It is "unusual" in the sense that all the countries that at least pretend to operate under some sane judiciary principles do not allow cops to also become juries, judges and executioners all rolled into one, instead they go for the "innocent until proven guilty" ideal. Allowing police to collect fines on the spot is the very anathema of this, the assumption is that whomever the cop fingers is "guilty until proven innocent".
Consider what happens if an incompetent or malicious cop decides to go after you: you get for all practical purposes robbed at gun-point and it is then up to you to run through the hostile, bureaucratic rigmarole to attempt to prove your innocence and maybe even to get some of your fine back. Most people will simply be cowed into subservience and the police will assume the role it ever desires in every country: as the lynch-pin of a police-state.
In the light of some people moderating my above post as "Informative", I find it necessary to get drunk senseless and to run naked around the neighborhood with a pair of log-periodic antennas as antlers, looking for 666Mb/s Wireless Internet reception. I will see you on the news later...
You are clearly not familiar with the Ivy-league MBAs' legendary record in the area of improvement of long-term profitability of any activity they are involved in. Exorbitant wages are a key component of their "magic" and an essential element in the strategy of maximizing the aforementioned profit.
What the article fails to mention is that this marvelous speed is achieved by the means of a very consumer-friendly "Fair Use Policy" of the ISP which sets the download maximum at 100 kilobytes per month, "for our customers' convenience".
It is an orgasmic convergence of RIAA and MPIAA-friendly corporate stance (no music and movie pilfering possible), glorious marketing opportunity ("We are THE fastest Internet Service Provider in the USA!") and great PR ("All the national statistics clearly show us delivering most outstanding speed in the Nation!"). And it is all possible only because of the great foresight of the CEO of the ISP to replace all the useless "engineers" and "technicians" with Ivy-league educated MBAs.
Behold, for you are seeing the awesome future of US Internet Industry!
The US produces quite a few basic consumer goods - food in particular. A plastic toy supply shortage will not cripple the US. Granted, the US does depend on imports for a number of fairly
critical practical things.
Practical things like all the drills, tools, bits, farming equipment components, chemicals used in farming... and fuel that drives all the farming equipment and transportation of the end product to the mega-stores, fuel that allows the suburbia-dwelling, 2 hour-commute, blissfully ignorant of their massive dependence on their cars consumers to get to the store to get that produce (and to work) and on and on and on...
Arguably, then the US is in the best place of all. For the last decade we've been receiving useful and practical basic goods in exchange for pieces of paper that you believe are worthless. Is it any surprise that US companies don't want to bother making these goods if others are willing to do so just for pieces of paper?
Well, yes and no. From the very short-sighted, short-term perspective, yes, the scam went off peachy. But in the long-term you have one side whose manufacturing capability (and thus the ability to make real - as opposed to imaginary - products, combined with associated experienced labour force needed for this capability) ends up deteriorating to nearly nothing but who is awash in disposable, short-term-use plastic goods and consumables purchased on credit or in exchange for intangible vapour and the other who ends up with all that manufacturing capability, has robust internal market for its own goods, local support services, experienced labour force etc. but who also holds utterly worthless debt of the other. In addition to that, the entire "living standard" of the consuming side is predicated upon constant delivery of these disposable goods by the other, while the opposite is not true, delivery of make-believe paper "value" is not a necessary pre-condition to prosperity of the manufacturing side.
Needless to say the moment the "value" of the debt being held by the manufacturing side comes in question, the entire scheme collapses, but the shock of that collapse will be orders of magnitude greater for the side that is not self-sufficient and in whose entire "way of living" will implode. Is recovery possible? Of course, but the "reckoning" period will be worse the longer this transfer of manufacturing capability goes on, and even at this point it is already destined to be utterly brutal.
Right now manufacturing in the US tends to not be as cheap as it is elsewhere, but it isn't like the US couldn't build enough cars or whatever for its own needs.
Not if the currency is worth shit and it takes a decade to rebuild all the wantonly squandered infrastructure. The US "rust belt" is pretty much completely dismantled as is the manufacturing capability of most major industrial companies. US imports nearly everything required for major production efforts, beginning with steel.
Oil is probably the most critical imported resource, but the problems of oil aren't so much that the US depends on foreign supplies so much as that the entire world depends on a resource that will be limited everywhere at some point.
True, but we were discussing the implications of US currency collapse and not of "peak oil".
If anything the relatively untapped US local oil reserves will put the US in a good strategic position when everybody else is running out.
Now thats funny. All the combined strategic US reserves are capable of sustaining current US oil consumption for about two months and most of the oil available for extraction is depleted (the US production peaked in 1970s). The "new" "untapped" reserves are of uncertain size, are of known extreme difficulty of extraction, yield heavy crude and other low-grade varieties etc and so on. If anyth
But, since there are no shortages in actual supply in the US, things didn't happen that way here.
This is a circular argument. Supply of basic consumer goods in the US is at this point nearly entirely based upon imports (a bulk of it from China, incidentally). So a collapse in the US currency's purchasing power would also lead to collapse of supply of goods and thus their shortage.
The world's economy is at these days pretty much a gigantic Ponzi scheme whereby "value" of currencies and goods is in its entirety based on make-believe wishful thinking. US currency has "value" only because enough people globally wish to pretend that it is so. So far that belief has been strained, but not broken. But if that, fundamentally irrational, belief were to be shaken sufficiently, the entire scheme collapses.
And this (not any "goods shortages") is what causes currency collapses, i.e wide-spread loss of belief in the "value" of the pieces of paper that purport to be "valuable".
An ability to manipulate people's opinions of "value" is at the core of the move from physical-resource-backed currencies to utterly fictional ones as governments realized that as long as the public can be made gullible enough, they will pretend that numbers in some bank computers, numbers created at a whim of bankers and politicians, actually represent "value".
Gold (and other natural resource) backed currencies had their own dire problems but at least they had some semi-subjective means of controlling the "value" (by constraining supply) of the currency in a way that lay outside of government whim.
Ultimately an ideal currency would have never-changing (but divisible) constant total circulation to which and from no one could artificially add or subtract.
You make several assumptions and provide nothing to back them up with. Using this argument it would be just as easy to argue that slavery is just, for the owner betters the life of the slave.
Clearly not from the point of view of the slave, nor from any external objective point of view. Unless you can demonstrate that some small material considerations compensate for the lack of free will that is. I am looking forward to that argument!
And you, once again, fail to show any work (as the school teacher might say) and simply claim the rest of your proof follows naturally.
As the point above demonstrates, I admit that assumed that the patently obvious does not need to be explained. Furthermore, a complete, in-detail step-by-step reasoning of all arguments would fill whole books, not mere off-hand Slashdot posts. Here I can afford but a most coarse of outlines.
What right do you have to 'protect' anyone from physical harm? From whence does this right flow and how is it defined?
From the initial point: the purpose of society. If one participates, the obvious and logical consequence of such a choice is that the society is to protect its members from harm. Otherwise there is very little point in being part to such a scheme, no? As to the specific definition, the rudimentary basics are "protection from unwanted physical harm" (i.e. you are welcome to bash yourself on the head with a hammer as long as you do not expect the society to come to your rescue afterwards). Etc and so on (and no I am not inclined to a 30-page dissertation on every point just because you asked).
How do you decide what is physical harm?
You are kidding, right? Any harm to our body (as opposed to our psyche) is called "physical harm".
If wish to pierce my ears, should this be prevented? How about my nipples? My genitals? If I choose to split my tongue? What if I choose to insert titanium knobs under my skin?
What if I choose to drink? Smoke tobacco? Smoke pot? Shoot heroin?
What if I cut myself? Refuse to eat? What if I have a curable but deadly if untreated disease and refuse treatments?
Knock yourself out. As long as you do not come running for communal help afterwards. A society can only prevent harm that is preventable, i.e. harm that you wish (or can be deduced wishing if you are incommunicado) to be staved off. If you are on the other hand into poking your own eyes out... who are we to stop you? The only thing a society can offer is an assistance in case of a suspected mental illness, but that can only work if you are willing to accept it. Forcing treatment is only justifiable if you are trying to harm others and that is to balance their rights against yours.
What if I touch myself in inappropriate places?
None of society's business.
If I engage in risky sexual behavior?
Risky how?
What if I have sexual relations with someone with a known STD?
That would depend if you knew about it. If you did, see the point about poking your own eyes out.
What if I hang out with a 'bad boy'? What if I hang out with a gang? What if I hang out with a group of people known to commit violent felonies? What if I hang out with people who think strapping a bomb on themselves and walking into a mall of crowded people and exploding is an ethical, moral, and reasonable way to make a social statement?
As long as you actually do not explode or assist in making a bomb, at which point you cross the line into violating rights of others.
... your failure to even know what cognitive dissonance is or realize that everyone suffers from it
Cognitive dissonance is a mental disorder. Not everyone suffer
Actually, that's what you've done, which is why I've called you on it. If you had attempted to make any sort of rational argument supporting your view point, and no waving your hand and stating your opinions as if they were fact isn't an attempt, I'd have simply assumed you were someone who hadn't thought completely through their viewpoint. But rather you are the rare individual who attempts to claim anything that spews forth from their mouth is gospel truth and anyone who disagrees is ignorant vermin.
Again, you offer nothing but vague generalities. I answered individual points as presented, however your specific refutations of my arguments are conspicuously absent.
Are you claiming science is perfect, and that the people practicing it, practice it perfectly?
Of course not. This however does not change the fact that science is the best tool for the job, by far. It is self-correcting (although sometimes slowly), verifiable and logical. None of the other "methods" come close.
You seem to hold an intense desire to do away with all gray areas. Unfortunately, it is all gray.
No, it is not. While it is true that many questions humans pose cannot be answered in the binary fashion or even offered satisfactory scientific answers, all the basic ones which pertain to governance and society can be. Saying that "it is all gray" is a grand cop-out and oversimplification.
You can never get everyone to agree on a black and white world view, even using science, logic and reason.
Since the "black and white" analogy is not universally applicable, it is of little wonder that logic cannot offer you help in making this flawed analogy unconditional.
Therefore, science, logic, and reason are not the ultimate answer to societal problems.
Non sequitur. Consider however what is the alternative: societies based on idiocy, superstition, assorted woo-woos designed to elevate some group of their peddlers over others, rabid animalistic tendencies, etc and so on. Everything but science, logic and reason. I for one want nothing to do with such a "society" (although "a pack of rabid animals" would be a much more apt).
I look forward to your logical proof of your statements especially RE:Who has what right to demand what of whom.
As I mentioned to others here, the starting point of the arguments is with the purpose of society (and thus its governance). Ostensibly the only rational reason to participate is if by participation one can be better off then otherwise. Ergo the societal rules have to be formulated so that all those who are to participate must be better off then otherwise. The rest of the logical argument naturally evolves from here.
However so far all you've stated in response to this and the other questions I presented are opinions, not facts.
How so?
The fact is there is no factual definition of who has what rights in this world.
"Rights" are a consequence of societal models employed. However if you start your chain of reasoning at the point I indicated, which is the only logical place to begin, one arrives on a very similar set of "rights" irrespective of models chosen, as long as logical arguments are followed. This is why many different governance models all have many commonalities revolving around the definition of these "rights".
You can just as easily argue logically that all men are free as you can that dominance is a natural result of life and thus the stronger should naturally and logically rule the weaker. It depends solely on the opinions/assumptions you begin your argument on.
Irrelevant. Such arguments cease to have any meaning as soon as the concept of "society" is introduced, which replaces entirely the context of a lone individual in the "wild".
The fact is there are no factual definitions to how far we must go to 'protect someone from themselves' or even 'to protect the public'.
Huh? You are confused. There is no "factual definition" as to "how far" because no such thing is possible. This however does not prevent one from arriving at logical conclusions as to rational actions that lead to an increase of the level of "protection" of some individuals from others (or themselves). What is important here, and what is keeping your confused, is the definition of "protection". And that definition can be arrived at logically, i.e. protection from physical harm... as opposed from protection from some "moral panic".
The fact is that logic itself is useless without starting with a foundation of pre-existing assumptions (axioms), things which can not be proven using the logic based upon them, as by definition any attempt do so would result in a tautology. Even something as simple as the math you presented in your opening argument is bound by this, for math is an axiomatic system.
True. Fortunately we have the axioms to work with, like "the purpose of society". The rest follows from there. And while true, such a system has no opinion on "how many angels one can fit at the tip of a pin" and the resulting "morality" and other medieval nonsense, I posit that it is the only logical way to move forward.
What matters in the end is how consistent are the axioms we base out world view on. Do we claim to believe that all men should be free while keeping slaves? Do we count men and women as equal while denying women the ability to do the same things as men? Do we claim to follow a higher being while simultaneously ignoring the commandments attributed to said being?
All of these are easily answered by answering the initial question: "what is the purpose of society". The answer (axiomatic arguably) is that its purpose is to make all of its members better off then if they were on their own. The rest follows. Slavery, unless consensual, is clearly contradictory. Gender equality (with provisions for maternity) is also an easy deduction. Religion on the other hand is just (usually mal
Your biggest problem here is that you're assuming a base desirable (malformed babies are bad)
No, that is not a base of my chain of reasoning, the base and the starting point is the purpose of society (and consequently its governance). "malformed babies are bad" is a logical conclusion predicated upon the base assumption of the purpose of the society they get born into (i.e. for individuals in a society to be better off then being on their own) combined with knowledge of medical science. It is arguably many steps removed from the initial step.
Humans depend on leadership to govern and guide them.
That is a sweeping (and quite unsubstantiated) generalization. The objective assessment is that some humans are incapable of their own decision-making and thus depend on "authority".
Logic cannot tell you what is best, cold reason cannot show you what will make society function properly. People are inherently irrational and solutions are often counter-intuitive (or illogical, if you will).
That is a quite different kettle of fish. What I was discussing was a sane, rational society. Arguably a large proportion of humanity in general is not rational or even sane. Ergo it is quite logical that the only forms of governance that "work" for them are a-few-slices-short-of-a-loaf kind and the general consensus (and one which you seem to endorse) is that it is "too bad" for the rest of us who are not so close to sheep in their mental state.
But for any progress to be achieved one has to realize that in the long run that is a recipe for disaster. There is only so much technological progress a medieval mindset can handle - for proof see also under "Al Qaeda" and 9/11. Now imagine the same with nanotech.
Then sir, I respectfully submit that it is time for you to remove yourself from the discussion. As so far your attempts at logic have mostly been blatantly illogical.
For them to be illogical, it should be easy for you to demonstrate the errors. You have not done so. Instead, what you are stating is simply "I dislike your reasoning and so I am going to pretend it is illogical". A standard operating procedure of all those who prefer to employ the logical fallacy called "an appeal to authority" to replace logic itself in their "arguments".
Please explain, logically, how we can determine issues of consent and age.
Step one: stop making sex into a mysterious, shameful activity with negative religious connotations and thus make it possible for people of all ages to discuss it openly. By removing the shame element, combating the social peer pressure elements and creating easy access to information and counseling for children, one can easily detect non-consensual activity (i.e. they will be unafraid to complain). Two: if the kids insist on screwing, ensure that the results are managed: easily available contraception, education etc. Whatever you do, the religious woo-woo based medieval approach currently so much in vogue is the worst possible answer, having the dubious distinction of being ineffective, counter-productive, conductive to authoritarian abuse (which in fact its the reason why authoritarians of all stripes love it) and wholly illogical.
And then explain, using logic, why it is anyone's business if I have a web footed duck baby because I like porking my sister.
The logical purpose of a society is for all of its members to be better off as compared to them not participating. Subsequently it is society's business that individuals are given the best possible start in it, this includes protection from preventable diseases, genetic disorders included. You porking your sister is none of my business, until she gets pregnant and has a severely damaged child on the way. If we allow that, we fail the primary logical reason for the formation of a society.
Then, using science, perhaps you could give some evidence that a web footed duck baby is a necessary consequence of sister-porking.
Due to the way our genes propagate, the likelihood of genetic errors (normally corrected by DNA that took a slightly different evolutionary path) increases rapidly with decreasing genetic distance. Having said so, it is not absolutely certain that an offspring of siblings has to be damaged, only that it is very likely. Thus the correct procedure would be to test the embryo in early stages of development to determine if any damage is present. Decisions to be made based on the outcome of the tests.
Finally, explain how your emotional, derogatory attempt at poisoning the well by claiming all your opponents must be idiots not to agree with your logic is in itself at all logical.
Well, the truth sometimes hurts. If one cannot logically explain himself/herself, one has no business being an "opponent" in any logical discussions, be it with myself or anybody else. I guess you could call it "poisoning of the well" from the point of view of peddlers of all kinds of illogical woo-woo.
Logic, science and reason are nice, but the sad fact is that people do not always give these any credence.
Which is at the root of pretty much all societal problems, in pretty much all cultures.
And, unfortunately, logic and reason operate the same way on falsehoods as they do on truths, thus getting any particular group of people to agree on what is true is not simply a matter of logic or reason. Science, though more amenable to ideas of truth, does not, ever, speak of what is true. We can't see the true functioning of the Universe, only the evidence of our senses. We can make scientific theories, and these may be highly accurate, but they are not 'true.'
Yes, however science is, by far, best equipped to offer reliable answers to complex mysteries of our environment. Thus employing any other tool (which in practice means all kinds of insane woo-woo of the hour) for this purpose is.. well... illogical. And basing one's societal rules on some convoluted, patently false nonsense just because some group of wackos or other in "authority" likes it, is downright insane.
And two apples added to two apples don't always make four apples. They may make 'many' apples for innumerate cultures, for instance. Two plus two equals four only for cultures with the concepts of two, four, and plus.
Yes, those would incidentally also be the very same "cultures" whose Grand Shaman bleeds his dick ceremonially every other full moon to keep the Big Bad Juu Juu away from stealing their souls and who sacrifice virgins by throwing them into a well to seal the Juu Juu "repellant" procedure...
Of course it does. It is just that you (and a lot of other people) really, really do not like the answers.
Logic does not answer questions of ethics.
See above.
Logic does not answer questions of aesthetics.
True, but then again aesthetics has no place in governance, does it now?
How many apples must be added together to find out if it's "OK" for two men to lie together?
Non sequitur. Sexual conduct is a natural function of human bodies, sexuality is hard-wired into human brains by countless millions of years of evolution and subject to genetic and environmental variations and you nor the frothing-at-the-snout mob nor the power-hungry-lynch-mob-whipping-up-politicians nor the cracked-up religious zealots of the minute have any "moral" business in dictating who can lie together with whom.
The only concerns with sex are logical, i.e. dealing with incestuous activities which are likely to result in genetically damaged progeny and the issues of consent and age.
The rest is just another unreasoning, idiotic, rabid, woo-woo of the minute, the only purpose of which is for some individuals to control and persecute all the others.
How many apples must be added together to find out if it's "OK" to deprive another of freedom?
Non sequitur. Freedom (depending on its definition) is a logical concept which can be analyzed logically, although it is unlikely that arithmetic is applicable in this case.
How many apples must be added together to determine if something is "Porn" or "Art". And how many more to determine if there is an actual difference?
As I indicated, art has no meaning in governance and you, nor anyone else, has any business deciding what can or cannot be seen by others.
To date, the only way people have found a way to 'answer' those questions that logic can not answer is to rely on someone's authority.
Bullshit. People intentionally discarded the answers offered by logic and reason because they did not like them, instead replacing them with arbitrary "authority", for it suited their various malicious intents much better. Following which they enforced this "authority" (usually by means rather violent) onto all who did not subscribe to it.
Be that the authority of the majority or minority, the "rule" of any is seen as the only way for more than two people to live in this world without being constantly at each others throats.
That is the reasoning of every dick-wad King, Emperor, Duke, Baron, Generalissimo, Glorious Leader and all smaller fish politicians, all casting themselves as our "protectors", and all we have to do is to defer to their "authority" to be "protected" against each other.
And while in practice it "works" for them, because majority of humanity are indeed thoughtless animals who abhor all reason and logic, it does not change the fact that the only sane rules by which to establish enlightened society are those very rules that are so contemptible to you: logic, reason science and the like.
Your argument falls apart because of wholly baseless assumptions. In fact the rule of both "majority" or "minority" are equally nonsensical. What matters is logic, reason and science. Two apples added to another two apples make four apples irrespective if the person adding them together is the King or the mud-covered peasant, the President or his would-be assassin, the Glorious Leader of One Party or a partisan of the Resistance in a forest, a media celebrity or a leper, a member of the vast self-righteous majority or a rag-clad member of the persecuted outcast minority.
And this is why you will find all the politicians always blather about "democracy" or "the will of the people": they abhor logic, knowing that it would deprive them of their power to manipulate the weak-minded masses in order so that perversions such as the rule of a "majority" or a "minority" can be put in place against all reason.
Ever since Deng Xiaoping ditched university Marxism and took the Communist Party on the capitalist road ("socialism is not poverty / to get rich is glorious") life has only gotten better in China.
Now that is a mind-bender...
It has a distinction of being the most illogical, incoherent, self-contradictory shot at one of the oldest intellectual pursuits of man: to "justify" ones' own greed and desire for power over others.
While Marxism is quite demonstrably dysfunctional, at its core premise lie the notions that we are all responsible for the bulk of each other's success and that the disparities in talent and drive are, even at their extremes, nowhere near to the disparities in accumulation of wealth and power which the feudal and capitalist systems were constructed to purposefully allow (it is in fact their main function, to justify the very few to grab nearly all from the very many by creating an illusion of a popular increase in - usually endless-debt or trade-imbalance based - "standard of living", all behind superficially appealing but upon deeper analysis completely illogical assumptions). And so "socialism is not poverty / to get rich is glorious" idiocy is easily dispatched: in order to get "gloriously" rich one has to make sure that many, many others do not get "gloriously" rich - because if they do... one is no longer "gloriously" rich, one becomes only an "average" individual. You can easily observe this from global statistical trends - accumulation of ever more global wealth in the hands of ever proportionately fewer people and the disparity between very very few "gloriously rich" and the rest of the global population was (and is) growing since its previous reset in the 1929 market crash, having accelerated massively with the fall of the USSR and the Chinese about-face. It has now exceeded the pre-1929 levels. If Capitalism had the effect of getting everyone to become wealthy, the "tide" (speaking of the other oft-repeated idiotic imagery on the subject) having "lifted all the boats", this trend would not be occurring, instead there would be global narrowing of the gap as the unwashed masses got richer too. Alas, it seems that luxury yachts are the only ones that go up, apparently the row-boat owners are to be encouraged to hold breath instead...
Add to this the fact that China, India and many others simply cannot (its physically impossible) to achieve the levels of locust-like consumerism that the USA and EU boast (it would mean total destruction of environment and depletion of most of global natural resources) and you have a recipe for the next social disaster. Its just a matter of time before consumerism-based ideologies fail in a lot of places (they already are mightily wobbly - just take a look at the financial shape the USA is in) and are replaced by a rash of Marxism-like meritocracy-based corrections again, which will then be thoroughly corrupted by the same people who come up with things like Capitalism, which will cause those to fail, to be replaced with some new "glorious to get rich" scheme... lather, rinse, repeat ad infinitum.
The reality is that Humanity is, when you get down to it, rather imbecilic and hopeless as a group.
Trust me: Lots (the bulk) of Americans learned the lessons just fine.
I too believed this for a while, but the numbers actually do not support this assertion. Not only (the rather unscientific) personal experience in places like Slashdot does not bear that out (just look at the c6gunner-type fellows here - with whom I had the "pleasure" of arguing before - and all of their cheerers-on) but the actual electoral numbers indicate very close races between Republicans, who these days pretty much all subscribe to the In-Your-Face-And-Up-Yours-Belligerent-Jerk Imperial Doctrine and the "Blue Dog" and other assorted establishment-entrenched DC cocktail-circuit Democrats, whose vast majority subscribe to the PR-Friendly-but-Just-As-Deadly-And-More-Insidious Imperial Doctrine. You keep voting these clowns in every time, goaded on by the Star Power of the latest Presidential Celebrity - "Hey did you see his bod!? Rawr!... What connections?! You are like-soo-uncool, he will be like-totally-Change! Don't you even try to speak bad about him cause he is like a Movie Star! And did you see his bod!?" - and the numbers are oscillating back-and-forth very close to 50/50% nationally between these two Circuses.
Also, the inane "support our troops" (incidentally very close to the slogans used to get people to send warm clothing to Werhmacht when the Operation Barbarossa unexpectedly ground to a halt mid-winter) mentality permeates pretty much the whole US society. This alone is a sure-fire hallmark of successfully brainwashed citizenry of an Empire. Then there is the American Exceptionalism, the Manifest Destiny, the idea that the US is somehow "forced" to "bring American values" to the unwashed global masses, be it via Hollywood or, failing that, at a tip of an M-16 rifle. And on and on and on...
They don't yet believe they've come to the point that the damage will exceed the profit in THEIR cases and that it's thus time to pull the plug.
That is another mis-conception. Most of the profiteers are no longer merely USA-centric, they are far beyond that. All those "market liberalization" and "globalization" efforts that started in the 80s did pay off for them. They are pan-national now. Even the largest US military contractor's (Halliburton/KBR) head-quarters are now in Dubai. The jet-set does not go through the DHS air-port check-points and trifles like national borders are long past their caring. The money is spread globally and far past the reach of laws of any particular country. And their slice of wealth pie keeps growing and that of the rest of the 6 billion of us shrinking.
What's happening now is that the factions of the bulk of the American population are realizing the ruling class has finally cut the government off from the population's control and is pushing it into a runaway failure mode. So they're organizing to attempt to bring said ruling class to heel (in the hopes of heading off the need for more drastic solutions, with their higher costs and still greater risks in case of failure).
Wishful thinking. Until the failure mode actually occurs and food riots start, vast majority of the denizens of USA will not, I repeat NOT, be pulled away from their latest episode of Idol or Dancing With the Stars! You seem to forget that people who actually even bother to show up voting in the USA constitute only 61% or so of the population. The rest doesn't even bother.
Thus the excitement at the town-hall meetings. And thus the two flavors of the Tea Party movement - coming out of the Libertarian / Paulite and the Paleo-conservative factions - and the recent overtures from the anti-war factions of the left wing for an alliance with them.
Now that's funny. Those fractious made-to-media-mogul-order "movements'" only purpose is to distract attention from what is actually going on at the power centres of your country.
I'm sorry you think you have the smallest bit of insight into our infrastructure, the data centers they are in, the hardware and software configurations, the software we design as well as the packaged bits we use based on a couple of Slashdot postings. I'm not hinting at any design. It's neither on topic, nor brief enough to fit in a reply.
This is somewhat of a cop out. If true, all Slashdot conversations could be reduced to "you have no idea of Our Great Mysterious Cosmic Unknowable Infrastructure, even if I mention some bit of it explicitly, and you actually refer only to those because.... because.... its just Too Cosmic... and Too Unknowable! Too Mysterious For You too! Why, it is so Mysterious and Unknowable that I myself have no clue what's what! Ha! Gotcha! So there!"
Interestingly enough, that's not true. I'm not sure how intimate you are with the latest gen of blade chassis,
LOL. Enough to know not to trust the vendor fanfare about "fault-tolerant" back-planes as far as I can throw it, anyhow. Too many fried blade backplanes locking all blades despite being supposedly "fault tolerant". Same goes for "fault-tolerant" SANs which nuke all data on their disks when one of the supposedly "redundant" controllers or buses goes kaboom, RAID arrays that lose all their crap when the one of the "redundant" RAID5+1 controllers goes to meet its maker, etc and so on. But it all looks sooo seriously cool on the glossy brochures! All those colourful diagrams!
... more flexibility on the desktop than our old, old Metaframe system...
Oh dear, next I am gonna hear that you went away from Terminal Services into one of those insane Dell / Citrix blade-based individual Virtual Desktop environments... if so, I can only admire your gluttony for punishment via convoluted-complexity-for-complexity's-sake. But then again, its your own personal Hell to run. If what I suspect is true, its no wonder that you sing praises of VMotion, it quite fits into that mess, in a sad kind of way.
But hey, if you can do better, you should send in a resume. Assuming you aren't always arrogant, we always are looking for good engineers. Just don't be that guy who comes in and can redo everything
today the way it should be. That always works out great, right?
Thanks for the offer but I am looking very closely into retirement these days and the only reason I am not posting this from a boat is that I can't seem to shake the clients I still have off. Something about the track record...
But strange, you went from saying it was never needed, to just arguing against my setup, knowing about 1% or less of how our actual infrastructure is designed.
No, I simply went from saying it was never needed to pointing out how your perceived "need" is actually a result of shortcomings of the design you were hinting at.
You see, we have many, many, many servers.
Which are running on hosts apparently designed to sometimes fail in packs of 16...
But again, you went from arguing against any need for 24x7 or VMotion into trying to pick apart someone's infrastructure while not knowing anything about it.
No, again, I simply pointed out that your perceived need for a VMotion-based "solution" is in fact the result of poor overall design, design which you were hinting at yourself.
VMotion is horrible, all engineers that incorporate it into their plan are incompetent, and there's always a better way. PS: Even when there is a better way, sometimes the budget precludes that option. Other times, it's just a good way to go. But keep assuming you understand everybody's environment and are smarter than all of us.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with who is "smarter", but it has everything to do with robust designs of fault-tolerant systems. If you are truly going to go full-tilt fault-tolerant, it is a very difficult undertaking to accomplish, but irrespective of your choices along the way the end result of any good design is inevitably lack of any need for superfluous hacks like VMotion to be part of the scenario. Sure you can use it, like people also can create software out of a spaghetti of numerically labelled branching instructions... but it does not make me "smarter" then everyone else to point out that doing so would be a rather dumb idea in the long run. It is simply a logical fact.
Yet you appear to take such obvious truths as a personal attack and so you seek to counter-attack with ever increasing ferocity every time you feel you need to defend your choices, which of course soon leads you to such emotionally-motivated, rash outbursts as the ones above, seeking to so desperately to prove yourself beyond reproach that in the end it has the opposite effect of creating an impression of rather dubious competence and woefully inadequate fault-tolerance of the designs you describe. Which in turn prompts me to levity at your expense...
By the way, clustered apps are great, but doesn't Storage VMotion come in handy to say... upgrade a SAN without massive downtime?
Which of course can be achieved by taking offline and upgrading individual SANs in the redundant storage cluster and then re-syncing them back. I assume you are using redundant SAN arrays, having been on this self-professed bleeding edge of hyper-super-critical everything.
Or what about using VMotion to replace an entire blade chassis without downing 16 hosts and untold guests?
LOL. Some mission critical setup you got there! All this pontificating... and then you have a massive single-point failure spot like a chassis holding 16 hosts! It just figures. All shiny V-motion-this and V-motion-that toys and no design forethought whatsoever.
I'm not much for pretending anything when it comes to whether or not my business needs to be 24x7. From our board on down it's been told to me that it's a requirement for some (but not all) of our
services. It's also an expectation of our caregivers, and in turn our patients. I don't do it for fun. Oh well, at least your username fits.
You business and businesses like it constitute a tiny fraction of all businesses out there. And from what you described you are also a typical example of "commerce-based" ideology of simply throwing more and more hardware resources and money at the problem, in ever more convoluted contortions, so that your poorly fit, awfully inadequate OS and application combinations can be made to creek and wobble on hordes of VMs and armies of ill-fitting hosts to some sort of state of illusion of semi-reliability.
There's a lot of other scenarios where a business should be 24x7, even if a life isn't at stake. Or should Google shut down at the whim of their engineers?
Nice try, but truly robust systems like Google do not use virtualization in a way even remotely similar to yours, instead using custom close-to-the-OS cluster configurations written from the ground up for this purpose. They are in fact the very anathema of what you are doing.
Of course VMware is not for EVERY situation, especially in it's Enterprise Plus with SRM bolted on top incarnation. But it's reinvented the way many of us keep things online that need to be. Oh, and
like it or not, DRS/DPM have reinvented the way some of us provide better performance and reduced power consumption.
Oh there is no doubt that there is market for all that nonsense, like there is also robust market for penis extensions, but this alone does not in any way have any bearing on the point I was making. VMotion is a solution looking for a problem precisely because if you do truly need VMotion, it is a sure fire indicator of you having screwed the pooch royally when it came to overall design of your fault tolerant systems.
VMotion and Storage VMotion are needed in a well designed setup like a pair of boils on one's buttocks. VMotion, and particularly automated performance based VMotion encourage throwing lazilly and incoherently mis-matched VMs at bunches of inadequate hosts only to see the VMs hopping about the hosts like a bunch of deranged rabbits instead of having them stay put in a well estimated and adequate hosts. All Storage VMotion does is to encourage lazy, resource consuming activities like shuffling contents of multi-terabyte arrays back and forth for no good reason whatsoever, while at the same time hiding serious shortcomings in storage and host points of failure.
... these guys were so great that they even managed to piss off IRAN. Of course they had to slaughter several thousand civilians and a bunch of Iranian diplomats in their own embassy to do it.
Actually, this is typical US-centric ignorance showing, Taliban and Al Qaeda are both derivatives of Wahhabi Sunni Arabic Islam sect, while Iranians are not only Shiites but also Persian, not Arabs. Their language is Farsi, not Arabic. Taliban and Bin Laden were always at war with Iran, they consider Shiites to be "apostates". It is one of the reasons the US chose Saddam as its cat's-paw to attack Iran, he was (at least nominally) a Sunni and held deep contempt of all things Shiite, Iran in particular. Curiously, Saddam and Bin Laden were also at odds, mainly because Bin Laden saw Saddam's Iraq in the way of re-creating his utopian Caliphate, with the Caliph restored to Baghdad in its centre. Needles to say pretty much secular and socialist Saddam would not be welcome in the epicentre of the zealot paradise and Bin Laden had fatwas issued calling for Saddam's head to roll (which makes Dick Cheney's idiotic claims of Saddam - Al Qaeda cooperation truly comical).
Also, the U.S. didn't have to provide proof of Osama's connection, and responsibility, for 9/11 attacks as he did that himself. If you can't trust the words from the horse's mouth then you're a hopeless tinfoil hatter. http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2004/10/29/binladen_message041029.html
As I pointed out in another post, should Bin Laden not take credit, some other wacko (and most likely several of them at once) would. Bin Laden's main claim to fame is that the US chose him to be the "Celebrity Evildoer #1" single-handedly responsible for all evils globally, past, present and future. Needless to say this instantly gave him far greater credibility then all the others combined.
It was in the interest of every radical loon to claim that he, and only he, was the "mastermind" of the most famous and successful terrorist foreign strike on the US soil. The instant ego expansion possibilities were just endless on this one for the Jihadists.
I know that it's great when the U.S. is the bad guy,
Actually, no, it is not great. We do not want you to be the "bad guy". In fact we'd rather that the US came to its senses and started to act like its actions were based on the great principles and traditions it always boasts about being at its core. The world would be a much better place for it than with the US as a hypocritical, back-stabbing, duplicitous, greedy, self-centred, arrogant bully it is acting like now.
Uh.... you do realize we're talking about the leader of a movement, not an operative? Someone who is expected to talk, not do? I'm not sure what evidence you expected to hand to the Taliban to convince them that bin Laden was to be handed over.
Well, therein lies the rub. Some US presidents were explicitly encouraging bona-fide war crimes and their underlings did follow the instructions merrily. The current "wisdom" of the US power elites however seems to be that they are wholly innocent of any actual doings and that it is the underlings who are entirely responsible, see also under: Abu Grahib. So how much actual culpability belongs to Bin Laden? It is precisely such duplicity and double-standards the US is so fond of, which compromise any attempt at maintaining any sort of credibility when asking for others to be handed over on pretty much the same basis.
To extend your analogy again, your impossible requests for evidence indicate that you're not interested in cooperation. As a result, action will be taken without your involvement. And the first airdrop is on its way. Have a nice day.
More self-serving double standards. If Bin Laden is fully culpable, as you suggest, so is G. W. Bush and pretty much all of his staff, based on the very same principle. If Taliban were to hand over Bin Laden today, I assume the US would send GW to Hague om the next plane, surely?
From there: He is currently wanted by the United States for participating in terrorist actions with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and on 19 February 2003, the United States Department of State designated him as a "Specially Designated Global International Terrorist".[2].
All of your scenarios make an implicit (and incorrect) assumption that all (or even most) companies deploying large VMWare setups expect their production servers to run 24/7. Vast majority of businesses operate 9-5 (or similar) hours and have no such requirement. And so in all of the cases you described the standard procedure is simply to shut down the VMs on a host in question and then simply restart them after upgrade or on another host. Then there is of course the fact that Windows VMs need to be regularly rebooted for various reasons, such as Microsoft updates, thus offering a lot of opportunities to perform scheduled host modifications.
What next, you can't think of a reason anyone would ever need SRM?
VMotion is only useful in 24/7 operations where server downtime for scheduled maintenance is wholly unacceptable (and thus guest VMs cannot be Windows OS based... or must be clustered and what not - which of course defeats the need for VMotion). There are very few such scenarios in real life, although a lot of corporate IT types like to pretend otherwise, I guess it somehow bolsters their egos or something, I not sure why, really. This and other kinds of what can only be described as "computer science masturbation" seems to be a very popular sport in over-funded IT shops.
Slashdot Mirror
It is "unusual" in the sense that all the countries that at least pretend to operate under some sane judiciary principles do not allow cops to also become juries, judges and executioners all rolled into one, instead they go for the "innocent until proven guilty" ideal. Allowing police to collect fines on the spot is the very anathema of this, the assumption is that whomever the cop fingers is "guilty until proven innocent".
Consider what happens if an incompetent or malicious cop decides to go after you: you get for all practical purposes robbed at gun-point and it is then up to you to run through the hostile, bureaucratic rigmarole to attempt to prove your innocence and maybe even to get some of your fine back. Most people will simply be cowed into subservience and the police will assume the role it ever desires in every country: as the lynch-pin of a police-state.
In the light of some people moderating my above post as "Informative", I find it necessary to get drunk senseless and to run naked around the neighborhood with a pair of log-periodic antennas as antlers, looking for 666Mb/s Wireless Internet reception. I will see you on the news later...
You are clearly not familiar with the Ivy-league MBAs' legendary record in the area of improvement of long-term profitability of any activity they are involved in. Exorbitant wages are a key component of their "magic" and an essential element in the strategy of maximizing the aforementioned profit.
What the article fails to mention is that this marvelous speed is achieved by the means of a very consumer-friendly "Fair Use Policy" of the ISP which sets the download maximum at 100 kilobytes per month, "for our customers' convenience".
It is an orgasmic convergence of RIAA and MPIAA-friendly corporate stance (no music and movie pilfering possible), glorious marketing opportunity ("We are THE fastest Internet Service Provider in the USA!") and great PR ("All the national statistics clearly show us delivering most outstanding speed in the Nation!"). And it is all possible only because of the great foresight of the CEO of the ISP to replace all the useless "engineers" and "technicians" with Ivy-league educated MBAs.
Behold, for you are seeing the awesome future of US Internet Industry!
Practical things like all the drills, tools, bits, farming equipment components, chemicals used in farming ... and fuel that drives all the farming equipment and transportation of the end product to the mega-stores, fuel that allows the suburbia-dwelling, 2 hour-commute, blissfully ignorant of their massive dependence on their cars consumers to get to the store to get that produce (and to work) and on and on and on...
Well, yes and no. From the very short-sighted, short-term perspective, yes, the scam went off peachy. But in the long-term you have one side whose manufacturing capability (and thus the ability to make real - as opposed to imaginary - products, combined with associated experienced labour force needed for this capability) ends up deteriorating to nearly nothing but who is awash in disposable, short-term-use plastic goods and consumables purchased on credit or in exchange for intangible vapour and the other who ends up with all that manufacturing capability, has robust internal market for its own goods, local support services, experienced labour force etc. but who also holds utterly worthless debt of the other. In addition to that, the entire "living standard" of the consuming side is predicated upon constant delivery of these disposable goods by the other, while the opposite is not true, delivery of make-believe paper "value" is not a necessary pre-condition to prosperity of the manufacturing side.
Needless to say the moment the "value" of the debt being held by the manufacturing side comes in question, the entire scheme collapses, but the shock of that collapse will be orders of magnitude greater for the side that is not self-sufficient and in whose entire "way of living" will implode. Is recovery possible? Of course, but the "reckoning" period will be worse the longer this transfer of manufacturing capability goes on, and even at this point it is already destined to be utterly brutal.
Not if the currency is worth shit and it takes a decade to rebuild all the wantonly squandered infrastructure. The US "rust belt" is pretty much completely dismantled as is the manufacturing capability of most major industrial companies. US imports nearly everything required for major production efforts, beginning with steel.
True, but we were discussing the implications of US currency collapse and not of "peak oil".
Now thats funny. All the combined strategic US reserves are capable of sustaining current US oil consumption for about two months and most of the oil available for extraction is depleted (the US production peaked in 1970s). The "new" "untapped" reserves are of uncertain size, are of known extreme difficulty of extraction, yield heavy crude and other low-grade varieties etc and so on. If anyth
This is a circular argument. Supply of basic consumer goods in the US is at this point nearly entirely based upon imports (a bulk of it from China, incidentally). So a collapse in the US currency's purchasing power would also lead to collapse of supply of goods and thus their shortage.
The world's economy is at these days pretty much a gigantic Ponzi scheme whereby "value" of currencies and goods is in its entirety based on make-believe wishful thinking. US currency has "value" only because enough people globally wish to pretend that it is so. So far that belief has been strained, but not broken. But if that, fundamentally irrational, belief were to be shaken sufficiently, the entire scheme collapses.
And this (not any "goods shortages") is what causes currency collapses, i.e wide-spread loss of belief in the "value" of the pieces of paper that purport to be "valuable".
An ability to manipulate people's opinions of "value" is at the core of the move from physical-resource-backed currencies to utterly fictional ones as governments realized that as long as the public can be made gullible enough, they will pretend that numbers in some bank computers, numbers created at a whim of bankers and politicians, actually represent "value".
Gold (and other natural resource) backed currencies had their own dire problems but at least they had some semi-subjective means of controlling the "value" (by constraining supply) of the currency in a way that lay outside of government whim.
Ultimately an ideal currency would have never-changing (but divisible) constant total circulation to which and from no one could artificially add or subtract.
Clearly not from the point of view of the slave, nor from any external objective point of view. Unless you can demonstrate that some small material considerations compensate for the lack of free will that is. I am looking forward to that argument!
As the point above demonstrates, I admit that assumed that the patently obvious does not need to be explained. Furthermore, a complete, in-detail step-by-step reasoning of all arguments would fill whole books, not mere off-hand Slashdot posts. Here I can afford but a most coarse of outlines.
From the initial point: the purpose of society. If one participates, the obvious and logical consequence of such a choice is that the society is to protect its members from harm. Otherwise there is very little point in being part to such a scheme, no? As to the specific definition, the rudimentary basics are "protection from unwanted physical harm" (i.e. you are welcome to bash yourself on the head with a hammer as long as you do not expect the society to come to your rescue afterwards). Etc and so on (and no I am not inclined to a 30-page dissertation on every point just because you asked).
You are kidding, right? Any harm to our body (as opposed to our psyche) is called "physical harm".
Knock yourself out. As long as you do not come running for communal help afterwards. A society can only prevent harm that is preventable, i.e. harm that you wish (or can be deduced wishing if you are incommunicado) to be staved off. If you are on the other hand into poking your own eyes out... who are we to stop you? The only thing a society can offer is an assistance in case of a suspected mental illness, but that can only work if you are willing to accept it. Forcing treatment is only justifiable if you are trying to harm others and that is to balance their rights against yours.
None of society's business.
Risky how?
That would depend if you knew about it. If you did, see the point about poking your own eyes out.
As long as you actually do not explode or assist in making a bomb, at which point you cross the line into violating rights of others.
Cognitive dissonance is a mental disorder. Not everyone suffer
Again, you offer nothing but vague generalities. I answered individual points as presented, however your specific refutations of my arguments are conspicuously absent.
Of course not. This however does not change the fact that science is the best tool for the job, by far. It is self-correcting (although sometimes slowly), verifiable and logical. None of the other "methods" come close.
No, it is not. While it is true that many questions humans pose cannot be answered in the binary fashion or even offered satisfactory scientific answers, all the basic ones which pertain to governance and society can be. Saying that "it is all gray" is a grand cop-out and oversimplification.
Since the "black and white" analogy is not universally applicable, it is of little wonder that logic cannot offer you help in making this flawed analogy unconditional.
Non sequitur. Consider however what is the alternative: societies based on idiocy, superstition, assorted woo-woos designed to elevate some group of their peddlers over others, rabid animalistic tendencies, etc and so on. Everything but science, logic and reason. I for one want nothing to do with such a "society" (although "a pack of rabid animals" would be a much more apt).
As I mentioned to others here, the starting point of the arguments is with the purpose of society (and thus its governance). Ostensibly the only rational reason to participate is if by participation one can be better off then otherwise. Ergo the societal rules have to be formulated so that all those who are to participate must be better off then otherwise. The rest of the logical argument naturally evolves from here.
How so?
"Rights" are a consequence of societal models employed. However if you start your chain of reasoning at the point I indicated, which is the only logical place to begin, one arrives on a very similar set of "rights" irrespective of models chosen, as long as logical arguments are followed. This is why many different governance models all have many commonalities revolving around the definition of these "rights".
Irrelevant. Such arguments cease to have any meaning as soon as the concept of "society" is introduced, which replaces entirely the context of a lone individual in the "wild".
Huh? You are confused. There is no "factual definition" as to "how far" because no such thing is possible. This however does not prevent one from arriving at logical conclusions as to rational actions that lead to an increase of the level of "protection" of some individuals from others (or themselves). What is important here, and what is keeping your confused, is the definition of "protection". And that definition can be arrived at logically, i.e. protection from physical harm ... as opposed from protection from some "moral panic".
True. Fortunately we have the axioms to work with, like "the purpose of society". The rest follows from there. And while true, such a system has no opinion on "how many angels one can fit at the tip of a pin" and the resulting "morality" and other medieval nonsense, I posit that it is the only logical way to move forward.
All of these are easily answered by answering the initial question: "what is the purpose of society". The answer (axiomatic arguably) is that its purpose is to make all of its members better off then if they were on their own. The rest follows. Slavery, unless consensual, is clearly contradictory. Gender equality (with provisions for maternity) is also an easy deduction. Religion on the other hand is just (usually mal
No, that is not a base of my chain of reasoning, the base and the starting point is the purpose of society (and consequently its governance). "malformed babies are bad" is a logical conclusion predicated upon the base assumption of the purpose of the society they get born into (i.e. for individuals in a society to be better off then being on their own) combined with knowledge of medical science. It is arguably many steps removed from the initial step.
That is a sweeping (and quite unsubstantiated) generalization. The objective assessment is that some humans are incapable of their own decision-making and thus depend on "authority".
That is a quite different kettle of fish. What I was discussing was a sane, rational society. Arguably a large proportion of humanity in general is not rational or even sane. Ergo it is quite logical that the only forms of governance that "work" for them are a-few-slices-short-of-a-loaf kind and the general consensus (and one which you seem to endorse) is that it is "too bad" for the rest of us who are not so close to sheep in their mental state.
But for any progress to be achieved one has to realize that in the long run that is a recipe for disaster. There is only so much technological progress a medieval mindset can handle - for proof see also under "Al Qaeda" and 9/11. Now imagine the same with nanotech.
For them to be illogical, it should be easy for you to demonstrate the errors. You have not done so. Instead, what you are stating is simply "I dislike your reasoning and so I am going to pretend it is illogical". A standard operating procedure of all those who prefer to employ the logical fallacy called "an appeal to authority" to replace logic itself in their "arguments".
Step one: stop making sex into a mysterious, shameful activity with negative religious connotations and thus make it possible for people of all ages to discuss it openly. By removing the shame element, combating the social peer pressure elements and creating easy access to information and counseling for children, one can easily detect non-consensual activity (i.e. they will be unafraid to complain). Two: if the kids insist on screwing, ensure that the results are managed: easily available contraception, education etc. Whatever you do, the religious woo-woo based medieval approach currently so much in vogue is the worst possible answer, having the dubious distinction of being ineffective, counter-productive, conductive to authoritarian abuse (which in fact its the reason why authoritarians of all stripes love it) and wholly illogical.
The logical purpose of a society is for all of its members to be better off as compared to them not participating. Subsequently it is society's business that individuals are given the best possible start in it, this includes protection from preventable diseases, genetic disorders included. You porking your sister is none of my business, until she gets pregnant and has a severely damaged child on the way. If we allow that, we fail the primary logical reason for the formation of a society.
Due to the way our genes propagate, the likelihood of genetic errors (normally corrected by DNA that took a slightly different evolutionary path) increases rapidly with decreasing genetic distance. Having said so, it is not absolutely certain that an offspring of siblings has to be damaged, only that it is very likely. Thus the correct procedure would be to test the embryo in early stages of development to determine if any damage is present. Decisions to be made based on the outcome of the tests.
Well, the truth sometimes hurts. If one cannot logically explain himself/herself, one has no business being an "opponent" in any logical discussions, be it with myself or anybody else. I guess you could call it "poisoning of the well" from the point of view of peddlers of all kinds of illogical woo-woo.
Which is at the root of pretty much all societal problems, in pretty much all cultures.
Yes, however science is, by far, best equipped to offer reliable answers to complex mysteries of our environment. Thus employing any other tool (which in practice means all kinds of insane woo-woo of the hour) for this purpose is .. well ... illogical. And basing one's societal rules on some convoluted, patently false nonsense just because some group of wackos or other in "authority" likes it, is downright insane.
Yes, those would incidentally also be the very same "cultures" whose Grand Shaman bleeds his dick ceremonially every other full moon to keep the Big Bad Juu Juu away from stealing their souls and who sacrifice virgins by throwing them into a well to seal the Juu Juu "repellant" procedure...
Of course it does. It is just that you (and a lot of other people) really, really do not like the answers.
See above.
True, but then again aesthetics has no place in governance, does it now?
Non sequitur. Sexual conduct is a natural function of human bodies, sexuality is hard-wired into human brains by countless millions of years of evolution and subject to genetic and environmental variations and you nor the frothing-at-the-snout mob nor the power-hungry-lynch-mob-whipping-up-politicians nor the cracked-up religious zealots of the minute have any "moral" business in dictating who can lie together with whom.
The only concerns with sex are logical, i.e. dealing with incestuous activities which are likely to result in genetically damaged progeny and the issues of consent and age.
The rest is just another unreasoning, idiotic, rabid, woo-woo of the minute, the only purpose of which is for some individuals to control and persecute all the others.
Non sequitur. Freedom (depending on its definition) is a logical concept which can be analyzed logically, although it is unlikely that arithmetic is applicable in this case.
As I indicated, art has no meaning in governance and you, nor anyone else, has any business deciding what can or cannot be seen by others.
Bullshit. People intentionally discarded the answers offered by logic and reason because they did not like them, instead replacing them with arbitrary "authority", for it suited their various malicious intents much better. Following which they enforced this "authority" (usually by means rather violent) onto all who did not subscribe to it.
That is the reasoning of every dick-wad King, Emperor, Duke, Baron, Generalissimo, Glorious Leader and all smaller fish politicians, all casting themselves as our "protectors", and all we have to do is to defer to their "authority" to be "protected" against each other.
And while in practice it "works" for them, because majority of humanity are indeed thoughtless animals who abhor all reason and logic, it does not change the fact that the only sane rules by which to establish enlightened society are those very rules that are so contemptible to you: logic, reason science and the like.
Your argument falls apart because of wholly baseless assumptions. In fact the rule of both "majority" or "minority" are equally nonsensical. What matters is logic, reason and science. Two apples added to another two apples make four apples irrespective if the person adding them together is the King or the mud-covered peasant, the President or his would-be assassin, the Glorious Leader of One Party or a partisan of the Resistance in a forest, a media celebrity or a leper, a member of the vast self-righteous majority or a rag-clad member of the persecuted outcast minority.
And this is why you will find all the politicians always blather about "democracy" or "the will of the people": they abhor logic, knowing that it would deprive them of their power to manipulate the weak-minded masses in order so that perversions such as the rule of a "majority" or a "minority" can be put in place against all reason.
Now that is a mind-bender...
It has a distinction of being the most illogical, incoherent, self-contradictory shot at one of the oldest intellectual pursuits of man: to "justify" ones' own greed and desire for power over others.
While Marxism is quite demonstrably dysfunctional, at its core premise lie the notions that we are all responsible for the bulk of each other's success and that the disparities in talent and drive are, even at their extremes, nowhere near to the disparities in accumulation of wealth and power which the feudal and capitalist systems were constructed to purposefully allow (it is in fact their main function, to justify the very few to grab nearly all from the very many by creating an illusion of a popular increase in - usually endless-debt or trade-imbalance based - "standard of living", all behind superficially appealing but upon deeper analysis completely illogical assumptions). And so "socialism is not poverty / to get rich is glorious" idiocy is easily dispatched: in order to get "gloriously" rich one has to make sure that many, many others do not get "gloriously" rich - because if they do ... one is no longer "gloriously" rich, one becomes only an "average" individual. You can easily observe this from global statistical trends - accumulation of ever more global wealth in the hands of ever proportionately fewer people and the disparity between very very few "gloriously rich" and the rest of the global population was (and is) growing since its previous reset in the 1929 market crash, having accelerated massively with the fall of the USSR and the Chinese about-face. It has now exceeded the pre-1929 levels. If Capitalism had the effect of getting everyone to become wealthy, the "tide" (speaking of the other oft-repeated idiotic imagery on the subject) having "lifted all the boats", this trend would not be occurring, instead there would be global narrowing of the gap as the unwashed masses got richer too. Alas, it seems that luxury yachts are the only ones that go up, apparently the row-boat owners are to be encouraged to hold breath instead ...
Add to this the fact that China, India and many others simply cannot (its physically impossible) to achieve the levels of locust-like consumerism that the USA and EU boast (it would mean total destruction of environment and depletion of most of global natural resources) and you have a recipe for the next social disaster. Its just a matter of time before consumerism-based ideologies fail in a lot of places (they already are mightily wobbly - just take a look at the financial shape the USA is in) and are replaced by a rash of Marxism-like meritocracy-based corrections again, which will then be thoroughly corrupted by the same people who come up with things like Capitalism, which will cause those to fail, to be replaced with some new "glorious to get rich" scheme ... lather, rinse, repeat ad infinitum.
The reality is that Humanity is, when you get down to it, rather imbecilic and hopeless as a group.
I too believed this for a while, but the numbers actually do not support this assertion. Not only (the rather unscientific) personal experience in places like Slashdot does not bear that out (just look at the c6gunner-type fellows here - with whom I had the "pleasure" of arguing before - and all of their cheerers-on) but the actual electoral numbers indicate very close races between Republicans, who these days pretty much all subscribe to the In-Your-Face-And-Up-Yours-Belligerent-Jerk Imperial Doctrine and the "Blue Dog" and other assorted establishment-entrenched DC cocktail-circuit Democrats, whose vast majority subscribe to the PR-Friendly-but-Just-As-Deadly-And-More-Insidious Imperial Doctrine. You keep voting these clowns in every time, goaded on by the Star Power of the latest Presidential Celebrity - "Hey did you see his bod!? Rawr! ... What connections?! You are like-soo-uncool, he will be like-totally-Change! Don't you even try to speak bad about him cause he is like a Movie Star! And did you see his bod!?" - and the numbers are oscillating back-and-forth very close to 50/50% nationally between these two Circuses.
Also, the inane "support our troops" (incidentally very close to the slogans used to get people to send warm clothing to Werhmacht when the Operation Barbarossa unexpectedly ground to a halt mid-winter) mentality permeates pretty much the whole US society. This alone is a sure-fire hallmark of successfully brainwashed citizenry of an Empire. Then there is the American Exceptionalism, the Manifest Destiny, the idea that the US is somehow "forced" to "bring American values" to the unwashed global masses, be it via Hollywood or, failing that, at a tip of an M-16 rifle. And on and on and on...
That is another mis-conception. Most of the profiteers are no longer merely USA-centric, they are far beyond that. All those "market liberalization" and "globalization" efforts that started in the 80s did pay off for them. They are pan-national now. Even the largest US military contractor's (Halliburton/KBR) head-quarters are now in Dubai. The jet-set does not go through the DHS air-port check-points and trifles like national borders are long past their caring. The money is spread globally and far past the reach of laws of any particular country. And their slice of wealth pie keeps growing and that of the rest of the 6 billion of us shrinking.
Wishful thinking. Until the failure mode actually occurs and food riots start, vast majority of the denizens of USA will not, I repeat NOT, be pulled away from their latest episode of Idol or Dancing With the Stars! You seem to forget that people who actually even bother to show up voting in the USA constitute only 61% or so of the population. The rest doesn't even bother.
Now that's funny. Those fractious made-to-media-mogul-order "movements'" only purpose is to distract attention from what is actually going on at the power centres of your country.
This is somewhat of a cop out. If true, all Slashdot conversations could be reduced to "you have no idea of Our Great Mysterious Cosmic Unknowable Infrastructure, even if I mention some bit of it explicitly, and you actually refer only to those because .... because .... its just Too Cosmic ... and Too Unknowable! Too Mysterious For You too! Why, it is so Mysterious and Unknowable that I myself have no clue what's what! Ha! Gotcha! So there!"
LOL. Enough to know not to trust the vendor fanfare about "fault-tolerant" back-planes as far as I can throw it, anyhow. Too many fried blade backplanes locking all blades despite being supposedly "fault tolerant". Same goes for "fault-tolerant" SANs which nuke all data on their disks when one of the supposedly "redundant" controllers or buses goes kaboom, RAID arrays that lose all their crap when the one of the "redundant" RAID5+1 controllers goes to meet its maker, etc and so on. But it all looks sooo seriously cool on the glossy brochures! All those colourful diagrams!
Oh dear, next I am gonna hear that you went away from Terminal Services into one of those insane Dell / Citrix blade-based individual Virtual Desktop environments ... if so, I can only admire your gluttony for punishment via convoluted-complexity-for-complexity's-sake. But then again, its your own personal Hell to run. If what I suspect is true, its no wonder that you sing praises of VMotion, it quite fits into that mess, in a sad kind of way.
Thanks for the offer but I am looking very closely into retirement these days and the only reason I am not posting this from a boat is that I can't seem to shake the clients I still have off. Something about the track record...
No, I simply went from saying it was never needed to pointing out how your perceived "need" is actually a result of shortcomings of the design you were hinting at.
Which are running on hosts apparently designed to sometimes fail in packs of 16 ...
No, again, I simply pointed out that your perceived need for a VMotion-based "solution" is in fact the result of poor overall design, design which you were hinting at yourself.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with who is "smarter", but it has everything to do with robust designs of fault-tolerant systems. If you are truly going to go full-tilt fault-tolerant, it is a very difficult undertaking to accomplish, but irrespective of your choices along the way the end result of any good design is inevitably lack of any need for superfluous hacks like VMotion to be part of the scenario. Sure you can use it, like people also can create software out of a spaghetti of numerically labelled branching instructions ... but it does not make me "smarter" then everyone else to point out that doing so would be a rather dumb idea in the long run. It is simply a logical fact.
Yet you appear to take such obvious truths as a personal attack and so you seek to counter-attack with ever increasing ferocity every time you feel you need to defend your choices, which of course soon leads you to such emotionally-motivated, rash outbursts as the ones above, seeking to so desperately to prove yourself beyond reproach that in the end it has the opposite effect of creating an impression of rather dubious competence and woefully inadequate fault-tolerance of the designs you describe. Which in turn prompts me to levity at your expense...
Which of course can be achieved by taking offline and upgrading individual SANs in the redundant storage cluster and then re-syncing them back. I assume you are using redundant SAN arrays, having been on this self-professed bleeding edge of hyper-super-critical everything.
LOL. Some mission critical setup you got there! All this pontificating ... and then you have a massive single-point failure spot like a chassis holding 16 hosts! It just figures. All shiny V-motion-this and V-motion-that toys and no design forethought whatsoever.
You business and businesses like it constitute a tiny fraction of all businesses out there. And from what you described you are also a typical example of "commerce-based" ideology of simply throwing more and more hardware resources and money at the problem, in ever more convoluted contortions, so that your poorly fit, awfully inadequate OS and application combinations can be made to creek and wobble on hordes of VMs and armies of ill-fitting hosts to some sort of state of illusion of semi-reliability.
Nice try, but truly robust systems like Google do not use virtualization in a way even remotely similar to yours, instead using custom close-to-the-OS cluster configurations written from the ground up for this purpose. They are in fact the very anathema of what you are doing.
Oh there is no doubt that there is market for all that nonsense, like there is also robust market for penis extensions, but this alone does not in any way have any bearing on the point I was making. VMotion is a solution looking for a problem precisely because if you do truly need VMotion, it is a sure fire indicator of you having screwed the pooch royally when it came to overall design of your fault tolerant systems.
VMotion and Storage VMotion are needed in a well designed setup like a pair of boils on one's buttocks. VMotion, and particularly automated performance based VMotion encourage throwing lazilly and incoherently mis-matched VMs at bunches of inadequate hosts only to see the VMs hopping about the hosts like a bunch of deranged rabbits instead of having them stay put in a well estimated and adequate hosts. All Storage VMotion does is to encourage lazy, resource consuming activities like shuffling contents of multi-terabyte arrays back and forth for no good reason whatsoever, while at the same time hiding serious shortcomings in storage and host points of failure.
Actually, this is typical US-centric ignorance showing, Taliban and Al Qaeda are both derivatives of Wahhabi Sunni Arabic Islam sect, while Iranians are not only Shiites but also Persian, not Arabs. Their language is Farsi, not Arabic. Taliban and Bin Laden were always at war with Iran, they consider Shiites to be "apostates". It is one of the reasons the US chose Saddam as its cat's-paw to attack Iran, he was (at least nominally) a Sunni and held deep contempt of all things Shiite, Iran in particular. Curiously, Saddam and Bin Laden were also at odds, mainly because Bin Laden saw Saddam's Iraq in the way of re-creating his utopian Caliphate, with the Caliph restored to Baghdad in its centre. Needles to say pretty much secular and socialist Saddam would not be welcome in the epicentre of the zealot paradise and Bin Laden had fatwas issued calling for Saddam's head to roll (which makes Dick Cheney's idiotic claims of Saddam - Al Qaeda cooperation truly comical).
As I pointed out in another post, should Bin Laden not take credit, some other wacko (and most likely several of them at once) would. Bin Laden's main claim to fame is that the US chose him to be the "Celebrity Evildoer #1" single-handedly responsible for all evils globally, past, present and future. Needless to say this instantly gave him far greater credibility then all the others combined.
It was in the interest of every radical loon to claim that he, and only he, was the "mastermind" of the most famous and successful terrorist foreign strike on the US soil. The instant ego expansion possibilities were just endless on this one for the Jihadists.
Actually, no, it is not great. We do not want you to be the "bad guy". In fact we'd rather that the US came to its senses and started to act like its actions were based on the great principles and traditions it always boasts about being at its core. The world would be a much better place for it than with the US as a hypocritical, back-stabbing, duplicitous, greedy, self-centred, arrogant bully it is acting like now.
Well, therein lies the rub. Some US presidents were explicitly encouraging bona-fide war crimes and their underlings did follow the instructions merrily. The current "wisdom" of the US power elites however seems to be that they are wholly innocent of any actual doings and that it is the underlings who are entirely responsible, see also under: Abu Grahib. So how much actual culpability belongs to Bin Laden? It is precisely such duplicity and double-standards the US is so fond of, which compromise any attempt at maintaining any sort of credibility when asking for others to be handed over on pretty much the same basis.
More self-serving double standards. If Bin Laden is fully culpable, as you suggest, so is G. W. Bush and pretty much all of his staff, based on the very same principle. If Taliban were to hand over Bin Laden today, I assume the US would send GW to Hague om the next plane, surely?
Oh yea, I forgot to link to this dude, the main recipient of US funds via Pakistan
From there: He is currently wanted by the United States for participating in terrorist actions with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and on 19 February 2003, the United States Department of State designated him as a "Specially Designated Global International Terrorist".[2].
Oh but the truth must hurt!
All of your scenarios make an implicit (and incorrect) assumption that all (or even most) companies deploying large VMWare setups expect their production servers to run 24/7. Vast majority of businesses operate 9-5 (or similar) hours and have no such requirement. And so in all of the cases you described the standard procedure is simply to shut down the VMs on a host in question and then simply restart them after upgrade or on another host. Then there is of course the fact that Windows VMs need to be regularly rebooted for various reasons, such as Microsoft updates, thus offering a lot of opportunities to perform scheduled host modifications.
VMotion is only useful in 24/7 operations where server downtime for scheduled maintenance is wholly unacceptable (and thus guest VMs cannot be Windows OS based ... or must be clustered and what not - which of course defeats the need for VMotion). There are very few such scenarios in real life, although a lot of corporate IT types like to pretend otherwise, I guess it somehow bolsters their egos or something, I not sure why, really. This and other kinds of what can only be described as "computer science masturbation" seems to be a very popular sport in over-funded IT shops.