It's easy to script something that submits spam through their web interface; access through WebDAV shouldn't make much of a difference. And I would hardly call that a "vulnerability".
Let's call a spade a spade: companies like Microsoft should be liable for negligence when they sell buggy software for lots of money, at least for the amount of money the user paid for the software. Now, instead, not only do they want to be able to release buggy software with impunity, they also want to get free testing and bug fixes from users, and all that without the embarrassment and risk of having their bugs revealed.
OK, but we're talking publicly available documents here. We don't care what each user has in their "My Documents" directory. It's trivial to add an (automatic) task to workflow that converts.doc to.pdf as part of the publishing process.
No, we are talking about format lock-in whereever it occurs. But even if were were just talking about publicly available documents, what makes you think that such documents are for publishing only? Most Word documents that I get are documents that require me to modify them and then return them, submit them, or forward them to someone else. The only format Microsoft offers that does that with MS Office is their proprietary DOC format. Users just don't have a choice.
The creator of the information chose not to use the available tools, yet you blame the creator of the tools, not the user of the tools.
None of those "alternative" formats are fully round-trip, so they are useless for the kind of use organization usually make of MS Office documents. Even if those formats were round trip, trying to get a large organization to use them consistently is like herding kittens: every MS Office installation and every external user just reverts to using the proprietary format. And the reason for that is because of the choices Microsoft made when designing their products.
This leads me to suspect that you simply want to bash Microsoft, and don't really care about or understand the underlying issue at all.
No, I just live in the real world and have actually dealt with these issues with real users. You, however, are making the Microsoft equivalent of the statement "let them eat cake".
So, I do unabashedly bash Microsoft, for the kind of software they produce and the kinds of evil games they play with their users.
Great! With that, I can convert from one version of MS Office to another, or I can view the documents on Windows. How does that address any of the issues I have raised?
Many European nations have larger immigrant populations than the US as a fraction of their populations, so their policies can't be all that "rabidly anti-immigrant".
Also, I have first hand experience with immigration policies in both the US and Europe. US immigration was degrading, threatening, and unpredictable. The US has quotas and (what amounts to) racial restrictions. If it weren't for US politicians who are keeping the borders open for skilled immigrants and laborers because they know they would be destroying their local economies, popular attitudes in the US are strongly anti-immigration.
America's diversity.
I don't see much diversity in the US, only a lot of bickering about skin color and "heritage" by people who speak the same language, drive the same SUVs, watch the same TV shows, and eat at the same fast food restaurants.
Europe's declining population.
And why is that a problem? China and India are trying to achieve that goal. The idea that high fertility is the solution to economic and social woes is some 19th century myth. Sooner or later, every nation has to stop growing.
Radicilization of minorities in Europe.
Even with all that supposed radicalization, violent crime, and terrorism generally seem less of a problem in Europe than in the US.
Really? I have a degree in World History (focusing on German History and WWII history in particular).
Well, it sounds to me like you didn't get your money's worth.
In any case, you are missing the real point. If a nation of 300 million people unilaterally makes political decisions for the remaining 6 billion people, that is undemocratic and violates the principles that the US supposedly stands for; if Americans enjoy unparalleld freedoms domestically, as you keep arguing, that only is adding insult to injury.
A bunch of in-house X11 apps is the most important use.
Also, Tcl/Tk/expectk, xscribble, Gtk#, lablgtk, Squeak, xloadimage, and others. You know, all the stuff that runs on my desktop and for which a 200MHz 64M machine is plenty fast.
It is possible to install X11 on all current Zauruses (including your SL-5500).
Yes, but it doesn't integrate with the existing desktop. The X11-based version of OpenZaurus may help, but that involves a ROM upgrade and you lose SD card access.
For their own good, I hope Sharp will switch to an X11-based handheld; all the existing Qt applications should continue to run.
Think about what a gold mine in terms of IP value a hash table would have been if it invented at a commercial organization instead of in academia.
No, it wouldn't have been, because it was invented so long ago that the market was tiny at the time. That's, in fact, true for most computer-related inventions.
Algorithms (not to mention software in the US) are certainly patentable -- and efficient data storage mechanisms are too.
There is no contradiction between a requirement for open data formats and patents. If there are patents on the data format, then the law could require "RAND" licensing terms, but that's still better than the closed, undocumented formats we have right now.
In terms of hardware, I'd much rather see the "B" series coming to the US: they are actually PDA-sized machines.
In terms of software, I think these machines have their own set of problems. As a PDA, I think the Zaurus lags behind Palm and even PPC. And the lack of X11 support by the default window system means that most Linux GUI applications require a complete rewrite of their UI, rather than just a simple port.
I have a Zaurus 5500, but I'm probably going to be replacing it with a Yopy.
I don't like MS Office either, and I resent having to pay for it to access information (often public information), when, in my view, it has no other merit and I don't use it for anything else.
So, we may each like or not like MS Office or OpenOffice, but the principle is that simple, textual public information should not require the purchase of a package that costs several hundred dollars in licensing fees.
And if the formats are forced to be open, maybe we will get a lot more applications that can read and write MS Office file formats, applications that we actually like.
I said "relational filesystem." As in, finding documents that are related to some other entity. I enjoy messing around in the Gimp. Sometimes I do work related images, other times it's just for fun. I'd like to put every image under $HOME/gimpwork. However, I like to find out which ones are for work and which job, for fun, etc.
Perhaps you should just familiarize yourself a bit more with UNIX command line utilities; the ease and power with which skilled UNIX users can find and organize things is one of the major selling points of UNIX.
If you want to find all the tex files containing the word "business" and having been modified recently, use:
$ find ~ -mtime -2 | xargs fgrep -il business
If you have a command line program "similar-to" that outputs a numerical similarity score to a given target file, you can do something like the following to get all the files under your home dirctory that are similar to ~/target.tex, sorted by similarity
Organizing data is hard, but chances are that whatever you want to do is already pretty easy with existing tools in UNIX/Linux; otherwise, people would have already added tools for addressing the problem long ago.
The US has clearly been very important globally in terms of technology, politics, and the advancement of freedom and liberty in the world. Overall, the US is generally a nice, well-behaved country. But you make it sound like the US did everything single-handedly and that's just not true. And I don't even want to get into all the areas where the positive US self-image corresponds to a rather negative historical reality.
You also make the assumption that the first 200 years of the US are predictive of the future. There is no reason to believe that that's the case. Compared to most other nations, the US had it really easy over the first 200 years of its existence: it had vast natural resources, relative isolation both from other nations and of states within the nation, huge waves of skilled and motivated immigrants, etc. All that has been gradually changing over the last half century.
Overall, thank you for illustrating my point so clearly: your posting is probably quite representative of the self-image of the US public, and it is just stunning in both its arrogance and its ignorance of world history.
Oops, make that "ill-behaved applications still force a reset of the entire handheld, even under PalmOS 5"; the problem hasn't gone away even in the latest minor releases.
Lots of functionality has no standard APIs. Handeras and Sonys were using different hires APIs from Palm, keyboard handling is different on all of them, sound and audio is different among all of them. In contrast, on a real operating system, there are well-defined drivers and interfaces for things like keyboards, audio I/O, and screens.
It doesn't give you a 32bit flat address space. As a consequence, for example, applications like Mapopolis have more functionality on PocketPC than on equally powerful Palms, and image and PDF viewers have a really hard time dealing with large images. Also, just porting software to the Palm is hard and expensive--there is actually a lot more of that "high end" software for Linux than for Palm.
It's unreliable: ill-behaved applications still force a reset of the entire handheld, even under PalmOS 5.0.
There is no package management and no directory structure: Palms accumulate huge amounts of stuff in their memory and it's hard to clean it up.
I think PalmOS is roughly comparable to MS DOS 2.0. There were lots of great applications for DOS as well, but it wasn't much of an OS.
A file system with the power and flexibility of a relational database ceases to be a file system. What are things like "cp" supposed to mean? How do you transfer "a row" through a serial connection? What kind of transactional guarantees is it going to make; if it's going to make DBMS guarantees, it's too slow for many file system applications, and if it's not going to do that, is it really a DBMS?
If you want a database, just use a database. MySQL and various embedded databases are widely available on Linux now; no need to clutter up the kernel.
Good news! You're getting one, the successor to Windows XP will sport WinFS
Yes, that is great news--the attempt will break so many things that it will seriously hurt Microsoft.
Anyways, in a few decades someone will write a free-as-in-no-money version for lunix. So hold tight.
DBMS-based file systems have been around for decades; there are good reasons why people aren't using them.
Linux has several file systems using database technologies (as well as change notification). However, what Linux doesn't have is a file system that lets you perform arbitrary relational operations. That's because such a "file system" would simply not conform to the interface and semantics expected of a file system, and lots of things would break.
But, of course, if you are Microsoft, you don't have to worry about standards, you just merrily break things and redefine APIs whenever you please.
All PDAs have very serious software problems of one form or another. With Palm, it's the OS, with PocketPC, it's the UI, and with Linux PDAs, it's the desktop integration.
If you want just a PDA, your best bet is to get a $99 Palm Zire or the Sony SJ-22 or SJ-33; they are fairly cheap, so you won't feel too bad getting a new one in a year.
If you want to do custom programming for a handheld, consider a Linux PDA--Linux hardware may come and go, but you can be pretty certain that there will be Linux PDAs in the future and they will run, well, Linux.
America's dominance is not a passing phase that started with WWII and ended on 9/11
The beginning of the decline probably was some time in the 1980's when the US started going into debt more and more (see here). Ultimately, the whole idea of "America" itself becomes fuzzy, when a significant fraction of its assets are foreign-owned.
I think 9/11 is mostly irrelevant to the long term position of the US in the world. If anything, it has harmed US power because of Bush's foreign policy blunders.
and an apples-to-apples comparison would measure the EU against NAFTA
No. NAFTA is primarily a trade arrangement, while the EU is much closer to a federation (free movement of people, harmonized laws, etc.).
it's a phenomenon that will last as long as America lasts,
Well, you reiterate common attitudes among Americans; the question is: are there any rational reasons to believe this?
or until other nations become so much like America that one can't tell them apart.
That's impossible: there simply isn't enough foreign investment (or oil, for that matter) to run other large nations like the US.
In any case, the issue is not whether Europe or the US is "better" or a little bigger. The issue is whether the US is clearly predominant or whether it is just one of many centers of power in the world. I think the world will actually consist of half a dozen or so roughly equally powerful blocks or regions, one of which is the US. The question is whether Americans will accept that fact willingly.
You say the US is a mid-sized nation. Isn't it #3 in both population and size?
I didn't put that very well. In terms of nation states, I believe the US is fourth in terms of area (with Australia and Brazil close behind) and third in terms of population.
But while the US is a nation and wants to act autonomously, other nations increasingly act as groups: Europe, the Arab nations, OPEC, sub-Saharan Africa, China, Japan, and Latin America. Among those half-dozen or so entities, the US is a fairly mid-size entity.
Also, is it not true the population of Europe is stagnant, or even declining? Won't that require a change in social spending?
Yes, but what is your point? Older populations also entail many savings (lower crime rates, lower educational expenses, better productivity), and the major issue, a mismatch between life expectancy and retirement age, can be addressed fairly easily. I don't view that as a serious problem. Also, the impact is reduced by European expansion. And, finally, Europeans don't have unrealistic expectations: Europe doesn't expect to lead the world.
At issue to me is the mismatch between the apparent American sense of indefinite entitlement to world leadership on the one hand, and the shaky foundations of its economy and moderate size on the other hand.
In a truly reusable system, the only costs would be fuel and maintenance. It would be more like an aircraft than a car in terms of maintenance, but it would still be significantly cheaper.
If you are talking about a reusable shuttle-like vehicle, then it's not clear that even if it were fully reusable, it would be cheaper: you need a lot of mass coming down to give astronauts an airplane-like landing, and that means that you get much less cargo capacity and that you need a lot more fuel to get the thing up and down again. The increased fuel costs per trip combined with the costs arising from having to do many more launches may well make a shuttle-like system more costly than something using expendable components even if the shuttle were fully reusable.
Of course, you might make all the components of a capsule-like system reusable as well, but then the discussion is kind of moot. The important distinction isn't between reusable/non-reusable, it's between shuttle and capsule.
We need reusable launch vehicles because that what they use in science fiction movies and because they let the government funnel huge amounts of R&D money to ailing aerospace companies.
If it were just a question of efficient space travel, expendable rockets and Soyuz/Apollo-style return vehicles would be much cheaper, and probabl a lot safer as well.
Not intending to troll but that "conflict" thing does seem like an odd conclusion. Are Europeans now terrorists?
I think the problem is that Americans like to think of themselves as the most powerful nation on earth and have gotten used to being first in everything. But, objectively, the US is a mid-size nation with an economy that is in deep trouble ($3 trillion in foreign debt and growing rapidly), that depends on skilled immigration for its competitiveness, and that faces enormous inequalities and social problems. The preeminent role of the US was an artifact of the aftermath of WWII. Now that Europe is pretty close to a federation and that China and India have caught up technologically, America becomes merely one among several large players, and not the biggest or most important one.
The only area where the US is clearly first is in military spending. But that really worries foreign nations. What is the US going to do when (and it's "when", not "if") foreign investments slow down, the dollar crumbles, skilled workers stay away, and the economy falters? Is it going to dismantle its military and quietly accept being a second-rate player on the world stage? Or is the US going to try to get by force what it won't be able to get by other means? Using the US military for economic reasons has happened before.
It is completely natural for European and Asian space programs, which represent larger populations and economies, to surpass the US programs. This is only the beginning of many changes. The question is whether Americans can get used to it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy to script something that submits spam through their web interface; access through WebDAV shouldn't make much of a difference. And I would hardly call that a "vulnerability".
So, in addition to MP3 players, FM radios, digital cameras, and voice recorders, phones will now also have lighters?
Let's call a spade a spade: companies like Microsoft should be liable for negligence when they sell buggy software for lots of money, at least for the amount of money the user paid for the software. Now, instead, not only do they want to be able to release buggy software with impunity, they also want to get free testing and bug fixes from users, and all that without the embarrassment and risk of having their bugs revealed.
OK, but we're talking publicly available documents here. We don't care what each user has in their "My Documents" directory. It's trivial to add an (automatic) task to workflow that converts .doc to .pdf as part of the publishing process.
No, we are talking about format lock-in whereever it occurs. But even if were were just talking about publicly available documents, what makes you think that such documents are for publishing only? Most Word documents that I get are documents that require me to modify them and then return them, submit them, or forward them to someone else. The only format Microsoft offers that does that with MS Office is their proprietary DOC format. Users just don't have a choice.
The creator of the information chose not to use the available tools, yet you blame the creator of the tools, not the user of the tools.
None of those "alternative" formats are fully round-trip, so they are useless for the kind of use organization usually make of MS Office documents. Even if those formats were round trip, trying to get a large organization to use them consistently is like herding kittens: every MS Office installation and every external user just reverts to using the proprietary format. And the reason for that is because of the choices Microsoft made when designing their products.
This leads me to suspect that you simply want to bash Microsoft, and don't really care about or understand the underlying issue at all.
No, I just live in the real world and have actually dealt with these issues with real users. You, however, are making the Microsoft equivalent of the statement "let them eat cake".
So, I do unabashedly bash Microsoft, for the kind of software they produce and the kinds of evil games they play with their users.
Great! With that, I can convert from one version of MS Office to another, or I can view the documents on Windows. How does that address any of the issues I have raised?
Europe's rabid anti-immigration policies.
Many European nations have larger immigrant populations than the US as a fraction of their populations, so their policies can't be all that "rabidly anti-immigrant".
Also, I have first hand experience with immigration policies in both the US and Europe. US immigration was degrading, threatening, and unpredictable. The US has quotas and (what amounts to) racial restrictions. If it weren't for US politicians who are keeping the borders open for skilled immigrants and laborers because they know they would be destroying their local economies, popular attitudes in the US are strongly anti-immigration.
America's diversity.
I don't see much diversity in the US, only a lot of bickering about skin color and "heritage" by people who speak the same language, drive the same SUVs, watch the same TV shows, and eat at the same fast food restaurants.
Europe's declining population.
And why is that a problem? China and India are trying to achieve that goal. The idea that high fertility is the solution to economic and social woes is some 19th century myth. Sooner or later, every nation has to stop growing.
Radicilization of minorities in Europe.
Even with all that supposed radicalization, violent crime, and terrorism generally seem less of a problem in Europe than in the US.
Really? I have a degree in World History (focusing on German History and WWII history in particular).
Well, it sounds to me like you didn't get your money's worth.
In any case, you are missing the real point. If a nation of 300 million people unilaterally makes political decisions for the remaining 6 billion people, that is undemocratic and violates the principles that the US supposedly stands for; if Americans enjoy unparalleld freedoms domestically, as you keep arguing, that only is adding insult to injury.
zssh? Why do people write complicated C programs for things that a small expect script would do just as well?
Anyway, what X11 app do you want on the Zaurus?
A bunch of in-house X11 apps is the most important use.
Also, Tcl/Tk/expectk, xscribble, Gtk#, lablgtk, Squeak, xloadimage, and others. You know, all the stuff that runs on my desktop and for which a 200MHz 64M machine is plenty fast.
It is possible to install X11 on all current Zauruses (including your SL-5500).
Yes, but it doesn't integrate with the existing desktop. The X11-based version of OpenZaurus may help, but that involves a ROM upgrade and you lose SD card access.
For their own good, I hope Sharp will switch to an X11-based handheld; all the existing Qt applications should continue to run.
Think about what a gold mine in terms of IP value a hash table would have been if it invented at a commercial organization instead of in academia.
No, it wouldn't have been, because it was invented so long ago that the market was tiny at the time. That's, in fact, true for most computer-related inventions.
Algorithms (not to mention software in the US) are certainly patentable -- and efficient data storage mechanisms are too.
There is no contradiction between a requirement for open data formats and patents. If there are patents on the data format, then the law could require "RAND" licensing terms, but that's still better than the closed, undocumented formats we have right now.
In terms of hardware, I'd much rather see the "B" series coming to the US: they are actually PDA-sized machines.
In terms of software, I think these machines have their own set of problems. As a PDA, I think the Zaurus lags behind Palm and even PPC. And the lack of X11 support by the default window system means that most Linux GUI applications require a complete rewrite of their UI, rather than just a simple port.
I have a Zaurus 5500, but I'm probably going to be replacing it with a Yopy.
I don't like MS Office either, and I resent having to pay for it to access information (often public information), when, in my view, it has no other merit and I don't use it for anything else.
So, we may each like or not like MS Office or OpenOffice, but the principle is that simple, textual public information should not require the purchase of a package that costs several hundred dollars in licensing fees.
And if the formats are forced to be open, maybe we will get a lot more applications that can read and write MS Office file formats, applications that we actually like.
If you want to find all the tex files containing the word "business" and having been modified recently, use:
Perhaps you should just familiarize yourself a bit more with UNIX command line utilities; the ease and power with which skilled UNIX users can find and organize things is one of the major selling points of UNIX.
If you want to find all the tex files containing the word "business" and having been modified recently, use:If you have a command line program "similar-to" that outputs a numerical similarity score to a given target file, you can do something like the following to get all the files under your home dirctory that are similar to ~/target.tex, sorted by similarityIf you want to set up some tagging system, try using symlinks or hard links:Organizing data is hard, but chances are that whatever you want to do is already pretty easy with existing tools in UNIX/Linux; otherwise, people would have already added tools for addressing the problem long ago.
The US has clearly been very important globally in terms of technology, politics, and the advancement of freedom and liberty in the world. Overall, the US is generally a nice, well-behaved country. But you make it sound like the US did everything single-handedly and that's just not true. And I don't even want to get into all the areas where the positive US self-image corresponds to a rather negative historical reality.
You also make the assumption that the first 200 years of the US are predictive of the future. There is no reason to believe that that's the case. Compared to most other nations, the US had it really easy over the first 200 years of its existence: it had vast natural resources, relative isolation both from other nations and of states within the nation, huge waves of skilled and motivated immigrants, etc. All that has been gradually changing over the last half century.
Overall, thank you for illustrating my point so clearly: your posting is probably quite representative of the self-image of the US public, and it is just stunning in both its arrogance and its ignorance of world history.
Oops, make that "ill-behaved applications still force a reset of the entire handheld, even under PalmOS 5"; the problem hasn't gone away even in the latest minor releases.
Several really major problems:
I think PalmOS is roughly comparable to MS DOS 2.0. There were lots of great applications for DOS as well, but it wasn't much of an OS.
A file system with the power and flexibility of a relational database ceases to be a file system. What are things like "cp" supposed to mean? How do you transfer "a row" through a serial connection? What kind of transactional guarantees is it going to make; if it's going to make DBMS guarantees, it's too slow for many file system applications, and if it's not going to do that, is it really a DBMS?
If you want a database, just use a database. MySQL and various embedded databases are widely available on Linux now; no need to clutter up the kernel.
Good news! You're getting one, the successor to Windows XP will sport WinFS
Yes, that is great news--the attempt will break so many things that it will seriously hurt Microsoft.
Anyways, in a few decades someone will write a free-as-in-no-money version for lunix. So hold tight.
DBMS-based file systems have been around for decades; there are good reasons why people aren't using them.
Linux has several file systems using database technologies (as well as change notification). However, what Linux doesn't have is a file system that lets you perform arbitrary relational operations. That's because such a "file system" would simply not conform to the interface and semantics expected of a file system, and lots of things would break.
But, of course, if you are Microsoft, you don't have to worry about standards, you just merrily break things and redefine APIs whenever you please.
All PDAs have very serious software problems of one form or another. With Palm, it's the OS, with PocketPC, it's the UI, and with Linux PDAs, it's the desktop integration.
If you want just a PDA, your best bet is to get a $99 Palm Zire or the Sony SJ-22 or SJ-33; they are fairly cheap, so you won't feel too bad getting a new one in a year.
If you want to do custom programming for a handheld, consider a Linux PDA--Linux hardware may come and go, but you can be pretty certain that there will be Linux PDAs in the future and they will run, well, Linux.
America's dominance is not a passing phase that started with WWII and ended on 9/11
The beginning of the decline probably was some time in the 1980's when the US started going into debt more and more (see here). Ultimately, the whole idea of "America" itself becomes fuzzy, when a significant fraction of its assets are foreign-owned.
I think 9/11 is mostly irrelevant to the long term position of the US in the world. If anything, it has harmed US power because of Bush's foreign policy blunders.
and an apples-to-apples comparison would measure the EU against NAFTA
No. NAFTA is primarily a trade arrangement, while the EU is much closer to a federation (free movement of people, harmonized laws, etc.).
it's a phenomenon that will last as long as America lasts,
Well, you reiterate common attitudes among Americans; the question is: are there any rational reasons to believe this?
or until other nations become so much like America that one can't tell them apart.
That's impossible: there simply isn't enough foreign investment (or oil, for that matter) to run other large nations like the US.
In any case, the issue is not whether Europe or the US is "better" or a little bigger. The issue is whether the US is clearly predominant or whether it is just one of many centers of power in the world. I think the world will actually consist of half a dozen or so roughly equally powerful blocks or regions, one of which is the US. The question is whether Americans will accept that fact willingly.
You say the US is a mid-sized nation. Isn't it #3 in both population and size?
I didn't put that very well. In terms of nation states, I believe the US is fourth in terms of area (with Australia and Brazil close behind) and third in terms of population.
But while the US is a nation and wants to act autonomously, other nations increasingly act as groups: Europe, the Arab nations, OPEC, sub-Saharan Africa, China, Japan, and Latin America. Among those half-dozen or so entities, the US is a fairly mid-size entity.
Also, is it not true the population of Europe is stagnant, or even declining? Won't that require a change in social spending?
Yes, but what is your point? Older populations also entail many savings (lower crime rates, lower educational expenses, better productivity), and the major issue, a mismatch between life expectancy and retirement age, can be addressed fairly easily. I don't view that as a serious problem. Also, the impact is reduced by European expansion. And, finally, Europeans don't have unrealistic expectations: Europe doesn't expect to lead the world.
At issue to me is the mismatch between the apparent American sense of indefinite entitlement to world leadership on the one hand, and the shaky foundations of its economy and moderate size on the other hand.
In a truly reusable system, the only costs would be fuel and maintenance. It would be more like an aircraft than a car in terms of maintenance, but it would still be significantly cheaper.
If you are talking about a reusable shuttle-like vehicle, then it's not clear that even if it were fully reusable, it would be cheaper: you need a lot of mass coming down to give astronauts an airplane-like landing, and that means that you get much less cargo capacity and that you need a lot more fuel to get the thing up and down again. The increased fuel costs per trip combined with the costs arising from having to do many more launches may well make a shuttle-like system more costly than something using expendable components even if the shuttle were fully reusable.
Of course, you might make all the components of a capsule-like system reusable as well, but then the discussion is kind of moot. The important distinction isn't between reusable/non-reusable, it's between shuttle and capsule.
We need reusable launch vehicles because that what they use in science fiction movies and because they let the government funnel huge amounts of R&D money to ailing aerospace companies.
If it were just a question of efficient space travel, expendable rockets and Soyuz/Apollo-style return vehicles would be much cheaper, and probabl a lot safer as well.
Not intending to troll but that "conflict" thing does seem like an odd conclusion. Are Europeans now terrorists?
I think the problem is that Americans like to think of themselves as the most powerful nation on earth and have gotten used to being first in everything. But, objectively, the US is a mid-size nation with an economy that is in deep trouble ($3 trillion in foreign debt and growing rapidly), that depends on skilled immigration for its competitiveness, and that faces enormous inequalities and social problems. The preeminent role of the US was an artifact of the aftermath of WWII. Now that Europe is pretty close to a federation and that China and India have caught up technologically, America becomes merely one among several large players, and not the biggest or most important one.
The only area where the US is clearly first is in military spending. But that really worries foreign nations. What is the US going to do when (and it's "when", not "if") foreign investments slow down, the dollar crumbles, skilled workers stay away, and the economy falters? Is it going to dismantle its military and quietly accept being a second-rate player on the world stage? Or is the US going to try to get by force what it won't be able to get by other means? Using the US military for economic reasons has happened before.
It is completely natural for European and Asian space programs, which represent larger populations and economies, to surpass the US programs. This is only the beginning of many changes. The question is whether Americans can get used to it.