Because the US and the USSR were both too powerful for the other to risk a full-scale war.
Partly true but in WWI and WWII Germany and Japan risked national annihiliation in persuit of their goals. Nuclear weapons make this argument somewhat harder in that each country risked complete annihiliation. You will also be hard pressed to find for me more than a handful of cases whereby in the last 50 years one country invaded and tried to take over another. This includes in the past 15 years where the USSR is no longer relavent.
One example of UN sanctions having good effects is in South Africa where they were at least partially responsible for the end of apartheid. China, under pressure from the WTO, has somewhat loosened restrictions on its citizens as well.
Eliot Cohen would be grossly mistaken. No single military action/campagin of the last 50 years has compared in scope to either WWI or WWII. Consider that in WWII the total combined forces of allied + axis forces numbered well over 120 million -- indeed it was much closer to 200 million if you count total number who served and died. Find me a war that involves that many men in uniform in the last 50 years.
Also important to note is that while the cold war might be called WWIII, simply because of the resources involved, it did not involve a major direct military confrontation between superpowers. Flares up did occur but they were regional confrontations between world superpowers, not a direct war.
Calling the "war on terror" world war IV is... wrong. While the war on terror does indeed have a worldwide scope it, once again, doesn't involve the resources or amount of men that others did. It is also limited to a relative few countries and is against, in reality, very few people.
While the US presence in europe undoubtedly has helped prevent europe from self destructing into war (again) another factor is the increased co-operation and the knowledge of what another world war would due to Europe. Europe seems content with the idea of preserving each individual countries unique
Saying that European countries do not possess formidable armies is wrong. Germany and France both maintain armies of comparable size to the US' and comparable equipment. Now, air force and navy is quite another matter. They also rely almost wholly upon the US for all their military R&D needs, especially aircraft and high technology weapons systems. In that respect, yes, the US does prop them up a bit. But as of currently, iirc, the US maintains only 2 divisons in Europe plus air and naval forces of course.
Indeed, most military sucess' of the UN have come with US forces involved, most often heavily. This is somewhat due to the fact that only the United States has the resources and equipment necassary to project force on a worldwide scale. No other country in the world can do this.
Pax americana eh? While somewhat true it ignores some pretty big things like, oh, say the USSR's role in keeping the peace or the fact that the US has started more wars in the last 50 years than any other country. Of course, it remains true that beacuse the US is so damm powerful nobody dares attack either us or our allies directly. It is important to note that the US does tend to work through the UN in most cases of international diplomacy -- current administration nonwithstanding.
Most of your other comments were flames, but WHO has done some great work in saving millions of lives and disparaging their contribution shows your ignorance on the subject (what they ahve to do with H-1B visas god only knows).
Iraq was a worldwide effort, while roughly 75% of the troops were US troops from nearly 50 countries did participate and in some cases, Britain and others, were significant combat forces.
Also, in the days after WWII the UN wasn't run solely by allied powers, by this time it was run by countries hostile to the allies (i.e. Soviets and the new Communist China).
Any historian would argue with that defination, US was a superpower before WWI but never really flexed its might. Indeed, by population and industrial output US outranked every single European country individually before the start of WWI. Then, however, the gap wasn't quite as big as it became after WWII.
WWII really pushed us over the edge into true superpower status whereby we had no real opponents (save USSR). After WWII the gap widened to its current status whereby the US is more powerful than the whole of europe. Due, partially, to the fact that europe was bombed to pieces and partially due to the US' enormous population and natural resources.
Yes LoN fell because of it was powerless and because it didn't include some of the most important players in the world at that time. It may also be argued that LoN fell because certain european countries like UK and France were unable or unwilling to enforce its resolutions.
Very true, but nothing has happened that approaches the catastrophic scale of WWI and WWII. Those wars killed hundreds of millions of people and, to top it off, destroyed whole economies and generatins of people (i.e. the lost generation after WWI).
Many smaller wars, yes but no gigantic world wide changing war yet. It's a small step forward but a good one IMO.
UN peackeepers in Korea, Cyprus, Iraq, Kosovo, etc, etc. Many examples abound. Plus the threat of economic sanctions. Worldwide pressure via an open forum is another way.
The UN has nothing to do with this. It's the more powerful countries that have prevented this from happening. Do you honestly think the UN could do shit if the US and China decided to go at it?
No, most definatley not. The UN does, however, give them the chance to negoiate their differences fairly peacefully as well as allow other nations of the world ot exert pressure to prevent war.
I maintain that the UN is the world's first supra-national organization, before league of nations, simply because LN didn't have the US in it. It can hardly be considered world wide if you exclude one of the world's superpowers.
UN might be a joke, but it's the best we have. Kuwait was saved because of its oil, and South Korea, arguablly, was saved.
True, millions have been killed in wars over the last few years but nothing, repeat nothing, like the likes of world war I & II where, literally, Hundreds of millions of people died. A whole generation of western europeans were basically lost after world war I.
League of Nations did not include the US so it wasn't really worldwide. Hanseatic league, to be honest, i've never heard of.
The catholic church only had jurisdiction over christendom, if that, and was ignored by all for the most part. Leauge of Nations didn't have one of the world's superpowers (US) and can, therefore, hardly be considered worldwide.
Oh come on now, the UN has done some very good things over the past 50 years. A few, off the top of my head:
No world wars in 50+ years
Has negotiated and enforced many peace treaties throughout that time.
Economic and other sanctions have had positive effects on some countries.
WHO has done some fantastic work in the 3rd world.
Is the world's first supra-national organization and, more remarkably, has had its power seriously challenged only a few times.
Has, respectively, saved the countries of Korea, Kuwait,and many others i'm forgetting by using multinational forces to defeat a common agressor enemy.
Is the UN that great? Well no, but it has at least contributed to world peace, stability and such throughout its existence. Its main flaws being that it isn't really above an individual nation states power and is especially vulnerable to the power of the US.
Yes, indeed. But the NFL shields incompetent owners/general managers by making only the signing bonus gauranteed -- if the contract is cut no extra money is due to the player. Ergo, the effects of said incompetence aren't quite as noticeable.
And don't forget that right now the NFL is king of the sports world for a few reasons, the biggest being the monstrous parity that exists and the overall level of play that is demonstrated.
Part of this is because, unlike MLB or NBA contracts, NFL contracts -- except for the signing bonus -- aren't gauranteed. You think it was a mistake that no football players were listed in that overpaid category? It isn't. Very, very few exist (hugh douglas of jacksonville comes to mind as does kurt warner) and those that do exist are going to be cut next year. Why? Because the contracts aren't gauranteed so the team has nothing to lose by cutting them -- except a possible salary cap hit.
OTOH you have MLB which, ridiculously, has no salary cap and so teams like the Yankees can continually buy themselves into competition. Or the NBA where there are constant stories of overpaid underperforming athletes who stick with the teams only because the contract cannot be voided.
In the end these fixed contracts lead to a decline in the level of play because teams cannot kick out washed out veterans in the hopes of finding new talent and are saddled with third rate, washed up veterans.
THe 'plant material' they are talking about is rather specific, the only thing that produces large deposits of petreloeum is phytoplankton. I.E. floating plants in the ocean. The stuff they use to float eventually breaks down and forms petro. So, you are talking about billions upon billions of microscopic floating plants feeding our cars, not a tree or something.
If you're lucky enough to go to school at University of Nebraska last nite they had a special event for it:
1. Panther Mid-Nite Madness,Union Computer Store 24 Oct
For Mac users who just can't wait, the UNL Computer Store at the
Union Campus location is hosting a "Panther Mid-Nite Madness" on
Friday, October 24th. The new Panther operating system will be
demonstrated, and copies will be available for sale at the student
price of $69. To preorder your copy, call 472-0505 or 472-5787.
I guess I figured most major universities would have apple outlets on campus like we do.. is that not the case?
38 pounds is $64.60 (at the latest conversion rate of 1.7 dollars/pound). So half as much, which isn't bad.
Of course, I'm currently attending a university in england (lancaster) and I bought textbooks a few weeks ago. I spent about 150 pounds on books which is about 3/4 of what I would spend in the states. It is also weird because, here, they have almost every textbook in the library on short loan so you don't even really need to buy the textbooks -- something that US universities should really consider... if book buying wasn't such a huge cash cow for them.
I would be suprised considering there is no real point to having a computer up for 10 years running linux.1. Especially considering the type of people who would be running Linux 10 years ago were probably interested in developing it, not in using it for something that would require 10 years of uptime. Now 10 years from today would somebody have a linux box with 10 years uptime... quite possible.
On the other hand,at various IBM confrences i've talked to plenty of folks whose IBM big iron mainframes have uptimes of 10-15 years. And a friend of mine has a old BSD DNS box that currently has an uptime of 3.5 years. It's been sitting at his parents house collecting dust over the years and, despite having no UPS, has somehow managed to remain up and running.
The easiest way to explain this is to look at an example. We have two people, person A makes 20,000 dollars a year. Person B makes 200,000 dollars a year.
Assume we have a flat tax of 20%. In this way person A will pay 2,000 in taxes leaving him with 18,000. Person B will pay 20,000 in taxes and will have 180,000 left over.
Now, here is why this is unfair. Person A is now below the poverty line if he has a family or, if he doesn't, is barely able to afford the basic things like food, shelter, car, etc. The amount of disposable income he has probably doesn't hit much over 2,000 dollars. Person B on the other hand has $180,000 to do with as he pleases and is far, far above the poverty line. His disposable income would probably be in the six digits, at least.
What happens with the flat tax is that the poor bear the greatest burden. The rich have plenty of money while the poor have virutally all their disposable income sucked up and, in some cases, can actually be put below the poverty line in the interests of a "fair" flat tax.
Obviously the brazilian government shouldn't care, but americans do care. That much money taken from country X is that much more money we don't have to get from home. Yeah I know, crappy world view but what can you do?
Also, if you looked at the trade deficit/surplus figures between the US and Brazil my *guess* would be that american puts in about as much money into brazil as we take.
Yeah, that's kindof what Microsoft and some members of the US government are afraid of. Obviously some US companies will adapt (like red hat and IBM) but people are afraid of a business model which allows for no one country to dominate the market and is, basically, free. The cost-of-entry barriers are virtually non existent for something like linux, compared to - say - car manufacturing, chip production, or heavy industry. Interesting times indeed.
It would be far better for just about any country to invest in a localized linux distro but, and this is a big but, Linux still isn't as good as either Windows or Mac OS X *all around* for everybody. Once this starts to change in a few years, as it has been, I'm sure we will see Microsoft dropping their prices.
BTW, I would guess your figure is off by a factor of at least 2 considering things like volume licensing and the fact that most sales of office/windows are via OEM sales from manufacturers, far cheaper than retail versions. I would say the total cost would be closer to something like $2-3 Billion - not an insignificant chunk of change by any means.
Yeah, that is definately one thing that people in the states never think about when they mindlessly bash MS and people like the MPAA and RIAA.
Whether or not you realize it the software industry, and music and movie industry, contribute huge amounts of money to the US economy - i'm too lazy to look up the links - but without those industrys the US' trade deficit would be much higher than it already is, and it's already too high.
The Brazilian government, and all those who switch to linux and other free alternatives, are that many less customers that MS gets and that less tax we americans get. Especially considering that most do not buy products like Red Hat or other US based compaines distros but instead focus on local distro's. Great for their country, crappy for the US. While it is preferable on slashdot to think of congress critters as being bought and paid for by the industry in reality some think exactly along the lines I laid out, more piracy and more switching to free software equals less taxes and less jobs for americans.
Note, I do not necassarily agree with the above statements but it is something to think about.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the US and the USSR were both too powerful for the other to risk a full-scale war.
Partly true but in WWI and WWII Germany and Japan risked national annihiliation in persuit of their goals. Nuclear weapons make this argument somewhat harder in that each country risked complete annihiliation. You will also be hard pressed to find for me more than a handful of cases whereby in the last 50 years one country invaded and tried to take over another. This includes in the past 15 years where the USSR is no longer relavent.
One example of UN sanctions having good effects is in South Africa where they were at least partially responsible for the end of apartheid. China, under pressure from the WTO, has somewhat loosened restrictions on its citizens as well.
Eliot Cohen would be grossly mistaken. No single military action/campagin of the last 50 years has compared in scope to either WWI or WWII. Consider that in WWII the total combined forces of allied + axis forces numbered well over 120 million -- indeed it was much closer to 200 million if you count total number who served and died. Find me a war that involves that many men in uniform in the last 50 years.
Also important to note is that while the cold war might be called WWIII, simply because of the resources involved, it did not involve a major direct military confrontation between superpowers. Flares up did occur but they were regional confrontations between world superpowers, not a direct war.
Calling the "war on terror" world war IV is... wrong. While the war on terror does indeed have a worldwide scope it, once again, doesn't involve the resources or amount of men that others did. It is also limited to a relative few countries and is against, in reality, very few people.
While the US presence in europe undoubtedly has helped prevent europe from self destructing into war (again) another factor is the increased co-operation and the knowledge of what another world war would due to Europe. Europe seems content with the idea of preserving each individual countries unique
Saying that European countries do not possess formidable armies is wrong. Germany and France both maintain armies of comparable size to the US' and comparable equipment. Now, air force and navy is quite another matter. They also rely almost wholly upon the US for all their military R&D needs, especially aircraft and high technology weapons systems. In that respect, yes, the US does prop them up a bit. But as of currently, iirc, the US maintains only 2 divisons in Europe plus air and naval forces of course.
Indeed, most military sucess' of the UN have come with US forces involved, most often heavily. This is somewhat due to the fact that only the United States has the resources and equipment necassary to project force on a worldwide scale. No other country in the world can do this.
Pax americana eh? While somewhat true it ignores some pretty big things like, oh, say the USSR's role in keeping the peace or the fact that the US has started more wars in the last 50 years than any other country. Of course, it remains true that beacuse the US is so damm powerful nobody dares attack either us or our allies directly. It is important to note that the US does tend to work through the UN in most cases of international diplomacy -- current administration nonwithstanding.
Most of your other comments were flames, but WHO has done some great work in saving millions of lives and disparaging their contribution shows your ignorance on the subject (what they ahve to do with H-1B visas god only knows).
Iraq was a worldwide effort, while roughly 75% of the troops were US troops from nearly 50 countries did participate and in some cases, Britain and others, were significant combat forces.
Also, in the days after WWII the UN wasn't run solely by allied powers, by this time it was run by countries hostile to the allies (i.e. Soviets and the new Communist China).
Any historian would argue with that defination, US was a superpower before WWI but never really flexed its might. Indeed, by population and industrial output US outranked every single European country individually before the start of WWI. Then, however, the gap wasn't quite as big as it became after WWII.
WWII really pushed us over the edge into true superpower status whereby we had no real opponents (save USSR). After WWII the gap widened to its current status whereby the US is more powerful than the whole of europe. Due, partially, to the fact that europe was bombed to pieces and partially due to the US' enormous population and natural resources.
Yes LoN fell because of it was powerless and because it didn't include some of the most important players in the world at that time. It may also be argued that LoN fell because certain european countries like UK and France were unable or unwilling to enforce its resolutions.
Very true, but nothing has happened that approaches the catastrophic scale of WWI and WWII. Those wars killed hundreds of millions of people and, to top it off, destroyed whole economies and generatins of people (i.e. the lost generation after WWI).
Many smaller wars, yes but no gigantic world wide changing war yet. It's a small step forward but a good one IMO.
UN peackeepers in Korea, Cyprus, Iraq, Kosovo, etc, etc. Many examples abound. Plus the threat of economic sanctions. Worldwide pressure via an open forum is another way.
The UN has nothing to do with this. It's the more powerful countries that have prevented this from happening. Do you honestly think the UN could do shit if the US and China decided to go at it?
No, most definatley not. The UN does, however, give them the chance to negoiate their differences fairly peacefully as well as allow other nations of the world ot exert pressure to prevent war.
I maintain that the UN is the world's first supra-national organization, before league of nations, simply because LN didn't have the US in it. It can hardly be considered world wide if you exclude one of the world's superpowers.
UN might be a joke, but it's the best we have. Kuwait was saved because of its oil, and South Korea, arguablly, was saved.
True, millions have been killed in wars over the last few years but nothing, repeat nothing, like the likes of world war I & II where, literally, Hundreds of millions of people died. A whole generation of western europeans were basically lost after world war I.
League of Nations did not include the US so it wasn't really worldwide. Hanseatic league, to be honest, i've never heard of.
The catholic church only had jurisdiction over christendom, if that, and was ignored by all for the most part. Leauge of Nations didn't have one of the world's superpowers (US) and can, therefore, hardly be considered worldwide.
I should've phrased that better I admit.
Is the UN that great? Well no, but it has at least contributed to world peace, stability and such throughout its existence. Its main flaws being that it isn't really above an individual nation states power and is especially vulnerable to the power of the US.
Yes, indeed. But the NFL shields incompetent owners/general managers by making only the signing bonus gauranteed -- if the contract is cut no extra money is due to the player. Ergo, the effects of said incompetence aren't quite as noticeable.
And don't forget that right now the NFL is king of the sports world for a few reasons, the biggest being the monstrous parity that exists and the overall level of play that is demonstrated.
Part of this is because, unlike MLB or NBA contracts, NFL contracts -- except for the signing bonus -- aren't gauranteed. You think it was a mistake that no football players were listed in that overpaid category? It isn't. Very, very few exist (hugh douglas of jacksonville comes to mind as does kurt warner) and those that do exist are going to be cut next year. Why? Because the contracts aren't gauranteed so the team has nothing to lose by cutting them -- except a possible salary cap hit.
OTOH you have MLB which, ridiculously, has no salary cap and so teams like the Yankees can continually buy themselves into competition. Or the NBA where there are constant stories of overpaid underperforming athletes who stick with the teams only because the contract cannot be voided.
In the end these fixed contracts lead to a decline in the level of play because teams cannot kick out washed out veterans in the hopes of finding new talent and are saddled with third rate, washed up veterans.
To be fair dreamweaver MX produces, by far, the best code. while it might look like crap 99.999% of the time it is w3c compliant.
And, supposedly, Frontpage 2003 is *alot* better nowadays. Haven't used it so I can say for sure.
Oil comes from rotting algae and phytoplankton. The compound they use to float eventually breaks down to form oil.
Not dinosaur bones and and cabbage. When you consider the scale and massive amounts of algae that exist in the ocean it's not hard to figure out why.
THe 'plant material' they are talking about is rather specific, the only thing that produces large deposits of petreloeum is phytoplankton. I.E. floating plants in the ocean. The stuff they use to float eventually breaks down and forms petro. So, you are talking about billions upon billions of microscopic floating plants feeding our cars, not a tree or something.
If you're lucky enough to go to school at University of Nebraska last nite they had a special event for it:
1. Panther Mid-Nite Madness,Union Computer Store 24 Oct
For Mac users who just can't wait, the UNL Computer Store at the
Union Campus location is hosting a "Panther Mid-Nite Madness" on
Friday, October 24th. The new Panther operating system will be
demonstrated, and copies will be available for sale at the student
price of $69. To preorder your copy, call 472-0505 or 472-5787.
I guess I figured most major universities would have apple outlets on campus like we do.. is that not the case?
38 pounds is $64.60 (at the latest conversion rate of 1.7 dollars/pound). So half as much, which isn't bad.
Of course, I'm currently attending a university in england (lancaster) and I bought textbooks a few weeks ago. I spent about 150 pounds on books which is about 3/4 of what I would spend in the states. It is also weird because, here, they have almost every textbook in the library on short loan so you don't even really need to buy the textbooks -- something that US universities should really consider... if book buying wasn't such a huge cash cow for them.
I would be suprised considering there is no real point to having a computer up for 10 years running linux .1. Especially considering the type of people who would be running Linux 10 years ago were probably interested in developing it, not in using it for something that would require 10 years of uptime. Now 10 years from today would somebody have a linux box with 10 years uptime... quite possible.
On the other hand,at various IBM confrences i've talked to plenty of folks whose IBM big iron mainframes have uptimes of 10-15 years. And a friend of mine has a old BSD DNS box that currently has an uptime of 3.5 years. It's been sitting at his parents house collecting dust over the years and, despite having no UPS, has somehow managed to remain up and running.
Except for the family of 5 trying to work on $30,000 worth of income...
No matter what way you try to slant it the flat tax is a boon for the rich and the bane of the middle class nad the poor.
Why ought the rich to pay a greater percentage?
The easiest way to explain this is to look at an example. We have two people, person A makes 20,000 dollars a year. Person B makes 200,000 dollars a year.
Assume we have a flat tax of 20%. In this way person A will pay 2,000 in taxes leaving him with 18,000. Person B will pay 20,000 in taxes and will have 180,000 left over.
Now, here is why this is unfair. Person A is now below the poverty line if he has a family or, if he doesn't, is barely able to afford the basic things like food, shelter, car, etc. The amount of disposable income he has probably doesn't hit much over 2,000 dollars. Person B on the other hand has $180,000 to do with as he pleases and is far, far above the poverty line. His disposable income would probably be in the six digits, at least.
What happens with the flat tax is that the poor bear the greatest burden. The rich have plenty of money while the poor have virutally all their disposable income sucked up and, in some cases, can actually be put below the poverty line in the interests of a "fair" flat tax.
Politics is just a way of saying 'nice doggie' untill you can find a big stick.
Tech Support
Obviously the brazilian government shouldn't care, but americans do care. That much money taken from country X is that much more money we don't have to get from home. Yeah I know, crappy world view but what can you do?
Also, if you looked at the trade deficit/surplus figures between the US and Brazil my *guess* would be that american puts in about as much money into brazil as we take.
Yeah, that's kindof what Microsoft and some members of the US government are afraid of. Obviously some US companies will adapt (like red hat and IBM) but people are afraid of a business model which allows for no one country to dominate the market and is, basically, free. The cost-of-entry barriers are virtually non existent for something like linux, compared to - say - car manufacturing, chip production, or heavy industry. Interesting times indeed.
It would be far better for just about any country to invest in a localized linux distro but, and this is a big but, Linux still isn't as good as either Windows or Mac OS X *all around* for everybody. Once this starts to change in a few years, as it has been, I'm sure we will see Microsoft dropping their prices.
BTW, I would guess your figure is off by a factor of at least 2 considering things like volume licensing and the fact that most sales of office/windows are via OEM sales from manufacturers, far cheaper than retail versions. I would say the total cost would be closer to something like $2-3 Billion - not an insignificant chunk of change by any means.
Yeah, that is definately one thing that people in the states never think about when they mindlessly bash MS and people like the MPAA and RIAA.
Whether or not you realize it the software industry, and music and movie industry, contribute huge amounts of money to the US economy - i'm too lazy to look up the links - but without those industrys the US' trade deficit would be much higher than it already is, and it's already too high.
The Brazilian government, and all those who switch to linux and other free alternatives, are that many less customers that MS gets and that less tax we americans get. Especially considering that most do not buy products like Red Hat or other US based compaines distros but instead focus on local distro's. Great for their country, crappy for the US. While it is preferable on slashdot to think of congress critters as being bought and paid for by the industry in reality some think exactly along the lines I laid out, more piracy and more switching to free software equals less taxes and less jobs for americans.
Note, I do not necassarily agree with the above statements but it is something to think about.