Well, at that point, in 2006 in Iraq, the enemy was a combination of various groups trying to bring down the Iraqi government and to expel the US by force. These include the Mahdi Army, the remnants of the Ba'athists, a variety of al Qaeda-linked or -inspired groups, and a few Iranian and Syrian front groups (as well as, to a much lesser extent, some Kurdish groups).
In the larger sense, the failure to define the enemy has been one of the salient features of both Bush and Obama as they have approached a war we're almost nine years into. I think that the fear is that the enemy is "all Muslims," and that is why everyone is so skittish about defining the enemy. I don't think bin Laden is right, though; I don't think that we are necessarily in a civilizational struggle along the lines of Rome vs. the barbarians or the American Indians vs. the Europeans.
I suppose the real debate is whether we are at war with only the jihadis (who want to restore the Caliphate by force) or with the Islamists as well (who want to restore the Caliphate, not necessarily by force). I would argue that we're in a war with the jihadists, and in an ideological struggle (comparable to the Cold War) with the Islamists.
But it's not my job, but Congress', to define the enemy, and I fear the consequences of their unwillingness to do so, and the willingness of two Presidents to allow that to continue.
From that description (I haven't seen the keynote or APIs yet), it sounds like Apple is using a publish/subscribe notifications feature to talk to system services for these seven tasks. That's actually both clever and useful, in that it allows the user to know that the backgrounded services are efficient (since Apple wrote them and are, pardon the pun, demons about performance on the phone) while still allowing the developer to easily use the most-requested services. And it would be trivial to extend with other services as they're seen to be needed.
It's not that we hate multitasking. It's that we hate excessive chrome and we hate having our batteries die because some useless crap is running in the background and we forgot about it. Simplicity is good in a mobile device. (On the desktop, it's a different world, so the requirements are different. On the server, it's a different world yet again, though desktops have basically adopted much of servers' paradigms and vice versa (GUIs on servers and daemons on desktops, oh my!).
I haven't seen Apple's implementation yet, but I sincerely hope it involves minimal (and obvious) chrome and allows me to easily kill off processes, or keep them from backgrounding in the first place. If not, I'll have to be a lot more careful about which apps I use.
A lot of iPhone apps have ads now. What typically happens is that developers release a free, unlimited version with ads, and a paid, unlimited version without ads. Then you can either pay, or take the ads. Choice is good.
Um, you do realize, I hope, that this has happened more than once? For that matter, it has happened more than once that the enemy will capture US soldiers, then brutally torture and mutilate them before killing them. For that matter, the enemy has done the same to civilians.
So, are you outraged at the enemy? Somehow I doubt it.
So you're saying that if there are a crowd of people in front of you, who might have weapons and might want to kill you, in a place and time where exactly that happens frequently in exactly this kind of situation, you would be content to sit back and be killed rather than firing first? If so, then your genes are destined for elimination the moment people like those that you are condemning stop protecting you, because you've lost your survival instinct.
Actually, that's it exactly. In fact, the conventions are written in such a way as to specifically exclude from (most of) their protections those who are unlawful combatants, which means those who do not fight according to the rules the convention lays out. For example, a force that does not wear uniforms and hides among civilians is both not entitled to the protections of the conventions, but also is the responsible party in any attack that kills those civilians. You wear uniforms and try to avoid the civilians so that your enemy won't attack your civilians.
If you go back and look at the history of WWII, you will find that we mostly observed the rules against the Germans, who mostly observed the rules against us. (This was, IIRC, predating the Geneva conventions per se, or at least the later ones.) The exception was the SS, who massacred American soldiers at Malmedy and as a result were generally not captured after that, nor allowed to surrender. Against Japan, though, we generally didn't observe the rules, because the Japanese didn't. Japanese early on frequently used the ruse of surrendering and then setting off a grenade as they were being taken into custody. They may have kept trying this, but it didn't work for long, because we started shooting people trying to surrender.
It is not uncommon for the enemy to drive up in vans and jump out. In fact, in places like Palestine (and previously in Iraq, when they had more resources) it is not unusual for jihadis to use ambulances to transport fighters. They try to use our rules against us, which is why it's common for the enemy to deliberately fire at us from within crowds of civilians. (If you want to know why the soldiers didn't stop just because there were also obvious civilians in the crowd, you have an answer now.)
Look, the enemy wants to win. I want for us to win. You want for us to fight clean. Your and the enemy's goals are compatible. My goal is not compatible with the enemy's, and it's far from clear if my goal is compatible with yours. No military has ever tried to fight a counterinsurgency of this scope with this many restrictions on how we behave in combat, and it's not clear if the enemy's exploitation of our rules, and our general determination to adhere to them, prevents us from winning or not. I sincerely hope that we can both minimize civilian (and "civilian") losses, and still win; I am unconvinced that we can.
Nope. The GPS is part of a "system on a chip" along with the 3G cell radio, which is why pre-3G iPhones didn't have GPS, and iPod Touches don't have GPS and WiFi-only iPads don't have GPS.
But at least in most urban places in N. America and (I think) Europe, the WiFi hotspot location is pretty good. Rural areas in N. America, not so much, and I'm not sure of the rest of the world.
I'm curious what evidence it was that convinced you that global warming is happening, is caused by humans, and will lead to catastrophic results. I'm agnostic on the first, because I've seen no reliable evidence given the problems with the global temperature data sets, but on the other hand it makes sense that the planet would be warming given that we're still coming out of the Little Ice Age. I've see essentially no credible evidence on the other two points at all. So what was it that convinced you that such claims (that is, the claims made by the global warming activists) are true?
So you consider collective ad hominem attacks and attempts to poison the well as an "attempt to debate issues openly with [some] chance of keepting the discussion rational and factual"? Physician, heal theyself.
Not in Texas, or Virginia, or about 30 other states. Oh, guy was in your house? Life's a bitch for him, then.
And believe me, you wouldn't want it otherwise. Look at England's recent history of home invasions after disarming the populace if you think you would.
I've had a domain registered with Network Solutions for ten years. I haven't moved it mainly because the cost of moving it was not worth the money I would save by doing so. But now I have a reason to incur the cost (in time) of moving the registration, and here is the letter I just sent Netsol in response to their email asking how they could keep my business:
"I wanted to explain why I am transferring my domain from Network Solutions, after 10 years of hosting with you.
It has recently come to my attention that a domain registered and hosted with Network Solutions, fitnathemovie.com, was suspended by Network Solutions for AUP violations, despite the fact that at the time it was suspended (and prior to that) it contained only a "coming soon" notice. It is my understanding that this was done because the site was to promote a movie that offended some Muslims. I assume that Network Solutions' decision was that there would be a monetary cost (either through lost business or through fighting frivolous lawsuits defending the domain registration) if Network Solutions did not pull the domain. It is my considered position that freedom of speech, including the freedom to offend, is critical to any conception of Liberty, and must at all costs be defended. It is, of course, Network Solutions' right to feel differently and to act upon that feeling. And it is, of course, my right to cease doing business with Network Solutions, publicize the reasons for that, and encourage others to do the same. I will do all of these things, because it is my hope that Network Solutions will find a larger financial downside in acting against domains expressing an opinion that some find offensive than it finds in promoting free expression.
I can do nothing about the moral downside of an American organization blinking in the face of threats to free expression, except hope that Network Solutions' chains, in the words of Samuel Adams, rest lightly.
Choice is only good for abortions, apparently.
on
Requiem for Usenet
·
· Score: 1
Rummaging about in Usenet is like slumming through the tenderloin district during the plague years -- your chances of catching a computer virus or a handful of invitations to unspeakable sexual acts is much greater than finding what you were looking for in the first place.
And apparently, that's why Rogers should make sure that its users never have that option. Because you know, personal responsibility just leads to all kinds of problems, and if you just listened to your parents, you'd be better off. No use protesting that you're an adult: if you really were adult, you wouldn't be using USENET.
Socialist tripe, really, but quite the common belief. In reality, the likelihood is that Rogers didn't want to keep spending the money on disk space for a service relatively few people use these days.
I believe Apple is counting on that. Pre-release software will get shopped around among the techo-savvy PC users, but the released software won't work for them. So if they catch the bug, and want to run MacOS, very soon the feature set they have is antiquated, and they can't run the new cool stuff. At that point, why not buy Apple's PC and dual-boot Windows/MacOS, or just run MacOS, since you can't buy Dell and do that?
Meanwhile, ordinary users, who just want to keep having a stable and reliable Mac system like they've always had, will be able to keep having a stable and reliable Mac system. The instability of Windows seems to arise primarily from the extensive number of different types of hardware supported, which requires more code to support. Any project manager can tell you that more code means more bugs or more cost to produce or both. The Macs, by supporting a smaller, well-defined hardware base, will largely be able to avoid this.
I can go into local government - it's a small enough town, but with big enough land and value to businesses moving in - and become rich from the payoffs. And I'd better do it, too, before it's my house being sold out from under me.
OK, so let's drop the empty sloganeering, FUD about the draft and such for a few moments. The military exists. It only takes volunteers. To get the needed number of volunteers, the military recruits, which involves advertising.
Any organization which advertises attempts to reach the target most narrowly suited to the message being generated (in this case, preferable to military service). So what is scary about this? What is wrong about this?
Are you arguing that the military shouldn't recruit? If so, are you further arguing that the military shouldn't exist?
If the military should exist and should recruit, what is the problem with the military using the same techniques that every private organization from CocaCola to MoveON uses?
You guys are thinking backwards on ROI. The company has already spent the ~$2M - that's a sunk cost. Presumably, they have recouped, or will soon, the cost of this in internal business advantage. In other words, the costs to look at are the costs of selling and supporting it versus the income from selling licensing and/or support.
Without critical missing data, the ROI can only be guessed at. I'm supposing that the marketing types have already determined that number, from this point, is positive in a reasonable time period. Presumably, from the range of prices and size of the market as discussed, demand is price-inelastic, which makes sense if the business types are expecting a positive ROI from supporting the software. I cannot evaluate, either, the business impact on selling the product: if it provides a critical market advantage to the company (presumably it does, with that kind of R&D behind it), selling it may not make sense because of the loss of competitive advantage in a small market served by what (given the budget) must be large enterprises. I will simply assume that the business people have done their job, and that any loss would be smaller than the expected ROI gain.
Balanced against the net of ROI less the loss of competitive advantage, code_libre offers branding and getting back improvements. I suspect that the likelihood of getting the product improved by outside coders, given its niche character and the large amount of development effort already invested, is small. Thus the balance is net gain opposed to branding gains.
If the gain from branding can be quantified (or if a qualitative argument can be made that the company can be the single source of software, and thus related services and products, in a captive market), it is possible that the business would agree to open source the product.
But given just the information above, if I was asked to make the call, I would be disinclined to open source it. A captive niche market will often pay outrageous prices for software. Consider this: imagine if the software in question worked out when an airline should carry extra fuel, as opposed to when it should fly a leg with minimum safety margins, in order to take advantage of the cost differentials between fuel prices in different airports. Not a lot of customers, but each one could save millions of dollars a year (well, Delta did, and it can be extrapolated that others would, too). They would thus be likely willing to spend a million dollars to buy an enterprise license for the software: though the cost is huge, the benefit is even larger.
So from what I know, this would be a seriously uphill battle even if the company did have a robust history of open sourcing non-core software.
1. Viruses spread through a limited (though large) number of known vectors, primarily on unpatched or otherwise-insecure systems. 2. People who get viruses at one point generally end up getting a lot of them over time, because people generally don't learn from their mistakes for some reason.
In other words, it seems to be the same holes over and over and over again that get exploited. OK, I see two approaches to this that would do a better job of fixing the problem than running anti-virals. Both involve creating a virus to exploit the holes, whose payload is a security package.
One would have a security package that's a simple virus detector, that pops up a message to the user stating that virii have been found, and naming them. Another could actually attempt to clean the machine. That's a little intrusive, and it would be even more intrusive to, say, turn off the machine a day later if it's not disinfected, or to try to patch the holes in the machine, so I don't suggest that those be tried.
But the basic idea, of putting an anti-virus payload on a virus, seems straightforward enough that, since it hasn't been done so far as I know, I must be missing something.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at that point, in 2006 in Iraq, the enemy was a combination of various groups trying to bring down the Iraqi government and to expel the US by force. These include the Mahdi Army, the remnants of the Ba'athists, a variety of al Qaeda-linked or -inspired groups, and a few Iranian and Syrian front groups (as well as, to a much lesser extent, some Kurdish groups). In the larger sense, the failure to define the enemy has been one of the salient features of both Bush and Obama as they have approached a war we're almost nine years into. I think that the fear is that the enemy is "all Muslims," and that is why everyone is so skittish about defining the enemy. I don't think bin Laden is right, though; I don't think that we are necessarily in a civilizational struggle along the lines of Rome vs. the barbarians or the American Indians vs. the Europeans. I suppose the real debate is whether we are at war with only the jihadis (who want to restore the Caliphate by force) or with the Islamists as well (who want to restore the Caliphate, not necessarily by force). I would argue that we're in a war with the jihadists, and in an ideological struggle (comparable to the Cold War) with the Islamists. But it's not my job, but Congress', to define the enemy, and I fear the consequences of their unwillingness to do so, and the willingness of two Presidents to allow that to continue.
Fair point. Correlation is not causation.
From that description (I haven't seen the keynote or APIs yet), it sounds like Apple is using a publish/subscribe notifications feature to talk to system services for these seven tasks. That's actually both clever and useful, in that it allows the user to know that the backgrounded services are efficient (since Apple wrote them and are, pardon the pun, demons about performance on the phone) while still allowing the developer to easily use the most-requested services. And it would be trivial to extend with other services as they're seen to be needed.
It's not that we hate multitasking. It's that we hate excessive chrome and we hate having our batteries die because some useless crap is running in the background and we forgot about it. Simplicity is good in a mobile device. (On the desktop, it's a different world, so the requirements are different. On the server, it's a different world yet again, though desktops have basically adopted much of servers' paradigms and vice versa (GUIs on servers and daemons on desktops, oh my!). I haven't seen Apple's implementation yet, but I sincerely hope it involves minimal (and obvious) chrome and allows me to easily kill off processes, or keep them from backgrounding in the first place. If not, I'll have to be a lot more careful about which apps I use.
A lot of iPhone apps have ads now. What typically happens is that developers release a free, unlimited version with ads, and a paid, unlimited version without ads. Then you can either pay, or take the ads. Choice is good.
Um, you do realize, I hope, that this has happened more than once? For that matter, it has happened more than once that the enemy will capture US soldiers, then brutally torture and mutilate them before killing them. For that matter, the enemy has done the same to civilians.
So, are you outraged at the enemy? Somehow I doubt it.
So you're saying that if there are a crowd of people in front of you, who might have weapons and might want to kill you, in a place and time where exactly that happens frequently in exactly this kind of situation, you would be content to sit back and be killed rather than firing first? If so, then your genes are destined for elimination the moment people like those that you are condemning stop protecting you, because you've lost your survival instinct.
Actually, that's it exactly. In fact, the conventions are written in such a way as to specifically exclude from (most of) their protections those who are unlawful combatants, which means those who do not fight according to the rules the convention lays out. For example, a force that does not wear uniforms and hides among civilians is both not entitled to the protections of the conventions, but also is the responsible party in any attack that kills those civilians. You wear uniforms and try to avoid the civilians so that your enemy won't attack your civilians.
If you go back and look at the history of WWII, you will find that we mostly observed the rules against the Germans, who mostly observed the rules against us. (This was, IIRC, predating the Geneva conventions per se, or at least the later ones.) The exception was the SS, who massacred American soldiers at Malmedy and as a result were generally not captured after that, nor allowed to surrender. Against Japan, though, we generally didn't observe the rules, because the Japanese didn't. Japanese early on frequently used the ruse of surrendering and then setting off a grenade as they were being taken into custody. They may have kept trying this, but it didn't work for long, because we started shooting people trying to surrender.
Look, the enemy wants to win. I want for us to win. You want for us to fight clean. Your and the enemy's goals are compatible. My goal is not compatible with the enemy's, and it's far from clear if my goal is compatible with yours. No military has ever tried to fight a counterinsurgency of this scope with this many restrictions on how we behave in combat, and it's not clear if the enemy's exploitation of our rules, and our general determination to adhere to them, prevents us from winning or not. I sincerely hope that we can both minimize civilian (and "civilian") losses, and still win; I am unconvinced that we can.
Nope. The GPS is part of a "system on a chip" along with the 3G cell radio, which is why pre-3G iPhones didn't have GPS, and iPod Touches don't have GPS and WiFi-only iPads don't have GPS. But at least in most urban places in N. America and (I think) Europe, the WiFi hotspot location is pretty good. Rural areas in N. America, not so much, and I'm not sure of the rest of the world.
With such a simple process, you wonder why people buy so many more iPhones (and apps for them) than Android phones and apps.
I'm curious what evidence it was that convinced you that global warming is happening, is caused by humans, and will lead to catastrophic results. I'm agnostic on the first, because I've seen no reliable evidence given the problems with the global temperature data sets, but on the other hand it makes sense that the planet would be warming given that we're still coming out of the Little Ice Age. I've see essentially no credible evidence on the other two points at all. So what was it that convinced you that such claims (that is, the claims made by the global warming activists) are true?
So you consider collective ad hominem attacks and attempts to poison the well as an "attempt to debate issues openly with [some] chance of keepting the discussion rational and factual"? Physician, heal theyself.
Not in Texas, or Virginia, or about 30 other states. Oh, guy was in your house? Life's a bitch for him, then. And believe me, you wouldn't want it otherwise. Look at England's recent history of home invasions after disarming the populace if you think you would.
So you're OK with using this card as voter ID at the time and place of voting, also? Right?
I've had a domain registered with Network Solutions for ten years. I haven't moved it mainly because the cost of moving it was not worth the money I would save by doing so. But now I have a reason to incur the cost (in time) of moving the registration, and here is the letter I just sent Netsol in response to their email asking how they could keep my business:
"I wanted to explain why I am transferring my domain from Network Solutions, after 10 years of hosting with you.
It has recently come to my attention that a domain registered and hosted with Network Solutions, fitnathemovie.com, was suspended by Network Solutions for AUP violations, despite the fact that at the time it was suspended (and prior to that) it contained only a "coming soon" notice. It is my understanding that this was done because the site was to promote a movie that offended some Muslims. I assume that Network Solutions' decision was that there would be a monetary cost (either through lost business or through fighting frivolous lawsuits defending the domain registration) if Network Solutions did not pull the domain. It is my considered position that freedom of speech, including the freedom to offend, is critical to any conception of Liberty, and must at all costs be defended. It is, of course, Network Solutions' right to feel differently and to act upon that feeling. And it is, of course, my right to cease doing business with Network Solutions, publicize the reasons for that, and encourage others to do the same. I will do all of these things, because it is my hope that Network Solutions will find a larger financial downside in acting against domains expressing an opinion that some find offensive than it finds in promoting free expression.
I can do nothing about the moral downside of an American organization blinking in the face of threats to free expression, except hope that Network Solutions' chains, in the words of Samuel Adams, rest lightly.
Sincerely,
Jeff Medcalf"
And I thought I'd been around for a while...
Rummaging about in Usenet is like slumming through the tenderloin district during the plague years -- your chances of catching a computer virus or a handful of invitations to unspeakable sexual acts is much greater than finding what you were looking for in the first place.
And apparently, that's why Rogers should make sure that its users never have that option. Because you know, personal responsibility just leads to all kinds of problems, and if you just listened to your parents, you'd be better off. No use protesting that you're an adult: if you really were adult, you wouldn't be using USENET.
Socialist tripe, really, but quite the common belief. In reality, the likelihood is that Rogers didn't want to keep spending the money on disk space for a service relatively few people use these days.
I believe Apple is counting on that. Pre-release software will get shopped around among the techo-savvy PC users, but the released software won't work for them. So if they catch the bug, and want to run MacOS, very soon the feature set they have is antiquated, and they can't run the new cool stuff. At that point, why not buy Apple's PC and dual-boot Windows/MacOS, or just run MacOS, since you can't buy Dell and do that?
Meanwhile, ordinary users, who just want to keep having a stable and reliable Mac system like they've always had, will be able to keep having a stable and reliable Mac system. The instability of Windows seems to arise primarily from the extensive number of different types of hardware supported, which requires more code to support. Any project manager can tell you that more code means more bugs or more cost to produce or both. The Macs, by supporting a smaller, well-defined hardware base, will largely be able to avoid this.
I can go into local government - it's a small enough town, but with big enough land and value to businesses moving in - and become rich from the payoffs. And I'd better do it, too, before it's my house being sold out from under me.
OK, so let's drop the empty sloganeering, FUD about the draft and such for a few moments. The military exists. It only takes volunteers. To get the needed number of volunteers, the military recruits, which involves advertising.
Any organization which advertises attempts to reach the target most narrowly suited to the message being generated (in this case, preferable to military service). So what is scary about this? What is wrong about this?
Are you arguing that the military shouldn't recruit? If so, are you further arguing that the military shouldn't exist?
If the military should exist and should recruit, what is the problem with the military using the same techniques that every private organization from CocaCola to MoveON uses?
You guys are thinking backwards on ROI. The company has already spent the ~$2M - that's a sunk cost. Presumably, they have recouped, or will soon, the cost of this in internal business advantage. In other words, the costs to look at are the costs of selling and supporting it versus the income from selling licensing and/or support.
Without critical missing data, the ROI can only be guessed at. I'm supposing that the marketing types have already determined that number, from this point, is positive in a reasonable time period. Presumably, from the range of prices and size of the market as discussed, demand is price-inelastic, which makes sense if the business types are expecting a positive ROI from supporting the software. I cannot evaluate, either, the business impact on selling the product: if it provides a critical market advantage to the company (presumably it does, with that kind of R&D behind it), selling it may not make sense because of the loss of competitive advantage in a small market served by what (given the budget) must be large enterprises. I will simply assume that the business people have done their job, and that any loss would be smaller than the expected ROI gain.
Balanced against the net of ROI less the loss of competitive advantage, code_libre offers branding and getting back improvements. I suspect that the likelihood of getting the product improved by outside coders, given its niche character and the large amount of development effort already invested, is small. Thus the balance is net gain opposed to branding gains.
If the gain from branding can be quantified (or if a qualitative argument can be made that the company can be the single source of software, and thus related services and products, in a captive market), it is possible that the business would agree to open source the product.
But given just the information above, if I was asked to make the call, I would be disinclined to open source it. A captive niche market will often pay outrageous prices for software. Consider this: imagine if the software in question worked out when an airline should carry extra fuel, as opposed to when it should fly a leg with minimum safety margins, in order to take advantage of the cost differentials between fuel prices in different airports. Not a lot of customers, but each one could save millions of dollars a year (well, Delta did, and it can be extrapolated that others would, too). They would thus be likely willing to spend a million dollars to buy an enterprise license for the software: though the cost is huge, the benefit is even larger.
So from what I know, this would be a seriously uphill battle even if the company did have a robust history of open sourcing non-core software.
He predicted Apple would move to Intel 8 of the last 1 times they did so.
Right, just as happened with the US Navy enforcing the law of the sea.
Oh, wait...
Here's what I don't get:
1. Viruses spread through a limited (though large) number of known vectors, primarily on unpatched or otherwise-insecure systems.
2. People who get viruses at one point generally end up getting a lot of them over time, because people generally don't learn from their mistakes for some reason.
In other words, it seems to be the same holes over and over and over again that get exploited. OK, I see two approaches to this that would do a better job of fixing the problem than running anti-virals. Both involve creating a virus to exploit the holes, whose payload is a security package.
One would have a security package that's a simple virus detector, that pops up a message to the user stating that virii have been found, and naming them. Another could actually attempt to clean the machine. That's a little intrusive, and it would be even more intrusive to, say, turn off the machine a day later if it's not disinfected, or to try to patch the holes in the machine, so I don't suggest that those be tried.
But the basic idea, of putting an anti-virus payload on a virus, seems straightforward enough that, since it hasn't been done so far as I know, I must be missing something.