There's more than one effect these stores seem to be having, but the situation is being oversimplified for political reasons. That isn't a "research brief," so much as it is a propaganda pamphlet from a lobbying group. These organizations spam editors of news aggregation sites, like Slashdot, with this drivel.
Some of the points made in the Guardian article that the pamphlet cites as a source are good ones. It sucks when a locally-owned retailer is blindsided by a large corporation that comes in and, dangling "jobs," manages to convince the local government to give it tax breaks that amount to an unfair advantage. From the perspective of the local-government, it will be counter-productive when the less-efficient local grocery (that employs more people) to be replaced by the hyper-efficient national chain that doesn't need as many employees, but the national chain is sophisticated in marketing itself, and politicians are shortsighted. From the perspective of consumers, the increased efficiency makes it cheaper to buy the same stuff, although they might end up with a more limited selection.
Sometimes, too, these stores aren't replacing much of anything, because there wasn't a store nearby. It's a complex mixture of bad and good effects, and one-sided pamphleteers from the "Institute of Local Self Reliance" don't help you to understand. It doesn't help to simply demonize efficiency because it means a company doesn't need to hire as many people, any more than it does to argue against economies of scale. That's a losing battle if ever there was one. Regulation can help to ensure desirable outcomes, but you can't enforce the perpetuation of outdated business models.
I'm sure there is some truth to this, but according to this story, Boeing is citing "slowing sales" as one of two reasons for the layoffs. How can that be the case, if demand exceeds production capacity?
The other reason, "increased competition," seems all the more reason not to reduce the workforce responsible for developing the products in competition, if you can afford not to. Otherwise you're being very shortsighted, making yourself ever less competitive.
There may be some detail to explain this situation better. Maybe there are subtypes of engineering specialty they no longer need due to changing technology or outsourcing certain skillsets to suppliers, et cetera, but that isn't at all what they're saying.
It's important to remember, though, that the BBC is subsidized by a tax the British government adds on to the retail price of all televisions in the UK, in addition to other funds the British government provides. The American broadcast networks (other than PBS/NPR) are commercial and don't have the luxury of heavy subsidies. And the republicans want to cut all funding for American Public broadcasting. So, what little we do have is already under attack.
I think it could only have been a sign of good faith on Disney's side.
Yes, exactly. Disney knows his personality, and they want Good Steve. Good Steve, only human, is transferable from Apple to Pixar. And it's not like they stand to lose anything selling a few shows on the Internet. Also, I don't think it's necessarily bad for Pixar to have Steve Jobs get buttered up by Disney. Pixar without Disney faces a difficult distribution problem, where either Pixar has to develop the ability to distribute, market, and merchandise its own movies (expensive, risky), or find a new partner (let's face it: who is the master of selling animated movies to children?). Pixar has probably just been holding out for Disney to offer a better deal. Or maybe they'll just sell all future movies through iTunes... after all, no overhead.
Yeah, for real. I tried changing "Lugaru" (which OS X tried to open in Photoshop) to "Lugaru.app" and when I ran it, it tried to open in Classic, which of course isn't--and will never be--installed on my new laptop. If this guy hasn't even updated his game to run on OS X, when he originally wrote it for the Mac, it makes me suspect he isn't at all serious about porting it to Linux, and he probably only submitted a question to be posted on Slashdot as advertising to milk the last few dollars out of this project, apparently from Windows users. Wonder if it runs on XP... there's always DOS compatibility mode.
Lecomte, born 1967, immigrated from France to Austin, Texas, at age 23. When his father died of colon cancer in 1992, it spurred him to do something extraordinary to raise awareness of and money for cancer research. With the help of Edward Coyle, director of UT Austin's Human Performance Lab, and dieticians, Lecomte trained to build his endurance, swimming and cycling 3 to 5 hours a day, six days a week for two years. On 16 July 1998 he set out from Cape Cod with 8 wet suits, a snorkel and some flippers into turning weather.
Navigated through the 40th and 50th latitude by two French sailors on a 12m (40 foot) sailboat and protected by an electronic force field, Lecomte swam 6 to 8 hours a day at two-hour intervals. He mainly used the crawl stroke, switching occasionally to a mono fin and using an undulating dolphin kick to carry him over the 5 600km (3 736 nautical miles) of relentless waves. 72 days later, on 28 September, he swam ashore exhausted but heroic at Quiberon, France.
Why would anyone want to do this? Why not just get one 30" display, a G5 Tower (say, the $2k one), and a copy of Virtual PC w/ Windows XP Professional, and save about $250? After all, do you really need almost NINE HUNDRED square inches of screen? If you do, isn't it kind of a waste to have it displaying the much shoddier Windows graphics (or, shoddier still, I'm sorry to say, those of certain more politically acceptable free operating systems), blown up to offend the eye all the more? (Yes, let's have the taskbar be an awful shade of blue, and contrast it with a Start button of an awful shade of green. Yum!) You can have a mere 450 square inches of screen showing you something much more pleasant to look at, and still have Windows if you need it.
The guy probably has tenure, and will never be replaced by his own program. Also, there's a lot more to being a professor than interacting with students/grading their papers.
They might quit hiring grad students as TA's, though...
Quote from transgaming's website: "Packaged Windows version will *not* work well with standard WineX due to lack of optimizations". So if you own the sims for windows and want it to run on linux, you're SOL unless you want to shell out another 70 or 90 dollars.
It's amazing to think that something with such enormous and horrible consequences could pretty easily have been caused to happen again just 25 years ago. The effects of the earth being struck by a 10 kilometer wide asteroid sound very similar to the effects of the activation of a nuclear device only about six meters wide, nuclear winter. Anyone can visit the airforce base in Albuquerque, New Mexico and go to the nuclear weapons museum and see a demilled 20 megaton nuclear bomb, sitting there looking very much like an innocent septic tank, but once, not too long ago, having been capable of the type of devastation described in this article. It's a very unique experience to see something so small that could have undiscriminatingly killed you and all your friends and all the members of your species and most of the other species on the planet.
On an unrelated note, I wonder if there would be anything left of that asteroid or if it would have been completely destroyed in its collision with the earth. Does anyone know if any scientific groups have looked or are looking for pieces of it off the coast of the Yucatan? It seems like it wouldn't be too difficult to figure out what it was composed of, by analyzing layers of what would have been topsoil at the time, and then one would know what sort of rocks to look for under the sea. A lot could be learned by knowing more about that asteroid, probably.
By claiming paternity to Open Source, Gates claims that the actions of his company (e.g. the portability stipulation in its contract with IBM) were pursuant to Open-Source philosophy when really they were only an effort to increase the number of entities to whom Microsoft could legally license its software.
Also, other people within Gates' company have recently made some pretty nasty comments about Open Source software, such as calling it (if I recall correctly) un-american and horrible for the software industry. It seems to me that a company with as proud a history of support for Open Source computing as the one Gates seems to be describing would have evidence of such support as part of its most basic company philosophy. And if so, then why would a public statement be made by a representative of Microsoft containing those horrible things? It could be a case of an errant representative, a philosophical discrepency between Gates and other people in the company, or hypocrisy. In any case, the first count of hypocrisy still applies, unless Gates' comment is being misinterpreted. We'll just have to wait and see if he sees fit to make himself more clear.
It seems like pretty much all of the replies to this article are flames against microsoft's evil plan. The other side of the coin is the willingness of Redhat to provide its software for free. This is really a very moving gesture on the part of Redhat. Yes, it greatly increases the likelihood that they will profit from it financially in the future, but Redhat would be spending a great deal of money providing the actual CDs and manuals and tech support, investing it all in the consumer reaction they will get from the widespread use. Redhat has only become profitable with its training courses. This would be a good move for them. If the Redhat proposal is actually used Linux will be thrown into the mainstream rather quickly. Schoolchildren everywhere will know how to use Linux. They will be more likely to use it at home as well as at school, which means that many games (which are mostly targeted at young people) will be developed for Linux instead of Windows. Jobs will be created; the people who currently run windows-based school networks will either need to be retrained or replaced. It would be very lucrative for Redhat to sell spots in training classes for all of the teachers and admins and parents and everybody involved who will want or need to know how to run Linux. Businesses would follow. It is conceivable that this could be what would instigate the Linux Armageddon that we all hope in the backs of our minds will one day take place. If all the school systems in the US start running Linux, and the very probable cultural chain reaction takes place, then in just a few years Linux could be on the level of Windows in terms of nearly everything. I applaud Redhat.
I mean only that the IBM platform is special because of what happened with it, not that it was so because it was any great innovation. Pirates of Silicon Valley I think pretty accurately illustrates Microsoft's intent in the portability stipulation in its contract with IBM, despite any of the movie's other shortcomings.
It is true that Microsoft's contract with IBM, which stipulated that Microsoft could sell its operating system software to whomever it wanted, allowed Microsoft's creation of a universal operating system which would run on any computer similar to those made by IBM. The popularity of this idea caused other companies to build IBM compatible parts, which started the open system architecture revolution of the mid-to-late 1980's. However, Microsoft did not intend to create a level playing field for hardware manufacturers. It did not produce an operating system which would run on a machine which could conceivably be made by any company for the purpose of promoting creativity and competition between hardware manufacturers. Microsoft did what it did so that it could sell as many copies of its operating system as possible. It is hard to believe that a person as anticompetitive as bill gates would claim to have idealistically started the open hardware architecture revolution with the intent of benefiting science or computing or whatever by opening the doors to new influences. This is beyond hypocrisy. Microsoft may have played a large role in setting architecture standards with its operating system, but it did so to make a profit, and any benefits to technology ensuing from the hordes of companies who began to make IBM compatible hardware and compete with each other were a side effect to Microsoft's bottom line. Open Source software, on the other hand, has the benefit of everyone in mind and is notoriously bad at producing a profit. I'll believe Bill when he begins to merrily distribute Microsoft system code, philanthropist that he is.
If you liked MST3K when it was running, you should check out Edward The Less, an "online series" with the same writers and actors. You should also check in on this MST3K tape-trading site from time-to-time. It's still under construction, but it'll be cool when they finish it.
Kafka was a pretty good judge of his work. He knew he had a keen insight into human thought, insecurity in particular, but felt that he was incapable of fully expressing whatever it was he knew. This made him feel that it would be better to leave no explanation of his insight at all than an unfinished one which could be misinterpreted. (I gather all of this from a Kafka quote in the forward to his Complete Stories from Schocken Books, New York.) This is a valid sentiment, I think; no one would want something they did not complete left open to analyzation. Kafka didn't feel he had fully realized his intentions. The style of his work was more important than the question of a fully fleshed-out plot, though, and yes it is lucky that much of his work was saved. Some was burned, however, by his girlfriend.
Unfinished writings are a very sensitive thing, and I don't think it's a good idea ever to generalize about them or extrapolate too heavily on the writer's intentions for whatever portion he hadn't set down when he died.
I think Adams' publishing company has gone a little too far to capitalize on the Hitchhiker's stuff (think all the different editions of the books, with photographs, and token short stories, and other gimmicky stuff to get you to buy the same book more than once). Not that any profit-motivated publisher wouldn't, but I'm not getting my hopes up about a really substantial piece of writing.
"Strategy" games' problem with oversimplification is hard to avoid. For most of those games, the only object is to obliterate your opponent before he can do likewise to you; any and all possible actions the player can make are directed toward that end. In the real world, the development of military technology is different because its object is more complex, primarily it involves self-defense. Because our nation is not seeking to destroy other nations (most of the time), it stockpiles weapons and works out tactics in the unfortunate event that they are called for. But not surprisingly strategy, game players aren't going to think in the long-term, about alliances or food production or the fate of their computer-generated population.
When from the get-go one is told that he must destroy some other military collective, the most obvious and best tactic is to get in there before much stockpiling or thinking (or morale changes) can take place. The only way to avoid this situation without changing the combative object of the game is to introduce limits ex machina (excuse the pun). Say, for instance, that no combat can take place for the first ten minutes or until a certain level on the technology tree has been reached by all parties. But artificial limitations tend to make things uninteresting.
If defenses were easier to attain and more effective and intelligent then perhaps blitzkrieg tactics would be ineffective enough to allow for a more sophisticated confrontation of intellect and skill, rather than of ever-more-frenzied mouse clicking.
The United States should be concentrating on teaching the rest of the world not to be starving and hateful. Or at least how not to starve because we haven't quite got the not hating part completely down ourselves.
But it's so much easier to drop bombs and sell each other new things...
You seem to be suggesting turning the slashdot community into a viable political party. I don't think that's possible. For any third party candidate to win an election that means anything (it might not take a lot to get a mayor elected in a small town) it takes quite a lot of dedication and work on the part of a great many people with real world connections and issues. The slashdot community is spread across the entire United States and beyond. To even win a US representative election it would take a concentrated group of people capable of convincing real voters that casting a ballot for whatever candidate would be in their best interest. Most people aren't too interested in the GPL. State legislature elections would be even harder for such a candidate to break into; people would want to vote for someone who seems most interested in local issues of the state. Forming a PAC with substantial backing numbers might be a good idea, but actually trying to get a candidate elected is pretty far-fetched.
Slashdot Mirror
There's more than one effect these stores seem to be having, but the situation is being oversimplified for political reasons. That isn't a "research brief," so much as it is a propaganda pamphlet from a lobbying group. These organizations spam editors of news aggregation sites, like Slashdot, with this drivel.
Some of the points made in the Guardian article that the pamphlet cites as a source are good ones. It sucks when a locally-owned retailer is blindsided by a large corporation that comes in and, dangling "jobs," manages to convince the local government to give it tax breaks that amount to an unfair advantage. From the perspective of the local-government, it will be counter-productive when the less-efficient local grocery (that employs more people) to be replaced by the hyper-efficient national chain that doesn't need as many employees, but the national chain is sophisticated in marketing itself, and politicians are shortsighted. From the perspective of consumers, the increased efficiency makes it cheaper to buy the same stuff, although they might end up with a more limited selection.
Sometimes, too, these stores aren't replacing much of anything, because there wasn't a store nearby. It's a complex mixture of bad and good effects, and one-sided pamphleteers from the "Institute of Local Self Reliance" don't help you to understand. It doesn't help to simply demonize efficiency because it means a company doesn't need to hire as many people, any more than it does to argue against economies of scale. That's a losing battle if ever there was one. Regulation can help to ensure desirable outcomes, but you can't enforce the perpetuation of outdated business models.
Has Microsoft explained how "Window 10 on ARM" is going to be different from the quickly-abandoned Windows RT debacle?
Astronauts Cosmonauts Taikonauts Aussienauts?
I'm sure there is some truth to this, but according to this story, Boeing is citing "slowing sales" as one of two reasons for the layoffs. How can that be the case, if demand exceeds production capacity?
The other reason, "increased competition," seems all the more reason not to reduce the workforce responsible for developing the products in competition, if you can afford not to. Otherwise you're being very shortsighted, making yourself ever less competitive.
There may be some detail to explain this situation better. Maybe there are subtypes of engineering specialty they no longer need due to changing technology or outsourcing certain skillsets to suppliers, et cetera, but that isn't at all what they're saying.
I wonder how this report squares with the one from late February that "Boeing and Airbus Can't Make Enough Airplanes To Keep Up With Demand". Poor workforce management? One of these two stories must misrepresent the truth.
It's important to remember, though, that the BBC is subsidized by a tax the British government adds on to the retail price of all televisions in the UK, in addition to other funds the British government provides. The American broadcast networks (other than PBS/NPR) are commercial and don't have the luxury of heavy subsidies. And the republicans want to cut all funding for American Public broadcasting. So, what little we do have is already under attack.
I think it could only have been a sign of good faith on Disney's side.
Yes, exactly. Disney knows his personality, and they want Good Steve. Good Steve, only human, is transferable from Apple to Pixar. And it's not like they stand to lose anything selling a few shows on the Internet.
Also, I don't think it's necessarily bad for Pixar to have Steve Jobs get buttered up by Disney. Pixar without Disney faces a difficult distribution problem, where either Pixar has to develop the ability to distribute, market, and merchandise its own movies (expensive, risky), or find a new partner (let's face it: who is the master of selling animated movies to children?). Pixar has probably just been holding out for Disney to offer a better deal. Or maybe they'll just sell all future movies through iTunes... after all, no overhead.
Yeah, for real. I tried changing "Lugaru" (which OS X tried to open in Photoshop) to "Lugaru.app" and when I ran it, it tried to open in Classic, which of course isn't--and will never be--installed on my new laptop.
If this guy hasn't even updated his game to run on OS X, when he originally wrote it for the Mac, it makes me suspect he isn't at all serious about porting it to Linux, and he probably only submitted a question to be posted on Slashdot as advertising to milk the last few dollars out of this project, apparently from Windows users. Wonder if it runs on XP... there's always DOS compatibility mode.
From this site:
Lecomte, born 1967, immigrated from France to Austin, Texas, at age 23. When his father died of colon cancer in 1992, it spurred him to do something extraordinary to raise awareness of and money for cancer research. With the help of Edward Coyle, director of UT Austin's Human Performance Lab, and dieticians, Lecomte trained to build his endurance, swimming and cycling 3 to 5 hours a day, six days a week for two years. On 16 July 1998 he set out from Cape Cod with 8 wet suits, a snorkel and some flippers into turning weather. Navigated through the 40th and 50th latitude by two French sailors on a 12m (40 foot) sailboat and protected by an electronic force field, Lecomte swam 6 to 8 hours a day at two-hour intervals. He mainly used the crawl stroke, switching occasionally to a mono fin and using an undulating dolphin kick to carry him over the 5 600km (3 736 nautical miles) of relentless waves. 72 days later, on 28 September, he swam ashore exhausted but heroic at Quiberon, France.
too much coffee.
erm... drink coffee, divide by ten.
Why would anyone want to do this? Why not just get one 30" display, a G5 Tower (say, the $2k one), and a copy of Virtual PC w/ Windows XP Professional, and save about $250? After all, do you really need almost NINE HUNDRED square inches of screen? If you do, isn't it kind of a waste to have it displaying the much shoddier Windows graphics (or, shoddier still, I'm sorry to say, those of certain more politically acceptable free operating systems), blown up to offend the eye all the more? (Yes, let's have the taskbar be an awful shade of blue, and contrast it with a Start button of an awful shade of green. Yum!) You can have a mere 450 square inches of screen showing you something much more pleasant to look at, and still have Windows if you need it.
The guy probably has tenure, and will never be replaced by his own program. Also, there's a lot more to being a professor than interacting with students/grading their papers.
They might quit hiring grad students as TA's, though...
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/install.html
it looks like there isn't an OSX version available.
Quote from transgaming's website: "Packaged Windows version will *not* work well with standard WineX due to lack of optimizations".
So if you own the sims for windows and want it to run on linux, you're SOL unless you want to shell out another 70 or 90 dollars.
It's amazing to think that something with such enormous and horrible consequences could pretty easily have been caused to happen again just 25 years ago. The effects of the earth being struck by a 10 kilometer wide asteroid sound very similar to the effects of the activation of a nuclear device only about six meters wide, nuclear winter.
Anyone can visit the airforce base in Albuquerque, New Mexico and go to the nuclear weapons museum and see a demilled 20 megaton nuclear bomb, sitting there looking very much like an innocent septic tank, but once, not too long ago, having been capable of the type of devastation described in this article. It's a very unique experience to see something so small that could have undiscriminatingly killed you and all your friends and all the members of your species and most of the other species on the planet.
On an unrelated note, I wonder if there would be anything left of that asteroid or if it would have been completely destroyed in its collision with the earth. Does anyone know if any scientific groups have looked or are looking for pieces of it off the coast of the Yucatan? It seems like it wouldn't be too difficult to figure out what it was composed of, by analyzing layers of what would have been topsoil at the time, and then one would know what sort of rocks to look for under the sea. A lot could be learned by knowing more about that asteroid, probably.
By claiming paternity to Open Source, Gates claims that the actions of his company (e.g. the portability stipulation in its contract with IBM) were pursuant to Open-Source philosophy when really they were only an effort to increase the number of entities to whom Microsoft could legally license its software.
Also, other people within Gates' company have recently made some pretty nasty comments about Open Source software, such as calling it (if I recall correctly) un-american and horrible for the software industry. It seems to me that a company with as proud a history of support for Open Source computing as the one Gates seems to be describing would have evidence of such support as part of its most basic company philosophy. And if so, then why would a public statement be made by a representative of Microsoft containing those horrible things? It could be a case of an errant representative, a philosophical discrepency between Gates and other people in the company, or hypocrisy. In any case, the first count of hypocrisy still applies, unless Gates' comment is being misinterpreted. We'll just have to wait and see if he sees fit to make himself more clear.
It seems like pretty much all of the replies to this article are flames against microsoft's evil plan.
The other side of the coin is the willingness of Redhat to provide its software for free. This is really a very moving gesture on the part of Redhat. Yes, it greatly increases the likelihood that they will profit from it financially in the future, but Redhat would be spending a great deal of money providing the actual CDs and manuals and tech support, investing it all in the consumer reaction they will get from the widespread use. Redhat has only become profitable with its training courses. This would be a good move for them.
If the Redhat proposal is actually used Linux will be thrown into the mainstream rather quickly. Schoolchildren everywhere will know how to use Linux. They will be more likely to use it at home as well as at school, which means that many games (which are mostly targeted at young people) will be developed for Linux instead of Windows.
Jobs will be created; the people who currently run windows-based school networks will either need to be retrained or replaced. It would be very lucrative for Redhat to sell spots in training classes for all of the teachers and admins and parents and everybody involved who will want or need to know how to run Linux. Businesses would follow. It is conceivable that this could be what would instigate the Linux Armageddon that we all hope in the backs of our minds will one day take place. If all the school systems in the US start running Linux, and the very probable cultural chain reaction takes place, then in just a few years Linux could be on the level of Windows in terms of nearly everything. I applaud Redhat.
I mean only that the IBM platform is special because of what happened with it, not that it was so because it was any great innovation.
Pirates of Silicon Valley I think pretty accurately illustrates Microsoft's intent in the portability stipulation in its contract with IBM, despite any of the movie's other shortcomings.
It is true that Microsoft's contract with IBM, which stipulated that Microsoft could sell its operating system software to whomever it wanted, allowed Microsoft's creation of a universal operating system which would run on any computer similar to those made by IBM. The popularity of this idea caused other companies to build IBM compatible parts, which started the open system architecture revolution of the mid-to-late 1980's.
However, Microsoft did not intend to create a level playing field for hardware manufacturers. It did not produce an operating system which would run on a machine which could conceivably be made by any company for the purpose of promoting creativity and competition between hardware manufacturers. Microsoft did what it did so that it could sell as many copies of its operating system as possible. It is hard to believe that a person as anticompetitive as bill gates would claim to have idealistically started the open hardware architecture revolution with the intent of benefiting science or computing or whatever by opening the doors to new influences. This is beyond hypocrisy.
Microsoft may have played a large role in setting architecture standards with its operating system, but it did so to make a profit, and any benefits to technology ensuing from the hordes of companies who began to make IBM compatible hardware and compete with each other were a side effect to Microsoft's bottom line.
Open Source software, on the other hand, has the benefit of everyone in mind and is notoriously bad at producing a profit.
I'll believe Bill when he begins to merrily distribute Microsoft system code, philanthropist that he is.
If you liked MST3K when it was running, you should check out Edward The Less, an "online series" with the same writers and actors.
You should also check in on this MST3K tape-trading site from time-to-time. It's still under construction, but it'll be cool when they finish it.
Kafka was a pretty good judge of his work. He knew he had a keen insight into human thought, insecurity in particular, but felt that he was incapable of fully expressing whatever it was he knew. This made him feel that it would be better to leave no explanation of his insight at all than an unfinished one which could be misinterpreted. (I gather all of this from a Kafka quote in the forward to his Complete Stories from Schocken Books, New York.) This is a valid sentiment, I think; no one would want something they did not complete left open to analyzation. Kafka didn't feel he had fully realized his intentions. The style of his work was more important than the question of a fully fleshed-out plot, though, and yes it is lucky that much of his work was saved. Some was burned, however, by his girlfriend. Unfinished writings are a very sensitive thing, and I don't think it's a good idea ever to generalize about them or extrapolate too heavily on the writer's intentions for whatever portion he hadn't set down when he died. I think Adams' publishing company has gone a little too far to capitalize on the Hitchhiker's stuff (think all the different editions of the books, with photographs, and token short stories, and other gimmicky stuff to get you to buy the same book more than once). Not that any profit-motivated publisher wouldn't, but I'm not getting my hopes up about a really substantial piece of writing.
"Strategy" games' problem with oversimplification is hard to avoid. For most of those games, the only object is to obliterate your opponent before he can do likewise to you; any and all possible actions the player can make are directed toward that end. In the real world, the development of military technology is different because its object is more complex, primarily it involves self-defense. Because our nation is not seeking to destroy other nations (most of the time), it stockpiles weapons and works out tactics in the unfortunate event that they are called for. But not surprisingly strategy, game players aren't going to think in the long-term, about alliances or food production or the fate of their computer-generated population.
When from the get-go one is told that he must destroy some other military collective, the most obvious and best tactic is to get in there before much stockpiling or thinking (or morale changes) can take place. The only way to avoid this situation without changing the combative object of the game is to introduce limits ex machina (excuse the pun). Say, for instance, that no combat can take place for the first ten minutes or until a certain level on the technology tree has been reached by all parties. But artificial limitations tend to make things uninteresting.
If defenses were easier to attain and more effective and intelligent then perhaps blitzkrieg tactics would be ineffective enough to allow for a more sophisticated confrontation of intellect and skill, rather than of ever-more-frenzied mouse clicking.
The United States should be concentrating on teaching the rest of the world not to be starving and hateful. Or at least how not to starve because we haven't quite got the not hating part completely down ourselves. But it's so much easier to drop bombs and sell each other new things...
You seem to be suggesting turning the slashdot community into a viable political party. I don't think that's possible. For any third party candidate to win an election that means anything (it might not take a lot to get a mayor elected in a small town) it takes quite a lot of dedication and work on the part of a great many people with real world connections and issues. The slashdot community is spread across the entire United States and beyond. To even win a US representative election it would take a concentrated group of people capable of convincing real voters that casting a ballot for whatever candidate would be in their best interest. Most people aren't too interested in the GPL. State legislature elections would be even harder for such a candidate to break into; people would want to vote for someone who seems most interested in local issues of the state. Forming a PAC with substantial backing numbers might be a good idea, but actually trying to get a candidate elected is pretty far-fetched.