From a military prespective, the US (and various allies) never lost a battle against the North Vietnamese army or their Vietcong allies, in fact in every major battle the US humiliated the enemies facing them through superior equipment, training and manoevribility.
Does the term "battle" apply though? I plead ignorance. I'm used to thinking of a 'battle' as large groups openly attacking each other, though I suppose that's a narrower definiton than necessary. My understanding of the Vietnam conflict is that it was mostly a series of guerilla encounters, and on the whole we mostly wore each other down much as the armies did in the trenches of WWI. There were exceptions like the Tet offensive, but on the whole I picture it as mainly being skirmishes in the jungle rather than armies & tanks & what have you.
The two main reasons most Americans see Vietnam as a loss are:
1. Lots of US soldiers got killed - true, but somewhere in the order of 1,000,000 N. Vietnamese soldiers were killed.
2. South Vietnam fell.
Right, and these two reasons are also why we effectively won, if "winning" means achieving objectives more than it means high popularity ratings. It was a bloody mess, but a primary objective was that North Vietnam would never be seen as a triumph & example of communist success, and we left the country in such a shattered condition that this was surely achieved.
But then this still plays into prospects for the current situation. Whether we "won" or "lost" the fight in Vietnam, it was certainly a terrible quagmire, and it would be political suicide for our so-called-leaders to drag us into a similar situation in (ironically) almost the same place. We may have a technological edge over the Chinese military, but they have a huge numerical advantage, much as the Russians have had against the various groups that have tried to invade them in the past, from Napoleon through the Nazis.
It seems to me that the only way we could win would be for us to kill as absolutely many people as possible as quickly as possible, up to & perhaps including the use of nuclear weapons. Maybe such tactics could award us a technical military victory, but would we have won politically, at home & abroad? Or would it be too much of a mess to conclusively interpret, just as Vietnam was?
What you say is a lot more level-headed than most of the stuff I've seen in this discussion, and I think you make a lot of good points that I won't argue with. My one question is with regard to the Iranian hostage situation.
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I seem to recall stories about backdoor dealings at the time such that the Iranians agreed to give up the hostages if Reagan was going to be elected. I really wish I remembered the details of this story, or could cite a reference that would elucidate things one way or the other.
I have no idea who's side this backs up here -- I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm trying to throw some historical light on the situation -- but I have the impression that it wasn't as simple as
"Carter was a pussy & Reagan was a pugilist." If anyone could fill in some details here, I'd love to see it.
How has such an obvious troll gotten such a high score? This isn't even particularly funny, as trolls go. I'm baffled...
If we don't start declaring open war on countries that disrespect our sovereignty, then foreign countries will think they can get away with pissing us off.
Um, we disrespected their soverignity, amigo. I don't really see a case for either side placing blame in the collision, but our plane put down on their soverign soil. We did so under compliance with international law (issued a Mayday signal, etc), but it was us poking their ribs and not the other way around here.
We tried to claim that the plane is "soverign territory" just like an embassy or military base, but that was mainly a move of desperation. If we play things right we'll get our crew back, but we're never going to see that plane again, and within a few years they'll have reverse engineered what technology they can for their own systems. Chalk that one up as a loss & move on...
We must settle for no less than outright war. They think they have the upper hand now, but wait until we give it to them old-fashioned American style. They probably don't even have all those nukes they keep whispering about. Have we ever seen them detonate one? Well have we? NO! They don't exist.
Right, give it to them American style... <voice sounds-like="John Cleese"> like, say, North Vietnam? Oh yeah, they whupped our butts reeeeaaaal gooooood....</voice> Fittingly, North Vietnam is mighty close to Hainan Island too, so I'm sure they probably got a pretty good look at what we can do over there.
As for nukes, anyone with a decent seismograph can detect a detonation anywhere in the world -- it looks like an earthquake. Three or four well scattered measurements can roughly triangulate on a detonation, and more than that can pin down the time & location quite well. Whether they say they have nuclear weapons or not almost doesn't matter, because hiding a successful test is like trying to hide a blue whale in a swimming pool. If we believe they have the devices, it's because we effectively saw them go off.
What I don't understand is why so many people say that this is clearly the US's fault, and that the US should clearly apologize?
Well, you're right -- it doesn't seem to have been the fault of the American aircraft. But the Chinese have stated repeatedly that if we want our crew to come home, all we have to do is say "I'm sorry". Is that too steep a price to pay to get them home? I think we can do that.
So we have a slow lumbering jet on AUTO-PILOY[sic]! and a small, limber, and fast jet being flown by a hot-shot--where do you think the fault lies?
Yes yes of course, but that's not really the point. We [US & China] can argue all year over why the incident happened, but if we want to resolve it then it looks like we're going to have to suck it up and say whatever we need to say to bring our crew home. That's not quite to say that we should capitulate fully to their demands, but we need to acknowledge that they have the upper hand at the moment and we really don't have much to gain by drawing this out unnecessarily.
The US has offered to help look for the downed pilot--the offer of help has indeed been extended several times, and has been rejected several times by the Chinese government. If they really cared about the downed pilot, wouldn't they want all the help they could get--I know I would? Instead they criticize the US government being too cowardly to apologize. Apparently having the US kowtow to Beijing is more important than the life of their downed man. But of course they also work the Chinese public up to frenzy over him, thanks to the Xinhua government owned news agency and other propaganda machines.
Nah, they don't need our help to find the pilot. It would be an interesting diplomatic move had they been willing to accept the offer, but the fact is that they already have their own air & sea abilities, and don't need to bring us in to help them. This sort of thing seems to have happened often during the cold war (as fictionalized in "Hunt for Red October" & repeated as farce with the Kursk last year) -- a country is just not likely to want this kind of help in this kind of situation. At this point, what they want more than anything else is the silly damned apology, and I can't see why we don't just accomodate their request.
So in short, I see no reason for the US to apologize for an accident that almost definitely wasn't their fault, and especially to a government whose actions reek of insincerity and sheer politicing as much as those of the communist chinese do.
Oh right, like China is the only country in the world to do this kind of political maneuvering either. Riiiiight......
What's this we stuff? Our countries have our fair share of differences, but no one was calling China an "enemy" until January 20th, and I'm not convinced that anything has really changed in that time, aside from more than usual sabre rattling from our Fair Crown Prince Georgie.
They have nuclear missles targeted on our cities RIGHT NOW!
So? It takes about 5 minutes to target a missile. The US & USSR ceremonially de-targeted their arsenals as a way of bringing a close to the cold war, but both sides knew that it would take about 15 minutes to get all 10k (or whatever) missiles pointed back at their original targets. It doesn't really matter where they're pointed, it matters whether they are used. And they are not being used. So chill out.
They take the monies we pay them to make our kids toys and computer parts and use them to build defensive systems to use in attacking us!
And out army berets are paying for their weapons, and some of the money we get from our economic ties with them end up in our defense systems -- again, so what? Welcome to the ho hum world of international trade, my friend. Have a look around, there are plenty of straw men for you to poke at.
They have bribed unscrupulous US citizens into stealing military secrets in a campaign of espionage against us.
...and we haven't done the same to them? You weren't paying attention during the cold war, were you? This is how countries deal with each other. The important thing is that life is going peacefully on in spite of it.
Just recently they attempted to purchase a building overlooking the Pentagon so they could advance their spy efforts.
And just recently we blew up their embassy. I think they're understandably pissed at us.
This is one of the many reasons that I make every effort to avoid buying Chinese made products.
Good for you.
OF COURSE WE SPY ON THEM!
And of course they spy on us. No big deal.
With respect to this incident, we were flying a slow plane on autopilot over international waters to listen to their emissions.
They were playing chicken with us, and messed up big-time. They collided with us while they were trying to intimidate us, and THEY caused this incident.
That's not really the point though. I happen to agree with you (bizarrely), but I also happen to realize that a simple "I'm sorry" would have our crew home within hours, but we're too stubborn to do it. If I were one of those crew members, I'd be just as pissed at our leadership for not being able to suck it up & apologize as I am towards their pilot for being too cocky for his own good.
They are now holding 24 US citizens hostage, as well as scouring the plane for military secrets, and _WE_ should say "sorry?"
You're right, let the crew rot over there. That's a much better solution.
Waiting for the Dubyuh administration to apoligize isn't going to get us anywhere. Better by far would be for the American people to apologize for the Bush administration:
We're sorry!
Estamos apesadumbrados.
Nous sommes désolés.
Es tut uns leid.
Siam spiacenti.
Nós somos pesarosos.
Zannendearu.
[non-asciifiable Chinese text]
Well, if you've been keeping up on the news, you know all about the spy plane incident in China. Apparently, China demanded an apology - nothing more - and Bush refused! So, now exists this page, apologizing to the entire world for our stupid fucking president.
If you wish to apologize in the name of our soulless nation and leader, please fill out the card below.
There have been 5003 people who have apologized [as of around Tue Apr 10 11:39:05 EDT 2001].
Dear All Other Countries (But Especially China),
I'm sorry about my stupid fucking president.
Yours truly, [name]
from [city, state]
Any fake submissions for people that are not you will be deleted. Any submissions involving racist statements will be deleted. The creators of this site have the right for any submission they feel like to be deleted. If you don't actually want to apologize, don't. It will be deleted.
Re:Upgrading from 1.3.x & preserving configuration
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Apache 2.0 Goes Beta
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· Score: 2
Anyway, as for the extent of the patches, I'm not entirely sure. It was built quite a while before I came to the company, and the modules that are running are all statically built in. Much to my annoyance, dynamic linking was disabled in the built version, meaning that the only way to add things like mod_speling (which would eliminate about 90% of our 404 errors, particularly people looking for INDEX.HTML etc & Apache being too case-sensitive for its own good) is by one way or the other rebuilding the server from scratch. Dammit.
Otherwise, the most exotic things we're doing seem to be Raven (which you make sound like it isn't very exotic at all) and NetSaint, which I can handle just fine. When time allows it, I'll start migrating things over to a new version I guess....
Re:Upgrading from 1.3.x & preserving configuration
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Apache 2.0 Goes Beta
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· Score: 2
...yeah, that's about what I figured it would come to. We're running Raven for the SSL services, which I don't really know much about but It Works so i'm Not Fucking With It. Moving to something a bit more conventional like mod_ssl would make a certain amount of sense, but until I can get a handle on how it differs from Raven, I'm leaving things as is.
As for the instability of the 2.x series, yeah, I know it isn't anything reliable yet, and I'm not planning to move to it yet. But right now we've got...
...and if it isn't a total headache to upgrade to something approaching 1.3.19 then I might do it at some point. But again, Things Work so I don't wanna Fuck With It.
Sooner or later though a slow week will come along & I'll probably do it. I was just hoping to hear something about a utility to update configuration files. Guess not. Oh well....
Recent articles on Excite & Slashdot discussed financial problems with Be, Inc, and their effect on the suberb BeOperatingSystem. Every time I use Be, it drives me nuts that the Linux community has not been able to produce an interface this easy, powerful, & fun. Linux is an excellent server, but when it comes to putting that computer in front of my mom, it isn't quite so excellent anymore. As valiantly as projects like KDE, GNOME, Eazel, & Nautilus have tried, none of them have been able to come up with anything as slick as what Be has been trying to sell for years now.
Some of the Slashdot discussion speculated that RedHat might be interested in buying Be. Others noted legal difficulties in opening the BeOS source, but the company recently registered some thought provoking domain names, so they may be planning to try it anyway.
A very interesting comment noted that BeOS and Linux complement each other nicely, with BeOS a great desktop system for end users while Linux works best as a server. It's a good point. We may be expecting a lot of an OS to make it do well on everything from high end mainframes & servers to desktop PCs & handheld PDAs & even small embedded controllers. While it's impressive that Linux can do all this, maybe allowing complementary systems to have complementary roles might be a better idea.
As the head of RedHat (chief hat wearer?;), what do you think of such speculation? Do you think that Linux could stand to gain by using BeOS technology? Would it be worthwhile to purchase Be &/or get involved in opening their software? If Sony's BeIA driven eVillainternet appliance catches on, having a stake in that contract could be very lucrative, but of course that's a gamble at this point.
Or do you feel that, as much as things may seem superficially similar, that there is too much
dissonance between the Linux & BeOS worlds to make a merger worthwhile? Do you disagree that having separate systems for desktop & server could be a good idea? If you feel that there should be "one OS to rule them all," could (indeed, should)Linux take a lesson from Be about how to make a really good, easy, slick desktop frontend for the existing excellent but arcane back end that Linux provides?
In short, should these two be wedded and can such a marriage work?
Upgrading from 1.3.x & preserving configuration
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Apache 2.0 Goes Beta
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· Score: 3
Can anyone provide some rough advice on how it might be best to upgrade from an "old" & moderately customized version of Apache to the 2.x series, or even the recent 1.3.x series?
I've inherited & since further adapted the installation that has been running at work, and I don't relish the idea of having to merge together the current httpd.conf file & various binaries into those of a newer version. If nothing else, all the various redirects, aliases, raven-ssl settings, etc that we're currently using would, I assume, be trampled by a stock upgrade. Further, I don't want to just maintain the current httpd.conf file on top of an upgraded installation, because it doesn't make any mention of some of the newer features that would become available and that I'd like to take advantage of.
Are there tools out there to merge in old settings with a new installation? I don't like the idea of mucking around with diff scripts to do this, but to date I haven't been able to think of any better alternatives. Can someone help?
Re:OSX has more jewlery hanging on it than Mr. T
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OS X
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· Score: 2
Two posts up:
One thing that I don't like about OS X is the root account is not active right off the start. They are afraid that if traditional MAC users are able to change/etc/motd, then the system will crash or something.
This isn't as much of a problem as you might think.
If you want to fiddle around with system settings via the GUI tools, you'll be prompted to give the admin password, which will be the password for the account you first created. No big deal, and you can do what you want to do with no hassles.
If you want to mess around with settings via the underlying text files, again, no big deal -- just use `sudo vi $file` and you can edit it as you please.
Not having default access to root isn't a big deal here, because you can accomplish whatever you want to do without it. Keep in mind, this is semi-*nix, and in that spirit you only semi-need root access.
Parent post:
What Apple's doing is trying to reduce security vulnerabilities by not even allowing anyone to log in as root, not even locally.
And here's where your *nix expertise can hurt you. I have been informed that creating an initial login account called "root" is a bad idea (though of course it is a perfectly typical thing to do in the *nix world).
Apparently a friend of mine did this and inadvertently wreaked all kinds of havoc. My best guess is that the name "root" was now attached to both the superuser and a not-so-superuser, and things pretty much fell apart from there, with the only recovery being reformatting & reinstallation.
Lesson: if you want root that badly, fine, but don't expect it as a GUI login option. Remember: su & sudo are you friend, so don't be afraid to call on their help when needed.
Apple has given it's customers an unusually large gun, hidden in plain sight for those that know where to look: don't point the damn things at your own foot for crying out loud...:)
...not that anyone is going to see a post this far into the discussion, but oh well....
Do you want to end up with someone who's idea of a good time is, well, hanging out in bars? I'd assume not.
So why do something you don't like & look for someone in a bar? Don't do it!
Yes, you do need to get out of the house to find somebody, but hey, getting out of the house should be fun anyway -- right? So, what do you like doing? Hanging out in computer shops & bookstores? All you have to do is find some place that you like spending time at, preferably one that has a mixed clientele (unless that isn't what you're looking for -- that's cool too), and start paying friendly, courteous attention to any of the regulars that you find interesting. Chances aren't bad that you'll hit it off with someone.
In a recent post (which I won't bother re-pasting here), I described a really cool "bar" that I visited in Auburn, Alabama. It had a great atmosphere -- you could get a beer or a coffee, a sandwich or a bagel. They had used books that you were free to read & buy, and comfortable furniture (chairs, tables, benches, lazy chairs, etc) that you were free to move around as you please. There were plans to install PCs with web browsers for the customers to play around with, and they would have little indie rock bands play there from time to time. The one & only time I got to go visit there, I was in heaven. A place like this would have been a great place for someone like me to meet, well, someone a little bit like me.
Maybe that's not your idea of fun at all, but that's alright. Somewhere out there is a place that should be more to your liking, and the people that go there are probably people at least a little bit like you. Maybe that place is a local $tech Users Group (Linux, Perl, Mac, Be, whatever). Maybe it's somewhere on a local college campus. Maybe it's someone's home. I dont know -- you have to find out.
Just get up, get away from Slashdot for a few weekends, and start looking!;)
I have seen a plethora of projects successfully that used Perl, and exactly zero that used Python.
Here's three for you, and chances aren't bad that you've already come across any or all of them:
maps.yahoo.com, a map finding search system written in python
mailman, a mailing list software package written in python
RedHat's installer (can't find a URL -- try here?), an installation package written in python
So. Now you've seen three major projects written in Python, and chances are this isn't the first time you've seen one or all of them. Like Linux, Apache, Sendmail, and yes Perl, if you use the internet at all then you probably interact with Python all the time without necessarily realizing it. It's a nice, clean, scalable lanaguage who's one main drawback -- it's slow -- is handled nicely by the fact that it's so easy to integrate it with C. As a result, it gets easy to maintain a large, complex project in Python while optimizing bottlenecks with pure C modules.
Perl can pull some of the same tricks of course, but it's much messier. I like Perl, I mainly use Perl, and I'm not knocking it. But I really can't see the point in arguing the matter: Python is a much cleaner language that is far better suited for large scale projects. If you haven't come across it yet, maybe you just haven't done anything big enough yet.
One I keep on my website, and use for sites that I visit fairly regularly, like Slashdot, CNN, my job, some friends, etc. I set this as the home page on computers that I use regularly (home & work).
The other file -- well, actually several files -- is the internal bookmark file for the individual browsers on each computer. These are of course typically way out of sync with one another, but for the most part that doesn't bother me. Anything important enough that I'd want to go back to repeatedly can be put into the website bookmark file, and in practice the pages that I come across at home are mostly different from the ones I find at work.
That said, some sort of bookmark document management system would be pretty nice, if only to manage the way they tend to grow drastically, accumulating dead & irrelevant links over time. A way of running a sort of `diff` against them would be useful, though at the moment I can't see a clean way to synchronize e.g. Netscape's format (one html file, last I checked) against IE's (one or more directories, containing individual.url files). I'm sure it's doable though, if someone were that worried about it. I'm just not that person...;)
Those two other things would appear to be a star ("my god, it's the Death Star -- I didn't think that thing was operational!") and a cup of coffee ("my god, it's the Death Java -- I thought Python was the Javakiller, not this thing -- noooo!")
The number of characters in each word corresponds to a base-10 digit of pi, and the comma even serves to mark the decimal place. If nine digits of precision isn't enough to calculate pretty much whatever you want, you might as well look it up anyway...
(Oh, I get it -- I thought your.sig was a pi-mnemonic device, no wonder I was confused...:)
the danger is not speed, by itself, it's speed differences
An anecdote that plays into this theme:
Just to the east of Mobile, Alabama,
Interstate 10 goes over a 10 mile long causeway bridge that spans the northern section of Mobile Bay. A few years ago (roughly 1996, I think, though I can't find a date at the moment), that bridge was the site of what was at the time one of the the biggest pileups in American history, involving around 100-110 cars. Amazingly, only one person died in the accident -- a schoolteacher who's car caught on fire -- but the property damage, to both the cars and to both directions of the bridge itself, was considerable.
The primary cause of the accident was poor visibility due to heavy fog, and huge differences in speed as some drivers continued at normal driving speeds (70 mph or so) while others, nervously, slowed down to 40, 30, or 20 mph. As a result, the "speeding" drivers kept plowing into the slower ones, and a disaster ensued. That disaster wouldn't have happened if everyone either maintained a normal speed, or everyone slowed down; it was the mixture of responses that caused problems.
Interestingly, the initial reason for the 55 MPH federal speed limit had nothing to do with auto safety: it was enacted during the oil crises of the 70s in an effort to conserve fuel. In that regard it was very successful; the fact that it saved lives was just a welcome side effect. Cars are better designed now, and can better protect their passengers in high speed impacts, thus leading to the lower fatality rates today even though average highway speeds are much higher than they were 20 years ago. The fuel efficiency angle hasn't changed though -- we'd still be getting better gas milage on the average if traffic was moving more slowly.
Right, but getting some sort of "global" figures (in the sense of accounting for total cost to use a given source of power) is useful for setting national energy policy. The average individual might not care, but lawmakers probably would appreciate having good figures give a sense of what the best way to go overall might be. I don't know what that best way is, but I'd hope that legislators would try to figure it out before passing any laws that we may come to regret later...
You bet that Shell, BP, Texaco, Mobil and so on are all lobbying for various taxes to be imposed
Actually that's not true -- some if not all of these companies are starting to move in the direction of alternative energy sources already. Recent BP ads refer to the company not as "British Petroleum", but as "Beyond Petroleum", the implication being that the writing is on the wall, oil supplies are being exhausted, and they're preparing for a day when their major product will be Something Else. This is a Good Thing.
it merely moves the pollution elsewhere
As noted repeatedly in this thread, by myself & others, this is a red herring. Pollution is displaced, yes, but it is displaced to a place where it is far easier to manage. There are a host of reasons why it's better to draw power from a centralized plant rather than millions of dirty little engines, and the sooner we can get to such a point, the better.
Electric cars mean that Londoners and Manhattanites will live in cleaner environments while the true countryside suffers a little more.
Maybe, I'm not sure. This is just speculation on my part, but my instinct is that the environment can probably as a rule better withstand a low level shock everywhere than an intense shock at certain localized points.
That is, if the level of say CO2 goes up everywhere by some small amount, say half a percent, then the global plant population can probably absorb that without too much trouble. On the other hand, if all of that is dumped into a 50% increase in, say, New Jersey, with basically no increase anywhere else, then I suspect New Jersey is basically screwed. (Anyone that has driven down the NJ Turnpike near Newark can verify this has already happened...:). If that point of acute damage to one place is then followed by a low level increase as in scenario one, the damaged area probably won't be able to handle the load as it would have otherwise.
But like I say, this is all speculation on my part, and I welcome sources that can back up or refute the hypothesis.
In any event, I don't think that would be a very big problem if electric cars were to catch on. The pollution is getting centralized, but probably not to the point that it would cause that much of a shock, especially considering previous points about power plant scrubbers and what have you. Given the choice between 150 million nasty gasoline cars and the same number of electic ones complemented with a few thousand power plants, I'd eagerly take the latter.
What we really need is for electric cars to overtake petrol based cars in terms of miles/gallon
Does that concept even apply here though? What are you saying -- the amount of lead acid burned for every certain number of miles? God I hope that's a small number -- way smaller than gasoline consumption, 1000x times better even.
It's a problem of comparing the proverbial apples & oranges. What's needed are metrics that are more generally applicable. Perhaps a measure of energy units (joules?) consumed per unit distance, with maybe a local & global factorization that accounts for how much the vehicle itself consumes (the gas tank, the battery, etc) and how much went into supplying the vehicle (the oil refinery, the power plant, transportation costs, etc). Only then can reasonable comparisons be made.
I hope not either, because you're not entirely correct. Moving to electric vehicles does have the problem of simply displacing the pollution to a centralized point, but generally that plant is going to be cleaner than personal vehicles could ever be. Even if it is a coal plant, there will be scrubbers that do a better job of cleaning up the by-products than can generally be done on cars.
When moving to electric vehicles & centralized power production, economies of scale are on your side. The dirtiest engines today are, perhaps surprisingly, the smallest ones out there: lawnmowers. People don't tend to think about how much air pollution the Lawn Boy makes, but they're really nasty. For a lot of reasons, larger engines tend to be more fuel efficient, cleaner burning, and more economical overall. We stand a lot to gain by moving as far in that direction as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the term "battle" apply though? I plead ignorance. I'm used to thinking of a 'battle' as large groups openly attacking each other, though I suppose that's a narrower definiton than necessary. My understanding of the Vietnam conflict is that it was mostly a series of guerilla encounters, and on the whole we mostly wore each other down much as the armies did in the trenches of WWI. There were exceptions like the Tet offensive, but on the whole I picture it as mainly being skirmishes in the jungle rather than armies & tanks & what have you.
Right, and these two reasons are also why we effectively won, if "winning" means achieving objectives more than it means high popularity ratings. It was a bloody mess, but a primary objective was that North Vietnam would never be seen as a triumph & example of communist success, and we left the country in such a shattered condition that this was surely achieved.
But then this still plays into prospects for the current situation. Whether we "won" or "lost" the fight in Vietnam, it was certainly a terrible quagmire, and it would be political suicide for our so-called-leaders to drag us into a similar situation in (ironically) almost the same place. We may have a technological edge over the Chinese military, but they have a huge numerical advantage, much as the Russians have had against the various groups that have tried to invade them in the past, from Napoleon through the Nazis.
It seems to me that the only way we could win would be for us to kill as absolutely many people as possible as quickly as possible, up to & perhaps including the use of nuclear weapons. Maybe such tactics could award us a technical military victory, but would we have won politically, at home & abroad? Or would it be too much of a mess to conclusively interpret, just as Vietnam was?
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I seem to recall stories about backdoor dealings at the time such that the Iranians agreed to give up the hostages if Reagan was going to be elected. I really wish I remembered the details of this story, or could cite a reference that would elucidate things one way or the other.
I have no idea who's side this backs up here -- I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm trying to throw some historical light on the situation -- but I have the impression that it wasn't as simple as "Carter was a pussy & Reagan was a pugilist." If anyone could fill in some details here, I'd love to see it.
How has such an obvious troll gotten such a high score? This isn't even particularly funny, as trolls go. I'm baffled...
Um, we disrespected their soverignity, amigo. I don't really see a case for either side placing blame in the collision, but our plane put down on their soverign soil. We did so under compliance with international law (issued a Mayday signal, etc), but it was us poking their ribs and not the other way around here.
We tried to claim that the plane is "soverign territory" just like an embassy or military base, but that was mainly a move of desperation. If we play things right we'll get our crew back, but we're never going to see that plane again, and within a few years they'll have reverse engineered what technology they can for their own systems. Chalk that one up as a loss & move on...
Right, give it to them American style... <voice sounds-like="John Cleese"> like, say, North Vietnam? Oh yeah, they whupped our butts reeeeaaaal gooooood....</voice> Fittingly, North Vietnam is mighty close to Hainan Island too, so I'm sure they probably got a pretty good look at what we can do over there.
As for nukes, anyone with a decent seismograph can detect a detonation anywhere in the world -- it looks like an earthquake. Three or four well scattered measurements can roughly triangulate on a detonation, and more than that can pin down the time & location quite well. Whether they say they have nuclear weapons or not almost doesn't matter, because hiding a successful test is like trying to hide a blue whale in a swimming pool. If we believe they have the devices, it's because we effectively saw them go off.
Well, you're right -- it doesn't seem to have been the fault of the American aircraft. But the Chinese have stated repeatedly that if we want our crew to come home, all we have to do is say "I'm sorry". Is that too steep a price to pay to get them home? I think we can do that.
Yes yes of course, but that's not really the point. We [US & China] can argue all year over why the incident happened, but if we want to resolve it then it looks like we're going to have to suck it up and say whatever we need to say to bring our crew home. That's not quite to say that we should capitulate fully to their demands, but we need to acknowledge that they have the upper hand at the moment and we really don't have much to gain by drawing this out unnecessarily.
Nah, they don't need our help to find the pilot. It would be an interesting diplomatic move had they been willing to accept the offer, but the fact is that they already have their own air & sea abilities, and don't need to bring us in to help them. This sort of thing seems to have happened often during the cold war (as fictionalized in "Hunt for Red October" & repeated as farce with the Kursk last year) -- a country is just not likely to want this kind of help in this kind of situation. At this point, what they want more than anything else is the silly damned apology, and I can't see why we don't just accomodate their request.
Oh right, like China is the only country in the world to do this kind of political maneuvering either. Riiiiight......
What's this we stuff? Our countries have our fair share of differences, but no one was calling China an "enemy" until January 20th, and I'm not convinced that anything has really changed in that time, aside from more than usual sabre rattling from our Fair Crown Prince Georgie.
So? It takes about 5 minutes to target a missile. The US & USSR ceremonially de-targeted their arsenals as a way of bringing a close to the cold war, but both sides knew that it would take about 15 minutes to get all 10k (or whatever) missiles pointed back at their original targets. It doesn't really matter where they're pointed, it matters whether they are used. And they are not being used. So chill out.
And out army berets are paying for their weapons, and some of the money we get from our economic ties with them end up in our defense systems -- again, so what? Welcome to the ho hum world of international trade, my friend. Have a look around, there are plenty of straw men for you to poke at.
...and we haven't done the same to them? You weren't paying attention during the cold war, were you? This is how countries deal with each other. The important thing is that life is going peacefully on in spite of it.
And just recently we blew up their embassy. I think they're understandably pissed at us.
Good for you.
And of course they spy on us. No big deal.
That's not really the point though. I happen to agree with you (bizarrely), but I also happen to realize that a simple "I'm sorry" would have our crew home within hours, but we're too stubborn to do it. If I were one of those crew members, I'd be just as pissed at our leadership for not being able to suck it up & apologize as I am towards their pilot for being too cocky for his own good.
You're right, let the crew rot over there. That's a much better solution.
Well at least Jonathan Swift was funny....
Slackers.
:)
Anyway, as for the extent of the patches, I'm not entirely sure. It was built quite a while before I came to the company, and the modules that are running are all statically built in. Much to my annoyance, dynamic linking was disabled in the built version, meaning that the only way to add things like mod_speling (which would eliminate about 90% of our 404 errors, particularly people looking for INDEX.HTML etc & Apache being too case-sensitive for its own good) is by one way or the other rebuilding the server from scratch. Dammit.
Otherwise, the most exotic things we're doing seem to be Raven (which you make sound like it isn't very exotic at all) and NetSaint, which I can handle just fine. When time allows it, I'll start migrating things over to a new version I guess....
As for the instability of the 2.x series, yeah, I know it isn't anything reliable yet, and I'm not planning to move to it yet. But right now we've got...
...and if it isn't a total headache to upgrade to something approaching 1.3.19 then I might do it at some point. But again, Things Work so I don't wanna Fuck With It.
Sooner or later though a slow week will come along & I'll probably do it. I was just hoping to hear something about a utility to update configuration files. Guess not. Oh well....
Some of the Slashdot discussion speculated that RedHat might be interested in buying Be. Others noted legal difficulties in opening the BeOS source, but the company recently registered some thought provoking domain names, so they may be planning to try it anyway.
A very interesting comment noted that BeOS and Linux complement each other nicely, with BeOS a great desktop system for end users while Linux works best as a server. It's a good point. We may be expecting a lot of an OS to make it do well on everything from high end mainframes & servers to desktop PCs & handheld PDAs & even small embedded controllers. While it's impressive that Linux can do all this, maybe allowing complementary systems to have complementary roles might be a better idea.
As the head of RedHat (chief hat wearer? ;), what do you think of such speculation? Do you think that Linux could stand to gain by using BeOS technology? Would it be worthwhile to purchase Be &/or get involved in opening their software? If Sony's BeIA driven eVilla internet appliance catches on, having a stake in that contract could be very lucrative, but of course that's a gamble at this point.
Or do you feel that, as much as things may seem superficially similar, that there is too much dissonance between the Linux & BeOS worlds to make a merger worthwhile? Do you disagree that having separate systems for desktop & server could be a good idea? If you feel that there should be "one OS to rule them all," could (indeed, should)Linux take a lesson from Be about how to make a really good, easy, slick desktop frontend for the existing excellent but arcane back end that Linux provides?
In short, should these two be wedded and can such a marriage work?
I've inherited & since further adapted the installation that has been running at work, and I don't relish the idea of having to merge together the current httpd.conf file & various binaries into those of a newer version. If nothing else, all the various redirects, aliases, raven-ssl settings, etc that we're currently using would, I assume, be trampled by a stock upgrade. Further, I don't want to just maintain the current httpd.conf file on top of an upgraded installation, because it doesn't make any mention of some of the newer features that would become available and that I'd like to take advantage of.
Are there tools out there to merge in old settings with a new installation? I don't like the idea of mucking around with diff scripts to do this, but to date I haven't been able to think of any better alternatives. Can someone help?
This isn't as much of a problem as you might think.
If you want to fiddle around with system settings via the GUI tools, you'll be prompted to give the admin password, which will be the password for the account you first created. No big deal, and you can do what you want to do with no hassles.
If you want to mess around with settings via the underlying text files, again, no big deal -- just use `sudo vi $file` and you can edit it as you please.
Not having default access to root isn't a big deal here, because you can accomplish whatever you want to do without it. Keep in mind, this is semi-*nix, and in that spirit you only semi-need root access.
Parent post:
And here's where your *nix expertise can hurt you. I have been informed that creating an initial login account called "root" is a bad idea (though of course it is a perfectly typical thing to do in the *nix world).
Apparently a friend of mine did this and inadvertently wreaked all kinds of havoc. My best guess is that the name "root" was now attached to both the superuser and a not-so-superuser, and things pretty much fell apart from there, with the only recovery being reformatting & reinstallation.
Lesson: if you want root that badly, fine, but don't expect it as a GUI login option. Remember: su & sudo are you friend, so don't be afraid to call on their help when needed.
Apple has given it's customers an unusually large gun, hidden in plain sight for those that know where to look: don't point the damn things at your own foot for crying out loud... :)
...not that anyone is going to see a post this far into the discussion, but oh well....
Yeah, well now it;'s the Conspiricy of Britney Spears
sorry, couldn't resist the lame gag...
Well, at least they wake up. How dead can they be?
;)
Do you like handing out in bars?
Apparently not.
Do you want to end up with someone who's idea of a good time is, well, hanging out in bars?
I'd assume not.
So why do something you don't like & look for someone in a bar? Don't do it!
Yes, you do need to get out of the house to find somebody, but hey, getting out of the house should be fun anyway -- right? So, what do you like doing? Hanging out in computer shops & bookstores? All you have to do is find some place that you like spending time at, preferably one that has a mixed clientele (unless that isn't what you're looking for -- that's cool too), and start paying friendly, courteous attention to any of the regulars that you find interesting. Chances aren't bad that you'll hit it off with someone.
In a recent post (which I won't bother re-pasting here), I described a really cool "bar" that I visited in Auburn, Alabama. It had a great atmosphere -- you could get a beer or a coffee, a sandwich or a bagel. They had used books that you were free to read & buy, and comfortable furniture (chairs, tables, benches, lazy chairs, etc) that you were free to move around as you please. There were plans to install PCs with web browsers for the customers to play around with, and they would have little indie rock bands play there from time to time. The one & only time I got to go visit there, I was in heaven. A place like this would have been a great place for someone like me to meet, well, someone a little bit like me.
Maybe that's not your idea of fun at all, but that's alright. Somewhere out there is a place that should be more to your liking, and the people that go there are probably people at least a little bit like you. Maybe that place is a local $tech Users Group (Linux, Perl, Mac, Be, whatever). Maybe it's somewhere on a local college campus. Maybe it's someone's home. I dont know -- you have to find out.
Just get up, get away from Slashdot for a few weekends, and start looking! ;)
Here's three for you, and chances aren't bad that you've already come across any or all of them:
So. Now you've seen three major projects written in Python, and chances are this isn't the first time you've seen one or all of them. Like Linux, Apache, Sendmail, and yes Perl, if you use the internet at all then you probably interact with Python all the time without necessarily realizing it. It's a nice, clean, scalable lanaguage who's one main drawback -- it's slow -- is handled nicely by the fact that it's so easy to integrate it with C. As a result, it gets easy to maintain a large, complex project in Python while optimizing bottlenecks with pure C modules.
Perl can pull some of the same tricks of course, but it's much messier. I like Perl, I mainly use Perl, and I'm not knocking it. But I really can't see the point in arguing the matter: Python is a much cleaner language that is far better suited for large scale projects. If you haven't come across it yet, maybe you just haven't done anything big enough yet.
One I keep on my website, and use for sites that I visit fairly regularly, like Slashdot, CNN, my job, some friends, etc. I set this as the home page on computers that I use regularly (home & work).
The other file -- well, actually several files -- is the internal bookmark file for the individual browsers on each computer. These are of course typically way out of sync with one another, but for the most part that doesn't bother me. Anything important enough that I'd want to go back to repeatedly can be put into the website bookmark file, and in practice the pages that I come across at home are mostly different from the ones I find at work.
That said, some sort of bookmark document management system would be pretty nice, if only to manage the way they tend to grow drastically, accumulating dead & irrelevant links over time. A way of running a sort of `diff` against them would be useful, though at the moment I can't see a clean way to synchronize e.g. Netscape's format (one html file, last I checked) against IE's (one or more directories, containing individual .url files). I'm sure it's doable though, if someone were that worried about it. I'm just not that person... ;)
Tee hee...
The number of characters in each word corresponds to a base-10 digit of pi, and the comma even serves to mark the decimal place. If nine digits of precision isn't enough to calculate pretty much whatever you want, you might as well look it up anyway...
(Oh, I get it -- I thought your .sig was a pi-mnemonic device, no wonder I was confused... :)
An anecdote that plays into this theme:
Interestingly, the initial reason for the 55 MPH federal speed limit had nothing to do with auto safety: it was enacted during the oil crises of the 70s in an effort to conserve fuel. In that regard it was very successful; the fact that it saved lives was just a welcome side effect. Cars are better designed now, and can better protect their passengers in high speed impacts, thus leading to the lower fatality rates today even though average highway speeds are much higher than they were 20 years ago. The fuel efficiency angle hasn't changed though -- we'd still be getting better gas milage on the average if traffic was moving more slowly.
;)
Right, but getting some sort of "global" figures (in the sense of accounting for total cost to use a given source of power) is useful for setting national energy policy. The average individual might not care, but lawmakers probably would appreciate having good figures give a sense of what the best way to go overall might be. I don't know what that best way is, but I'd hope that legislators would try to figure it out before passing any laws that we may come to regret later...
Actually that's not true -- some if not all of these companies are starting to move in the direction of alternative energy sources already. Recent BP ads refer to the company not as "British Petroleum", but as "Beyond Petroleum", the implication being that the writing is on the wall, oil supplies are being exhausted, and they're preparing for a day when their major product will be Something Else. This is a Good Thing.
As noted repeatedly in this thread, by myself & others, this is a red herring. Pollution is displaced, yes, but it is displaced to a place where it is far easier to manage. There are a host of reasons why it's better to draw power from a centralized plant rather than millions of dirty little engines, and the sooner we can get to such a point, the better.
Maybe, I'm not sure. This is just speculation on my part, but my instinct is that the environment can probably as a rule better withstand a low level shock everywhere than an intense shock at certain localized points.
That is, if the level of say CO2 goes up everywhere by some small amount, say half a percent, then the global plant population can probably absorb that without too much trouble. On the other hand, if all of that is dumped into a 50% increase in, say, New Jersey, with basically no increase anywhere else, then I suspect New Jersey is basically screwed. (Anyone that has driven down the NJ Turnpike near Newark can verify this has already happened... :). If that point of acute damage to one place is then followed by a low level increase as in scenario one, the damaged area probably won't be able to handle the load as it would have otherwise.
But like I say, this is all speculation on my part, and I welcome sources that can back up or refute the hypothesis.
In any event, I don't think that would be a very big problem if electric cars were to catch on. The pollution is getting centralized, but probably not to the point that it would cause that much of a shock, especially considering previous points about power plant scrubbers and what have you. Given the choice between 150 million nasty gasoline cars and the same number of electic ones complemented with a few thousand power plants, I'd eagerly take the latter.
Does that concept even apply here though? What are you saying -- the amount of lead acid burned for every certain number of miles? God I hope that's a small number -- way smaller than gasoline consumption, 1000x times better even.
It's a problem of comparing the proverbial apples & oranges. What's needed are metrics that are more generally applicable. Perhaps a measure of energy units (joules?) consumed per unit distance, with maybe a local & global factorization that accounts for how much the vehicle itself consumes (the gas tank, the battery, etc) and how much went into supplying the vehicle (the oil refinery, the power plant, transportation costs, etc). Only then can reasonable comparisons be made.
I hope not either, because you're not entirely correct. Moving to electric vehicles does have the problem of simply displacing the pollution to a centralized point, but generally that plant is going to be cleaner than personal vehicles could ever be. Even if it is a coal plant, there will be scrubbers that do a better job of cleaning up the by-products than can generally be done on cars.
When moving to electric vehicles & centralized power production, economies of scale are on your side. The dirtiest engines today are, perhaps surprisingly, the smallest ones out there: lawnmowers. People don't tend to think about how much air pollution the Lawn Boy makes, but they're really nasty. For a lot of reasons, larger engines tend to be more fuel efficient, cleaner burning, and more economical overall. We stand a lot to gain by moving as far in that direction as possible.