If ever Microsoft makes something like these I bet you whatever you wish it will NOT be a simple zip file format for widgets with resource images, xml configs and JS scripts in it.
Great point, and this should keep GOOG up short term. The problem is they can't do this indefinitely -- keep this stock price on the basis of ad revenue alone (unless, I guess, they eat DoubleClick/Overture/MSN for lunch). Sooner or later, they will have to show results for the (IIRC) $36B they took from the market.
Maybe it'll be a web/webforms2 based 'API for the web', maybe it's something that'll let you write web-based apps (including rich apps like Office) and host using Google's backend cluster/OS as the backend (with Google being the transaction middleman) with client-caching and replication.
Google's done a lot (their key achievement is doing server-side for 10x less than almost anybody, thanks to their inhouse research and software) but I know MSR and IBM are both working on similar problems too (MS even has a version of Windows called Eiger (sp?) planned with features like these.
The problem is, once Google's played their card, they'll find existing OS and thin-client vendors (Oracle, Sun, MS) giving them a good run for their money -- and that 2x/3x premium will start evaporating. At that time, it'll be about which platform vendor has the best platform story to attract developers (and dev shops) with... and IBM/MS/Sun have lightyears of experience at this, and this is something that Google can't solve by throwing PhDs at it.
Actually, it isn't. Google offers nothing that cannot be cloned by MSN or Yahoo within a year (and they have a userbase that's quite attached to them, esp Yahoo). Watch out for Yahoo's Oddpost-powered Yahoo Mail refresh and MSN's new Hotmail to beta this quarter.
The way I see it, Google's value is in its ability to be a disruptive innovator in the marketplace and make some money off its first-mover advantage. But its success at monetizing its first-mover advantage (almost exclusively through Adwords) has been good-to-lukewarm at best. Whereas Yahoo has been steadily diversifying its revenue stream.
YHOO's currently doing about $35 where GOOG's doing $300. Sure there's a premium on perceived Google's tech superiority, but it's probably worth 2x or 3x YHOO. 10x does not make sense, long term. (It's fine if you want to make short-term gains, however.)
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world (I live abroad), life goes on pretty much as it has before, and people don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. It's a lot less stressful, I can tell you.
I've lived in Europe too, so I know what you mean. And yet I see something different: a measure of ostrich-headedness that's hard to justify. When I lived in London, there were plenty of jihadi imams around. No one thought anything of them, despite the fact that they were all screaming about Gulf War II (of course, I see from Google News that some folk are recognizing this today. I should've gone into law enforcement). Paris has much a much more hardline approach to deporting 'undesirables', but it still ignores the unrest brewing in its slums. And in the midst of all this, you merely have to listen into the mosque/Islamist website chatter to hear about how 'we [Muslims] will take Europe in a generation simply by being there' -- easy to imagine given Europe's current demographics.
But yeah, if not knowing about all this makes you not worry, more power to you. I was born worrier anyway.
As for fighting the war on terror, my suggestion is that there really isn't any good way to fight it at all (as people have pointed out before, "terror" is a word, not a country.)
The British (with decades of experience fighting the IRA) and the Indians (fighting Sikh terrorists in the 80s and Muslim ones in 90s) would disagree with you. Terror is a word but fighting terror is very real and has to be done at several levels: military, psych, social.
In the case of the India/Sikh experience, the Indian Army and police hunted down and killed thousands of terrorists and their families (stick) while at the same time encouraging others to give up the gun in well-publicized 'surrender ceremonies' and making these people heroes in their communities through well-publicized propaganda (carrot). Many of those who surrendered are alive and well today and would be happy to tell you they are glad their state is prosperous again. From what I understand the IRA experience went similarly, though the stick was less severe (law enforcement + international pressure) and the carrot was a systematic peace process.
The India/Muslim experience is rather more illuminating. Unlike the Sikh experience, the Muslim problem has not quite been solved today. There are interesting parallels with the Islamic situation elsewhere: in Kashmir, as in Iraq, the terrorists come mainly from abroad -- certainly their leaders do -- and spread terror using mercs or disaffected locals.
(Initially this invited heavy-handed reprisals from the Indian government-- giving the terrorists another banner to recruit under. The government finally wised up and made community relations an important part of its campaign but we now see terrorists bombing the very Muslims they were supposed to liberate as reprisals. Sounds familiar? Should be, it's happening again in Iraq.)
The common thread to Islamic terrorism is that they do not respect nation-state boundaries, they acknowledge only the Nation of Islam (Dar al Islam, I think it is). The rules of war mean nothing to them: they are not uniformed soldiers, they think nothing of using civilian houses and places of worship as places of violence to further their plans. They do not even care about the lives of the the children of their fellow-Muslims. Of course, none of this brings forth any criticism of them from the world press. Instead, it is the nations who must face their mayhem, fighitng with one hand tied behind their backs, who must take the blame.
How can these people be stopped?
A lot of people who believe that Islam is a religion of 'violence'. I disagree, primarily because Christianity before the renaissance was not much better than Islam today -- plenty of wars -- internecine and otherwise -- in religion's name. I believe that the ordinary Muslim if given a chance will repudiate fundamentalist Islam. If given the chance wi
As for "spreading democracy," all he's accomplished so far is bombing a country back into the Stone Age and leaving them with a non-functioning puppet government and near anarchy...and incidentally getting Libya to renounce terror, the Syrians out of Lebanon, and the beginnings of democracy in the Emirates and KSA (where women were recently allowed representation-- women can now vote for women in segregated poll stations).
And Iraq is far from 'non-functioning puppet government and near anarchy'... the jihadists (many of them mercenaries) attack in the Sunni triangle because most of them are Sunni. The situation in the Shia and Kurd areas are much better.
Anyway, as I keep saying to naysayers: give us an alternative that addresses the root causes of terrorism*. 'Police-work' in identifying cells and taking them out is all very well, but you'll never quite eliminate the possibility of attack-- and after a particularly big attack you will see rabid (and dare I say, racist) hatred of the worst kind.
* And please don't say: 'lose our dependence on oil and get out of the Middle East'. You have just sentenced the region's only thriving democracy to death. The more you pander to madmen the more their ambitions rise.
Speak for yourself. As an American I'm proud of both of them.
Bush -- because spreading democracy in the middle east is better than the current chatter in Europe about mass deportations of muslims back to their kleptomullahcracies. It is harder but it still is the right thing to do.
Gates -- because he was one of the key figures in making personal computers more than just a business toy. If it weren't for his business model, we'd be paying DEC and IBM through the nose for Vaxen and PCs would be single-vendor (IBM/Apple) curiosities.
I'm familiar with their eDirectory product, which is not free but very, very cheap (and good), but that's not open-source... have they open-sourced anything else?
As I said in my other post, if they'd abandoned us it'd have been a disagreement between friends, nothing more. They obstructed and cost us lives because our strategy had to route around (chiefly French and German) diplomatic warfare. They managed to do what China, Russia and India (all of whom also were also against the War) did not.
None of France's friends thought anything of it when France left NATO in '66. In the case of the Iraq war, French stalling tactics ensured that US troops had to reroute through the North of Iraq, causing unnecessary delay and loss of lives.
There's a fine line between critical friendship and obstructionism. We've had the former but never -- until Gulf War II -- the latter from the French. I suspect it was because the French leadership, especially Chirac, underestimated Bush to be a Texas imbecile and dismissed him as a one-termer with not much popular support -- easily ignoreable, in other words (especially since French oil companies were getting a good deal in Iraq). Hell, India and China were opposed to the war and protested vigorously but did not obstruct. Hence the question: Pourquoi all the French love for Saddam?
I'm not saying this is the end of Franco-American relations, but only that Americans will remember France's actions for longer than the French think.
That was peace won by millions of lost lives and the slaying of almost an entire religion on the continent. That was peace maintained by assuring the shield of NATO (to which guess who contributes the bulk of money?) Of course, no one begrudges Europe these, but one does wish they were better friends in times of need. Instead, we got sour Chirac and soulless Schroeder. You will, I'm sure, excuse the bitterness.
[ramble mode on]
Of course, the *real* problem is that the EU pretends to a social utopia controlled by bureaucrats and statesmen who 'know better' (cue Juncker, d'Estaing) than the people they govern. It will not work. Basic economics, political science and human nature say so. Europe's leaders pretend to a secular patina and transnationalism. In reality, the thought of Turkey entering the EU makes Europe's citizens deeply uncomfortable. It seems secularism is okay only when you worship some form of crucifix. Common market ideals? Free movement of labour makes the lumbering Franco-German economies tremble ('Beware the Polish Plumber'). Europe pretends to sexual liberalism-- I'm waiting for the first right-to-marry cases to come forward to the European Human Rights courts.
In short, Europe aspires to a postmodern future (very laudable! I'm an ST:TNG fan and I laud those goals!) but it has not fully faced up to the ghosts of its past: religion, nationalism and culture identities forged by nationalism.
The EU won't be dismembered by war or conquest: rather it will be dismembered by its internal contradictions long before that.
If you think an 'Empire' sacrifices its own tax dollars and the blood of its own people to make sure democracy takes roots in a foreign land, then yeah -- I'm proud of this Empire.
Last I heard, the oldstyle European empires mainly used their colonies as income sources, leaving most of them (esp the third-world ones) as basket cases when they left.
This new American Empire sure looks good by comparison.
> Why do you call for realism and then ponder a conquest in 45 years time?
I'm assuming the more literate of my readers will be able to distinguish realism in the realism-versus-utopianism and realism-versus-likely-scenario based on current demographic trends and mankind's prior history.
> The EU is currently trying to make the political sell for the remodelling and furtherance of the WEU
Yeah. I heard about a referendum or two in a couple of teeny countries about that. But don't worry, all the big important countries like Luxembourg are in favor of this newfangled constitution.
> however if it were required to go to war tomorrow we'd know about it today.
You can't lift a population out of sub-replacement level demographics in 20 years. Not even 25 years. And societies with sub-replacement, aging populations have a SERIOUS problem finding men and materiel for war. Especially when the biggest population increases in their countries are happening to hostile immigrants.
> I'd say the US has exemplified what happens when you don't prepare, ponder and practice the lessons you learnt from past (conventional) warfare.
Oh of course it was a complete failure. As against (say) the French approach, which was to kiss Saddam's ass until he was tickled enough to move out on his own. The non-inflammatory point here being sometimes you have to seize the moment: something the overly-fond-of-talk EU politicians have not (yet) realized. (Of course, the realization will come pretty quick the day the Eiffel Tower is razed to the ground by one of the lovely people residing in Paris' slums.)
Can we have a little less utopianism and a little more realism in the room? Greed, Ambition and Covetousness are very human failings. Europeans are so in rapture over their social model that they fail to note the squalor around them (Mid-east, North Africa). For that matter they fail to note the grumblings in the minorities in their midst.
We'll see what becomes of this idealism when around 2050, numerically superior Middle Eastern countries decide that Europe would make a tempting conquest. Remember Bin Laden blathering about Al-Andalus? Which country was that in?
And lest you think I'm revel at the prospect of Europe being invaded -- I don't. What I fear most about this is that a conventional-forces inferior Europe will choose the nuclear option to keep the peace. That will be horrific but given how Europe is giving up on conventional warfare, I don't see much reason for optimism.
So you're now saying that Europe will depend upon China for missile defense?:-) Brilliant national defense strategy.
And per capita military expenditure is a red herring. As things currently stand, the _Pakistani_ army could almost overrun Germany in a conventional war (and definitely overrun Italy or Greece) if no one else stopped them.
Btw, I'm not saying the Pakistani army even want to roll into the Germany, it's an example. The point is, if Europe ever needs to project its power outwards, it'd find it an uphill task because even Grade-3 countries are becoming a match for the once-mighty European powers.
And if you really believe the EU leadership's propaganda that everything can be solved by sitting across a table then I feel sorry for you (maybe you should have attended this conference). Even Europe's chief bargaining chip (trade and access to markets) will mean less and less in the future as economies in East and South Asia eclipse the traditional European powerhouses.
Pointing out that the EU (which has pretensions to being a superpower) has no clothes because it fails to take care of a basic item that governments (especially super-governments) are supposed to provide -- is 'trollish'?
What is it about EU-fans (as distinct from Europeans) that they have their head so splendidly stuck in the sand?
The EU sees this as a threat since they are basically depending on the US government to maintain economic and social stability for all.
Uh, you do realize that given Europe's social spending vis-a-vis its defense spending, it is practically dependent on the US, UK and Ausrtalia (the biggest defense spenders, and coincidentally all of them are the hated le anglo-saxon) for defense assistance should the need arise? The only thing Europe had going for it was France's nuclear capabilities (and I'm sure Italy and Germany can get there quickly enough) but ever since N Korea and Pakistan got nukes, Europe's nuclear shield is pretty much meaningless since their capitals present _very_ tempting targets.
So-- bureaucrats who can't be bothered to maintain a decent army suddenly feel the stirrings of independence and self-determination when it comes to domain names? Give me a break.
> Sometimes it shuts down, sometimes it sleeps, sometimes it locks the machine up (yay for Windows' ACPI support)
Stop blaming Windows and look at the hardware running: you get what you pay for when you build your own machines/get cheapass hardware -- my own built machines do ACPI just fine, and so does every Dell, HP, IBM and Toshiba with a 'Designed for Win2k'+ sticker I've seen.
Windows XP -- the initial release -- had a buffer overflow in its UPnP implementation discovered just days after the XP launch, which is where most people got a bad impression about it -- however it's quite widely used in all sorts of consumer-grade and small-business equipment.
Also, Azureus (on Windows) groks UPnP so it tries to automatically configure your NAT to allow port-forwarding for its ports -- this works with most consumer-level DSL modem NATs and firewalls. So in many cases the user isn't hassled with configuring port-forwarding.
> Umm... so how would you do all that with a web browser, especially if you have... no internet connection?;-)
IE supports the res:// protocol to load pages, images, and even HTA (hypertext applications) from local files, such as DLLs. Similarly Mozilla has chrome://.
I'm an engineer. I don't do 'perfect' solutions, I do tradeoffs that work. I don't do antispyware because:
- I don't need antispyware for my own boxes. My setups don't get random crap, and even if anything got through, I could fix it 'by hand'.
- Antispyware I've used has bad usability. The folk I've set up Windows boxes for (close friends and family) don't grok BHOs and startup lists. Worse, the antispyware UI intrudes into their computing experience and confuses them.
> it's the user's fault and consequently they deserve to suffer.
If the user makes a mistake (even assuming user != me) it's highly likely it's I who'd have to fix things. So I would have to suffer, or at least spend time. That said, I do make sure these PCs have decent backup, which helps.
And btw, wouldn't 0-day attack authors be able to deal with antispyware? and indeed antivirus? Novel attacks (like Valve got, for example) are in another class altogether, I'm talking about standard home machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Larry Ellison, then?
If ever Microsoft makes something like these I bet you whatever you wish it will NOT be a simple zip file format for widgets with resource images, xml configs and JS scripts in it.
Wo... for a minute I thought you were talking about the new Office file formats.
Great point, and this should keep GOOG up short term. The problem is they can't do this indefinitely -- keep this stock price on the basis of ad revenue alone (unless, I guess, they eat DoubleClick/Overture/MSN for lunch). Sooner or later, they will have to show results for the (IIRC) $36B they took from the market.
... and IBM/MS/Sun have lightyears of experience at this, and this is something that Google can't solve by throwing PhDs at it.
Maybe it'll be a web/webforms2 based 'API for the web', maybe it's something that'll let you write web-based apps (including rich apps like Office) and host using Google's backend cluster/OS as the backend (with Google being the transaction middleman) with client-caching and replication.
Google's done a lot (their key achievement is doing server-side for 10x less than almost anybody, thanks to their inhouse research and software) but I know MSR and IBM are both working on similar problems too (MS even has a version of Windows called Eiger (sp?) planned with features like these.
The problem is, once Google's played their card, they'll find existing OS and thin-client vendors (Oracle, Sun, MS) giving them a good run for their money -- and that 2x/3x premium will start evaporating. At that time, it'll be about which platform vendor has the best platform story to attract developers (and dev shops) with
Actually, it isn't. Google offers nothing that cannot be cloned by MSN or Yahoo within a year (and they have a userbase that's quite attached to them, esp Yahoo). Watch out for Yahoo's Oddpost-powered Yahoo Mail refresh and MSN's new Hotmail to beta this quarter.
The way I see it, Google's value is in its ability to be a disruptive innovator in the marketplace and make some money off its first-mover advantage. But its success at monetizing its first-mover advantage (almost exclusively through Adwords) has been good-to-lukewarm at best. Whereas Yahoo has been steadily diversifying its revenue stream.
YHOO's currently doing about $35 where GOOG's doing $300. Sure there's a premium on perceived Google's tech superiority, but it's probably worth 2x or 3x YHOO. 10x does not make sense, long term. (It's fine if you want to make short-term gains, however.)
We all know NT really stood for 'Nice Tits'.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world (I live abroad), life goes on pretty much as it has before, and people don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. It's a lot less stressful, I can tell you.
I've lived in Europe too, so I know what you mean. And yet I see something different: a measure of ostrich-headedness that's hard to justify. When I lived in London, there were plenty of jihadi imams around. No one thought anything of them, despite the fact that they were all screaming about Gulf War II (of course, I see from Google News that some folk are recognizing this today. I should've gone into law enforcement). Paris has much a much more hardline approach to deporting 'undesirables', but it still ignores the unrest brewing in its slums. And in the midst of all this, you merely have to listen into the mosque/Islamist website chatter to hear about how 'we [Muslims] will take Europe in a generation simply by being there' -- easy to imagine given Europe's current demographics.
But yeah, if not knowing about all this makes you not worry, more power to you. I was born worrier anyway.
As for fighting the war on terror, my suggestion is that there really isn't any good way to fight it at all (as people have pointed out before, "terror" is a word, not a country.)
The British (with decades of experience fighting the IRA) and the Indians (fighting Sikh terrorists in the 80s and Muslim ones in 90s) would disagree with you. Terror is a word but fighting terror is very real and has to be done at several levels: military, psych, social.
In the case of the India/Sikh experience, the Indian Army and police hunted down and killed thousands of terrorists and their families (stick) while at the same time encouraging others to give up the gun in well-publicized 'surrender ceremonies' and making these people heroes in their communities through well-publicized propaganda (carrot). Many of those who surrendered are alive and well today and would be happy to tell you they are glad their state is prosperous again. From what I understand the IRA experience went similarly, though the stick was less severe (law enforcement + international pressure) and the carrot was a systematic peace process.
The India/Muslim experience is rather more illuminating. Unlike the Sikh experience, the Muslim problem has not quite been solved today. There are interesting parallels with the Islamic situation elsewhere: in Kashmir, as in Iraq, the terrorists come mainly from abroad -- certainly their leaders do -- and spread terror using mercs or disaffected locals.
(Initially this invited heavy-handed reprisals from the Indian government-- giving the terrorists another banner to recruit under. The government finally wised up and made community relations an important part of its campaign but we now see terrorists bombing the very Muslims they were supposed to liberate as reprisals. Sounds familiar? Should be, it's happening again in Iraq.)
The common thread to Islamic terrorism is that they do not respect nation-state boundaries, they acknowledge only the Nation of Islam (Dar al Islam, I think it is). The rules of war mean nothing to them: they are not uniformed soldiers, they think nothing of using civilian houses and places of worship as places of violence to further their plans. They do not even care about the lives of the the children of their fellow-Muslims. Of course, none of this brings forth any criticism of them from the world press. Instead, it is the nations who must face their mayhem, fighitng with one hand tied behind their backs, who must take the blame.
How can these people be stopped?
A lot of people who believe that Islam is a religion of 'violence'. I disagree, primarily because Christianity before the renaissance was not much better than Islam today -- plenty of wars -- internecine and otherwise -- in religion's name. I believe that the ordinary Muslim if given a chance will repudiate fundamentalist Islam. If given the chance wi
As for "spreading democracy," all he's accomplished so far is bombing a country back into the Stone Age and leaving them with a non-functioning puppet government and near anarchy ...and incidentally getting Libya to renounce terror, the Syrians out of Lebanon, and the beginnings of democracy in the Emirates and KSA (where women were recently allowed representation-- women can now vote for women in segregated poll stations).
... the jihadists (many of them mercenaries) attack in the Sunni triangle because most of them are Sunni. The situation in the Shia and Kurd areas are much better.
And Iraq is far from 'non-functioning puppet government and near anarchy'
Anyway, as I keep saying to naysayers: give us an alternative that addresses the root causes of terrorism*. 'Police-work' in identifying cells and taking them out is all very well, but you'll never quite eliminate the possibility of attack-- and after a particularly big attack you will see rabid (and dare I say, racist) hatred of the worst kind.
* And please don't say: 'lose our dependence on oil and get out of the Middle East'. You have just sentenced the region's only thriving democracy to death. The more you pander to madmen the more their ambitions rise.
Speak for yourself. As an American I'm proud of both of them.
Bush -- because spreading democracy in the middle east is better than the current chatter in Europe about mass deportations of muslims back to their kleptomullahcracies. It is harder but it still is the right thing to do.
Gates -- because he was one of the key figures in making personal computers more than just a business toy. If it weren't for his business model, we'd be paying DEC and IBM through the nose for Vaxen and PCs would be single-vendor (IBM/Apple) curiosities.
As another poster noted, it's all about the drivers. Try a Thinkpad running Windows XP (Vaios are good too, I hear).
I'm familiar with their eDirectory product, which is not free but very, very cheap (and good), but that's not open-source ... have they open-sourced anything else?
... was an embarassment because OpenLDAP is a pile of junk compared to the quality of flagship OSS products like the LAMP stack.
Thankfully, Redhat's new Directory Server (based off iPlanet's) should be much easier to use and deploy.
> Abandoned in your time of need? My ass
As I said in my other post, if they'd abandoned us it'd have been a disagreement between friends, nothing more. They obstructed and cost us lives because our strategy had to route around (chiefly French and German) diplomatic warfare. They managed to do what China, Russia and India (all of whom also were also against the War) did not.
Make no mistake, America will remember.
None of France's friends thought anything of it when France left NATO in '66. In the case of the Iraq war, French stalling tactics ensured that US troops had to reroute through the North of Iraq, causing unnecessary delay and loss of lives.
There's a fine line between critical friendship and obstructionism. We've had the former but never -- until Gulf War II -- the latter from the French. I suspect it was because the French leadership, especially Chirac, underestimated Bush to be a Texas imbecile and dismissed him as a one-termer with not much popular support -- easily ignoreable, in other words (especially since French oil companies were getting a good deal in Iraq). Hell, India and China were opposed to the war and protested vigorously but did not obstruct. Hence the question: Pourquoi all the French love for Saddam?
I'm not saying this is the end of Franco-American relations, but only that Americans will remember France's actions for longer than the French think.
That was peace won by millions of lost lives and the slaying of almost an entire religion on the continent. That was peace maintained by assuring the shield of NATO (to which guess who contributes the bulk of money?) Of course, no one begrudges Europe these, but one does wish they were better friends in times of need. Instead, we got sour Chirac and soulless Schroeder. You will, I'm sure, excuse the bitterness.
[ramble mode on]
Of course, the *real* problem is that the EU pretends to a social utopia controlled by bureaucrats and statesmen who 'know better' (cue Juncker, d'Estaing) than the people they govern. It will not work. Basic economics, political science and human nature say so. Europe's leaders pretend to a secular patina and transnationalism. In reality, the thought of Turkey entering the EU makes Europe's citizens deeply uncomfortable. It seems secularism is okay only when you worship some form of crucifix. Common market ideals? Free movement of labour makes the lumbering Franco-German economies tremble ('Beware the Polish Plumber'). Europe pretends to sexual liberalism-- I'm waiting for the first right-to-marry cases to come forward to the European Human Rights courts.
In short, Europe aspires to a postmodern future (very laudable! I'm an ST:TNG fan and I laud those goals!) but it has not fully faced up to the ghosts of its past: religion, nationalism and culture identities forged by nationalism.
The EU won't be dismembered by war or conquest: rather it will be dismembered by its internal contradictions long before that.
[ramble mode off]
If you think an 'Empire' sacrifices its own tax dollars and the blood of its own people to make sure democracy takes roots in a foreign land, then yeah -- I'm proud of this Empire.
Last I heard, the oldstyle European empires mainly used their colonies as income sources, leaving most of them (esp the third-world ones) as basket cases when they left.
This new American Empire sure looks good by comparison.
> Why do you call for realism and then ponder a conquest in 45 years time?
I'm assuming the more literate of my readers will be able to distinguish realism in the realism-versus-utopianism and realism-versus-likely-scenario based on current demographic trends and mankind's prior history.
> The EU is currently trying to make the political sell for the remodelling and furtherance of the WEU
Yeah. I heard about a referendum or two in a couple of teeny countries about that. But don't worry, all the big important countries like Luxembourg are in favor of this newfangled constitution.
> however if it were required to go to war tomorrow we'd know about it today.
You can't lift a population out of sub-replacement level demographics in 20 years. Not even 25 years. And societies with sub-replacement, aging populations have a SERIOUS problem finding men and materiel for war. Especially when the biggest population increases in their countries are happening to hostile immigrants.
> I'd say the US has exemplified what happens when you don't prepare, ponder and practice the lessons you learnt from past (conventional) warfare.
Oh of course it was a complete failure. As against (say) the French approach, which was to kiss Saddam's ass until he was tickled enough to move out on his own. The non-inflammatory point here being sometimes you have to seize the moment: something the overly-fond-of-talk EU politicians have not (yet) realized. (Of course, the realization will come pretty quick the day the Eiffel Tower is razed to the ground by one of the lovely people residing in Paris' slums.)
Can we have a little less utopianism and a little more realism in the room? Greed, Ambition and Covetousness are very human failings. Europeans are so in rapture over their social model that they fail to note the squalor around them (Mid-east, North Africa). For that matter they fail to note the grumblings in the minorities in their midst.
We'll see what becomes of this idealism when around 2050, numerically superior Middle Eastern countries decide that Europe would make a tempting conquest. Remember Bin Laden blathering about Al-Andalus? Which country was that in?
And lest you think I'm revel at the prospect of Europe being invaded -- I don't. What I fear most about this is that a conventional-forces inferior Europe will choose the nuclear option to keep the peace. That will be horrific but given how Europe is giving up on conventional warfare, I don't see much reason for optimism.
So you're now saying that Europe will depend upon China for missile defense? :-) Brilliant national defense strategy.
And per capita military expenditure is a red herring. As things currently stand, the _Pakistani_ army could almost overrun Germany in a conventional war (and definitely overrun Italy or Greece) if no one else stopped them.
Btw, I'm not saying the Pakistani army even want to roll into the Germany, it's an example. The point is, if Europe ever needs to project its power outwards, it'd find it an uphill task because even Grade-3 countries are becoming a match for the once-mighty European powers.
And if you really believe the EU leadership's propaganda that everything can be solved by sitting across a table then I feel sorry for you (maybe you should have attended this conference). Even Europe's chief bargaining chip (trade and access to markets) will mean less and less in the future as economies in East and South Asia eclipse the traditional European powerhouses.
Pointing out that the EU (which has pretensions to being a superpower) has no clothes because it fails to take care of a basic item that governments (especially super-governments) are supposed to provide -- is 'trollish'?
What is it about EU-fans (as distinct from Europeans) that they have their head so splendidly stuck in the sand?
The EU sees this as a threat since they are basically depending on the US government to maintain economic and social stability for all.
Uh, you do realize that given Europe's social spending vis-a-vis its defense spending, it is practically dependent on the US, UK and Ausrtalia (the biggest defense spenders, and coincidentally all of them are the hated le anglo-saxon) for defense assistance should the need arise? The only thing Europe had going for it was France's nuclear capabilities (and I'm sure Italy and Germany can get there quickly enough) but ever since N Korea and Pakistan got nukes, Europe's nuclear shield is pretty much meaningless since their capitals present _very_ tempting targets.
So-- bureaucrats who can't be bothered to maintain a decent army suddenly feel the stirrings of independence and self-determination when it comes to domain names? Give me a break.
> Sometimes it shuts down, sometimes it sleeps, sometimes it locks the machine up (yay for Windows' ACPI support)
Stop blaming Windows and look at the hardware running: you get what you pay for when you build your own machines/get cheapass hardware -- my own built machines do ACPI just fine, and so does every Dell, HP, IBM and Toshiba with a 'Designed for Win2k'+ sticker I've seen.
Windows XP -- the initial release -- had a buffer overflow in its UPnP implementation discovered just days after the XP launch, which is where most people got a bad impression about it -- however it's quite widely used in all sorts of consumer-grade and small-business equipment.
Also, Azureus (on Windows) groks UPnP so it tries to automatically configure your NAT to allow port-forwarding for its ports -- this works with most consumer-level DSL modem NATs and firewalls. So in many cases the user isn't hassled with configuring port-forwarding.
Another reason why Azureus rocks so much, IMO.
> Umm... so how would you do all that with a web browser, especially if you have... no internet connection? ;-)
IE supports the res:// protocol to load pages, images, and even HTA (hypertext applications) from local files, such as DLLs. Similarly Mozilla has chrome://.
> I'm awfully glad you're not a doctor
I'm an engineer. I don't do 'perfect' solutions, I do tradeoffs that work. I don't do antispyware because:
- I don't need antispyware for my own boxes. My setups don't get random crap, and even if anything got through, I could fix it 'by hand'.
- Antispyware I've used has bad usability. The folk I've set up Windows boxes for (close friends and family) don't grok BHOs and startup lists. Worse, the antispyware UI intrudes into their computing experience and confuses them.
> it's the user's fault and consequently they deserve to suffer.
If the user makes a mistake (even assuming user != me) it's highly likely it's I who'd have to fix things. So I would have to suffer, or at least spend time. That said, I do make sure these PCs have decent backup, which helps.
And btw, wouldn't 0-day attack authors be able to deal with antispyware? and indeed antivirus? Novel attacks (like Valve got, for example) are in another class altogether, I'm talking about standard home machines.