This was simply a difference in policy. The belief of the current administration is that things such as this are local government's responsiblity. Agree or disagree, I respect that, but it wasn't maliciousness.
Heaping responsibilities on local government while keeping the same share of the money is malicious. Local administrators are responsible if anything happens but don't actually have the means to do something about it - unless they choose to become responsible for a very significant tax rise. Isn't that practice called 'setting up a Patsy' in English? Apparently it failed because the federal government is blamed anyway.
I do support organizing water control on a local level, like the elected water district councils we have in the Netherlands: it makes sure that there are always accurate disaster control plans tailored to the present situation in the district because the councillors live there, and it helps when mobilizing the population (whether for evacuation or raising temporary levees to minimize damage). Making a change like this requires time and money.
Building structures should obviously be left to the Army Corps of Engineers because of the advantages of economies of scale.
In New Orleans things happened that are unimaginable to me: - people who should have evacuated didn't and the government didn't coerce them, creating a law enforcement and disaster relief problem; - the evacuated people without family or friends outside the area were quartered in ridiculous circumstances (again not involving coercion); - the local population was not used as manpower for controlling levee breaches or raising temporary levees to protect areas not in the direct path of the water; - the local government basically had no plan whatsoever; - the federal government did not prepare disaster relief and damage control in the days before the floodings, even though it was obvious that the water control system in Louisiana was not up to the task.
Recommendations: - disaster is one of those rare cases where you want more coercion in the future - when you evacuate people really evacuate them; - send the responsible disaster planners over to Bangladesh when disaster strikes there again to test their skills. Mental note: do it a few days before it happens. It is free: you can charge it on the development aid budget.
There were ample resources available in this area, but the state and local officials chose not to seek their assistance until well after the fact.
Ample resources? Even the temporary morgue is a foreign import: it comes from the Netherlands. The political situation may be as you describe, but that still doesn't prevent the federal government from preparing itself for a disaster of that scale. One would expect them, given the 911 attack, to at least be prepared this time to recover and identify lots of dead bodies.
They might be technologically advanced, but they simply don't possess enough warheads for MAD, which is what the GP was talking about.
Europe does have the weapons grade plutonium stockpiles from its nuclear commercial industry, the knowledge, the money, and the industrial base to mass produce warheads. It can change its posture in a year time if it really wants to. This is a bit late to count as a MAD option now, but they are capable of developing one.
For most other existing 'nuclear powers' this is not an option: even obtaining the necessary amounts of plutonium is impossible. A lesser power with some warheads is still a lesser power.
Japan and Canada may also be able to develop a viable MAD capability. Canada actually already has MAD vis a vis the US by the way: the US cannot possibly nuke its own border. It wouldn't really help them since they could easily be defeated by the US in a conventional way, though.
American soldiers were not terrorists. They engaged in guerilla warfare, but they did not kill innocent British civilians. There is a difference.
It is not the best possible analogy, but the point about freedom fighters is valid. The American Revolution happens to be an anemic gentleman's affair: 'British citizens' were far away and it was a bit of a side show of a big naval war between the European continental powers and Britain anyway.
In my home town in the Netherlands we celebrate the day in 1572 we liberated ourselves from Spain, the garrison fled, and a mob hanged all Catholic foreigners in town that spoke unintelligible languages (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese) regardless of whether they were men, women, or children. In WWII our 'resistance heroes' mostly killed native traitors: police officers, civil servants, Nazi 'whores', etc. The Nazis consistently called them terrorists, and justified increasing oppression with it.
In fact, the only wars in which we behaved like perfect gentlemen and didn't resort to any form of 'terrorism' are the ones we started and won without trouble, like the second Anglo-Dutch war. Terrorism is, and has always been, the strategy of the underdog, while the aggressor - who needs a justification - pretends to be a gentleman and claims that God, justice, freedom, democracy, and the tide of history are on his side.
Since most of the world population was not born a citizen of a superpower, it is not very surprising that people tend to put the burden of proof on the superpower and assume that terrorism is somehow defensive in nature unless a convincing case is made to the contrary.
...Pakistan really dodged the bullet on that one, huh? Not only did we tolerate their proliferation and sale of nuclear systems and technical knowledge, but we spared their regime too.
Not only that: the CIA ordered the Netherlands Intelligence Services twice to let Abdul Kadeer Khan walk in the seventies, even though it was completely obvious that he was copying everything there was to know about URENCO classified centrifuge technology (which is the most complex part of the process of making nuclear weapons). This is claimed by the former Netherlands prime minister, and apparently by sources in the Netherlands and US intelligence community. The latest development (in Dutch, unfortunately) is that a judge of the Amsterdam courthouse accuses the CIA of taking the file they compiled on mr. Khan in the eighties.
Is it possible that the CIA wanted the Pakistanis to have nuclear weapons to counterbalance India's newly acquired 1974 nuclear superpower status? Or is it just a decade of monumental incompetence by everyone involved in the CIA.
These events should also make clear, by the way, that the Netherlands (and for instance Germany, likely Japan, etc.) do have and maintain the means - including stockpiles of fission material - to produce nuclear weapons quickly, but defer the actual production of them as a matter of foreign policy doctrine.
Accessibility is one approach, but doesn't the US have a competition authority??? The government cannot possibly require you to use a product that is available from only one supplier: it subsidizes a monopolist if it does. Great: yet another reason for the EU to take on Microsoft.
It is an iterative activity. It takes no intelligence to run all possible outcomes and pick the one most likely to succeed. Intelligence is the chess master that evaluates trees of choices and prunes them, guessing what the other person will do (rather than calculating for all possible moves) to reduce the computations necessary. I don't know of any computer programs that prune choices based on being below some threshold of probability based off likely moves. They just throw more itterations into it. It's easier to improve the hardware than programming.
You assumption about what the chess master does, is based on the idea that introspection gives us an accurate idea of how many alternatives we evaluate. There is no reason to expect that it is, given that we know that our stream of consciousness trails behind our actual decision making processes considerably. Consider it a kind of summary being entered into a log.
Makers of competitive chess programs have little reason to prune, because it doesn't make the chess program any better (given that we already use the best evaluation function we can come up with). I can't blame them for their conservatism.
Chess, while originally considered a very intelligent activity, turned out to be easy to program into a computer, requiring even little creativity on the part of the programmer, while for instance tying shoelaces turns out to be difficult. That is not a reason to change our opinions on what is intelligent.
It is a fortunate fact that we are most successful designing computer programs to do things that humans are comparatively bad at. There is no viable market for robots that tie shoelaces, because experts on tying shoelaces are not scarce.
On the other hand, relatively simple information processing and fraud detection applications did take over the jobs of 4 out of 5 employees in the tax administration where I am involved as a consultant. These were educated people, doing "knowledge-intensive" jobs that were taken over by the computer. The computer applications are so disappointingly simple that they don't require a genius to make them, but they do automate an activity requiring intelligence when performed by a human.
I think, given the apparent popularity of black box technologies of limited utility like neural networks in the media, that the audience will only be happy if AI researchers build something they don't understand - a black box - from which a general purpose intelligence suddenly emerges.
This view is based on a total misunderstanding of the purposes of science and engineering. I don't even TRY to invent the magical algorithm; I want to build special purpose problem-solvers that are transparent and self-explanatory, built from scalable building blocks that I understand. "Emergent features" are bugs from an engineering point of view.
I don't think the problem is with the AI community. Critics should stop calling trivial but hard exercises like tying shoelaces "intelligent". Tying shoelaces is difficult, but not intelligent. Chess is an intelligent activity.
Since computers were first used to play chess (THE original example Descartes gave when he distinguished men from beasts by their analytic intelligence) mankind has been redefining intelligence as simply "hard for a machine to do".
AI is hugely successful. Example: in some countries over 85% of income tax applications are now processed without any human intervention. That is AI in action, and would save many billions if organizations stopped inventing new reasons for employing people.
"In 1718, French colonist Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville ignored his engineers' warnings about the hazards of flooding and mapped a settlement in a pinch of swampland between the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico and a massive lake to the north."
On the positive side the settlement would have been very easy to defend against attacks, as it is surrounded by water on three sides and its position beneath sea level makes it easy to inundate areas - making those areas impassable for artillery, cavalry, and ships. In the 18th century that would have been the more pressing concern; "Fortress Holland" was a success before the invention of planes for the same reasons.
New Orleans was built in one of the best possible locations in America from the perspective of a relatively minor colonial power like France.
One thing I find really weird is that there haven't been any adverts here in the UK asking us to help donate? Does anyone know why??
I know that in the Netherlands the association of disaster relief organizations made a statement that they don't believe the US is short of money, but only of equipment, qualified people, and a plan.
The reason we aren't helping yet is because the US didn't ask for any help and the government doesn't want to insult the US.
The government did offer two teams of diking engineers, but heard nothing from the US. We have a lot of experience controlling dike breaches, and huge amounts of equipment for that purpose. They also sent a disaster relief frigate from the Netherlands Antilles towards the Louisiana coast in order to have a launch platform for assistance ready just in case the US asks for help.
You can't fool me. Gene fading is an established theory supported by reputable sources. It should be taught alongside intelligent design, because people, especially blonde people, should be aware of the mechanism of gene fading and its dangers in our modern society.
1. Nobody knows how to use it, everybody coming out of school these days is used to using Linux and/or BSD, from this perspective Solaris does a lot of weird things for no reason.
2. Much as Sun's pushing Solaris/x86, if you're using Solaris, you're still pretty much going to be using expensive, locked-in Sun hardware. (Of course that hardware is probably more reliable, but sometimes lower TCO means you get what you pay for).
3. Sun is a competitor to IBM who commissioned the study, maybe the study misrepresents Sun TCO in some way.
Sparcstations are just too reliable. We have machines from 1991 running NIS+ and some other stuff. No manager making a purchase decision is ever going to believe that a server will run for 15 years without a glitch, and he is not going to spread the TCO over 15 years. Nobody in the organization is qualified to touch the machines, and many of the windows system admins who have taken over don't even know they exist.
The windows admins occasionally screw up the network (like when they made the NIS+ servers unreachable by changing the IP numbers of the only two sparcstations allowed to access them), and then we immediately hire an expensive external admin to solve the problem.
Lessons: - Sun hardware is too reliable: the machines will be technologically obsolete before they fail. Sun can save costs there, because nobody appreciates it anyway unless they are building a spacecraft or nuclear power plant. - Comparing an x86 machine against a sparcstation based on a lifespan of 5 years is completely unfair. We spend an expensive two weeks configuring a new sparcstation, and then let it run for 15 years. The Windows machines are tinkered with all the time by cheap Windows idiots. The sparcstation gets cheaper as time progresses (if Windows administrators cannot interfere with its operation). - What about the costs of letting Windows idiots tinker with your infrastructure all the time? THEY are the ones that create the problems for the sparcstations in our organization because they don't know what they are doing.
I mean, who would pay for such a service? Suppose the US did. Then the rest of the world gets a nice clean LEO without contributing a dime, freeloading off of their effort. If you tried to set up some international payment agreement, you'd get all sorts of bickering similar to the Kyoto agreements: why should third world nations pay, why should nations with developing space industries pay the same as behemoths like NASA, etc.
Obviously the countries that caused the space garbage problem should pay the cleaning bill, but that line of reasoning didn't work in Kyoto either. Space was 'clean' 50 years ago.
On the other hand garbage collection is a very good excuse for weaponizing space, so I actually expect to see a garbage collection race develop if one country takes the initiative.
I fail to see why formations of smaller satellites should be a new development. If smaller types could accomplish the mission of bigger ones, the big ones wouldn't be up there (carrying large antennae, big lenses or whatever).
At the bottom of the article this article is linked, about ESA's SSETI Express, launching 1kg CubeSat picosatellites developed by European universities.
The idea of using smaller and lighter satellites is hardly revolutionary, and resources are quite tight as it is: 71*60*60 cm max. form factor for Ariane 5 launches, peak power of maybe 50W - a modest car pc - if you don't want to add heavy batteries. Fitting multiple micro, nano, or picosatellites in a single cargo hold is the obvious way to decrease costs.
What is the difference between "foreign policy for internal consumption only" and "propaganda"?
There is none. Most "foreign policy" in the media is just stageplay for the folks at home.
First, if you can back it up (with, for example, the most effective and well-trained military in the world not to mention the world's largest nuclear arsenal), then is it really "empty" posturing?
It is not diplomacy anymore. It is scripted stageplay. Threats through the media are legitimizing only: the offending country can't actually meet any demands, and is not supposed to react to it.
Second, doesn't posturing, empty or not, have more to do with the ability to destroy anyone you please than it does with any perceived feeling of invulnerability? Third, how does the USA "feel" invulnerable, or "feel" anything for that matter?
The USA can defend itself to any military force at home and retaliate with nukes. It is not necessarily capable of achieving its foreign policy objectives, certainly not without its allies.
Being capable of winning any battle does not mean you get any closer to achieving objectives, unless merely "waving your dicks around" is the objective.
Not being capable of winning any battle against your rivals does not mean you can't achieve military objectives. An example: I am from the Netherlands; In the 19th century we were conquering the whole of Indonesia - at that time one of the only known sources of oil - while Great Britain, Japan, and the US were eyeing eachother suspiciously and all believed the others had secret military pacts with the Netherlands. All three were stronger than we were, but we ended up with the great prize. The stalemate situation was stable until the winter of 1941, when the US started an oil boycott against Japan and the Netherlands immediately copied it -leaving the Japanese fighting China without oil- to provoke a Japanese attack on the Americans to clear the way for an attack on the Netherlands Indies. This was in our national interests, since obliging the Americans to us and drawing them into WWII was the prime objective of the government in exile by that time. The lost battles were propaganda events: we always knew we couldn't win, but the drama worked towards regaining our independence.
The 80 year war (1568-1648) is another case: we won only one major battle out of dozens, but we did bankrupt the Spanish Empire eventually. 1830 is the other way around: we won all battles, but lost Belgium anyway.
Confusing glorious victories with achieving foreign policy objectives is a luxury that only superpowers can afford.
Much like how the Stalin cooperated with Hitler to divide Poland?
Stalin didn't think about his objectives well, but on the other hand he didn't really have a choice. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt also cooperated, you know, to defeat Hitler.
Doesn't the nature of compromise involve giving up on some of your goals in order to find agreement?
Yes. It also involves finding the right allies, and selling your goals as their goals. If you think compromise is something bad: for us in the Netherlands compromise is a defining national trait and therefore a doubleplusgood concept.
If the USA stopped "threatening/bullying", as you imply it should do, then it would be the only country on the planet that does NOT "threaten" or "bully". What one person may call "threatening" or "bullying" is what another person would simply call "looking out for one's interests" -- which is the very essence of diplomacy.
Most countries only very rarely openly threaten or bully. There is little point in making disinterested bystanders into enemies by engaging in oafish behavior. If you threaten, do it discreetly or indirectly. You don't want to be perceived as the aggressor. Goodwill should be treasured: it is not easy to get it back.
Foreign policy sometimes involves some empty posturing, but that is usually for internal consumption (in which case it is not diplomacy). Countries that feel invulnerable, like the US, tend to engage more in empty posturing than small and vulnerable countries.
Small countries usually keep a low profile, and try to achieve foreign policy goals by manipulating larger countries' policies towards eachother (e.g. riding a double anchor, preserving a balance of power), developing joint policies with countries that share some interests, and (if wealthy) generally being generous with development aid to gain some karma and to be able to threaten to withhold it. Supporting a large country like the US on something that is unimportant to you in return for some other, valuable concession is also a favorite tactic.
Every nation is competing and standing up for their own interests, regardless of the spin that we want to put on it and pretend that everyone is "cooperating".
Cooperation is a great way achieving shared foreign policy goals. It's also much cheaper than conflict. In my dictionary cooperation does not involve any self-sacrifice.
My guess is that the only thing stopping them now is the availability of nukes or the logistics of getting them into the US. I doubt the will to use them is a problem right now.
If you don't have nukes, then your "will to use them" is irrelevant. If you only have a few nukes, you'd generally want to save your ammo.
It is not hard to get stuff shipped into the US in a container. Many people can arrange that, including preclearance. Fortunately, most terrorists are literally idiots and have few supporters in important places.
When nutcases get bombs and a clear path to their target, they blow things up. For the most part terrorism is as simple as this. Sure, foreign policy probably does tend to exhasperate the situation a little, and it may also influence whether terrorist groups get sponsored by national governments.
The world is full of idiots and it is just becoming harder to limit there actions...
Sure the world is full of idiots, but the idiots only get a nuke if many people want to them to have a nuke. If you see a puppet in the limelight, look for the puppet master.
| I wouldn't say it was entirely fair. Your unexpected stategy of cowering behind the French left us helpless with laughter.
A word of warning: don't expect any help from France, the Netherlands, and Spain this time. The US would be on its own now if it takes on the British Empire, and footing the bill itself.
Unless you're in some very, very new field, it is hubris to assume that nothing older than 10 years is relevant.
Once you are at a higher level of studies such as Masters or PhD, you will find that you are primarily reading research journals. Most fields have 'seminal' papers that establish the current paradigms. Subsequent papers build on those. Most of these for most fields were written before 1995. Most of them are not on-line in full text.
To a certain extent the internet has spawned laziness in referencing, as many students simply only reference articles that they can pull up on-line. If it involves a trip to the stacks, forget it. They'll just assume that issue or reference has been settled and not bother to check or read the original reference underlying most articles. It is as if everything before the internet doesn't exist in their world of research.
I am in a field that doesn't predate the use of computers, and I am a senior researcher. I do use pre-1995 academic sources occasionally, but I normally just email the author (or colleagues with a bigger electronic collection) and ask for the ps file and the bib record. I know most people in my field personally; Notable exceptions are two celebrities in our field that are deceased. In very rare cases I just buy the book on Internet.
As far as I am concerned, in my field libraries are for younger people who don't have a personal collection of papers relevant to their line of research yet. At some point this collection becomes almost static, and you will be only interested in the newest issue of relevant journals. This will also happen in other fields, except that the historical corpus is bigger.
I do refer to legal sources quite regularly, sometimes from the 19th and early 20th century, but they are usually available on-line in full text.
I am a university researcher, and I do use Google Scholar and Citeseer almost exclusively. The university is subscribed to almost everything out there, and I only rarely need something that is not available through the web. It depends on the field you are in, of course; I rarely need something more than 10 years old.
Exactly what is there that you can't do on a non windows box?
Meet the customer's requirement that the server application we build has been tested on MS Windows Server, MS SQL Server, etc. Since we don't have any Windows servers, I am forced to use windows as a development platform.
This is just crime. People often complicate matters needlessly by making a distinction between 'virtual' and real.
Generally speaking, theft (continental European style anyway) involves the unlawful taking of a good with the intention of partially or wholly appropriating it to oneself. A case of course meets the appropriation criterium if the good is given away or sold. In many jurisdictions the concept of 'good' is sufficiently stretched to include a virtual valuable, just like it was once stretched to include electricity and phone calls. Nothing surprising there.
What this is really about is the 'unlawfulness' criterium. Taking a good in a self service shop is for instance not unlawful because custom sanctions it. Only when you walk out you become a thief by breaking an implicit contract. Theft in games is lawful to the extent that it is an established custom in, or even explicit goal of, the type of game. The Japanese police is apparently drawing the line at taking a good from someone with the intent of selling it outside the game. The bot will be taken as evidence of intent.
In my opinion this is a potential landmark case, that may set a precedent for western countries if the court argues its decision well.
The whole fact you're able to mug someone in-game makes this a non-crime.
And what if you are able to walk out of a shop with a computer? If you are able to log into someone's internet bank account?
In many sports you are able to disable other players for life, and you will get prosecuted for that if your actions are excessively reckless, or clearly motivated by malicious intent to disable the player.
You can't use the land-mass vs population arguement in the US because you can't get very high speed internet even in the most populated cities.
The population density argument assumes that the cost of wiring the same distance is the same everywhere, which is nonsense.
Wiring up a pre-19th century town with streets one car wide and narrow sidewalks is going to be orders of magnitude more disruptive economically than wiring up a modern town. It will disrupt traffic, public transport, and create parking problems as opening up one street can close off a whole neighbourhood. Either you work only at night and move your equipment out every day, or your pay reparation for economic damage.
IF you decide to make that investment, as many European utility companies did, you will make sure that you put enough electricity and data cables in the ground to last for decades. Here in Amsterdam we were forced to rewire everything anyway in the 90s because power consumption quadrupled in 5 years due to IT companies in the town centre.
I have been in the US several times, and I am sure even inner cities in the US have ample room to rewire everything without closing off streets to traffic. Even small streets are easily 4 cars wide.
There is no excuse for the US falling behind Europe: less economic disruption, lower costs for manual labour, higher average income of customers, theoretically more competition because it is a bigger uniform market for advertising and support etc.
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This was simply a difference in policy. The belief of the current administration is that things such as this are local government's responsiblity. Agree or disagree, I respect that, but it wasn't maliciousness.
Heaping responsibilities on local government while keeping the same share of the money is malicious. Local administrators are responsible if anything happens but don't actually have the means to do something about it - unless they choose to become responsible for a very significant tax rise. Isn't that practice called 'setting up a Patsy' in English? Apparently it failed because the federal government is blamed anyway.
I do support organizing water control on a local level, like the elected water district councils we have in the Netherlands: it makes sure that there are always accurate disaster control plans tailored to the present situation in the district because the councillors live there, and it helps when mobilizing the population (whether for evacuation or raising temporary levees to minimize damage). Making a change like this requires time and money.
Building structures should obviously be left to the Army Corps of Engineers because of the advantages of economies of scale.
In New Orleans things happened that are unimaginable to me:
- people who should have evacuated didn't and the government didn't coerce them, creating a law enforcement and disaster relief problem;
- the evacuated people without family or friends outside the area were quartered in ridiculous circumstances (again not involving coercion);
- the local population was not used as manpower for controlling levee breaches or raising temporary levees to protect areas not in the direct path of the water;
- the local government basically had no plan whatsoever;
- the federal government did not prepare disaster relief and damage control in the days before the floodings, even though it was obvious that the water control system in Louisiana was not up to the task.
Recommendations:
- disaster is one of those rare cases where you want more coercion in the future - when you evacuate people really evacuate them;
- send the responsible disaster planners over to Bangladesh when disaster strikes there again to test their skills. Mental note: do it a few days before it happens. It is free: you can charge it on the development aid budget.
There were ample resources available in this area, but the state and local officials chose not to seek their assistance until well after the fact.
Ample resources? Even the temporary morgue is a foreign import: it comes from the Netherlands. The political situation may be as you describe, but that still doesn't prevent the federal government from preparing itself for a disaster of that scale. One would expect them, given the 911 attack, to at least be prepared this time to recover and identify lots of dead bodies.
They might be technologically advanced, but they simply don't possess enough warheads for MAD, which is what the GP was talking about.
Europe does have the weapons grade plutonium stockpiles from its nuclear commercial industry, the knowledge, the money, and the industrial base to mass produce warheads. It can change its posture in a year time if it really wants to. This is a bit late to count as a MAD option now, but they are capable of developing one.
For most other existing 'nuclear powers' this is not an option: even obtaining the necessary amounts of plutonium is impossible. A lesser power with some warheads is still a lesser power.
Japan and Canada may also be able to develop a viable MAD capability. Canada actually already has MAD vis a vis the US by the way: the US cannot possibly nuke its own border. It wouldn't really help them since they could easily be defeated by the US in a conventional way, though.
American soldiers were not terrorists. They engaged in guerilla warfare, but they did not kill innocent British civilians. There is a difference.
It is not the best possible analogy, but the point about freedom fighters is valid. The American Revolution happens to be an anemic gentleman's affair: 'British citizens' were far away and it was a bit of a side show of a big naval war between the European continental powers and Britain anyway.
In my home town in the Netherlands we celebrate the day in 1572 we liberated ourselves from Spain, the garrison fled, and a mob hanged all Catholic foreigners in town that spoke unintelligible languages (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese) regardless of whether they were men, women, or children. In WWII our 'resistance heroes' mostly killed native traitors: police officers, civil servants, Nazi 'whores', etc. The Nazis consistently called them terrorists, and justified increasing oppression with it.
In fact, the only wars in which we behaved like perfect gentlemen and didn't resort to any form of 'terrorism' are the ones we started and won without trouble, like the second Anglo-Dutch war. Terrorism is, and has always been, the strategy of the underdog, while the aggressor - who needs a justification - pretends to be a gentleman and claims that God, justice, freedom, democracy, and the tide of history are on his side.
Since most of the world population was not born a citizen of a superpower, it is not very surprising that people tend to put the burden of proof on the superpower and assume that terrorism is somehow defensive in nature unless a convincing case is made to the contrary.
...Pakistan really dodged the bullet on that one, huh? Not only did we tolerate their proliferation and sale of nuclear systems and technical knowledge, but we spared their regime too.
Not only that: the CIA ordered the Netherlands Intelligence Services twice to let Abdul Kadeer Khan walk in the seventies, even though it was completely obvious that he was copying everything there was to know about URENCO classified centrifuge technology (which is the most complex part of the process of making nuclear weapons). This is claimed by the former Netherlands prime minister, and apparently by sources in the Netherlands and US intelligence community. The latest development (in Dutch, unfortunately) is that a judge of the Amsterdam courthouse accuses the CIA of taking the file they compiled on mr. Khan in the eighties.
Is it possible that the CIA wanted the Pakistanis to have nuclear weapons to counterbalance India's newly acquired 1974 nuclear superpower status? Or is it just a decade of monumental incompetence by everyone involved in the CIA.
These events should also make clear, by the way, that the Netherlands (and for instance Germany, likely Japan, etc.) do have and maintain the means - including stockpiles of fission material - to produce nuclear weapons quickly, but defer the actual production of them as a matter of foreign policy doctrine.
Doesn't the disabilities act apply to FEMA?
Accessibility is one approach, but doesn't the US have a competition authority??? The government cannot possibly require you to use a product that is available from only one supplier: it subsidizes a monopolist if it does. Great: yet another reason for the EU to take on Microsoft.
It is an iterative activity. It takes no intelligence to run all possible outcomes and pick the one most likely to succeed. Intelligence is the chess master that evaluates trees of choices and prunes them, guessing what the other person will do (rather than calculating for all possible moves) to reduce the computations necessary. I don't know of any computer programs that prune choices based on being below some threshold of probability based off likely moves. They just throw more itterations into it. It's easier to improve the hardware than programming.
You assumption about what the chess master does, is based on the idea that introspection gives us an accurate idea of how many alternatives we evaluate. There is no reason to expect that it is, given that we know that our stream of consciousness trails behind our actual decision making processes considerably. Consider it a kind of summary being entered into a log.
Makers of competitive chess programs have little reason to prune, because it doesn't make the chess program any better (given that we already use the best evaluation function we can come up with). I can't blame them for their conservatism.
Chess, while originally considered a very intelligent activity, turned out to be easy to program into a computer, requiring even little creativity on the part of the programmer, while for instance tying shoelaces turns out to be difficult. That is not a reason to change our opinions on what is intelligent.
It is a fortunate fact that we are most successful designing computer programs to do things that humans are comparatively bad at. There is no viable market for robots that tie shoelaces, because experts on tying shoelaces are not scarce.
On the other hand, relatively simple information processing and fraud detection applications did take over the jobs of 4 out of 5 employees in the tax administration where I am involved as a consultant. These were educated people, doing "knowledge-intensive" jobs that were taken over by the computer. The computer applications are so disappointingly simple that they don't require a genius to make them, but they do automate an activity requiring intelligence when performed by a human.
I think, given the apparent popularity of black box technologies of limited utility like neural networks in the media, that the audience will only be happy if AI researchers build something they don't understand - a black box - from which a general purpose intelligence suddenly emerges.
This view is based on a total misunderstanding of the purposes of science and engineering. I don't even TRY to invent the magical algorithm; I want to build special purpose problem-solvers that are transparent and self-explanatory, built from scalable building blocks that I understand. "Emergent features" are bugs from an engineering point of view.
complaints about it sound like people whining that there's been no serious research in new light switches.
Bakelite two-way toggle switches are dreadful. I still use the original ones because they look much nicer, but the new ones are certainly better.
Stop calling it "artificial intelligence."
I don't think the problem is with the AI community. Critics should stop calling trivial but hard exercises like tying shoelaces "intelligent". Tying shoelaces is difficult, but not intelligent. Chess is an intelligent activity.
Since computers were first used to play chess (THE original example Descartes gave when he distinguished men from beasts by their analytic intelligence) mankind has been redefining intelligence as simply "hard for a machine to do".
AI is hugely successful. Example: in some countries over 85% of income tax applications are now processed without any human intervention. That is AI in action, and would save many billions if organizations stopped inventing new reasons for employing people.
"In 1718, French colonist Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville ignored his engineers' warnings about the hazards of flooding and mapped a settlement in a pinch of swampland between the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico and a massive lake to the north."
On the positive side the settlement would have been very easy to defend against attacks, as it is surrounded by water on three sides and its position beneath sea level makes it easy to inundate areas - making those areas impassable for artillery, cavalry, and ships. In the 18th century that would have been the more pressing concern; "Fortress Holland" was a success before the invention of planes for the same reasons.
New Orleans was built in one of the best possible locations in America from the perspective of a relatively minor colonial power like France.
One thing I find really weird is that there haven't been any adverts here in the UK asking us to help donate? Does anyone know why??
I know that in the Netherlands the association of disaster relief organizations made a statement that they don't believe the US is short of money, but only of equipment, qualified people, and a plan.
The reason we aren't helping yet is because the US didn't ask for any help and the government doesn't want to insult the US.
The government did offer two teams of diking engineers, but heard nothing from the US. We have a lot of experience controlling dike breaches, and huge amounts of equipment for that purpose. They also sent a disaster relief frigate from the Netherlands Antilles towards the Louisiana coast in order to have a launch platform for assistance ready just in case the US asks for help.
What is the mechanism by which genes fade?
You can't fool me. Gene fading is an established theory supported by reputable sources. It should be taught alongside intelligent design, because people, especially blonde people, should be aware of the mechanism of gene fading and its dangers in our modern society.
My guess would be:
1. Nobody knows how to use it, everybody coming out of school these days is used to using Linux and/or BSD, from this perspective Solaris does a lot of weird things for no reason.
2. Much as Sun's pushing Solaris/x86, if you're using Solaris, you're still pretty much going to be using expensive, locked-in Sun hardware. (Of course that hardware is probably more reliable, but sometimes lower TCO means you get what you pay for).
3. Sun is a competitor to IBM who commissioned the study, maybe the study misrepresents Sun TCO in some way.
Sparcstations are just too reliable. We have machines from 1991 running NIS+ and some other stuff. No manager making a purchase decision is ever going to believe that a server will run for 15 years without a glitch, and he is not going to spread the TCO over 15 years. Nobody in the organization is qualified to touch the machines, and many of the windows system admins who have taken over don't even know they exist.
The windows admins occasionally screw up the network (like when they made the NIS+ servers unreachable by changing the IP numbers of the only two sparcstations allowed to access them), and then we immediately hire an expensive external admin to solve the problem.
Lessons:
- Sun hardware is too reliable: the machines will be technologically obsolete before they fail. Sun can save costs there, because nobody appreciates it anyway unless they are building a spacecraft or nuclear power plant.
- Comparing an x86 machine against a sparcstation based on a lifespan of 5 years is completely unfair. We spend an expensive two weeks configuring a new sparcstation, and then let it run for 15 years. The Windows machines are tinkered with all the time by cheap Windows idiots. The sparcstation gets cheaper as time progresses (if Windows administrators cannot interfere with its operation).
- What about the costs of letting Windows idiots tinker with your infrastructure all the time? THEY are the ones that create the problems for the sparcstations in our organization because they don't know what they are doing.
I mean, who would pay for such a service? Suppose the US did. Then the rest of the world gets a nice clean LEO without contributing a dime, freeloading off of their effort. If you tried to set up some international payment agreement, you'd get all sorts of bickering similar to the Kyoto agreements: why should third world nations pay, why should nations with developing space industries pay the same as behemoths like NASA, etc.
Obviously the countries that caused the space garbage problem should pay the cleaning bill, but that line of reasoning didn't work in Kyoto either. Space was 'clean' 50 years ago.
On the other hand garbage collection is a very good excuse for weaponizing space, so I actually expect to see a garbage collection race develop if one country takes the initiative.
I fail to see why formations of smaller satellites should be a new development. If smaller types could accomplish the mission of bigger ones, the big ones wouldn't be up there (carrying large antennae, big lenses or whatever).
At the bottom of the article this article is linked, about ESA's SSETI Express, launching 1kg CubeSat picosatellites developed by European universities.
The idea of using smaller and lighter satellites is hardly revolutionary, and resources are quite tight as it is: 71*60*60 cm max. form factor for Ariane 5 launches, peak power of maybe 50W - a modest car pc - if you don't want to add heavy batteries. Fitting multiple micro, nano, or picosatellites in a single cargo hold is the obvious way to decrease costs.
What is the difference between "foreign policy for internal consumption only" and "propaganda"?
There is none. Most "foreign policy" in the media is just stageplay for the folks at home.
First, if you can back it up (with, for example, the most effective and well-trained military in the world not to mention the world's largest nuclear arsenal), then is it really "empty" posturing?
It is not diplomacy anymore. It is scripted stageplay. Threats through the media are legitimizing only: the offending country can't actually meet any demands, and is not supposed to react to it.
Second, doesn't posturing, empty or not, have more to do with the ability to destroy anyone you please than it does with any perceived feeling of invulnerability? Third, how does the USA "feel" invulnerable, or "feel" anything for that matter?
The USA can defend itself to any military force at home and retaliate with nukes. It is not necessarily capable of achieving its foreign policy objectives, certainly not without its allies.
Being capable of winning any battle does not mean you get any closer to achieving objectives, unless merely "waving your dicks around" is the objective.
Not being capable of winning any battle against your rivals does not mean you can't achieve military objectives. An example: I am from the Netherlands; In the 19th century we were conquering the whole of Indonesia - at that time one of the only known sources of oil - while Great Britain, Japan, and the US were eyeing eachother suspiciously and all believed the others had secret military pacts with the Netherlands. All three were stronger than we were, but we ended up with the great prize. The stalemate situation was stable until the winter of 1941, when the US started an oil boycott against Japan and the Netherlands immediately copied it -leaving the Japanese fighting China without oil- to provoke a Japanese attack on the Americans to clear the way for an attack on the Netherlands Indies. This was in our national interests, since obliging the Americans to us and drawing them into WWII was the prime objective of the government in exile by that time. The lost battles were propaganda events: we always knew we couldn't win, but the drama worked towards regaining our independence.
The 80 year war (1568-1648) is another case: we won only one major battle out of dozens, but we did bankrupt the Spanish Empire eventually. 1830 is the other way around: we won all battles, but lost Belgium anyway.
Confusing glorious victories with achieving foreign policy objectives is a luxury that only superpowers can afford.
Much like how the Stalin cooperated with Hitler to divide Poland?
Stalin didn't think about his objectives well, but on the other hand he didn't really have a choice. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt also cooperated, you know, to defeat Hitler.
Doesn't the nature of compromise involve giving up on some of your goals in order to find agreement?
Yes. It also involves finding the right allies, and selling your goals as their goals. If you think compromise is something bad: for us in the Netherlands compromise is a defining national trait and therefore a doubleplusgood concept.
Just get it into the harbor of NYC or LA or Houston or ...
You are right, of course. Most targets are on the coast. Only Crawford, Texas is too far from the coast, isn't it?
If the USA stopped "threatening/bullying", as you imply it should do, then it would be the only country on the planet that does NOT "threaten" or "bully". What one person may call "threatening" or "bullying" is what another person would simply call "looking out for one's interests" -- which is the very essence of diplomacy.
Most countries only very rarely openly threaten or bully. There is little point in making disinterested bystanders into enemies by engaging in oafish behavior. If you threaten, do it discreetly or indirectly. You don't want to be perceived as the aggressor. Goodwill should be treasured: it is not easy to get it back.
Foreign policy sometimes involves some empty posturing, but that is usually for internal consumption (in which case it is not diplomacy). Countries that feel invulnerable, like the US, tend to engage more in empty posturing than small and vulnerable countries.
Small countries usually keep a low profile, and try to achieve foreign policy goals by manipulating larger countries' policies towards eachother (e.g. riding a double anchor, preserving a balance of power), developing joint policies with countries that share some interests, and (if wealthy) generally being generous with development aid to gain some karma and to be able to threaten to withhold it. Supporting a large country like the US on something that is unimportant to you in return for some other, valuable concession is also a favorite tactic.
Every nation is competing and standing up for their own interests, regardless of the spin that we want to put on it and pretend that everyone is "cooperating".
Cooperation is a great way achieving shared foreign policy goals. It's also much cheaper than conflict. In my dictionary cooperation does not involve any self-sacrifice.
...but he in NO WAY invented making fun of the French.
He IS the first to make it the leading principle of French-American diplomacy.
My guess is that the only thing stopping them now is the availability of nukes or the logistics of getting them into the US. I doubt the will to use them is a problem right now.
If you don't have nukes, then your "will to use them" is irrelevant. If you only have a few nukes, you'd generally want to save your ammo.
It is not hard to get stuff shipped into the US in a container. Many people can arrange that, including preclearance. Fortunately, most terrorists are literally idiots and have few supporters in important places.
When nutcases get bombs and a clear path to their target, they blow things up. For the most part terrorism is as simple as this. Sure, foreign policy probably does tend to exhasperate the situation a little, and it may also influence whether terrorist groups get sponsored by national governments.
The world is full of idiots and it is just becoming harder to limit there actions...
Sure the world is full of idiots, but the idiots only get a nuke if many people want to them to have a nuke. If you see a puppet in the limelight, look for the puppet master.
We won, fair and square, almost 250 years ago
| I wouldn't say it was entirely fair. Your unexpected stategy of cowering behind the French left us helpless with laughter.
A word of warning: don't expect any help from France, the Netherlands, and Spain this time. The US would be on its own now if it takes on the British Empire, and footing the bill itself.
Unless you're in some very, very new field, it is hubris to assume that nothing older than 10 years is relevant.
Once you are at a higher level of studies such as Masters or PhD, you will find that you are primarily reading research journals. Most fields have 'seminal' papers that establish the current paradigms. Subsequent papers build on those. Most of these for most fields were written before 1995. Most of them are not on-line in full text.
To a certain extent the internet has spawned laziness in referencing, as many students simply only reference articles that they can pull up on-line. If it involves a trip to the stacks, forget it. They'll just assume that issue or reference has been settled and not bother to check or read the original reference underlying most articles. It is as if everything before the internet doesn't exist in their world of research.
I am in a field that doesn't predate the use of computers, and I am a senior researcher. I do use pre-1995 academic sources occasionally, but I normally just email the author (or colleagues with a bigger electronic collection) and ask for the ps file and the bib record. I know most people in my field personally; Notable exceptions are two celebrities in our field that are deceased. In very rare cases I just buy the book on Internet.
As far as I am concerned, in my field libraries are for younger people who don't have a personal collection of papers relevant to their line of research yet. At some point this collection becomes almost static, and you will be only interested in the newest issue of relevant journals. This will also happen in other fields, except that the historical corpus is bigger.
I do refer to legal sources quite regularly, sometimes from the 19th and early 20th century, but they are usually available on-line in full text.
I am a university researcher, and I do use Google Scholar and Citeseer almost exclusively. The university is subscribed to almost everything out there, and I only rarely need something that is not available through the web. It depends on the field you are in, of course; I rarely need something more than 10 years old.
Exactly what is there that you can't do on a non windows box?
Meet the customer's requirement that the server application we build has been tested on MS Windows Server, MS SQL Server, etc. Since we don't have any Windows servers, I am forced to use windows as a development platform.
This is just crime. People often complicate matters needlessly by making a distinction between 'virtual' and real.
Generally speaking, theft (continental European style anyway) involves the unlawful taking of a good with the intention of partially or wholly appropriating it to oneself. A case of course meets the appropriation criterium if the good is given away or sold. In many jurisdictions the concept of 'good' is sufficiently stretched to include a virtual valuable, just like it was once stretched to include electricity and phone calls. Nothing surprising there.
What this is really about is the 'unlawfulness' criterium. Taking a good in a self service shop is for instance not unlawful because custom sanctions it. Only when you walk out you become a thief by breaking an implicit contract. Theft in games is lawful to the extent that it is an established custom in, or even explicit goal of, the type of game. The Japanese police is apparently drawing the line at taking a good from someone with the intent of selling it outside the game. The bot will be taken as evidence of intent.
In my opinion this is a potential landmark case, that may set a precedent for western countries if the court argues its decision well.
The whole fact you're able to mug someone in-game makes this a non-crime.
And what if you are able to walk out of a shop with a computer? If you are able to log into someone's internet bank account?
In many sports you are able to disable other players for life, and you will get prosecuted for that if your actions are excessively reckless, or clearly motivated by malicious intent to disable the player.
You can't use the land-mass vs population arguement in the US because you can't get very high speed internet even in the most populated cities.
The population density argument assumes that the cost of wiring the same distance is the same everywhere, which is nonsense.
Wiring up a pre-19th century town with streets one car wide and narrow sidewalks is going to be orders of magnitude more disruptive economically than wiring up a modern town. It will disrupt traffic, public transport, and create parking problems as opening up one street can close off a whole neighbourhood. Either you work only at night and move your equipment out every day, or your pay reparation for economic damage.
IF you decide to make that investment, as many European utility companies did, you will make sure that you put enough electricity and data cables in the ground to last for decades. Here in Amsterdam we were forced to rewire everything anyway in the 90s because power consumption quadrupled in 5 years due to IT companies in the town centre.
I have been in the US several times, and I am sure even inner cities in the US have ample room to rewire everything without closing off streets to traffic. Even small streets are easily 4 cars wide.
There is no excuse for the US falling behind Europe: less economic disruption, lower costs for manual labour, higher average income of customers, theoretically more competition because it is a bigger uniform market for advertising and support etc.