Publishers are professional assholes -- but you can need that, when trying to figure out how to squeeze money out of consumers to fund game development and get your salaries paid.
Nooface -- I tend to keep my "Slashdot persona" separate from my "real world persona". Someone dedicated enough to reading through my old comments could probably pick up my identity without too much trouble, but it's enough effort to warrant that most people do not do so, and I'd prefer that people not do so. Doing so gives me greater ability to speak freely.
Setting up an anonymous dropbox and posting a GPG key on Slashdot is certainly possible, but it's easier to handle this (reposting of comments) in a general manner rather than a case-by-case basis. I've added a journal entry addressing reprinting.
There's nothing that someone who has been working at a large company worries about more than a bunch of new fresh, stubborn, idealistic faces who is willing to devote all their time to work coming in and taking over. That's true even in the existing system.
Microsoft is a very large company. It has an established hierarchy, and people who have worked for years to reach their positions, and now have guaranteed status. They're concerned about someone walking in and taking what they've spent a long time getting and rely on.
Linux is a loose network of some of the most devoted-to-work people, who want to stir things up and change the world, even if it results in a lot less money for them. It is a hypercompetitive meritocracy -- you can't work up any type of "status" that you can live off for years (well, maybe if you work at IBM).
Microsoft/Linux is just another example of a neverending struggle. It's just a little more blatant than most.
Why? Blizzard is part of Viviendi. They are not small, cute and fluffy. They are big, nasty, and unpleasant. It's exactly what I'd expect. If Google's motto is "don't be evil", Viviendi's is the exact opposite.
Exactly. We should also ban all P2P apps (they are, after all, used most commonly by pirates), the Internet (same reason -- most bandwidth is devoted to illegal content), web servers other than IIS (Microsoft made a server for their client, dammit, and nobody else has a right to horn in on their market by providing alternate implementations -- just like bnetd is an alternet Battle.net implementation).
The real breakthrough in recent years has been the massive work that has gone into the cross-platform SDL toolkit. It's really amazing, and not to discount anyone else's work, but I see a lot of great stuff coming out ever since SDL became commonplace.
Funny, that.
Guess who made SDL?
Sam Lantinga.
Guess who funded him (insofar as he was funded)?
Loki.
Guess who hired him after Loki passed away?
Blizzard.
Blizzard is starting to remind me of Microsoft (Buy Bungie, buy Connetix, buy Mongomusic). I remember when the technically-superior Total Annihilation was squashed by the better-marketed Starcraft. Every time I really start to like something, Blizzard starts sticking their fingers into it and ruining it.
What did they do wrong anyway? Adding value to Blizzard's games?
They removed control from Blizzard.
Blizzard wanted to become an application service provider. This is a great position for a vendor to be in -- they get a subscription-based payment model (Blizzard, thus far, hasn't charged in money, but only in information about users), can cut off their service at any time, can tie new products into their service, provide tiered service, and so forth. This works as long as they are the sole provider of Battle.net. If someone else comes along and implements a daemon that can provide the same service, Blizzard loses their monopoly.
Frankly, there isn't a lot of economic justification for Blizzard's stance -- I won't be buying any Blizzard titles in the future (though, as others have pointed out, a few people here and there aren't likely to make much of a dent in Blizzard's bottom line, and most don't care). The bnetd/Blizzard lawsuit is the most obvious example of large-company-squashes-existing-volunteer-open-sou rce-project-to-make-more-money that I can think of.
*Personal* firewalls are pointless as security against remote attacks (the ones where you run one program to "protect" one computer). They're sold by the same scaremongers that sell AV software, and have traditionally opened more holes (via non-robust analysis code) than they've solved. If you're using something like that, you're blowing CPU cycles and RAM without gaining much. Tighten up a computer by removing broken and insecure daemons and properly configuring the remaining ones, not by adding in more software into the mix that purports to "secure" your computer.
It seems like kind of a stupid idea to do this. Seriously.
Okay, consider what would have to be true for the Demms to be behind it. They want some data from a computer. They don't pay someone on the inside to get keys or another form of access. They have a plan to obtain the campaign plans from a laptop. Instead of taking lockpicks or anything else that one might expect from professional espionage types, they smash in a window -- using a rock. That's the sort of thing that you'd find at the scene, and unless there were gloves used, there are probably fingerprints left on the thing. They take the laptops.
We've had Watergate -- we know what happens to politcos that get caught fucking around with election campaigns. They ignore Watergate and public reaction to that. They leave evidence all over the scene in a very obvious break-in right before an election -- there's no way that anyone can miss a smashed window with a stone on the ground and missing laptops. Even if they couldn't *possibly* come up with a more intelligent plan for stealing the data, they still feel that the spectre of a Watergate is worth the stealing of a laptop.
No, I just don't buy that it's the Demms (at least the party). It'd just be stupid.
Could it be someone pro-Bush that wants to tie up the Demms in a scandal right before the election? Maybe. That seems a little far-fetched, though. It's a terribly visible dirty trick. I'm not sure that I'd want to do something like that -- there has to be *some* sort of more effective, less risky want to pull things than to try framing the Demms.
A common thief? Maybe. They did say that the laptops of the top three people were the ones taken. As the Republican guy said, that seems a bit unusual. Unless, of course, the laptops of the three biggest head honchos were the flashiest computers.
And then, of course, there's the oddball concept -- maybe it's just someone who isn't intending to influence the election one way or another *or* wants the computers -- who just gets their jollies from screwing with the people and the media. This is pretty much guaranteed to produce a shitstorm. Kind of like the guys that send fake anthrax to people to screw with them. They get to read about themselves in the newspaper, and love it.
So, I dunno. It could be the Demms, but if it is, they're being *awfully* stupid.
In other news, if said computers were using encrypted filesystems, none of this would matter. Could be a simple computer theft, could be DNC dirty tricks, could be anything. It just wouldn't matter.
We live in a nation where we can freely (mostly) obtain and use encryption, and people choose not to do so.
Can you? I can't. I mean, let's say you are a fundamentalist christian. Unless you're gay or lesbian, what do you care?
Because if you are a fundamentalist Christian, you may felt bound by chunks of Judaic law, and there are portions of Old Testament Judaic law that expressly ban homosexuality (of course, they're right next to chunks of Old Testament that tell you to have sick people blessed by a priest and put in rituals, but such is life). You may feel that it is the right thing to do to try to do what the Jews did -- to legally enforce your views. I don't agree with people trying to ban gay/lesbian marriage, and I think that you need to have a lot of misunderstandings of Christianity to try to do this, but at least I can see where people are coming from.
Liberty and freedom, though, are two pretty fundamental American values. I mean, the discussion is abstract enough that it's hard to go one way or another, but we generally recognize the minimally acceptable limitations on liberty and freedom.
Normally I ignore spelling and grammar errors on Slashdot, but if I was misspelling the name of my political affiliation, I think I'd want someone to correct me.
When the RIAA went after P2P software we all screamed "don't attack software that has legitimate uses, go after the people actually breaking the law." Now that they're doing just that everyone's still pitching a fit..
Uh, perhaps we can wait until the RIAA/MPAA actually stop trying to push anti-P2P research and development laws to make claims like this?
I wish they did. They keep pushing legislation to try to make authors and researchers of P2P software liable.
I don't have a problem with them going after pirates. That's the lookout of the pirates -- you want copyright laws changed, you need to agitate. It's the incessant attempts from the RIAA/MPAA to make research and development illegal that *piss me off*. If I want to write a piece of P2P software that doesn't log all transfers centrally, that should be fine. If I want to write software that transfers encrypted data, *that* should be fine. I don't want a single law going after P2P authors and researchers, and I can't see justification for same.
If the RIAA/MPAA wants to sue twelve year old girls for thousands of dollars and wants to hit them with criminal lawsuits, I can understand people getting irritable, but that's not my lookout.
As long as the RIAA/MPAA insists on:
(a) Pushing for further copyright extensions.
(b) Pushing to criminalize software development and computer science research.
As long as this continues, I will do what I can to make their lives difficult. I'd like to see a statement from both saying that they intend to stop pressuring *developers* and *researchers*. If they want to target people actually infringing copyright with data transfer software, *then* they can go raise a ruckus.
This is wonderful. I've been hoping that someone would put up a website with "top-ranked" IP and tech legislators for a while. This makes it *much* easier for Slashdot to be politically influential.
I'd like to see IPac also try to produce a scorecard for *any* represenatives that vote on IP and tech related issues. Some of the folks out there vote very contrary to my views, and if I can't vote in favor of a representative, at least I can vote against a negative one in favor of a neutral one.
I think most Slashdotters know about Rick Boucher (Virginian representative, fantastic tech and IP voting record). I've heard of Doolittle before in a positive light, but the other names don't ring a bell. I'd be very interested in hearing opinions of other Slashdotters on them.
It's a very wide-spread practice, and I think justified -- the whole point of a sentence is to punish someone by removing that person's freedoms.
My take is that:
* Voting is a civil *duty*. There are freedoms that can be removed in the name of punishment that largely make an inmate's life less pleasant without impacting our ability to obtain feedback from the citizenry. We remove freedoms for pragmatic reasons -- I don't see a pragmatic justification for removing sufferage from criminals.
* Felons are probably people *most* likely to have a complaint about what's going on.
* Much of our Constitutional infrastructure is designed around producing a robust government that can't easily fall prey to massive abuse. Having legislators be able to define what is a felony *and* preventing felons from being able to elect legislators produces a very troublesome feedback loop -- exactly the sort of thing that checks-and-balances are supposed to avoid.
* A major benefit of democracy (the reason we keep claiming that democracies are stable) is that a democracy provides a way for elements to voice themselves *without* resorting to violence. It's a safety valve -- it makes people not just feel exploited by a leadership. I can't think of any place that this is more urgently needed than with felons.
It was a successful livestock feed. One food manufacturer illegally took Starlink (which they were *not* supposed to put into human food) and put it into human food. This is the same as putting anything else that isn't legal to put into human food in there. Beyond that, there have never been any medical problems caused by Starlink, nor to my knowledge does anyone have any serious concerns theories that Starlink would cause medical problems. As a matter of fact, at the time that the one food manufacturer misused Starlink, Starlink was waiting for approval for use in human food.
The only concern that Starlink raised (and I'm not trying to minimize it) is that a food vendor improperly used something not approved for human consumption in food intended for humans. That is certainly not a genetically-enhanced-food-specific problem.
Frankly, I think that people affected by European agricultural interests (which don't want the predominantly US-based genetic engineering industry to dominant them), which have run PR campaigns against genetically-enhanced food. People were quite scared of GE food by the time that Starlink rolled around, and GE opponents simply used Starlink as a rallying point for abuses of GE. Really, though, Starlink wasn't a particularly nasty case.
...but Florida proved one thing, you can't trust most voters to understand complex design dystems. You're just replacing one problem with another if you swap the electoral college for IRV.
Not quite. IRV (which *could* still be implemented using an electoral college) does have pretty clear advantages. You're right that complexity is bad in that IRV has more complexity exposed to the voter (instead of choosing *one* candidate, they choose a list of candidates in order of preference). However, there are major benefits -- the existing system, with "swing states" due to winner-take-all, and the extra layer of the electoral college is not particularly simple either, and most Americans probably *don't* understand it very well.
Mr. Cobb also fails to address the issue the EC solves, that of representation for the states with smaller population centers. For all its flaws, the EC forces candidates to deal with issues in smaller states. Going to a proportional voting system or eliminating the EC altogether is going to disenfranchise these states and the people who live there.
No, no, no, no. EC has nothing to do with solving the problem of small state representation. *Vote weighting* is what does that, where people in small states have votes that count for more than those in large states. We *happen* to implement vote weighting using the electoral college (since we currently use an EC-based system), but vote weighting can be done with or without the electoral college, and the electoral college can be present with or without vote weighting.
Would someone please explain to me why, in 2004, the color of your skin matter?
Because ethnic arguments and wars have been conducted for the history of mankind and are unlikely to stop.
One of the reasons humans are so effective is that they have the ability to glom together into organized masses around those with similar ideas and values. Monkeys don't have nations with hundreds of millions of people, but we do, and as a result, we have computers and jet fighters. Ethnic organizations are easy to form and maintain, and we'll probably keep doing 'em for a long time to come.
Slashdot Mirror
Publishers are professional assholes -- but you can need that, when trying to figure out how to squeeze money out of consumers to fund game development and get your salaries paid.
Online distribution is still pretty untested.
Then how come the UN does nothing but try to bring the USA down to its level?
Could you provide examples?
In general, I'm reasonably impressed with the UN -- I'd say that it's one of the greater diplomatic achievements the world has ever seen.
Nooface -- I tend to keep my "Slashdot persona" separate from my "real world persona". Someone dedicated enough to reading through my old comments could probably pick up my identity without too much trouble, but it's enough effort to warrant that most people do not do so, and I'd prefer that people not do so. Doing so gives me greater ability to speak freely.
Setting up an anonymous dropbox and posting a GPG key on Slashdot is certainly possible, but it's easier to handle this (reposting of comments) in a general manner rather than a case-by-case basis. I've added a journal entry addressing reprinting.
There's nothing that someone who has been working at a large company worries about more than a bunch of new fresh, stubborn, idealistic faces who is willing to devote all their time to work coming in and taking over. That's true even in the existing system.
Microsoft is a very large company. It has an established hierarchy, and people who have worked for years to reach their positions, and now have guaranteed status. They're concerned about someone walking in and taking what they've spent a long time getting and rely on.
Linux is a loose network of some of the most devoted-to-work people, who want to stir things up and change the world, even if it results in a lot less money for them. It is a hypercompetitive meritocracy -- you can't work up any type of "status" that you can live off for years (well, maybe if you work at IBM).
Microsoft/Linux is just another example of a neverending struggle. It's just a little more blatant than most.
Why? Blizzard is part of Viviendi. They are not small, cute and fluffy. They are big, nasty, and unpleasant. It's exactly what I'd expect. If Google's motto is "don't be evil", Viviendi's is the exact opposite.
Exactly. We should also ban all P2P apps (they are, after all, used most commonly by pirates), the Internet (same reason -- most bandwidth is devoted to illegal content), web servers other than IIS (Microsoft made a server for their client, dammit, and nobody else has a right to horn in on their market by providing alternate implementations -- just like bnetd is an alternet Battle.net implementation).
The real breakthrough in recent years has been the massive work that has gone into the cross-platform SDL toolkit. It's really amazing, and not to discount anyone else's work, but I see a lot of great stuff coming out ever since SDL became commonplace.
Funny, that.
Guess who made SDL?
Sam Lantinga.
Guess who funded him (insofar as he was funded)?
Loki.
Guess who hired him after Loki passed away?
Blizzard.
Blizzard is starting to remind me of Microsoft (Buy Bungie, buy Connetix, buy Mongomusic). I remember when the technically-superior Total Annihilation was squashed by the better-marketed Starcraft. Every time I really start to like something, Blizzard starts sticking their fingers into it and ruining it.
What did they do wrong anyway? Adding value to Blizzard's games?
u rce-project-to-make-more-money that I can think of.
They removed control from Blizzard.
Blizzard wanted to become an application service provider. This is a great position for a vendor to be in -- they get a subscription-based payment model (Blizzard, thus far, hasn't charged in money, but only in information about users), can cut off their service at any time, can tie new products into their service, provide tiered service, and so forth. This works as long as they are the sole provider of Battle.net. If someone else comes along and implements a daemon that can provide the same service, Blizzard loses their monopoly.
Frankly, there isn't a lot of economic justification for Blizzard's stance -- I won't be buying any Blizzard titles in the future (though, as others have pointed out, a few people here and there aren't likely to make much of a dent in Blizzard's bottom line, and most don't care). The bnetd/Blizzard lawsuit is the most obvious example of large-company-squashes-existing-volunteer-open-so
That wasn't the Party, though (or it's a pretty good bet that it wasn't).
*Personal* firewalls are pointless as security against remote attacks (the ones where you run one program to "protect" one computer). They're sold by the same scaremongers that sell AV software, and have traditionally opened more holes (via non-robust analysis code) than they've solved. If you're using something like that, you're blowing CPU cycles and RAM without gaining much. Tighten up a computer by removing broken and insecure daemons and properly configuring the remaining ones, not by adding in more software into the mix that purports to "secure" your computer.
It seems like kind of a stupid idea to do this. Seriously.
Okay, consider what would have to be true for the Demms to be behind it. They want some data from a computer. They don't pay someone on the inside to get keys or another form of access. They have a plan to obtain the campaign plans from a laptop. Instead of taking lockpicks or anything else that one might expect from professional espionage types, they smash in a window -- using a rock. That's the sort of thing that you'd find at the scene, and unless there were gloves used, there are probably fingerprints left on the thing. They take the laptops.
We've had Watergate -- we know what happens to politcos that get caught fucking around with election campaigns. They ignore Watergate and public reaction to that. They leave evidence all over the scene in a very obvious break-in right before an election -- there's no way that anyone can miss a smashed window with a stone on the ground and missing laptops. Even if they couldn't *possibly* come up with a more intelligent plan for stealing the data, they still feel that the spectre of a Watergate is worth the stealing of a laptop.
No, I just don't buy that it's the Demms (at least the party). It'd just be stupid.
Could it be someone pro-Bush that wants to tie up the Demms in a scandal right before the election? Maybe. That seems a little far-fetched, though. It's a terribly visible dirty trick. I'm not sure that I'd want to do something like that -- there has to be *some* sort of more effective, less risky want to pull things than to try framing the Demms.
A common thief? Maybe. They did say that the laptops of the top three people were the ones taken. As the Republican guy said, that seems a bit unusual. Unless, of course, the laptops of the three biggest head honchos were the flashiest computers.
And then, of course, there's the oddball concept -- maybe it's just someone who isn't intending to influence the election one way or another *or* wants the computers -- who just gets their jollies from screwing with the people and the media. This is pretty much guaranteed to produce a shitstorm. Kind of like the guys that send fake anthrax to people to screw with them. They get to read about themselves in the newspaper, and love it.
So, I dunno. It could be the Demms, but if it is, they're being *awfully* stupid.
I'd say it was the news media. They derive the largest direct benefit from panicked people.
In other news, if said computers were using encrypted filesystems, none of this would matter. Could be a simple computer theft, could be DNC dirty tricks, could be anything. It just wouldn't matter.
We live in a nation where we can freely (mostly) obtain and use encryption, and people choose not to do so.
When will they ever learn?
Can you? I can't. I mean, let's say you are a fundamentalist christian. Unless you're gay or lesbian, what do you care?
Because if you are a fundamentalist Christian, you may felt bound by chunks of Judaic law, and there are portions of Old Testament Judaic law that expressly ban homosexuality (of course, they're right next to chunks of Old Testament that tell you to have sick people blessed by a priest and put in rituals, but such is life). You may feel that it is the right thing to do to try to do what the Jews did -- to legally enforce your views. I don't agree with people trying to ban gay/lesbian marriage, and I think that you need to have a lot of misunderstandings of Christianity to try to do this, but at least I can see where people are coming from.
Liberty and freedom, though, are two pretty fundamental American values. I mean, the discussion is abstract enough that it's hard to go one way or another, but we generally recognize the minimally acceptable limitations on liberty and freedom.
Normally I ignore spelling and grammar errors on Slashdot, but if I was misspelling the name of my political affiliation, I think I'd want someone to correct me.
When the RIAA went after P2P software we all screamed "don't attack software that has legitimate uses, go after the people actually breaking the law." Now that they're doing just that everyone's still pitching a fit. .
Uh, perhaps we can wait until the RIAA/MPAA actually stop trying to push anti-P2P research and development laws to make claims like this?
I wish they did. They keep pushing legislation to try to make authors and researchers of P2P software liable.
I don't have a problem with them going after pirates. That's the lookout of the pirates -- you want copyright laws changed, you need to agitate. It's the incessant attempts from the RIAA/MPAA to make research and development illegal that *piss me off*. If I want to write a piece of P2P software that doesn't log all transfers centrally, that should be fine. If I want to write software that transfers encrypted data, *that* should be fine. I don't want a single law going after P2P authors and researchers, and I can't see justification for same.
If the RIAA/MPAA wants to sue twelve year old girls for thousands of dollars and wants to hit them with criminal lawsuits, I can understand people getting irritable, but that's not my lookout.
As long as the RIAA/MPAA insists on:
(a) Pushing for further copyright extensions.
(b) Pushing to criminalize software development and computer science research.
As long as this continues, I will do what I can to make their lives difficult. I'd like to see a statement from both saying that they intend to stop pressuring *developers* and *researchers*. If they want to target people actually infringing copyright with data transfer software, *then* they can go raise a ruckus.
This is wonderful. I've been hoping that someone would put up a website with "top-ranked" IP and tech legislators for a while. This makes it *much* easier for Slashdot to be politically influential.
I'd like to see IPac also try to produce a scorecard for *any* represenatives that vote on IP and tech related issues. Some of the folks out there vote very contrary to my views, and if I can't vote in favor of a representative, at least I can vote against a negative one in favor of a neutral one.
I think most Slashdotters know about Rick Boucher (Virginian representative, fantastic tech and IP voting record). I've heard of Doolittle before in a positive light, but the other names don't ring a bell. I'd be very interested in hearing opinions of other Slashdotters on them.
As an Independant, it doesn't surprise me that's what Republicans believe...
For future reference, it's "Independent", not "Independant".
It's a very wide-spread practice, and I think justified -- the whole point of a sentence is to punish someone by removing that person's freedoms.
My take is that:
* Voting is a civil *duty*. There are freedoms that can be removed in the name of punishment that largely make an inmate's life less pleasant without impacting our ability to obtain feedback from the citizenry. We remove freedoms for pragmatic reasons -- I don't see a pragmatic justification for removing sufferage from criminals.
* Felons are probably people *most* likely to have a complaint about what's going on.
* Much of our Constitutional infrastructure is designed around producing a robust government that can't easily fall prey to massive abuse. Having legislators be able to define what is a felony *and* preventing felons from being able to elect legislators produces a very troublesome feedback loop -- exactly the sort of thing that checks-and-balances are supposed to avoid.
* A major benefit of democracy (the reason we keep claiming that democracies are stable) is that a democracy provides a way for elements to voice themselves *without* resorting to violence. It's a safety valve -- it makes people not just feel exploited by a leadership. I can't think of any place that this is more urgently needed than with felons.
He is a man who, despite many of his supporters claims and hopes, is historically pro-war.
He *fought* in Vietnam because that was his duty. When he decided that Vietnam was a bad idea, he became an important pro-peace leader.
If learning from your mistakes is being "wishy washy", I'll take "wishy washy" any day.
I'll trade you, I'll take a vote from Bush, and you take a vote from Kerry. Then we can both vote for who we want.
Same problem as the "I'm going to vote third party" concept. Our voting system isn't designed for it. You can't enforce such an agreement.
It was a successful livestock feed. One food manufacturer illegally took Starlink (which they were *not* supposed to put into human food) and put it into human food. This is the same as putting anything else that isn't legal to put into human food in there. Beyond that, there have never been any medical problems caused by Starlink, nor to my knowledge does anyone have any serious concerns theories that Starlink would cause medical problems. As a matter of fact, at the time that the one food manufacturer misused Starlink, Starlink was waiting for approval for use in human food.
The only concern that Starlink raised (and I'm not trying to minimize it) is that a food vendor improperly used something not approved for human consumption in food intended for humans. That is certainly not a genetically-enhanced-food-specific problem.
Frankly, I think that people affected by European agricultural interests (which don't want the predominantly US-based genetic engineering industry to dominant them), which have run PR campaigns against genetically-enhanced food. People were quite scared of GE food by the time that Starlink rolled around, and GE opponents simply used Starlink as a rallying point for abuses of GE. Really, though, Starlink wasn't a particularly nasty case.
...but Florida proved one thing, you can't trust most voters to understand complex design dystems. You're just replacing one problem with another if you swap the electoral college for IRV.
Not quite. IRV (which *could* still be implemented using an electoral college) does have pretty clear advantages. You're right that complexity is bad in that IRV has more complexity exposed to the voter (instead of choosing *one* candidate, they choose a list of candidates in order of preference). However, there are major benefits -- the existing system, with "swing states" due to winner-take-all, and the extra layer of the electoral college is not particularly simple either, and most Americans probably *don't* understand it very well.
Mr. Cobb also fails to address the issue the EC solves, that of representation for the states with smaller population centers. For all its flaws, the EC forces candidates to deal with issues in smaller states. Going to a proportional voting system or eliminating the EC altogether is going to disenfranchise these states and the people who live there.
No, no, no, no. EC has nothing to do with solving the problem of small state representation. *Vote weighting* is what does that, where people in small states have votes that count for more than those in large states. We *happen* to implement vote weighting using the electoral college (since we currently use an EC-based system), but vote weighting can be done with or without the electoral college, and the electoral college can be present with or without vote weighting.
Would someone please explain to me why, in 2004, the color of your skin matter?
Because ethnic arguments and wars have been conducted for the history of mankind and are unlikely to stop.
One of the reasons humans are so effective is that they have the ability to glom together into organized masses around those with similar ideas and values. Monkeys don't have nations with hundreds of millions of people, but we do, and as a result, we have computers and jet fighters. Ethnic organizations are easy to form and maintain, and we'll probably keep doing 'em for a long time to come.