Our military is ruling Iraq right now; instituting a copy of our form of government is reasonable and has oodles of historical precedent.
Like the Red Army in Eastern Europe, that liberated these countries from Nazi opression? That provided these countries with a "copy" of the Soviet government?
It is a fact that conquerors make the conquered into their own image. This does not make it a pleasant experience for the conquered.
the US did fewer bad things, and was by far the good guys.
Doing fewer evil things only makes you less evil, not "good". Let's just say the magnitude of evil displayed the the US was far far less than the magnitude displayed by the USSR. Someone suffering under a pro-US dictatorship may have suffered less than their counterparts in the Soviet Union, but they suffered nevertheless.
The collapse of communism got rid of something very evil. Now we have to work on those "lesser" evils perpetrated by the winning team. THEN we can start talking about the "good guys" winning.
Would you release automakers of liability just because they give you what they're giving now (opening the hood, manual, etc)?
If i were buying a used car, I would insist on being able to choose a mechanic to evaluate the car's condition. Having done that, I WOULD release the seller for any liability for the typical mechnical problems associated with buying a used car (e.g., bad brakes, emission controls tampered with, etc.). Works for cars, should work for software. Can't guarentee the car will work perfectly, but the inspection reduces the risk by enough that I feel comfortable completing the transaction. Similarly, a design/code inspection won't guarentee the software is perfect, just that it is good enough to serve its intended purpose.
Or companies would buy OSS from middlemen who would obtain the appropriate insurance. In order to ensure a reasonable profit, the middlemen would have to perform some sort of due diligence to minimize their risk. Even with the insurance (plus other costs plus profit) passed through, the software would be MUCH less expensive than what you would buy from Microsoft.
Sort of like the RedHat/IBM model for making money from OSS/FOSS - sell the services, give away the software. In this case the service is managing the risk.
What about free (as in beer) software? In this case, the best solution would be for the user of the software to assume the liability. The software user could either accept the liability for free software, or pay someone else to assume that liability (meaning buy the software from the middlemen).
The point is we need the ability of software users and producers to rationally cost the risks of software malfunction, then assign these risks to the party that makes most sense. What we have now is a unilateral non-negotiable assignment of ALL risks to the purchaser.
Why should software companies face multi-million lawsuits for software errors? The same reason that software users ALREADY assume multi-million dollar costs of flawed software. Allowing tort liability does not change the fact that there are real costs to bad software - it only allows a mechanism for allocating these costs (versus the current unilateral buyer-takes-all-the-risks).
And some people believe that the more difficult it is to get something right is a measure of how good they are. An autombile that is easy to handle and crash-resistant must be worse than one that handles poorly. After all, if you were a careful driver, you would rely on your own skill to avoid accidents, and not depend on mechanical conveniences to prevent them. I mean, why design systems to be fault resistant when you always have people to blame for any problems? Or, if you make a mistake managing a poorly designed system, it must be your fault for not being careful enough.
A very odd notion of engineering, that only applies to computer operating systems and not to anything else. Every other device is designed with human users in mind, to minimize the possibility of error through good user interface design. Only computers are allowed to be poorly designed, because we know system administrators do not make mistakes. Que es mas macho?
Naaa... A good CLI will work. I mean a CLI is what we use in human verbal communications all the time? Do you use a GUI when talking to your wife? No, you say something like "dearest sweetheart, could you grab me a beer from the fridge".
The problem with the UNIX CLI is that is is cryptic, inconsistent, and un-intuitive. Cryptic, in that it is designed for a 1971 teletype terminal, where typing every extra character is difficult. Why "mv" instead of "move"? Why "rm" instead of "remove"? It is inconsistent in that the ordering and naming of arguments varies command by command (why chmod mode file, instead of chmod file mode?). It is unintuitive in that many commands are named (or have options) that make no sense to the uninitiated. Why is a text search command "grep"?
Simson Garfinkel [simson.net] eventually became a hermit and withdrew from public life after too many people mistook him for Art Garfunkel. He now lives in a cave in southern California.
You mean the same cave where they used to film the Batmobile charging out to fight evil do-ers? in Beechwood Canyon? Holy shit Robin, there's a UNIX guru in the Bat Cave!
Many dictatorships have fallen in the last 30 years. Chile, Argentina, the whole of Eastern Europe, Russia, Marcos in the Philipines, fascist governments in Spain and Portugal. In NO case where these brought about by "armed citizens". Economic decay, mass popular protests, and the defection of the armed forces were more importnatn factors. Primary though were the organizational skills of democratic forces.
Gene Sharp has written a well researched study of the issue. His conclusions about the effectiveness of armed rebellion?
victims have sometimes organized to fight the brutal dictators with whatever violent and military capacity they could muster, despite the odds being against them. These people have often fought bravely, at great cost in suffering and lives. Their accomplishments have sometimes been remarkable, but they rarely have won freedom.
The ability to skillfully organize on a mass scale allowed the democratic opposition in all these countries to overthrow dictatorships - not the marksmanship skills of firearms afficionados.
The US has been throwing its weight around for a very long time, as the history books will tell you if you choose to read them. Gratuitous provocative comment for discussion: Has the US has committed more terrorist acts and war crimes in the past hundred years than any other nation on earth?
Yes this is definitely flamebait, aside from the "gratuitous provocative comment", consider that approximately 3,000 Chileans were murdered by the Pinochet government (and some Americans were murdered as well. This government overthrew one that was democratically elected and forced decades of dictatorship on Chile. It is well documented that the coup was strongly supported by the US government, a fact that to this day makes Henry Kissenger very nervous.
Regardless of whether you agree with the war or not (I sure as hell do not) we all have to support our troops.
Yeah right, just like the NRA opposes gun regulation but supports the nice folks in the BATF. Not like every government official having to support a law unpopular with some part of the population has not had public abuse heaped on them (and their families). What makes it so essential for us to "support our troops" when every other government employee puts up with deliberate abuse from the citizenry?
Personally, I've found folks with the right type of experience in the military to be an asset - I mean maybe 4 yrs in a good technical position. Sharp, responsible, yet adaptable enough to function in the most nimble civilian environment.
Now the dinosaurs who have spent their entire adult lives in the military are an entirely different matter....
Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
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· Score: 5, Informative
There was a demographer, Beth Osborne Daponte , for the US government that estimated the following:
13,000 civilians were killed directly by American and allied forces, and about 70,000 civilians died subsequently from war-related damage to medical facilities and supplies, the electric power grid, and the water system, she calculated.
In all, 40,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in the conflict, she concluded, putting total Iraqi losses from the war and its aftermath at 158,000, including 86,194 men, 39,612 women, and 32,195 children.
She was fired by the Bush administration shortly thereafter.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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In 1918, we founght to make the world safe for democracy. We ended up making it safe for Stalin, Hitler, and another World War.
War is a devil that you conjure up to give you unprecedented power. You think you are using the devil for good, but he has other ideas....
Re:Not necessarily the war yet
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Yes, we've found it is better to pay the folks who love killing rather than forcing a bunch of reluctant civilians to do the job. Terrible idea, having the draft during Vietnam, you actually inducted a lot of guys who thought the whole thing was pointless. Made for morale problems, when the soldiers had the same ideas as the civilians. This is a big problem with a democracy, when citizen volunteers make government run, instead of dedicated paid professionals. Get rid of those pesky citizens, and the paid professionals can run things much smoother.
Rand McNalley should censor their maps of cities, omitting key terrorist targets.
Didn't the former Soviet Union do this? Didn't they actually decide street maps of major cities were sensitive defense information hence classified and not publicly available? Despite their sad demise, it appears the Soviets were ahead of the rest of us in recognizing the national security implications of simple things like this. We should hire some of them to advise us on further measures, we could certainly use more ideas of this sort...
Let us say there is a law against American companies having their work done by foreign workers. Let us also assume that we stop all immigration, since most people who want the former want the latter too. That would make American products much more costlier.
Hmm... Sounds like Homeland Security at work to me.
Countries that sacrifice their economies for national security lose. So will the USA.
However, sooner or later, all those other countries to which we've outsourced our industrial base will realise that they really don't need us. When they get their acts together, they'll just start dealing directly with each other. And when that happens, watch this Pax Americana come to a screeching halt.
Sounds like how Pax Brittanica came to a halt in the late 19th century. It must have been devastating when the UK's GDP was surpassed by Italy. A former world power reduced to a second class European nation. All that had held it together was it domination over other countries (colonies).
I predict in 50 years, Mexico's GDP will exceed the US, and we will be forced to join a new NAFTA, not as the dominant power but as a sad remnant of one.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the Red Army in Eastern Europe, that liberated these countries from Nazi opression? That provided these countries with a "copy" of the Soviet government?
It is a fact that conquerors make the conquered into their own image. This does not make it a pleasant experience for the conquered.
Doing fewer evil things only makes you less evil, not "good". Let's just say the magnitude of evil displayed the the US was far far less than the magnitude displayed by the USSR. Someone suffering under a pro-US dictatorship may have suffered less than their counterparts in the Soviet Union, but they suffered nevertheless.
The collapse of communism got rid of something very evil. Now we have to work on those "lesser" evils perpetrated by the winning team. THEN we can start talking about the "good guys" winning.
If i were buying a used car, I would insist on being able to choose a mechanic to evaluate the car's condition. Having done that, I WOULD release the seller for any liability for the typical mechnical problems associated with buying a used car (e.g., bad brakes, emission controls tampered with, etc.). Works for cars, should work for software. Can't guarentee the car will work perfectly, but the inspection reduces the risk by enough that I feel comfortable completing the transaction. Similarly, a design/code inspection won't guarentee the software is perfect, just that it is good enough to serve its intended purpose.
Sort of like the RedHat/IBM model for making money from OSS/FOSS - sell the services, give away the software. In this case the service is managing the risk.
What about free (as in beer) software? In this case, the best solution would be for the user of the software to assume the liability. The software user could either accept the liability for free software, or pay someone else to assume that liability (meaning buy the software from the middlemen).
The point is we need the ability of software users and producers to rationally cost the risks of software malfunction, then assign these risks to the party that makes most sense. What we have now is a unilateral non-negotiable assignment of ALL risks to the purchaser.
Why should software companies face multi-million lawsuits for software errors? The same reason that software users ALREADY assume multi-million dollar costs of flawed software. Allowing tort liability does not change the fact that there are real costs to bad software - it only allows a mechanism for allocating these costs (versus the current unilateral buyer-takes-all-the-risks).
A very odd notion of engineering, that only applies to computer operating systems and not to anything else. Every other device is designed with human users in mind, to minimize the possibility of error through good user interface design. Only computers are allowed to be poorly designed, because we know system administrators do not make mistakes. Que es mas macho?
The problem with the UNIX CLI is that is is cryptic, inconsistent, and un-intuitive. Cryptic, in that it is designed for a 1971 teletype terminal, where typing every extra character is difficult. Why "mv" instead of "move"? Why "rm" instead of "remove"? It is inconsistent in that the ordering and naming of arguments varies command by command (why chmod mode file, instead of chmod file mode?). It is unintuitive in that many commands are named (or have options) that make no sense to the uninitiated. Why is a text search command "grep"?
You mean the same cave where they used to film the Batmobile charging out to fight evil do-ers? in Beechwood Canyon? Holy shit Robin, there's a UNIX guru in the Bat Cave!
but if he does, does he have to come back?
Gene Sharp has written a well researched study of the issue. His conclusions about the effectiveness of armed rebellion?
The ability to skillfully organize on a mass scale allowed the democratic opposition in all these countries to overthrow dictatorships - not the marksmanship skills of firearms afficionados.In my opinion you are all wet!
Sounds good to me!
Dave's not here!
In the film biz??
Oh, but casinos will no longer send you to the bottom of the harbor for pissing them. That is the difference...
Yes this is definitely flamebait, aside from the "gratuitous provocative comment", consider that approximately 3,000 Chileans were murdered by the Pinochet government (and some Americans were murdered as well. This government overthrew one that was democratically elected and forced decades of dictatorship on Chile. It is well documented that the coup was strongly supported by the US government, a fact that to this day makes Henry Kissenger very nervous.
now who is the terrorist in this case?
Yeah right, just like the NRA opposes gun regulation but supports the nice folks in the BATF. Not like every government official having to support a law unpopular with some part of the population has not had public abuse heaped on them (and their families). What makes it so essential for us to "support our troops" when every other government employee puts up with deliberate abuse from the citizenry?
PsyOps? Wasn't this called "propaganda" in Oldspeak? My how the English language has changed.
Now the dinosaurs who have spent their entire adult lives in the military are an entirely different matter....
She was fired by the Bush administration shortly thereafter.
War is a devil that you conjure up to give you unprecedented power. You think you are using the devil for good, but he has other ideas....
Yes, we've found it is better to pay the folks who love killing rather than forcing a bunch of reluctant civilians to do the job. Terrible idea, having the draft during Vietnam, you actually inducted a lot of guys who thought the whole thing was pointless. Made for morale problems, when the soldiers had the same ideas as the civilians. This is a big problem with a democracy, when citizen volunteers make government run, instead of dedicated paid professionals. Get rid of those pesky citizens, and the paid professionals can run things much smoother.
Didn't the former Soviet Union do this? Didn't they actually decide street maps of major cities were sensitive defense information hence classified and not publicly available? Despite their sad demise, it appears the Soviets were ahead of the rest of us in recognizing the national security implications of simple things like this. We should hire some of them to advise us on further measures, we could certainly use more ideas of this sort...
No everyone will fail to read it twice, but still feel the need to comment upon it, based on the misleading write-up
I will celebrate with Borsht and Vodka, the two most holy Slavic sacraments!
Hmm... Sounds like Homeland Security at work to me.
Countries that sacrifice their economies for national security lose. So will the USA.
Sounds like how Pax Brittanica came to a halt in the late 19th century. It must have been devastating when the UK's GDP was surpassed by Italy. A former world power reduced to a second class European nation. All that had held it together was it domination over other countries (colonies).
I predict in 50 years, Mexico's GDP will exceed the US, and we will be forced to join a new NAFTA, not as the dominant power but as a sad remnant of one.