. And then add a 100% markup for stuff sold through American retail outlets. But your average phone should still not cost over $150 USD retail. So I highly doubt that anyone is subsidizing your phone. You are simply being ripped off because of a lack of competition in regional US cellular markets.
The exit poll figures currently on the CNN site are not the exit poll data that was displayed on election night. The numbers were changed overnight without explanation. We still do not know the methodology used for the exit polls or the reasons for the change.
There are potentially legitimate reasons for adjustments. You can come up with hypotheticals. So can I. So can most people. But we are operating from a state of ignorance. It is this state of ignorance that is the major problem.
Comparing degrees of uncertainty (or power) in large-N survey research and N=1 mining accidents is simply wrong from a statistical perspective. If there were errors with the exit polls, it is important that the data and methodology for the polls be made available for public scrutiny. Good luck finding this sort of data though.
CNN changed their exit polls for a number of states after the election was called for Bush. The numbers you are seeing at that site were not the numbers produced by their polling organization. You can check the link below, or simply Google for "CNN" and "change" and "exit polls".
It's a mixture of fact and assertion. Here's a list of assertions. I grant most of them are probably at least partly true. But I gather also that many of the 150 posts were from people disputing one or another fact or assertion.
It is a mixture of fact and fact. The discussion takes off after the first commenter does exactly what you just did -- accuse the writer of being slipshod and partisan. This poster gets quickly put in his place by the rest of the commentors. He eventually starts defending torture.
All of the issues regarding domestic instability you raise with North Korea have been raised before regarding the Soviet Union, China (which is still technically in the middle of a civil war and went through the cultural revolution with its nuclear arsenal intact), India and Pakistan. They are reasonable points, but if you want to talk about the real proliferation threat these days it involves the disintegration of the former Soviet nuclear arsenal, not the development of small-scale nuclear deterrents. Iran would no more provide Hezbollah with a nuclear device than the US would provide one to the Northern Alliance.
In any event, this discussion is not taking place in a vacuum when the implied alternative to proliferation is preventative war. That particular doctrine almost destroyed the world in 1962 (Cuba is now known to have had nuclear devices it would likely have used in the event of a territorial invasion), and all the brinkmanship bought America was a few years of breathing space until the Soviets developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Sometimes live and let live is a better philosophy.
I'm not really interested in who is running the US government because you are right that it is irrelevant to the issue of how to handle nuclear proliferation. And I do not see any differences between the Republicans and Democrats over North Korea. I'm simply not at all convinced that a small arsenal of nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea is a problem. The country is starting to move in the same direction China did almost thirty years ago. It has been experimenting with export-oriented production zones and apparently is a major source of global heroin production. The country is sending its best and brightest children into China to be educated.
I don't think you're in a position to tell me what is real or obvious.
I don't want to descend into a flame war, but there simply isn't support for your assertions. So rather than deal with them all let me just take one on in a bit of depth - the case of Iraq and nuclear weapons:
No-one with knowledge of Iraq believed that the country was on the verge of producing nuclear weapons or even chemical and biological weapons prior to the US invasion. The issue was whether Iraq was attempting to hide WMD that it was hypothesized Iraq had already developed. None of the evidence linking Iraq to nuclear weapons or uranium-enrichment was remotely plausible. Allegations of links were trumpeted by those trying to make a case for war. This the significance of the Valerie Plame story: Joe Wilson's wife was outed as a CIA agent when he went public in the New York Times showing claims the administration was trying to make about Iraqi efforts to procure uranium as the forgeries they were. Powell's presentation to the United Nations was presented as a "slam dunk" case by the pro-war media. His evidence for "mobile development trailers" was attacked at the time by experts. It has since been conclusively demonstrated that these experts were in fact correct:
So what was the actual problem with Iraq? The big one was that the west did not have accurate figures about actual Iraqi stockpiles. Estimates of Iraqi stores of chemical weapons were drawn up using projec
If North Korea were following the Chinese socialist road to modernization, they would have been there by now
China is not even "there yet". The government is struggling to find a way to reconcile coastal growth with interior poverty while combatting corruption and other problems that are a result of the way Chinese society and government is structured... and they started in 1978.
I read the article through and it's a typical "Iraq is a disaster troll". The author doesn't even bother to explain why he makes many of his assertions
That is the point. Those are not assertions they are facts and you will not find anyone who will dispute them. Perhaps you can argue that the situation is not as dire as the facts suggest because the Singularity is around the corner. But you are not dealing with opinion here. Reality actually exists.
Iran, you might be able to make a credible argument for. But not North Korea which utterly fails the sanity test and can't guarantee that it'll be around in five years much less control whatever weapons it has.
North Korea is trying to follow the Chinese socialist road to modernization. Whether they will succeed is anyone's guess, but where is the instability? I don't see any instability.... even the hawks in the Bush administration are focusing their efforts elsewhere. The lesson seems quite clear.
Israel's nuclear weapons have already stabalized the Middle East by eliminating a major source of intense wars in the region. The invasion of Iraq eliminated another.
Yes, Israeli nuclear weapons have had a stabilizing effect. I'm not going to comment on your claims about the UN, because they are patently false. If you don't think the war in Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster though, you should probably read the following thread below. Note the way it descends into a defense of torture:
Yes. I took a course in international relations once where we actually modelled this mathematically. It was interesting because it forced you to realize that if deterrence really is an expectations game people actually have an incentive to use nuclear weapons occasionally to establish the deterrent effect.
I'm not necessarily advocating proliferation. But there is a non wingbat argument to be made that teh cost of preventing this kind of proliferation far outweighs the cost. I am not convinced that the leadership of either Iran or North Korea is indeterrable. And I would personally much rather these countries developed a small nuclear arsenal than poured efforts into developing an equivalent arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.
People were saying the same things about India and Pakistan before those countries both aquired nuclear weapons. And about the Soviet Union and China before that.
The last thing one wants is to have nuclear weapons in the possession of unstable regimes either unable to control the devices or demonstratively irrational. But do either North Korea or Iran really meet those conditions? I personally don't think so. It is also somewhat understandable why these states are intersted in possessing them given the sort of armchair militarism that passes for IR analysis in much Western punditry.
The invasion of Iraq was a huge disaster, if only for destroying the credibility of international organizations like the United Nations as a restraint on the unilateral militarism of its members. The proliferation of nuclear weapons through the Middle East may be the only thing capable of stabilizing the region at this point.
Those statistics are really interesting. Just looked at the total number of FOIA requests made. You can see them climb slowly through 1990-1994 and then start going through the roof 1997-2000. Then downhill again.
Was it Clinton? I can't imagine any other reason why the requests would skyrocket in 1998 except for the Lewinsky scandal. But even that doesn't explain the climb in the number of requests under Clinton and recent fall.
Slashdot Mirror
Editor has probably just played the game, because this is definitely noteworthy for people who have, or people who care about innovative and fun gameplay.
Amen.... the Milkman level was pure brilliance. I'd even go so far as to say that this was the best game released on the XBox. What the oblivious posters above don't understand is that backwards compatibility with this game just made me and probably a lot of other people 360 owners. There are plenty of FPS game designers. Sadly, there is apparently only one Tim Schafer.
No kidding. I can download movies with a right-click on the link and then a "Save As". But as soon as Quicktime opens the same link in a browser window it becomes magically unsavable unless I pay for the commercial version.
Thanks but no thanks.
I read it... I just missed the point. My fault, and apologies for the rant.
Gore was incredibly active in the 1980s promoting the development of a national research network. He was a proponent of funding a national "data highway" as early as 1986, and proposed legislation in 1988 that among other things funded a 3GB/sec fiber optic national network backbone, pushed additional money to CS research and funded institutional supercomputing and database development. As his proposal stated:
This basically guaranteed what is today known as Network Neutrality -- business built on a technically non-discriminating data network. And if you don't consider it progressive you might want to remember that even by the early 1990s the market was still banking on online connectivity being offered to consumers through "walled gardens" like Compuserve/Sierra Online/AOL.
More details here if you are ever interested in taking those blinders off. Anyone who imagined Gore passing himself off as a hacker is either an idiot, or content to pass themselves off as one.
Free books for you? That was really sweet of her.
Perhaps you should have judged her by the act of giving rather than the gift. Rather than being condescending and judgmental (way to make her feel good, champ), you could have scored points and broadened her horizons by thinking about what she gave you and suggesting some other books she might have liked. Sounds like she likes shorter, punchier thrillers.
I'd have given her Gaston Leroux's "Phantom of the Opera", the collected short stories and cartoons of James Thurber, and maybe something short by literary like Ondatjee's "Running in the Family". How on earth can you know she won't like what you like unless you let her read it?
Isn't the CDDB data still available? Multiple posters here claim to have downloaded it so I'm not sure what you are complaining about.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but I really don't understand this controversy at all. As long as Gracenote specified that they were assuming the copyright over contributions their terms of use were no different than pretty much ANY online forum or corporate website. And it isn't as if they tried to revoke their earlier license, they just changed the way they treated new contributions after a certain point.
If people feel that contributing data to a commercial project is somehow abusing them, that is their perogative. But then they should either not contribute, or put their money where their mouths are and contribute their own cash and labour to create the infrastructure necessary to enable alternate collaboration. If it isn't already happening, this is probably because it is unreasonable to expect someone to do it all free of charge.
Personally, I'm really happy every time a free software product or service manages to produce a commercial application which earns the people who started it enough to feed themselves, and continue to produce materials I can use. Bagging on a guy who contributed a lot to a free project because he doesn't want to continuously work for free is selfish. If Linus wanted to work on a commercial Unix, I wouldn't hold it against the man simply because he has been a major force in the open source world.
(1) Depends on the country (US is more permissive, EU is more protective as far as sweat of the brow compilations are concerned)
(2) If the arrangement or selection process is creative then there is usually protection as well.
Be careful before starting to copy databases.
Hire someone in the developing world to monitor your blog and clear it of spam. If the cost is insignificant to them it is insignificant to you. And as the cost of labour rises with competition the problem naturally goes away.
Not sure about Arabic which is probably where the moeny is right now, but speech recognition is much less of a problem in languages like Chinese than in romance languages like English which conjugation, inflection and the sort.
On the other hand, text translation is much harder in Chinese than in romance languages, in large part because of the lack of conjugation, etc.
Considering that I've personally handled documents that the US embassy has "outsourced" for Chinese-English translation in Beijing, I think your confidence that the US has enough skilled translators in-house is grossly misplaced. Chinese is my second language and I am good at it, but I am not even an American citizen. And although I can't speak for military training, I have met people who have been trained by the State Department and found that very few of them have pushed beyond middling Chinese despite having serious advantages in time and funding for training.
That being said, let me praise as exceptions those people I've met who trained at IUP when it was in Taiwan, and less so in Beijing. With those few exceptions, everyone I've met who is remotely decent at Chinese has spent considerable time in China and mops the floor with those who have studied abroad.
As far as the tech goes, I'd respectfully suggest you're wrong on the need for more and better tools. The problem is that translation is really a small and limited domain for the use of bilingual NLP systems. I run an educational project which is doing something the private sector simply is not: developing Chinese-English machine annotation and translation technology with a focus on providing educational annotations for students. The technology itself is quite cool and if you are still studying Chinese you should actually check it out. We are currently the only place on the web where you can get word-by-word explanations of everything from newspapers to excepts from classic novels like Dream of the Red Chamber.
Getting back to the point.... the market that is emerging for this sort of technology is happening in places like enterprise search, contextual analysis of Chinese documents for search and other areas where there is a need for massive data analysis and you simply cannot rely on human translators. The real tragedy is that the market is not here yet, and the money is all going into closed research programs like those cited in the article. Seeing the US government simply stuffing millions and millions of dollars into closed research consortiums does not help what we are doing one bit. Nor does the status quo is a situation through which NIST holds "open" machine translation competitions where the results are not even made available for public comparison. More's the pity....
Bach himself actually heavily reused his own compositions. During his time in Leipzig the man would write shorter pieces regularly for weekly church services, and incorporate the music into his various passions, concertos and other longer pieces. He would often change the instruments and experiment in other ways, but the melodies and themes would stay the same.
This is actually one of the major techniques used to authenticate the pieces Bach himself wrote from those he merely copied or transcribed by hand. I actually believe this is one of the reasons the authorship of the famous Toccata and Fugue is D minor is in doubt. It is such an original piece sharing so little in common with his other work that there are reasonably claims to be made that Bach merely transcribed the piece (he did so for a lot of other works, including those from family), even though the only copy we have of the music is in Bach's handwriting.
Ok gents, so what rumour are we starting this week?
* China Buys, Loots Taiwan in Second Life
* Wen Jiabao is also my father
* Tangshan is bigger than Tianjin... at heart
* Norman Bethune was gay
* Shijiazhuang: the next Hong Kong
This is a thoughtful post. Three comments however from someone working in China:
(1) Workers in the west are already benefiting from the low costs of imported products, and there is still room for prices to fall in many areas. Wage adjustments in the west are simply lagging behind adjustments to consumer prices. This doesn't mean that falling product costs are unconnected with changing job stability. You can't have one without the other.
(2) The factors which make American employees uncompetitive wage-wise are largely tied to local markets (rent) and government policy (health care). If housing costs are a concern... well you guys should be complaining to your government about its imposition of import restrictions on Canadian timber in violation of NAFTA, lack of urban planning for high-density housing (everyone buys cars). If clothing costs are a concern... stop extending import quotas for foreign produced textiles (decent jeans here cost less than $7). If health costs are a concern... stop voting Republican and get decent nationalized health care plan like every other civilized western nation.
(3) Nationalism is immoral and one doesn't need to be Marxist to be an internationalist. I know a lot of college graduates here in Beijing whose monthly wages are around $250 USD a month. It is damn hard to find a place to rent, feed yourself and survive in this city on that salary -- the implication that people have it easy in countries where living standards lag behind the US is patently wrong.
To blame globalization for problems with the domestic economy is cheap and easy. But it is also wrong. The reason life is getting more difficult for Americans has a lot to do with government policy (try raising the minimum wage, guys). And things like the Iraq War and your government's plundering of social security and tax cuts to the rich are only making it worse.
Since it is funded by NIST, I imagine that the database is not available. This is the same organization that manages to conduct "open" testing of machine translation systems without making the actual translations public.
Hmmmm.... I paid about $40 USD for the last phone I purchased here in China. This was a low-market Motorola with a black and white screen. While slightly cheaper phones were available they weren't much cheaper. Most of the market here involves sales of pre-paid phones that retail for around $100 USD. No-one was taking a loss selling me that phone -- the phone service uses pre-paid cards and can be used with either the China Telecom or China Unicom networks.
Assume you will get lower costs because this stuff is all being manufactured in China. And then add a 100% markup for stuff sold through American retail outlets. But your average phone should still not cost over $150 USD retail. So I highly doubt that anyone is subsidizing your phone. You are simply being ripped off because of a lack of competition in regional US cellular markets.
The exit poll figures currently on the CNN site are not the exit poll data that was displayed on election night. The numbers were changed overnight without explanation. We still do not know the methodology used for the exit polls or the reasons for the change.
There are potentially legitimate reasons for adjustments. You can come up with hypotheticals. So can I. So can most people. But we are operating from a state of ignorance. It is this state of ignorance that is the major problem.
Comparing degrees of uncertainty (or power) in large-N survey research and N=1 mining accidents is simply wrong from a statistical perspective. If there were errors with the exit polls, it is important that the data and methodology for the polls be made available for public scrutiny. Good luck finding this sort of data though.
Mea culpa. Fox News wasn't carrying the story and Google is a link farm.
CNN changed their exit polls for a number of states after the election was called for Bush. The numbers you are seeing at that site were not the numbers produced by their polling organization. You can check the link below, or simply Google for "CNN" and "change" and "exit polls".
a rd.php?az=view_all&address=132x1293911
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/dubo
This isn't exactly a secret. You guys have some serious problems on your hands.
It is a mixture of fact and fact. The discussion takes off after the first commenter does exactly what you just did -- accuse the writer of being slipshod and partisan. This poster gets quickly put in his place by the rest of the commentors. He eventually starts defending torture.
All of the issues regarding domestic instability you raise with North Korea have been raised before regarding the Soviet Union, China (which is still technically in the middle of a civil war and went through the cultural revolution with its nuclear arsenal intact), India and Pakistan. They are reasonable points, but if you want to talk about the real proliferation threat these days it involves the disintegration of the former Soviet nuclear arsenal, not the development of small-scale nuclear deterrents. Iran would no more provide Hezbollah with a nuclear device than the US would provide one to the Northern Alliance.
In any event, this discussion is not taking place in a vacuum when the implied alternative to proliferation is preventative war. That particular doctrine almost destroyed the world in 1962 (Cuba is now known to have had nuclear devices it would likely have used in the event of a territorial invasion), and all the brinkmanship bought America was a few years of breathing space until the Soviets developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Sometimes live and let live is a better philosophy.
I'm not really interested in who is running the US government because you are right that it is irrelevant to the issue of how to handle nuclear proliferation. And I do not see any differences between the Republicans and Democrats over North Korea. I'm simply not at all convinced that a small arsenal of nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea is a problem. The country is starting to move in the same direction China did almost thirty years ago. It has been experimenting with export-oriented production zones and apparently is a major source of global heroin production. The country is sending its best and brightest children into China to be educated.
I don't want to descend into a flame war, but there simply isn't support for your assertions. So rather than deal with them all let me just take one on in a bit of depth - the case of Iraq and nuclear weapons:
No-one with knowledge of Iraq believed that the country was on the verge of producing nuclear weapons or even chemical and biological weapons prior to the US invasion. The issue was whether Iraq was attempting to hide WMD that it was hypothesized Iraq had already developed. None of the evidence linking Iraq to nuclear weapons or uranium-enrichment was remotely plausible. Allegations of links were trumpeted by those trying to make a case for war. This the significance of the Valerie Plame story: Joe Wilson's wife was outed as a CIA agent when he went public in the New York Times showing claims the administration was trying to make about Iraqi efforts to procure uranium as the forgeries they were. Powell's presentation to the United Nations was presented as a "slam dunk" case by the pro-war media. His evidence for "mobile development trailers" was attacked at the time by experts. It has since been conclusively demonstrated that these experts were in fact correct:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/04/11/AR2006041101888.html
So what was the actual problem with Iraq? The big one was that the west did not have accurate figures about actual Iraqi stockpiles. Estimates of Iraqi stores of chemical weapons were drawn up using projec
North Korea is trying to follow the Chinese socialist road to modernization. Whether they will succeed is anyone's guess, but where is the instability? I don't see any instability.... even the hawks in the Bush administration are focusing their efforts elsewhere. The lesson seems quite clear.
Yes, Israeli nuclear weapons have had a stabilizing effect. I'm not going to comment on your claims about the UN, because they are patently false. If you don't think the war in Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster though, you should probably read the following thread below. Note the way it descends into a defense of torture:
http://www.intel-dump.com/archives/archive_2006_0
It is counter-intuisive to claim that higher oil prices have weakened OPEC states.
Yes. I took a course in international relations once where we actually modelled this mathematically. It was interesting because it forced you to realize that if deterrence really is an expectations game people actually have an incentive to use nuclear weapons occasionally to establish the deterrent effect.
I'm not necessarily advocating proliferation. But there is a non wingbat argument to be made that teh cost of preventing this kind of proliferation far outweighs the cost. I am not convinced that the leadership of either Iran or North Korea is indeterrable. And I would personally much rather these countries developed a small nuclear arsenal than poured efforts into developing an equivalent arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.
Then again, I'm not living in the Middle East....
People were saying the same things about India and Pakistan before those countries both aquired nuclear weapons. And about the Soviet Union and China before that.
The last thing one wants is to have nuclear weapons in the possession of unstable regimes either unable to control the devices or demonstratively irrational. But do either North Korea or Iran really meet those conditions? I personally don't think so. It is also somewhat understandable why these states are intersted in possessing them given the sort of armchair militarism that passes for IR analysis in much Western punditry.
The invasion of Iraq was a huge disaster, if only for destroying the credibility of international organizations like the United Nations as a restraint on the unilateral militarism of its members. The proliferation of nuclear weapons through the Middle East may be the only thing capable of stabilizing the region at this point.
This isn't an easy case to argue either way.
Those statistics are really interesting. Just looked at the total number of FOIA requests made. You can see them climb slowly through 1990-1994 and then start going through the roof 1997-2000. Then downhill again.
Was it Clinton? I can't imagine any other reason why the requests would skyrocket in 1998 except for the Lewinsky scandal. But even that doesn't explain the climb in the number of requests under Clinton and recent fall.