I'm sure with the whole culture of female subservience over there the men have it pretty good.
Well, it's (as usual) a bit more complicated than that. Of course, machismo is de rigueur and women here have a lot less rights than in many other places in the world. But a young emirati woman has a certain status, and you won't force her to do anything against her wish unless you're willing to take serious risks (ie, rape her, and face the consequences). If it happens, she might be ostracized for what she "did" in the more conservative families, but in most cases she will fight back, particularly if she's from a rich or influent family (as many Emiratis are). So, she has to be into it, too, and in this respect, the boy/girlfriend relationship works pretty much as anywhere else, except that a) they must cover their tracks and b) limit themselves to oral/anal sex (well some girls go get stitched up in Lebanon...). I don't really know how the husband/wife relationship works, though.
Funny thing is, the wearing of a niqab covering the entire face (by no means compulsory, most women here wear the veil almost like Iranian women do (or did, prior to the current crackdown by idiotic Ahmadinejad)) can give more freedom to women. When it's time to go see the lover or any other activity she doesn't want her husband to know about, they simply take their car to the nearest mall, park there, cover their face completely in the toilets, hire a taxi, and do whatever they damn well please. No one will ever dare question a good, pious woman unless she's caught in the act.
On the other hand, if you're a poor Filipino or Sri-Lankan housemaid / worker, then yes, the local men (and a frightening proportion of the expats too) will expect a subservient behaviour. Rapes, as a consequence, are far too common and the emirati men pretty much get away with it with a slap on the hand (usually less than a year in prison, or even just a big fine).
You'd have a very, very hard time finding suicide bombers coming from any of these countries, save Saudi Arabia. Coincidentally, it's the one on the list with the least male/female imbalance... but it just happens to be the one with the most unemployment among its young nationals. Extremism and frustration, in my opinion, have much more to do with this factor than with young Arabs somehow getting less tail than other people. Trust me, most of them get plenty. The fact that they can't hang out in public with their girlfriends doesn't mean they can't bring them places (you thought their cars' darkened windows were just for the sun?). Creative use of Bluetooth phones to get express dates in malls, etc, is also a common practice. There's also more prostitutes in these countries than you could possibly imagine...
BTW, if anyone wonders why there is such a gender imbalance in the UAE: the population is made of over 70% expats, most of which are male construction workers (from India and Pakistan mainly). Same thing in Qatar. It has nothing to do with "honor killings" or any of that nonsense. It definitely happens sometimes, but it makes the news when it does and is quite rare. People here are as civilized as you'd expect anywhere in the world, and the government is "liberal" by regional standards. And, if anything, women's status here (and in Bahrein, from what I could see there) is pretty enjoyable compared to the rest of the region, especially Saudi/Qatar/Kuwait.
If they could make a 12 or 13 inch Macbook Pro (or even a black Macbook with a decent graphic card) I would be the first in line. For the moment I'm sticking to my beloved 12" Powerbook. When it breaks, if Apple doesn't have a decent 12" or 13" machine, I'll have to go with a PC.
Their 15 inches MP Pros are too big for me (I travel a lot) and the Macbooks' integrated graphics are a deal-breaker for me.
I don't understand why they killed the 12" Powerbook. They sold very well.
Orange's UNIK is UMA too, and can therefore switch from Wi-Fi to GSM seamlessly. Not sure about the competition (neuf, etc) but they're never very far behind so I think they are using the same standard.
According to this article, Neuf's "Twin" offer does the same thing AND allows you to use a non-Neuf Wi-Fi hotspot.
I really hope this catches on. Calling on GSM when there's already a Wi-Fi network seems like a waste of money. Personally I would be very happy with a phone that does not only that, but also allows me to audio chat with iChat/AIM/GTalk as well, at no cost while in Wi-Fi mode, and at the cost of a local phone call while in GSM mode . iPhone v2.0 perhaps, once they get out of the AT&T contract?!
This has been available in Europe (France at least) for a while. Orange's "Unik" plan. But I think they only allow you use the WiFi at your place.
Other DSL operators (Neuf, I think) have started rolling similar plans, but which allow to use any WiFi tied to the same data plan. i.e., if your friend is also a subscriber from the same service, you can use your cell phone at his place over his wifi for free. (I think)
even if you're in a war, you may NOT need to kill your foe.
That won't work in a "conventional war" scenario. If all you're doing is temporarily incapacitating the "other side's" soldiers, you will never win, unless you put everybody in prison camps until the end of the war. But if all you're saying to the other side is, "we'll flag you down with rubber bullets and feed and house you until the war stops", there'll be no shortage of people willing to "fight" you. Also, how willing is an army to send its boys with rubber bullets and laughing gas against an enemy who can, and will, use real lethal force?
There probably is a lot to be said in favor non-lethal weapons in other scenarios, though, such as asymetrical warfare, occupation (especially if the occupier has to enforce at least a semblance of law and order), or peacekeeping missions. In fact, many UN peacekeeping operations already make heavy use of non-lethal approaches, because most of their work is related with maintaining law and order rather than fighting armed groups (see UN missions in the Balkans for some good examples). However, what seems to be lacking these days is the political will to take care of such issues, rather than the practical and technical means to do it. I have no doubts that the U.S. army would have done a decent job of preventing lootings in Baghdad, regardless of the techniques used, had it been instructed to do so. It wasn't, and chaos ensued.
in fact, I'd argue that lethal approaches are more effective at countering civilians.
Yes and no. Of course if you're a brutal, ruthless regime that's already hated by the populace, and ostracized by the international community (North Korea, Burma...) then sure, it's just more effective to kill the dissidents. As a side benefit the regime also sends a strong signal to whoever might be tempted to, maybe, join the opposition.
The real concern is in countries with authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes that fall somewhere in between the extreme above example, and liberal democracy (unfortunately, a whole lot of countries fall into this category), where the government is still hellbent on controlling its population, but where a degree of freedom of expression and at least a nucleus of opposition, fragile as they may be, exist. If the police or army kill a bunch of people while squashing a protest, there is bound to be more unrest (and international pressure) as a result, not less. For such governments, non-lethal weapons solve the dilemma of using force to repress the opposition, because "nobody got killed, so where's your beef?" A couple of lives get saved, sure, but the regime stays unchallenged (and the dissidents probably end locked up in jail anyways, which may or may not be preferrable to death, depending on the country).
To an extent, this also applies to liberal democracies. But then there are (in theory) enough watchdogs and counterpowers to denounce the abusive use of non-lethal weapons. Whether these counterpowers are actually doing their job is another debate.
The under-appreciated and under-handled old issue - separate from the initial goal - is coping with the subsequent power vacuum.
On the contrary - and this is what is new in modern asymetrical warfare - the "subsequent power vacuum" cannot be treated as a separate issue, or a byproduct of the war, anymore. The Iraqi situation is a perfect proof for that: you can indeed win through "hyperwar" but what good is it if you are then stuck with a messy situation which you have no hope of solving easily, or at all?
That was what I meant when I said the US should ditch their cold war mentality: in "new" conflicts the fighting is now the trivial part and the politics is now the hard part. Which is the exact opposite of the hypothetical Cold War scenario (either you set up a puppet government, or you had liberated a country with old political traditions, in which case the problem would solve itself).
I would add that the fact that you *cannot* afford to let a power vacuum form (because it leads to regional instability, proliferation of unfriendly non-state actors, and encourages neighbouring countries to take their own actions that might not coincide with your own goals), gives you a very strong incentive to manage the resulting mess. Which means it makes even less sense to treat it as a separate issue.
Had the Bush administration realized that, and accepted to look into the consequences of the toppling of Saddam Hussein, instead of treating it as a separate issue, perhaps they would have been more cautious about actually starting the war.
There is nothing essential about the Iraq war which is new: the government of two countries are at odds, one sends troops into the other and eviscerates the existing government, attempts to instantiate a more friendly government in its place, and spends years trying to be nice to the population at large while quelling violent opposition.
Several things are new. I'll point a few:
-Non-state actors used to be marginal players, and those who existed (terrorism and insurgency are not new) were usually backed by other states. While this scenario still exists, the existence of completely privatized networks is now a reality. This changes a lot of things.
-Light and not-so-light weapons have never been so readily available, or so cheap. The market for new and second-hand weapons (and their resale, and transport) has been massively deregulated since the end of the Cold War. Back then you needed at least some degree of support from the intelligence services of one of two blocks to get your hands on arms. Now, you simply call a gun "broker" who will set up the acquisition, transport, and delivery. No-one is genuinely interested in controling these fluxes anymore.
The net result is enemies with much more firepower. It also means that the general population is much more likely to be armed, and that much more likely to go against the occupier when it does something wrong.
-Existence of autonomous regional powers with completely independent agendas (Iran, Syria, Turkey, in Iraq's case). Admittedly, this is not "new" but that kind of situation had not occured for a long period of time. Prior to WW2, most of the world was under colonial rule and thus there were just a handful of agendas that really mattered. During the Cold War the situation was even more simple, there were two main blocks and that was it; client states could have their own secondary goals but their main targets were roughly in line with either those of the US or those of the USSR. Now, every country and its dog has its own objectives and parameters, that are seldom aligned with those of anybody else. It complicates matters a lot. (Yes, that's an oversimplification, but you get my point).
Forget about the statistical model, the Slashdot blurb has completely missed the point (as usual) by emphasing it. The point that Mrs. Sullivan is trying to make - and it's a good point - is that the traditional criteria for assessing the outcome of the conflict and whether you have won or lost (such as the number of buildings blown up and enemies killed, number of square kilometers controlled, etc) have become irrelevant in new types of (asymetrical) conflicts, where the objectives are political more than geographical, and where sociological aspects (support of the population, curbing down radicalism or sectarianism, promoting a particular form of government) determine the outcome of the conflict more than raw firepower.
The relevant part: Driving Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War and overthrowing his government in 2003 was a brute force objective that was accomplished relatively quickly, for example, but quelling sectarian violence and building support for the current government has been much more difficult because it requires target compliance.
"We can try to use brute force to kill insurgents and terrorists, but what we really need is for the population to be supportive of the government and to stop supporting the insurgents," Sullivan said. "Otherwise, every time we kill an insurgent or a terrorist, they're going to be replaced by others."
So, don't panic. No one is seriously trying to "predict" the outcome of a war by statistics alone. It's about time the American academia and military ditch the Cold War mindset they've been stuck in since 1947, and start adjusting to the new realities of warfare and conflict resolution. This has happened in smaller countries (in Europe and elsewhere) some time ago, with varying degrees of success. French opposition to the war in Iraq, for instance, was largely based on a good understanding of which political and sociological forces would naturally prevail in Iraq once the artificial Baathist regime was terminated. In other words: yes, we can blow the country to bits, but once we've done that, there is very little that can be done to manage the country's politics afterwards.
As was pointed in many posts, it's funny that anyone would even try to enforce IP on the AK-47.
What makes it even funnier is that Russia created the situation in the first place: during the Cold War, the USSR actively, and intensively, distributed the plans for it (along with plans for the RPG7 and other types of weapons) at a cheap rate or for free, to kickstart arm industries in many of its satellite countries. The strategy was successful as it is estimated that over 90 million AK-47s have been produced worldwide since its invention, and dozens of countries had licencing agreements for it.
Fast-forward to today: when the USSR collapsed, all licences for production of the AK-47 were revoked. Of course, many producers have just conveniently ignored this fact(because their own armies rely on the AK-47 or, more likely, because the demand for AKs on the international market, both legal and illegal, has never been higher than since the end of the Cold War). Izhmash, the state-owned Russian company that retains the exclusive rights to the AK, recently complained that "out of the million AKs that are produced every year, only 10 to 12% are authentic", all the others being knock-offs.
Of course, they know they can't really do a thing about it. Copying designs of other countries' weapons is an established practice (just look up "Norinco CQ rifle" or "Khaybar M16" on google for unlicensed copies of the M16) that no-one ever really tried to suppress. What's more, the AK's simple design means it's not much of a challenge to produce them.
Izmash might go against one or two large, established producers that have been stupid enough to call their guns AK-47 (not sure they'll find one though) and press trademark charges against them. But the scores of small-to-medium-scale AK producers located around the world will probably simply continue to produce it regardless. It's not like most of their trade is legal anyways.
For more on the international trade in light weapons and its implications, read (in French) Armes légères, syndrome d'un monde en crise (disclaimer: I'm one of the co-authors of this book).
Sure, the money's good - but you might end up working in some remote oilfield in the Middle East desert or - worse - offshore.
One of my friends just enrolled for a year work in a gas reprocessing field somewhere in the middle of the desert in Qatar. He's probably making well over 75,000 USD/year (his first job!!) Not hearing much from him again, but the description of the place and living conditions were just... scary.
I now live in Dubai (in a business that has nothing to do with oil and doesn't make remotely as much money) and I see these poor souls coming from Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi etc for R&R: nightclub, booze, and cheap Russian hookers (Dubai as an endless supply of all three). Some of them look really traumatized;)
While I'm myself an iPod user and what you could call a Complete Mac Zealot(tm), I think Norway's decision is good, and should be followed by other EU countries, and, ultimately, the US.
DRM is a PITA and, if things don't change fast, limit the growth of the online music market instead of promoting it.
Too bad Apple (which has the loosest DRM around) gets the blame, but that's what you get for controlling around 80% of the market of online music sales. As a sidenote, some French retailers (FNAC.com and VirginMusic France IIRC) have started switching some of their sales to plain MP3.
Now that I'm not a student anymore and actually have an income (yay!), the only thing holding me back from buying on iTunes is DRM.
This is not very useful: the market value and intended targets of the iPod change from country to country.
You can safely assume the shiny gadget is a consumer good in the US, most of Europe, Japan, and other similarly rich countries. But in much of the developing world, it is a luxury item that local distributor(s) can afford to overprice (compared to its value in other markets) because they are only going after the 0,1 percent of wealthy people that can afford the item regardless if it costs 250 or 450USD. For this to make any sense, of course, you need to keep in mind that in many developing countries, there is no such thing as a large middle-class.
The Economist's Big Mac index is flawed for another, similar reason: going to Mc Donald's is considered cheap and unfashionable in Paris, France, while it the most hype thing to do in Cairo, Egypt, or Guangzhou, China. So despite the fact that you are talking about the exact same BigMac & fries, you are not considering the same product, because its perceived value changes considerably from place to place. I think I remember reading an Economist article that aknowledged this.
Where the HELL is iChat integration? As in, IM'ing or calling your iChat contacts, maybe not from GSM / Edge network, but at least from any WiFi hotspot?
I certainly hope they thought about it?!
So you are saying HP, Dell and the rest are are also not in the hardware business?
Well, one thing's for sure, they don't sell that thing called "design".
Also, I don't know about HP, but Dell still owns its own factories, which certainly qualifies it as a hardware manufacturer (or at least assembler). Dell *has* to be involved in manufacturing, it's a core part of their business model (zero-stock, allow you to configure your own PC, fast delivery).
Now compare with Apple's business model. Apple has closed down all its manufacturing facilities and is not involved into manufacturing anymore. Everything "physical" (manufacturing, assembly, handling, shipment) is subcontracted. The Apple added value is design and marketing. That new macpro you've received last week? No Apple employee has probably touched it or even seen it.
Not that one model is better than the other one. Those companies address different markets.
Come on, Apple doesn't qualify as a hardware manufacturer anymore. They don't even make their own motherboards. I doubt there is even one chip on the new intel macs that Apple is even remotely involved in (okay, except Firewire).
They have figured out a much more profitable business, though, which consists in selling something completely immaterial called "design", and that some people (including me) appreciate so much they'll gladly pay more for a machine that, apart from its looks, is absolutely identical to all others on the market.
In other words: once Jonathan Ive's team has created a new, expensive, shiny wonder, Apple calls up some taiwanese factory to do the manufacturing for them, while slapping in the very same Intel hardware the other companies use. They can then proceed to price it accordingly, then they ???, and then they PROFIT!
Which is exaclty what Steve Jobs had in mind when he came up with original iMac.
The more "applications" I try forcing into a tabbed web MDI model under a Mac, the more clumsy it gets. They aren't in my Dock, they can't be apple-tabbed through. Issues like this really frustrate me as I find myself wanting to use more web2.0 ajaxy fancy pants programs.
True that (and same on every OS). I, for one, can't wait for the day someone starts doing "standalone" online office apps (in separate windows, out of the browser). This way we'll get the same feature set as Word or Openoffice (only more limited), and as a bonus we'll *need* an internet connection just to write a friggin' letter. Also, someone somewhere deep within the Google moonbase (or worse, an ad script) will be reading to all our letters and spreadsheets. How cool. [/sarcasm]
I can see the potential of easily sharing videos, sound and pictures on "Web 2.0" portals (whatever that means): youtube, flicker, etc, provide easy solutions to what was until then a complex problem (sharing content). But we've known how to share text, tables and diagrams for a long time: that was the point of HTML in the first place, and e-mail, and, now, blogs. Ironically, Googledocs/Writely seems to be just that: an on-the-fly YSIWYG, HTML editor that lets you publish your document... or post it to your blog.
I see two big problems. The first one is a commercial / marketing issue: the killer feature here is definitely collaborative work capacities. But this appeals mostly to professionals, who have Word anyways and won't work on documents hosted somewhere online (can you say "security breach"?). Regular users, OTOH, couldn't care less about collaborative work. Students, perhaps. They pirate Word anyways.
Other (big) problem: what happens to *your documents* when the company behind your "online office" of choice goes bust and ceases operations? Ah, yes, of course, you've got a contingency plan for that and you have manually backed up everything locally as PDF. Yeah, right.
Overall, mark me not excessively impressed. It's cool and all, and a neat trick, and it's even somewhat convenient, but it looks like a solution in search for a problem.
In related news, 18-year-old David Banh, all-around genius and also an avid Slashdot reader, commits suicide as his stellar scholar achievements are labelled "slownewsday" on Slashdot's Tag system.
Contacted for comments, CowboyNeal, Slashdot mascot and fictional website manager, had nothing to say about this "crazy tags thing".
Well, the video iPod has video-out, so you can watch it on your TV, at least. It appears the Gigabeat doesn't offer this, but at least the Archos does. This would at least partially (if you had an Archos) make up for the "unable-to-burn-to-DVD" problem, as it's still relatively simple to watch this content on your TV.
Yeah, but then you only get the low-res, 640x480 version of the movie you've bought, even though you've paid for the hi-res version!! Not too bad if you're on plain SD, but it sucks for the folks who've sunken 2000 bucks on their brand new HD.
any DVDs that you burn with Amazon Unbox files will not be readable by a DVD player.
Yeah, that's pretty dumb.
Some manufacturer should step up and make a DVD player that's compatible with the fileformat (and that lets you type your password / account through the remote I guess), just like when the DivX logo started to appear on DVD players on the market.
Incompatibility with iPod: sure, it makes little sense to give compatibility to the 37 people who bought a Toshiba Gigabeat, and the 45 additional who got an Archos player, and not to the 50 million iPod users out there. BUT I think it doesn't really matter, I think the "watch-long-videos-on-the-go-on-a-tiny-screen" market is small anyway. People who really want to watch video on trains and planes have laptops or portable DVD players.
Basically, this service blows.
Agreed. However, I'm still sure they'll make a killing. Remember, it's Amazon, they're playing at home (on the internet), on their own webpage (huuuge userbase), and their marketing firepower is almost infinite.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure with the whole culture of female subservience over there the men have it pretty good.
Well, it's (as usual) a bit more complicated than that. Of course, machismo is de rigueur and women here have a lot less rights than in many other places in the world.
But a young emirati woman has a certain status, and you won't force her to do anything against her wish unless you're willing to take serious risks (ie, rape her, and face the consequences). If it happens, she might be ostracized for what she "did" in the more conservative families, but in most cases she will fight back, particularly if she's from a rich or influent family (as many Emiratis are). So, she has to be into it, too, and in this respect, the boy/girlfriend relationship works pretty much as anywhere else, except that a) they must cover their tracks and b) limit themselves to oral/anal sex (well some girls go get stitched up in Lebanon...).
I don't really know how the husband/wife relationship works, though.
Funny thing is, the wearing of a niqab covering the entire face (by no means compulsory, most women here wear the veil almost like Iranian women do (or did, prior to the current crackdown by idiotic Ahmadinejad)) can give more freedom to women. When it's time to go see the lover or any other activity she doesn't want her husband to know about, they simply take their car to the nearest mall, park there, cover their face completely in the toilets, hire a taxi, and do whatever they damn well please. No one will ever dare question a good, pious woman unless she's caught in the act.
On the other hand, if you're a poor Filipino or Sri-Lankan housemaid / worker, then yes, the local men (and a frightening proportion of the expats too) will expect a subservient behaviour. Rapes, as a consequence, are far too common and the emirati men pretty much get away with it with a slap on the hand (usually less than a year in prison, or even just a big fine).
You'd have a very, very hard time finding suicide bombers coming from any of these countries, save Saudi Arabia. Coincidentally, it's the one on the list with the least male/female imbalance... but it just happens to be the one with the most unemployment among its young nationals. Extremism and frustration, in my opinion, have much more to do with this factor than with young Arabs somehow getting less tail than other people. Trust me, most of them get plenty. The fact that they can't hang out in public with their girlfriends doesn't mean they can't bring them places (you thought their cars' darkened windows were just for the sun?). Creative use of Bluetooth phones to get express dates in malls, etc, is also a common practice. There's also more prostitutes in these countries than you could possibly imagine...
BTW, if anyone wonders why there is such a gender imbalance in the UAE: the population is made of over 70% expats, most of which are male construction workers (from India and Pakistan mainly). Same thing in Qatar. It has nothing to do with "honor killings" or any of that nonsense. It definitely happens sometimes, but it makes the news when it does and is quite rare. People here are as civilized as you'd expect anywhere in the world, and the government is "liberal" by regional standards. And, if anything, women's status here (and in Bahrein, from what I could see there) is pretty enjoyable compared to the rest of the region, especially Saudi/Qatar/Kuwait.
(Before anyone asks - I live in Dubai).
If they could make a 12 or 13 inch Macbook Pro (or even a black Macbook with a decent graphic card) I would be the first in line. For the moment I'm sticking to my beloved 12" Powerbook. When it breaks, if Apple doesn't have a decent 12" or 13" machine, I'll have to go with a PC.
Their 15 inches MP Pros are too big for me (I travel a lot) and the Macbooks' integrated graphics are a deal-breaker for me.
I don't understand why they killed the 12" Powerbook. They sold very well.
Orange's UNIK is UMA too, and can therefore switch from Wi-Fi to GSM seamlessly. Not sure about the competition (neuf, etc) but they're never very far behind so I think they are using the same standard.
According to this article, Neuf's "Twin" offer does the same thing AND allows you to use a non-Neuf Wi-Fi hotspot.
I really hope this catches on. Calling on GSM when there's already a Wi-Fi network seems like a waste of money. Personally I would be very happy with a phone that does not only that, but also allows me to audio chat with iChat/AIM/GTalk as well, at no cost while in Wi-Fi mode, and at the cost of a local phone call while in GSM mode . iPhone v2.0 perhaps, once they get out of the AT&T contract?!
This has been available in Europe (France at least) for a while. Orange's "Unik" plan. But I think they only allow you use the WiFi at your place.
Other DSL operators (Neuf, I think) have started rolling similar plans, but which allow to use any WiFi tied to the same data plan. i.e., if your friend is also a subscriber from the same service, you can use your cell phone at his place over his wifi for free. (I think)
I believe that Mexico suffers from an illegal immigration problem with fence-jumpers from Guatemala, ironically...
They're just on their way to the US. I don't think many of them stop in Mexico.
even if you're in a war, you may NOT need to kill your foe.
That won't work in a "conventional war" scenario. If all you're doing is temporarily incapacitating the "other side's" soldiers, you will never win, unless you put everybody in prison camps until the end of the war. But if all you're saying to the other side is, "we'll flag you down with rubber bullets and feed and house you until the war stops", there'll be no shortage of people willing to "fight" you.
Also, how willing is an army to send its boys with rubber bullets and laughing gas against an enemy who can, and will, use real lethal force?
There probably is a lot to be said in favor non-lethal weapons in other scenarios, though, such as asymetrical warfare, occupation (especially if the occupier has to enforce at least a semblance of law and order), or peacekeeping missions. In fact, many UN peacekeeping operations already make heavy use of non-lethal approaches, because most of their work is related with maintaining law and order rather than fighting armed groups (see UN missions in the Balkans for some good examples).
However, what seems to be lacking these days is the political will to take care of such issues, rather than the practical and technical means to do it. I have no doubts that the U.S. army would have done a decent job of preventing lootings in Baghdad, regardless of the techniques used, had it been instructed to do so. It wasn't, and chaos ensued.
in fact, I'd argue that lethal approaches are more effective at countering civilians.
Yes and no. Of course if you're a brutal, ruthless regime that's already hated by the populace, and ostracized by the international community (North Korea, Burma...) then sure, it's just more effective to kill the dissidents. As a side benefit the regime also sends a strong signal to whoever might be tempted to, maybe, join the opposition.
The real concern is in countries with authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes that fall somewhere in between the extreme above example, and liberal democracy (unfortunately, a whole lot of countries fall into this category), where the government is still hellbent on controlling its population, but where a degree of freedom of expression and at least a nucleus of opposition, fragile as they may be, exist. If the police or army kill a bunch of people while squashing a protest, there is bound to be more unrest (and international pressure) as a result, not less. For such governments, non-lethal weapons solve the dilemma of using force to repress the opposition, because "nobody got killed, so where's your beef?" A couple of lives get saved, sure, but the regime stays unchallenged (and the dissidents probably end locked up in jail anyways, which may or may not be preferrable to death, depending on the country).
To an extent, this also applies to liberal democracies. But then there are (in theory) enough watchdogs and counterpowers to denounce the abusive use of non-lethal weapons. Whether these counterpowers are actually doing their job is another debate.
Me, I think I'll just show them my middle finger(print). Twice, if they want, or as many times as they like, as a matter of fact :D
Ghhaaaahhh!!! MY EYES!! MY EYES!!
Seriously, who the hell designed this website? Or haven't they updated it since 1995?
Oh my. This is hillarious. Get them off to dubai with the haliburton execs to avoid prosecution.
Yeah, well, but no thanks, we already have enough rich assholes around here, and don't need any more.
Thanks,
A Dubai resident
The under-appreciated and under-handled old issue - separate from the initial goal - is coping with the subsequent power vacuum.
On the contrary - and this is what is new in modern asymetrical warfare - the "subsequent power vacuum" cannot be treated as a separate issue, or a byproduct of the war, anymore. The Iraqi situation is a perfect proof for that: you can indeed win through "hyperwar" but what good is it if you are then stuck with a messy situation which you have no hope of solving easily, or at all?
That was what I meant when I said the US should ditch their cold war mentality: in "new" conflicts the fighting is now the trivial part and the politics is now the hard part. Which is the exact opposite of the hypothetical Cold War scenario (either you set up a puppet government, or you had liberated a country with old political traditions, in which case the problem would solve itself).
I would add that the fact that you *cannot* afford to let a power vacuum form (because it leads to regional instability, proliferation of unfriendly non-state actors, and encourages neighbouring countries to take their own actions that might not coincide with your own goals), gives you a very strong incentive to manage the resulting mess. Which means it makes even less sense to treat it as a separate issue.
Had the Bush administration realized that, and accepted to look into the consequences of the toppling of Saddam Hussein, instead of treating it as a separate issue, perhaps they would have been more cautious about actually starting the war.
There is nothing essential about the Iraq war which is new: the government of two countries are at odds, one sends troops into the other and eviscerates the existing government, attempts to instantiate a more friendly government in its place, and spends years trying to be nice to the population at large while quelling violent opposition.
Several things are new. I'll point a few:
-Non-state actors used to be marginal players, and those who existed (terrorism and insurgency are not new) were usually backed by other states. While this scenario still exists, the existence of completely privatized networks is now a reality. This changes a lot of things.
-Light and not-so-light weapons have never been so readily available, or so cheap. The market for new and second-hand weapons (and their resale, and transport) has been massively deregulated since the end of the Cold War. Back then you needed at least some degree of support from the intelligence services of one of two blocks to get your hands on arms. Now, you simply call a gun "broker" who will set up the acquisition, transport, and delivery. No-one is genuinely interested in controling these fluxes anymore.
The net result is enemies with much more firepower. It also means that the general population is much more likely to be armed, and that much more likely to go against the occupier when it does something wrong.
-Existence of autonomous regional powers with completely independent agendas (Iran, Syria, Turkey, in Iraq's case). Admittedly, this is not "new" but that kind of situation had not occured for a long period of time. Prior to WW2, most of the world was under colonial rule and thus there were just a handful of agendas that really mattered. During the Cold War the situation was even more simple, there were two main blocks and that was it; client states could have their own secondary goals but their main targets were roughly in line with either those of the US or those of the USSR. Now, every country and its dog has its own objectives and parameters, that are seldom aligned with those of anybody else. It complicates matters a lot. (Yes, that's an oversimplification, but you get my point).
Forget about the statistical model, the Slashdot blurb has completely missed the point (as usual) by emphasing it. The point that Mrs. Sullivan is trying to make - and it's a good point - is that the traditional criteria for assessing the outcome of the conflict and whether you have won or lost (such as the number of buildings blown up and enemies killed, number of square kilometers controlled, etc) have become irrelevant in new types of (asymetrical) conflicts, where the objectives are political more than geographical, and where sociological aspects (support of the population, curbing down radicalism or sectarianism, promoting a particular form of government) determine the outcome of the conflict more than raw firepower.
The relevant part:
Driving Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War and overthrowing his government in 2003 was a brute force objective that was accomplished relatively quickly, for example, but quelling sectarian violence and building support for the current government has been much more difficult because it requires target compliance.
"We can try to use brute force to kill insurgents and terrorists, but what we really need is for the population to be supportive of the government and to stop supporting the insurgents," Sullivan said. "Otherwise, every time we kill an insurgent or a terrorist, they're going to be replaced by others."
So, don't panic. No one is seriously trying to "predict" the outcome of a war by statistics alone. It's about time the American academia and military ditch the Cold War mindset they've been stuck in since 1947, and start adjusting to the new realities of warfare and conflict resolution. This has happened in smaller countries (in Europe and elsewhere) some time ago, with varying degrees of success. French opposition to the war in Iraq, for instance, was largely based on a good understanding of which political and sociological forces would naturally prevail in Iraq once the artificial Baathist regime was terminated. In other words: yes, we can blow the country to bits, but once we've done that, there is very little that can be done to manage the country's politics afterwards.
As was pointed in many posts, it's funny that anyone would even try to enforce IP on the AK-47.
What makes it even funnier is that Russia created the situation in the first place: during the Cold War, the USSR actively, and intensively, distributed the plans for it (along with plans for the RPG7 and other types of weapons) at a cheap rate or for free, to kickstart arm industries in many of its satellite countries. The strategy was successful as it is estimated that over 90 million AK-47s have been produced worldwide since its invention, and dozens of countries had licencing agreements for it.
Fast-forward to today: when the USSR collapsed, all licences for production of the AK-47 were revoked. Of course, many producers have just conveniently ignored this fact(because their own armies rely on the AK-47 or, more likely, because the demand for AKs on the international market, both legal and illegal, has never been higher than since the end of the Cold War). Izhmash, the state-owned Russian company that retains the exclusive rights to the AK, recently complained that "out of the million AKs that are produced every year, only 10 to 12% are authentic", all the others being knock-offs.
Of course, they know they can't really do a thing about it. Copying designs of other countries' weapons is an established practice (just look up "Norinco CQ rifle" or "Khaybar M16" on google for unlicensed copies of the M16) that no-one ever really tried to suppress. What's more, the AK's simple design means it's not much of a challenge to produce them.
Izmash might go against one or two large, established producers that have been stupid enough to call their guns AK-47 (not sure they'll find one though) and press trademark charges against them. But the scores of small-to-medium-scale AK producers located around the world will probably simply continue to produce it regardless. It's not like most of their trade is legal anyways.
For more on the international trade in light weapons and its implications, read (in French) Armes légères, syndrome d'un monde en crise (disclaimer: I'm one of the co-authors of this book).
Sure, the money's good - but you might end up working in some remote oilfield in the Middle East desert or - worse - offshore.
;)
One of my friends just enrolled for a year work in a gas reprocessing field somewhere in the middle of the desert in Qatar. He's probably making well over 75,000 USD/year (his first job!!) Not hearing much from him again, but the description of the place and living conditions were just... scary.
I now live in Dubai (in a business that has nothing to do with oil and doesn't make remotely as much money) and I see these poor souls coming from Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi etc for R&R: nightclub, booze, and cheap Russian hookers (Dubai as an endless supply of all three). Some of them look really traumatized
Send a billion e-mails to everyone you're getting bounces from, saying you didn't do it.
:D
I can't see how it can fail
While I'm myself an iPod user and what you could call a Complete Mac Zealot(tm), I think Norway's decision is good, and should be followed by other EU countries, and, ultimately, the US. DRM is a PITA and, if things don't change fast, limit the growth of the online music market instead of promoting it. Too bad Apple (which has the loosest DRM around) gets the blame, but that's what you get for controlling around 80% of the market of online music sales. As a sidenote, some French retailers (FNAC.com and VirginMusic France IIRC) have started switching some of their sales to plain MP3. Now that I'm not a student anymore and actually have an income (yay!), the only thing holding me back from buying on iTunes is DRM.
This is not very useful: the market value and intended targets of the iPod change from country to country.
You can safely assume the shiny gadget is a consumer good in the US, most of Europe, Japan, and other similarly rich countries. But in much of the developing world, it is a luxury item that local distributor(s) can afford to overprice (compared to its value in other markets) because they are only going after the 0,1 percent of wealthy people that can afford the item regardless if it costs 250 or 450USD. For this to make any sense, of course, you need to keep in mind that in many developing countries, there is no such thing as a large middle-class.
The Economist's Big Mac index is flawed for another, similar reason: going to Mc Donald's is considered cheap and unfashionable in Paris, France, while it the most hype thing to do in Cairo, Egypt, or Guangzhou, China. So despite the fact that you are talking about the exact same BigMac & fries, you are not considering the same product, because its perceived value changes considerably from place to place. I think I remember reading an Economist article that aknowledged this.
Where the HELL is iChat integration? As in, IM'ing or calling your iChat contacts, maybe not from GSM / Edge network, but at least from any WiFi hotspot? I certainly hope they thought about it?!
So you are saying HP, Dell and the rest are are also not in the hardware business?
Well, one thing's for sure, they don't sell that thing called "design".
Also, I don't know about HP, but Dell still owns its own factories, which certainly qualifies it as a hardware manufacturer (or at least assembler). Dell *has* to be involved in manufacturing, it's a core part of their business model (zero-stock, allow you to configure your own PC, fast delivery).
Now compare with Apple's business model. Apple has closed down all its manufacturing facilities and is not involved into manufacturing anymore. Everything "physical" (manufacturing, assembly, handling, shipment) is subcontracted. The Apple added value is design and marketing. That new macpro you've received last week? No Apple employee has probably touched it or even seen it.
Not that one model is better than the other one. Those companies address different markets.
Come on, Apple doesn't qualify as a hardware manufacturer anymore. They don't even make their own motherboards. I doubt there is even one chip on the new intel macs that Apple is even remotely involved in (okay, except Firewire).
They have figured out a much more profitable business, though, which consists in selling something completely immaterial called "design", and that some people (including me) appreciate so much they'll gladly pay more for a machine that, apart from its looks, is absolutely identical to all others on the market.
In other words: once Jonathan Ive's team has created a new, expensive, shiny wonder, Apple calls up some taiwanese factory to do the manufacturing for them, while slapping in the very same Intel hardware the other companies use. They can then proceed to price it accordingly, then they ???, and then they PROFIT!
Which is exaclty what Steve Jobs had in mind when he came up with original iMac.
We're talking about frighteed 19 year olds who are afraid of each other.
With guns. And lots of them, too.
The more "applications" I try forcing into a tabbed web MDI model under a Mac, the more clumsy it gets. They aren't in my Dock, they can't be apple-tabbed through. Issues like this really frustrate me as I find myself wanting to use more web2.0 ajaxy fancy pants programs.
True that (and same on every OS). I, for one, can't wait for the day someone starts doing "standalone" online office apps (in separate windows, out of the browser). This way we'll get the same feature set as Word or Openoffice (only more limited), and as a bonus we'll *need* an internet connection just to write a friggin' letter. Also, someone somewhere deep within the Google moonbase (or worse, an ad script) will be reading to all our letters and spreadsheets. How cool. [/sarcasm]
I can see the potential of easily sharing videos, sound and pictures on "Web 2.0" portals (whatever that means): youtube, flicker, etc, provide easy solutions to what was until then a complex problem (sharing content). But we've known how to share text, tables and diagrams for a long time: that was the point of HTML in the first place, and e-mail, and, now, blogs. Ironically, Googledocs/Writely seems to be just that: an on-the-fly YSIWYG, HTML editor that lets you publish your document... or post it to your blog.
I see two big problems. The first one is a commercial / marketing issue: the killer feature here is definitely collaborative work capacities. But this appeals mostly to professionals, who have Word anyways and won't work on documents hosted somewhere online (can you say "security breach"?). Regular users, OTOH, couldn't care less about collaborative work. Students, perhaps. They pirate Word anyways.
Other (big) problem: what happens to *your documents* when the company behind your "online office" of choice goes bust and ceases operations? Ah, yes, of course, you've got a contingency plan for that and you have manually backed up everything locally as PDF. Yeah, right.
Overall, mark me not excessively impressed. It's cool and all, and a neat trick, and it's even somewhat convenient, but it looks like a solution in search for a problem.
In related news, 18-year-old David Banh, all-around genius and also an avid Slashdot reader, commits suicide as his stellar scholar achievements are labelled "slownewsday" on Slashdot's Tag system.
Contacted for comments, CowboyNeal, Slashdot mascot and fictional website manager, had nothing to say about this "crazy tags thing".
Well, the video iPod has video-out, so you can watch it on your TV, at least. It appears the Gigabeat doesn't offer this, but at least the Archos does. This would at least partially (if you had an Archos) make up for the "unable-to-burn-to-DVD" problem, as it's still relatively simple to watch this content on your TV.
Yeah, but then you only get the low-res, 640x480 version of the movie you've bought, even though you've paid for the hi-res version!! Not too bad if you're on plain SD, but it sucks for the folks who've sunken 2000 bucks on their brand new HD.
any DVDs that you burn with Amazon Unbox files will not be readable by a DVD player.
Yeah, that's pretty dumb.
Some manufacturer should step up and make a DVD player that's compatible with the fileformat (and that lets you type your password / account through the remote I guess), just like when the DivX logo started to appear on DVD players on the market.
Incompatibility with iPod: sure, it makes little sense to give compatibility to the 37 people who bought a Toshiba Gigabeat, and the 45 additional who got an Archos player, and not to the 50 million iPod users out there. BUT I think it doesn't really matter, I think the "watch-long-videos-on-the-go-on-a-tiny-screen" market is small anyway. People who really want to watch video on trains and planes have laptops or portable DVD players.
Basically, this service blows.
Agreed. However, I'm still sure they'll make a killing. Remember, it's Amazon, they're playing at home (on the internet), on their own webpage (huuuge userbase), and their marketing firepower is almost infinite.
Now, let's see what Apple can do.