History has demonstrated that power is acquired de facto, not de jure. The UN's role and power in the world would be altered de facto by its aquisition of a standing army.
There's just too much potential for abuse, particularly as (contrasted with national armies) such a force would have no legitimate ongoing "defense" role. Idle hands... As it is, even national armies get misused on a fairly regular basis (c.f. recent US actions).
I totally agree with you about the meagre requirements of Rawanda -- I just don't think the benefits of a standing UN army (whose size would be at the discretion of the UN) outweigh the costs of the inevitable abuses.
I don't view the UN as a particularly sinister organization -- it does function in a terribly valuable humanitarian capacity.
It is not, however, better defended against corruption than other human political institutions, and independent military power free of national concerns would be a very, very powerful temptation.
Stated plainly, 50 years from now, I don't want to see some poor country getting Iraq'ed by a now-corrupt UN leadership with its own economic or political goals. Ulterior motives are not the exclusive domain of national interests.
It is important to avoid the obvious "slippery slope" arguments here (which I hope I have managed); what's important is to consider:
1. What are the potential benefits?
2. What are the risks?
3. How serious are each?
4. How likely are each?
a. What are the incentives and disincentives for human actors to pursue each scenario?
b. What do past patterns of human behavior suggest?
Regardless of why it was proposed, the reason Linus finally accepted the MODULE_LICENSE stuff was that everyone was wasting a LOT of time trying to track down bugs that ended up being caused caused by binary-only drivers.
The effect of MODULE_LICENSE is mostly just to mark the kernel as "tainted" -- its internal state affected by code which isn't available for the kernel developers to consult when debugging.
This shows up in crash dumps, so if someone posts dump of a crash in which binary drivers were involved, the kernel developers know upfront not to bother (the bug has "crossed the county line", so to speak).
Linuxant's excuse is that the tainted message was too confusing for users (they don't appear to have any qualms about wasting kernel developer time).
Of course Linuxant's proprietary code which they can't let anyone see is pristine and perfect, and could never, ever be the cause of a bug...
Well, perhaps "world government" is a bit strong. How about giving the UN enough just to police what power and influence it already has?
If an institution cannot police the power and influence it putatively has, then by definition does it not in fact lack that power and influence?
The Yanks are always whining that they don't want to be the "world's policeman"...
Crocodile tears? Regardless of what US citizens might be saying, the present US leadership seems more eager to "police" the world than I would like. [ disclosure: I am a US citizen ]
Imagine a UN with the recources and logistics to prevent the next Rawanda or to actually capture indicted war criminals in Bosnia or to have enough troops and weapons to deliver aid to Somolia without the US getting it's hand dirty...
The collective UN membership already has sufficient resources; the apparent limitations are political rather than fundamentally logistical. NATO's relative effectiveness owes much to the closer political alignment of its membership.
Absent political agreement, the only way you can get resources from people is force. That kind of sucks too, but those are the realities of large-scale politics.
You can't just have "a little" government (of any kind). It's all or nothing.
And a World Government would suck because for the first time in history, if the government isn't being nice to you, you have (in the absolute sense) nowhere else to go.
I think Slashdot holds a lot of responsibility in this case for publishing unverified sources like the Qt article (and others).
I might say that Slashdot also bears a lot of responsbility for publishing a summary that miscasts the SuSE CEO's argument -- he's more concerned about an extreme level of backporting (and discouraging adoption of 2.6 to stay on 2.4 with backported features) than about backporting in general. SuSE backports stuff too.
Not sure if I agree with him or not, but that's a separate issue.
Remember, this trilogy includes an Oscar under its belt for best editing. Read that again: the (complete) film is twelve and a half hours long. And it apparently was the best edited film in 2003. Does this make any sense? What was it before they edited it, twelve and a half days long?
I believe they were working from at least a week of raw footage, yes. On any film you're going to have a LOT more stuff shot than will find its way into the final product.
What did you think was involved with editing, though? As someone who's actually done film editing, the hard part is not just cutting down a lot of material. It's selecting just the right pieces and fitting them together seamlessly (or as seamlessly as possible... sometimes you have to make compromises).
As you may know, each scene in a film is typically filmed multiple times, from many different angles. Most of the time the scene you see on screen has been pieced together from many different such takes. Since actors aren't machines, each one is subtly different and you have to pick your cuts carefully so the separate performances blend together (this is called continuity).
Usually you have to live with some mismatches (e.g. Morpheus' hands shifting behind hs back in long shots in the first Matrix, or Gandalf's staff strap shifting about in FotR) because those are the best takes you had to work with (bonus editor points for cutting in places that distract the eye from necessary discontinuities).
Another factor in chosing cuts is pacing -- when to linger, when to move on, to heighten the intended dramatic effect. This can even have a radical effect on the actors' apparent performances. Sometimes entire scenes are reshuffled relative to the shooting script during editing.
There are a lot of other issues too -- matching this mixture of different cuts to consistent-sounding music and sound tracks in effective ways.
But the point is that editing in film isn't just about how much was or wasn't cut away. Oftentimes the unsung editor deserves just as much credit for the finished product as the director.
Give Saddam and Osama some free soup! They have truly led lives of deprivation.
I know Osama came from a fairly privileged background, but Saddam grew up on the streets. Serious question: what if someone had helped him then; fed and educated him?
Saddam got where he is today as a result of a long string of bad decisions in hard situations (until he made his way up the ladder, anyway). He's completely responsible for the choices he made in those days, but need he have been in those desperate situations in the first place, really?
The term for this is having an "eidetic imagination" -- it's rare, but it's a trait you share with William Blake, Nicola Tesla, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gore Vidal, and many other such types.
Supposedly it's an ability many children have but lose by the time they reach adulthood. I suppose I was one of the unlucky ones; I don't seem to have the capacity for it that I used to, though I was never able to get more than vague shapes without closing my eyes anyway. I do often dream that vividly, however. The occasional lucid dream is fun.
I might take that as a valid comparison if either gcc or the Internet were proprietary products explicitly advertised as being tools for shipping work overseas.
My own motivation for working on Open Source is mostly just a combination of "If you want something done right, do it yourself," and polishing the skills for which I am employed.
The advent of bayesian spamming brought spams that included whole paragraphs of random words - just so that your list would get more and more bloated...
It doesn't appear to have impacted baynesian scanners too adversely, however. I've been using a Baynesian scanner for... I guess about a year now, and it's still working great (and the token list is big, but not unmanagable).
When Inkscape forked from Sodipodi, we were fortunate enough to have folks with both solid technical and marketing/graphic design backgrounds, so we put a lot of thought into branding up-front, as well as the technical issues.
That probably wouldn't have happened years ago -- "Inkscape" could just as easily have been named "VectorPIMP".
There's a similar increase in Human Interface factors in recent OSS work. Classic projects like the GIMP are simply beholden to old (bad) UI and marketing decisions.
X forgets a window's contents when it's covered over - try moving a large window over the front of a browser window quickly and see the slow redraw going on behind.
Actually, that one's not an X problem at all. The X specification includes server-side double-buffering, but XFree86 never bothered to implement it properly (and they weren't very good about accepting patches from others).
Hopefully the X.org fork should be less stagnant, and long-standing issues like that can finally get fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider that a "sneak peek" at the potential issues with a World Government.
History has demonstrated that power is acquired de facto, not de jure. The UN's role and power in the world would be altered de facto by its aquisition of a standing army.
There's just too much potential for abuse, particularly as (contrasted with national armies) such a force would have no legitimate ongoing "defense" role. Idle hands... As it is, even national armies get misused on a fairly regular basis (c.f. recent US actions).
I totally agree with you about the meagre requirements of Rawanda -- I just don't think the benefits of a standing UN army (whose size would be at the discretion of the UN) outweigh the costs of the inevitable abuses.
I don't view the UN as a particularly sinister organization -- it does function in a terribly valuable humanitarian capacity.
It is not, however, better defended against corruption than other human political institutions, and independent military power free of national concerns would be a very, very powerful temptation.
Stated plainly, 50 years from now, I don't want to see some poor country getting Iraq'ed by a now-corrupt UN leadership with its own economic or political goals. Ulterior motives are not the exclusive domain of national interests.
It is important to avoid the obvious "slippery slope" arguments here (which I hope I have managed); what's important is to consider:
1. What are the potential benefits?
2. What are the risks?
3. How serious are each?
4. How likely are each?
a. What are the incentives and disincentives for human actors to pursue each scenario?
b. What do past patterns of human behavior suggest?
This isn't fantacism, it's pragmatism.
Regardless of why it was proposed, the reason Linus finally accepted the MODULE_LICENSE stuff was that everyone was wasting a LOT of time trying to track down bugs that ended up being caused caused by binary-only drivers.
The effect of MODULE_LICENSE is mostly just to mark the kernel as "tainted" -- its internal state affected by code which isn't available for the kernel developers to consult when debugging.
This shows up in crash dumps, so if someone posts dump of a crash in which binary drivers were involved, the kernel developers know upfront not to bother (the bug has "crossed the county line", so to speak).
Linuxant's excuse is that the tainted message was too confusing for users (they don't appear to have any qualms about wasting kernel developer time).
Of course Linuxant's proprietary code which they can't let anyone see is pristine and perfect, and could never, ever be the cause of a bug...
If an institution cannot police the power and influence it putatively has, then by definition does it not in fact lack that power and influence?
Crocodile tears? Regardless of what US citizens might be saying, the present US leadership seems more eager to "police" the world than I would like. [ disclosure: I am a US citizen ]
The collective UN membership already has sufficient resources; the apparent limitations are political rather than fundamentally logistical. NATO's relative effectiveness owes much to the closer political alignment of its membership.
Absent political agreement, the only way you can get resources from people is force. That kind of sucks too, but those are the realities of large-scale politics.
You can't just have "a little" government (of any kind). It's all or nothing.
And a World Government would suck because for the first time in history, if the government isn't being nice to you, you have (in the absolute sense) nowhere else to go.
Hmm, Star Trek's Exploding Control Panels of Death explained?
dude, that's only sixteen different combinations to try...
Doctor Mengele seems to be more typical of human history than most people would be willing to admit.
I think Slashdot holds a lot of responsibility in this case for publishing unverified sources like the Qt article (and others).
I might say that Slashdot also bears a lot of responsbility for publishing a summary that miscasts the SuSE CEO's argument -- he's more concerned about an extreme level of backporting (and discouraging adoption of 2.6 to stay on 2.4 with backported features) than about backporting in general. SuSE backports stuff too.
Not sure if I agree with him or not, but that's a separate issue.
I believe they were working from at least a week of raw footage, yes. On any film you're going to have a LOT more stuff shot than will find its way into the final product.
What did you think was involved with editing, though? As someone who's actually done film editing, the hard part is not just cutting down a lot of material. It's selecting just the right pieces and fitting them together seamlessly (or as seamlessly as possible ... sometimes you have to make compromises).
As you may know, each scene in a film is typically filmed multiple times, from many different angles. Most of the time the scene you see on screen has been pieced together from many different such takes. Since actors aren't machines, each one is subtly different and you have to pick your cuts carefully so the separate performances blend together (this is called continuity).
Usually you have to live with some mismatches (e.g. Morpheus' hands shifting behind hs back in long shots in the first Matrix, or Gandalf's staff strap shifting about in FotR) because those are the best takes you had to work with (bonus editor points for cutting in places that distract the eye from necessary discontinuities).
Another factor in chosing cuts is pacing -- when to linger, when to move on, to heighten the intended dramatic effect. This can even have a radical effect on the actors' apparent performances. Sometimes entire scenes are reshuffled relative to the shooting script during editing.
There are a lot of other issues too -- matching this mixture of different cuts to consistent-sounding music and sound tracks in effective ways.
But the point is that editing in film isn't just about how much was or wasn't cut away. Oftentimes the unsung editor deserves just as much credit for the finished product as the director.
As another poster pointed out, typeof() is evaluated at compile-time, not runtime.
I know Osama came from a fairly privileged background, but Saddam grew up on the streets. Serious question: what if someone had helped him then; fed and educated him?
Saddam got where he is today as a result of a long string of bad decisions in hard situations (until he made his way up the ladder, anyway). He's completely responsible for the choices he made in those days, but need he have been in those desperate situations in the first place, really?
The term for this is having an "eidetic imagination" -- it's rare, but it's a trait you share with William Blake, Nicola Tesla, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gore Vidal, and many other such types.
Supposedly it's an ability many children have but lose by the time they reach adulthood. I suppose I was one of the unlucky ones; I don't seem to have the capacity for it that I used to, though I was never able to get more than vague shapes without closing my eyes anyway. I do often dream that vividly, however. The occasional lucid dream is fun.
I don't think I'd want to hire you to fix my deck either. ^_-
I might take that as a valid comparison if either gcc or the Internet were proprietary products explicitly advertised as being tools for shipping work overseas.
My own motivation for working on Open Source is mostly just a combination of "If you want something done right, do it yourself," and polishing the skills for which I am employed.
It doesn't appear to have impacted baynesian scanners too adversely, however. I've been using a Baynesian scanner for ... I guess about a year now, and it's still working great (and the token list is big, but not unmanagable).
Hello moderators? The parent has legitimate questions...
Canopy's *Ralph Yarro* sitting on the Trolltech board of directors certainly DOES qualify as influence.
Ahem, Blackdown IS Sun's JVM, plus a little spit-and-polish.
Apple's JVM is also a repackaging/polishing of the Sun JVM. Sorry.
Assuming:
...then yes, I think he absolutely would...
...and I think under those circumstances, I would agree with him.
Festival is at least tolerably good; it's under an X11-style license. It's admittedly not as nice as AT&T's thing though.
When Inkscape forked from Sodipodi, we were fortunate enough to have folks with both solid technical and marketing/graphic design backgrounds, so we put a lot of thought into branding up-front, as well as the technical issues.
That probably wouldn't have happened years ago -- "Inkscape" could just as easily have been named "VectorPIMP".
There's a similar increase in Human Interface factors in recent OSS work. Classic projects like the GIMP are simply beholden to old (bad) UI and marketing decisions.
So, just give it time. Things are improving.
Actually, that one's not an X problem at all. The X specification includes server-side double-buffering, but XFree86 never bothered to implement it properly (and they weren't very good about accepting patches from others).
Hopefully the X.org fork should be less stagnant, and long-standing issues like that can finally get fixed.
But, you know, actually, I still think we'd be so much better off on so many levels if everyone just shut up and forgot about it.
It was the best damn Superbowl game I've ever had the privilege of watching, and now it's been forever eclipsed by this stupid halftime show thing.