I'm on a lot of mailing lists. So 300 emails a day works out to 75 cents US. Which adds up to $273 a year that I have to pay. If you look at it from the point of view of the mailing lists, they might have 10,000 users which means every email costs them $25US. For someone like Debian this is death. For someone like Microsoft -- They'll just add $25 to their product prices.
When the F... are you going to realize that pay per use is not a means to being effective for anything. It's a means of generating money. It doesn't save you money and it doesn't get you any more freedom, happiness, or flexability
Not only will it generate revenue for delivering spam, but it will also mean the end of non-cost based mail delivery. Think mailing lists and personal domain servers.
So you're proposing we blacklist AOL, TimeWarner, ComCast...
I'm all for it. But if they don't blacklist each other there's not much affect this is going to have.
Read up on the early history of Radio. It used to be free to broadcast. Now it's really expensive. Soon the only web pages and mailing activities will be those that are sanctioned by the key masters.
Pure Capitalism is self destructive. Moral Capitalism is not.
The point behind guaranteed delivery is that the ISP will not blacklist your domain/ip address regardless of how many spam reports they receive. This is the whole point behind goodmail.
I just spend hours in a meeting discussing this very topic. Our company was blacklisted by AOL because too many people reported our email as spam (it's all mail that they opted in for -- default is out). The result was all of AOL delivery was blacklisted. Eventually we got it fixed, but the next tier to the solution is to pay GoodMail $$ to effectively certify our domains as legitimate senders and they pay AOL a portion of their proceeds to guarantee permanent whitelist status no matter what the users do.
The only criteria that AOL has leveled against us is if someone tags our email as spam, we have to remove them from the mailing list. But I don't know if this will change or not with the introduction of GoodMail into our mail delivery system.
That comes to mind. But I think ten years ago there was more merit to this way of thinking. It's far too easy for someone to get your email address today. To confirm an address means nothing to them. They don't really care - it's either all hit and miss or they already have confirmed your email address.
But the legitimate advertisers or subscriptions could and should use this mechanism for removal. Besides, failure to remove becomes harrassment.
Is this someone who you can rehabilitate? You make it sound as if the strong instinct about making money is a criminal or amoral behaviour that needs rehabilitation. I guess I don't understand your point.
I think it's OK to have an instinct about something. But it's not OK to follow that instinct regardless of the social norms or laws that exist in the society you participate in. Otherwise, most criminal behaviour would become OK since it's just following instincts.
If I had mod points today I would give them to you...
spam will never go away, it's a multi billion dollar industry and people actually buy this stuff. So there's a very strong business case to keep it around. Capitalism...
The process of sending unsolicited email may or may not be something you can criminalize if the sender is accurately representing themselves in the email. However, the process of not removing someone from a mailing list upon their request can be considered harassment. I don't know if harassment is a misdemeanor or a felony. Probably depends on the degree. I'll assume for now it is not a felony.
But doing this under snake oil pretenses is a criminal intent. You hide your true identify by forge mail headers and trespassing onto other peoples computers.
The forgery should be treated as just exactly that -- forgery. I think this is considered a felony.
The invasion of someone elses computer should be treated as breaking and entering or theft. The economic value of the theft should be calculated on the cost of the machine being stolen. This would push most actions out of small claims/misdemeanors into felony court. So this too is a felony.
So there you have it, based on previously existing law. Spam is legal if accurately represented. Continuing to send Spam is a misdemeanor. Sending spam as a misrepresentation of yourself or through resources you do not have permission to use, is a felony. Is that so hard to work with?
Rehabilitation works only if there's remorse for a crime. The only thing he is aware of is the $$$ he makes. If he had to delete 20 billion spam then he might start getting a clue of just how much of a pain in the ass he is for doing his business the way he has. I would go further in that he should also be held accountable for the format/install of all those owned machines out there. And on top of that he's probably also responsible for a lot of people buying new computers under the false impression that they need to get a new one because the old one is slow. It's only slow because of his doings.
I have no interest in rehabilitation unless someone actually shows a sense of regret and remorse for their crimes. And even then there's a question of being real or just playing the therapists.
I do hope that if he's convicted that they have the sense to toss everything they have at him.
The first thought that came into my mind was to use OpenOffice. Never heard of NeoOffice before.
After reading up on NeoOffice and having installed OpenOffice on my MacBook. I still say they should be using OpenOffice. I've been using that for almost 6 years for everything.
But I don't agree with what is almost described as, "He's sending you a preview of his deck for review". If he has something to discuss with me in person then I think the human interaction is better served by coming over without the email and sitting down at a table and talking it over a piece of paper. Paper is still an effective means of communication.
I particularly like the guy at work who walks over to my desk and says, "Hey there, did you get my email?" when he sent it about 30 seconds ago. What the fuck is he doing? Sending me an email so he can come over and talk to me about whatever it is that's in the email and then wasting my time even more?
I've started taking the approach of answering "No, but when I do I'll let you know if there are any questions. Right now I'm kind of busy..." What I really want to do is bitch whip him with my mouse.
When properly used, I like email in that it provides an asynchronous means of communication which does not become time dependent. I can send someone an email at 2:30AM when I happen to awake and just check for an answer later that day or the next. If I really need an instant reply, there's always the phone.
But I do think there are a lot of people in the world who's email is effectively broken because they cannot keep up with the spam that comes in.
Could it get better if there were not so many owned machines?
To a fare degree this is correct. But I would use different terminology.
For most people, they still do not consider or are willing to consider that there may be alternatives to Windows. And when faced with this option that there are alternatives they simply brush it off and say that they are willing to stick with what they have.
Apple has the same problem. Look at their marketing. They aren't so focused on what Mac can offer as they are on the differences and the lack of pain Mac offers. If you don't recognize the pain they identify as a personal pain, it's a lost campaign.
I wouldn't worry about it. I think it's nice that the computer industry is fragmenting into three main groups: Windows, Mac, Linux. Personally, I don't want to attract all the windows users to Linux. Some of them are idiots. But the nice thing available today is that the variations in personal demographics can be represented by variations in OS.
I use both Linux and Mac today. They both have advantages. And for me, they are both better than Windows.
As an anectdote: my father in law has a Windows notebook. He keeps asking me questions about it and I just don't have the answer for him. It's not that I don't want to help him, but I haven't used Windows in almost a decade. But he will probably stop using computers before he picks up a Mac or Linux.
If Google is so awesome, maybe they can put their money where there mouth is and do something commendable. Of course, they'll probably have a hard time turning this data into marketing material.
It's going to be extremely expensive compared to the current cable broadcasting. For starters you won't be charged a flat fee for unlimited downloads like you are in "broadcast cable" TV. You will charged on a banding of minutes in the show (even if you don't watch it all) and it's popularity. So Greys Anatomy will be at a premium and The Red Green show will not. It will also be banded by time of day, day of week, seasonally, and sports will be insane.
The social response will be to group together to watch these shows to be more cost effective. The network response will be to push the prices even higher. You think $5 a movie was bad? Why not charge $10 for a football game? Or $100 for the SuperBowl?
There is absolutely no way that this is a move which will do anything but cost the consumer more money.
While the TV bill may be reduced to zero, the Cable bill (which is often through cable TV networks) is going to be increased such that a typical viewer who currently pays $100 a month for both can be expected to pay $150 for both and those who use the TV as a baby sitter will be paying in excess of $200 and more. Babysitters would be cheaper at this point.
The down side is that now the Broadband definition moves up, so does the price.
I get 2Mbps most of the time on downloads. But if I get their definition of broadband, I can expect my bill to increase by at least double. And the ISP doesn't have to do a thing for me.
Anyone staying below Broadband can expect their speeds to drop as a sacrifice to those who pay more
I guess I should have applied one more... It's got to do a function in a single line and not a decision tree trying to find out what function will work in the current browser environment. Because of this, I cited the idea of taking an existing non-browser based language and using that. That way it's defined before it's assimulated into the browsers and if anyone screws it up, it becomes their problem.
Yay!!! AMD has a new product line for the mobile PC market.
Only problem is, they have so frickin many platforms that you spend forever trying to figure out WTF you want in a CPU. Sorry AMD, but I think you jumped the shark tank on this one and long before this too.
Would have been a lot easier if you had stuck to three basic cores:
CPU Core for compuational freaks who need it all.
CPU Core for grandma's CP that doesn't need the high performance. (Even this is a stretch)
CPU Core for mobile PC's
It could be argued that they really only need to make two CORES: Mobile and Stationary.
Given so many cores, it becomes a major research project trying to marry up the right CPU, Memory, and Motherboards so you can actually build a suitable PC. This is 10X worse when trying to get a notebook that will actually work with Linux.
I ended up getting a MacBook. Smells like Linux and it took me two minutes to pick out the one I wanted.
For my desktop, I will be purchasing my first Intel machine in ten years. Why? Because it will take me 3 months to get all this other cruft sorted out.
Companies probably aren't primarily concerned with the social implications of work habits. To some extent, yes. But it's got to have a cost benefit attached to it or they simply cannot do it.
I think there is something to be said for this and many people that I work with do this to some extent but only on a very informal and infrequent basis.
I think it would be interesting to implement a rolling work schedule where you only come to work on one or two days a week and work the rest at home.
I personally find that when I do work from home my productivity is rather insane in comparison. I might only work 4 hours on some days, but I'll finish an entire week of work in that time and then spend the remaining 4 hours of the work-day observing the work in action (reading logs) while I watch a movie. A heck of a lot better than it might be at work.
I think there are more alternatives than just Java.
The solution is not Javascript and I think everyone who looks at AJAX for a few minutes realizes that Javascript, as it stands today, is not long for this world.
Whatever the solution is going to be, someone better start working on it sooner than later. But the elements that will make the language useable into the future are going to be:
object oriented?
interpreted language.
extremely lightweight such that it can be loaded as part of the browser without bringing down the house lights.
non-proprietary is an absolute must.
capable of it's own (secure?) data transmission methods -- data marshalling, maybe xml, and ssl tunnelling support?
At this point I'm tempted to say the language will be a subset of an existing language that meets these requirements. Examples might be Perl, Ruby, or Python.
Java may have some pretty good starts in this direction, but I think Java has enough problems of its own that it will never be able to serve the lightweight interface of today's Javascript. It has it's place. Just not on every single web page in the universe.
About 1 second after I started reading this I realized it's something of a joke. No one spoofs the domain or tries to look like a different bank. They emulate a bank from IP addresses that aren't event showing a domain name.
It's an expensive way of addressing a fraction of the problem.
I will still get my daily dose of eBay, PayPal, and various Bank spam/phishing and the criminals will get their daily dose of stupid people. Perhaps we could start blocking the subnets that participate in the criminal activities?
Can't you set up some kind of HTTP Proxy that restricts IP address in much the same way that RBL blocks delivery of email from certain addresses? And if you accidentally take out the entire Russian nation, well perhaps the Russians should reconsider their business mode.
The appropriate action probably depends on the country you are in and the country hosting the herders.
From a list of things to be done, I would contact the ISP last. They will probably contact the perpatrators directly and remove them from service, but that will do nothing to take them out of circulation. That requires something more. Alternatively, you might ask your ISP for advice on how to procede. But make it clear the intentions with them. They might not have a clue what you've captured.
I disagree. If you could determine the physical location of such bot herders and disclose that to the internet at large, I'm sure that there would be a final solution applied that people would be willing to turn their backs on. Especially if you could post photographs, names, and physical addresses.
Ever read All Quiet on the Western Front? Ever talked to someone who was there or a civilian in European WWII?
War sucks. It's supposed to suck. Without the pain and suffering that war can bring to all sides of the battle, winners and losers alike. Perhaps the generals should go watch Star Trek Episode 23, A Taste of Armageddon, circa 1967.
That society has done such a nice job making war "clean" that they have decided to continue fighting a war for 500 years rather than just figure out how to make peace.
In most societies, people are taught that violence against others is fundamentally bad. This becomes a moral element that entwines all the people within that society. It also motivates the same people to find ways around doing violence.
If you study anything about the Nazi camps in WWII they had a growing behaviour where the soldiers in the concentration camps knew what they were doing but absolved themselves of any responsibility by hiding behind the statement, "I was just following orders", thereby removing themselves morally from the actitivies. After WWII this was considered to be a War Crime and has been backed by hundreds of trials across the world.
Fast forward 60 years and we are at a point where the soldiers who are operating a computer screen which operates these killer robots can absolve themselves from any responsibility of moral involvement because the Laws will simply allow them to say, I was just operating a computer program. And while this is going on, there is no one left to come back from the battlefield to serve as a reminder of just how bad war really is and how important it is to avoid it.
At the same time if we are going to commit to a war, we had better be willing to do it to completion even when it gets ugly. I'm pretty pissed at the news for giving us daily body counts of 4 and 10 soldiers on a 5 year battle. In contrast, WWII was hundreds to thousands a day and everyone was sticking to their plan. Everyone was commited to the plan and everyone knew why they were fighting. Vietnam wasn't so clear cut. It was rather vague as to why were where there and even on day one, not everyone was convinced we needed that war. And now we are in the Middle East without a convincing and clear cut plan as to what we are doing, why we are there, what we hope to accomplish, and not enough people in the States give a shit. Perhaps in New York City, but no where else.
They'll get their killer robots and their legal loopholes to kill anything they want and no one will really do much because it's clean and doesn't interfere with "Dancing with the Stars" and the sheep continue to bleat
Slashdot Mirror
But who do you think it going to pay that cost?
I'm on a lot of mailing lists. So 300 emails a day works out to 75 cents US. Which adds up to $273 a year that I have to pay. If you look at it from the point of view of the mailing lists, they might have 10,000 users which means every email costs them $25US. For someone like Debian this is death. For someone like Microsoft -- They'll just add $25 to their product prices.
When the F... are you going to realize that pay per use is not a means to being effective for anything. It's a means of generating money. It doesn't save you money and it doesn't get you any more freedom, happiness, or flexability
Give this man a cigar.
Not only will it generate revenue for delivering spam, but it will also mean the end of non-cost based mail delivery. Think mailing lists and personal domain servers.
So you're proposing we blacklist AOL, TimeWarner, ComCast...
I'm all for it. But if they don't blacklist each other there's not much affect this is going to have.
Read up on the early history of Radio. It used to be free to broadcast. Now it's really expensive. Soon the only web pages and mailing activities will be those that are sanctioned by the key masters.
Pure Capitalism is self destructive. Moral Capitalism is not.
No, you are really wrong.
The point behind guaranteed delivery is that the ISP will not blacklist your domain/ip address regardless of how many spam reports they receive. This is the whole point behind goodmail.
I just spend hours in a meeting discussing this very topic. Our company was blacklisted by AOL because too many people reported our email as spam (it's all mail that they opted in for -- default is out). The result was all of AOL delivery was blacklisted. Eventually we got it fixed, but the next tier to the solution is to pay GoodMail $$ to effectively certify our domains as legitimate senders and they pay AOL a portion of their proceeds to guarantee permanent whitelist status no matter what the users do.
The only criteria that AOL has leveled against us is if someone tags our email as spam, we have to remove them from the mailing list. But I don't know if this will change or not with the introduction of GoodMail into our mail delivery system.
That comes to mind. But I think ten years ago there was more merit to this way of thinking. It's far too easy for someone to get your email address today. To confirm an address means nothing to them. They don't really care - it's either all hit and miss or they already have confirmed your email address.
But the legitimate advertisers or subscriptions could and should use this mechanism for removal. Besides, failure to remove becomes harrassment.
Is this someone who you can rehabilitate? You make it sound as if the strong instinct about making money is a criminal or amoral behaviour that needs rehabilitation. I guess I don't understand your point.
I think it's OK to have an instinct about something. But it's not OK to follow that instinct regardless of the social norms or laws that exist in the society you participate in. Otherwise, most criminal behaviour would become OK since it's just following instincts.
If I had mod points today I would give them to you...
spam will never go away, it's a multi billion dollar industry and people actually buy this stuff. So there's a very strong business case to keep it around. Capitalism...
The process of sending unsolicited email may or may not be something you can criminalize if the sender is accurately representing themselves in the email. However, the process of not removing someone from a mailing list upon their request can be considered harassment. I don't know if harassment is a misdemeanor or a felony. Probably depends on the degree. I'll assume for now it is not a felony.
But doing this under snake oil pretenses is a criminal intent. You hide your true identify by forge mail headers and trespassing onto other peoples computers.
The forgery should be treated as just exactly that -- forgery. I think this is considered a felony.
The invasion of someone elses computer should be treated as breaking and entering or theft. The economic value of the theft should be calculated on the cost of the machine being stolen. This would push most actions out of small claims/misdemeanors into felony court. So this too is a felony.
So there you have it, based on previously existing law. Spam is legal if accurately represented. Continuing to send Spam is a misdemeanor. Sending spam as a misrepresentation of yourself or through resources you do not have permission to use, is a felony. Is that so hard to work with?
Holy Crap you're a bleeding heart pussy!!!
Rehabilitation works only if there's remorse for a crime. The only thing he is aware of is the $$$ he makes. If he had to delete 20 billion spam then he might start getting a clue of just how much of a pain in the ass he is for doing his business the way he has. I would go further in that he should also be held accountable for the format/install of all those owned machines out there. And on top of that he's probably also responsible for a lot of people buying new computers under the false impression that they need to get a new one because the old one is slow. It's only slow because of his doings.
I have no interest in rehabilitation unless someone actually shows a sense of regret and remorse for their crimes. And even then there's a question of being real or just playing the therapists.
I do hope that if he's convicted that they have the sense to toss everything they have at him.
The first thought that came into my mind was to use OpenOffice. Never heard of NeoOffice before.
After reading up on NeoOffice and having installed OpenOffice on my MacBook. I still say they should be using OpenOffice. I've been using that for almost 6 years for everything.
certainly sending files has merit.
But I don't agree with what is almost described as, "He's sending you a preview of his deck for review". If he has something to discuss with me in person then I think the human interaction is better served by coming over without the email and sitting down at a table and talking it over a piece of paper. Paper is still an effective means of communication.
My company has a policy rejecting the application or use of any GPL or F/OSS software.
I'm not kidding...
I particularly like the guy at work who walks over to my desk and says, "Hey there, did you get my email?" when he sent it about 30 seconds ago. What the fuck is he doing? Sending me an email so he can come over and talk to me about whatever it is that's in the email and then wasting my time even more?
I've started taking the approach of answering "No, but when I do I'll let you know if there are any questions. Right now I'm kind of busy..." What I really want to do is bitch whip him with my mouse.
When properly used, I like email in that it provides an asynchronous means of communication which does not become time dependent. I can send someone an email at 2:30AM when I happen to awake and just check for an answer later that day or the next. If I really need an instant reply, there's always the phone.
But I do think there are a lot of people in the world who's email is effectively broken because they cannot keep up with the spam that comes in.
Could it get better if there were not so many owned machines?
To a fare degree this is correct. But I would use different terminology.
For most people, they still do not consider or are willing to consider that there may be alternatives to Windows. And when faced with this option that there are alternatives they simply brush it off and say that they are willing to stick with what they have.
Apple has the same problem. Look at their marketing. They aren't so focused on what Mac can offer as they are on the differences and the lack of pain Mac offers. If you don't recognize the pain they identify as a personal pain, it's a lost campaign.
I wouldn't worry about it. I think it's nice that the computer industry is fragmenting into three main groups: Windows, Mac, Linux. Personally, I don't want to attract all the windows users to Linux. Some of them are idiots. But the nice thing available today is that the variations in personal demographics can be represented by variations in OS.
I use both Linux and Mac today. They both have advantages. And for me, they are both better than Windows.
As an anectdote: my father in law has a Windows notebook. He keeps asking me questions about it and I just don't have the answer for him. It's not that I don't want to help him, but I haven't used Windows in almost a decade. But he will probably stop using computers before he picks up a Mac or Linux.
Google it?
If Google is so awesome, maybe they can put their money where there mouth is and do something commendable. Of course, they'll probably have a hard time turning this data into marketing material.
It's going to be extremely expensive compared to the current cable broadcasting. For starters you won't be charged a flat fee for unlimited downloads like you are in "broadcast cable" TV. You will charged on a banding of minutes in the show (even if you don't watch it all) and it's popularity. So Greys Anatomy will be at a premium and The Red Green show will not. It will also be banded by time of day, day of week, seasonally, and sports will be insane.
The social response will be to group together to watch these shows to be more cost effective. The network response will be to push the prices even higher. You think $5 a movie was bad? Why not charge $10 for a football game? Or $100 for the SuperBowl?
There is absolutely no way that this is a move which will do anything but cost the consumer more money.
While the TV bill may be reduced to zero, the Cable bill (which is often through cable TV networks) is going to be increased such that a typical viewer who currently pays $100 a month for both can be expected to pay $150 for both and those who use the TV as a baby sitter will be paying in excess of $200 and more. Babysitters would be cheaper at this point.
The down side is that now the Broadband definition moves up, so does the price.
I get 2Mbps most of the time on downloads. But if I get their definition of broadband, I can expect my bill to increase by at least double. And the ISP doesn't have to do a thing for me.
Anyone staying below Broadband can expect their speeds to drop as a sacrifice to those who pay more
I guess I should have applied one more... It's got to do a function in a single line and not a decision tree trying to find out what function will work in the current browser environment. Because of this, I cited the idea of taking an existing non-browser based language and using that. That way it's defined before it's assimulated into the browsers and if anyone screws it up, it becomes their problem.
Yay!!! AMD has a new product line for the mobile PC market.
Only problem is, they have so frickin many platforms that you spend forever trying to figure out WTF you want in a CPU. Sorry AMD, but I think you jumped the shark tank on this one and long before this too.
Would have been a lot easier if you had stuck to three basic cores:
- CPU Core for compuational freaks who need it all.
- CPU Core for grandma's CP that doesn't need the high performance. (Even this is a stretch)
- CPU Core for mobile PC's
It could be argued that they really only need to make two CORES: Mobile and Stationary.Given so many cores, it becomes a major research project trying to marry up the right CPU, Memory, and Motherboards so you can actually build a suitable PC. This is 10X worse when trying to get a notebook that will actually work with Linux.
I ended up getting a MacBook. Smells like Linux and it took me two minutes to pick out the one I wanted.
For my desktop, I will be purchasing my first Intel machine in ten years. Why? Because it will take me 3 months to get all this other cruft sorted out.
Right. Software as a Service is a business model for making money. It is not a model for distribution and promotion of a free software or F/OSS
Companies probably aren't primarily concerned with the social implications of work habits. To some extent, yes. But it's got to have a cost benefit attached to it or they simply cannot do it.
I think there is something to be said for this and many people that I work with do this to some extent but only on a very informal and infrequent basis.
I think it would be interesting to implement a rolling work schedule where you only come to work on one or two days a week and work the rest at home.
I personally find that when I do work from home my productivity is rather insane in comparison. I might only work 4 hours on some days, but I'll finish an entire week of work in that time and then spend the remaining 4 hours of the work-day observing the work in action (reading logs) while I watch a movie. A heck of a lot better than it might be at work.
I think there are more alternatives than just Java.
The solution is not Javascript and I think everyone who looks at AJAX for a few minutes realizes that Javascript, as it stands today, is not long for this world.
Whatever the solution is going to be, someone better start working on it sooner than later. But the elements that will make the language useable into the future are going to be:
At this point I'm tempted to say the language will be a subset of an existing language that meets these requirements. Examples might be Perl, Ruby, or Python.
Java may have some pretty good starts in this direction, but I think Java has enough problems of its own that it will never be able to serve the lightweight interface of today's Javascript. It has it's place. Just not on every single web page in the universe.
About 1 second after I started reading this I realized it's something of a joke. No one spoofs the domain or tries to look like a different bank. They emulate a bank from IP addresses that aren't event showing a domain name.
It's an expensive way of addressing a fraction of the problem.
I will still get my daily dose of eBay, PayPal, and various Bank spam/phishing and the criminals will get their daily dose of stupid people. Perhaps we could start blocking the subnets that participate in the criminal activities?
Can't you set up some kind of HTTP Proxy that restricts IP address in much the same way that RBL blocks delivery of email from certain addresses? And if you accidentally take out the entire Russian nation, well perhaps the Russians should reconsider their business mode.
The appropriate action probably depends on the country you are in and the country hosting the herders.
From a list of things to be done, I would contact the ISP last. They will probably contact the perpatrators directly and remove them from service, but that will do nothing to take them out of circulation. That requires something more. Alternatively, you might ask your ISP for advice on how to procede. But make it clear the intentions with them. They might not have a clue what you've captured.
I disagree. If you could determine the physical location of such bot herders and disclose that to the internet at large, I'm sure that there would be a final solution applied that people would be willing to turn their backs on. Especially if you could post photographs, names, and physical addresses.
"War is Hell"
Ever read All Quiet on the Western Front? Ever talked to someone who was there or a civilian in European WWII?
War sucks. It's supposed to suck. Without the pain and suffering that war can bring to all sides of the battle, winners and losers alike. Perhaps the generals should go watch Star Trek Episode 23, A Taste of Armageddon, circa 1967.
That society has done such a nice job making war "clean" that they have decided to continue fighting a war for 500 years rather than just figure out how to make peace.
In most societies, people are taught that violence against others is fundamentally bad. This becomes a moral element that entwines all the people within that society. It also motivates the same people to find ways around doing violence.
If you study anything about the Nazi camps in WWII they had a growing behaviour where the soldiers in the concentration camps knew what they were doing but absolved themselves of any responsibility by hiding behind the statement, "I was just following orders", thereby removing themselves morally from the actitivies. After WWII this was considered to be a War Crime and has been backed by hundreds of trials across the world.
Fast forward 60 years and we are at a point where the soldiers who are operating a computer screen which operates these killer robots can absolve themselves from any responsibility of moral involvement because the Laws will simply allow them to say, I was just operating a computer program. And while this is going on, there is no one left to come back from the battlefield to serve as a reminder of just how bad war really is and how important it is to avoid it.
At the same time if we are going to commit to a war, we had better be willing to do it to completion even when it gets ugly. I'm pretty pissed at the news for giving us daily body counts of 4 and 10 soldiers on a 5 year battle. In contrast, WWII was hundreds to thousands a day and everyone was sticking to their plan. Everyone was commited to the plan and everyone knew why they were fighting. Vietnam wasn't so clear cut. It was rather vague as to why were where there and even on day one, not everyone was convinced we needed that war. And now we are in the Middle East without a convincing and clear cut plan as to what we are doing, why we are there, what we hope to accomplish, and not enough people in the States give a shit. Perhaps in New York City, but no where else.
They'll get their killer robots and their legal loopholes to kill anything they want and no one will really do much because it's clean and doesn't interfere with "Dancing with the Stars" and the sheep continue to bleat