Even if any of the/new/ laws covered anti-trust (I doubt it; they're mostly aimed at out-and-out cookin' of the books, if memory serves), they can't criminalize actions occurring/before/ the laws were passed.
Yup. He's smart enough to, say, hire a firm to manage his investments, and stipulate a maximum percentage of assets that can be in any one company. Keeping all his assets in one company would be incredibly stupid...
Innovation? It's all fine and good, but if the execution is lousy, or the design isn't fun...
Take 4X games, for instance. Much of what they do isn't terribly innovative -- balancing different needs of a state has been around since before the game "Hammurabi" appeared in "David Ahl's 100 BASIC Computer Games". Huge unit lists, spell lists, tech trees, upgradable units... those aren't innovative, with many of them going WAY back. However, it can be still pretty damn fun, if done well. I'll happily take "Dominions" over, say, something "innovative" like how "Seventh Legion" was -- adding cards to an RTS game may be an innovation, but anything where a side may randomly receive an "Armageddon" card that instantly obliterates everybody else's units strikes me as a remarkably idiotic design.
"Interstate 76" wasn't innovative, either -- the "heavily armed cars" theme featured in "Car Wars" and later the computer version "Autoduel" by SJG. However, the deliberately cheesy 70's atmosphere was done exceptionally well, and the actual execution was quite good.
Innovative != good. Trying to fly off a cliff with a set of mechanical wings was probably innovative at one point...
Take a look at Usenet, e.g. comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic. For B&W, there was a brief flare of interest... and then the posts died when people realized that while it might be cool, and the ideas were interesting, the game itself wasn't much of a game.
Having played _Syndicate Wars_, I'd have to say that the designer was on crack, given the absurdity of it all -- missions requiring unrealistically exquisite timing, missions requiring save/reload to figure out where the "spotter with satellite rain" is, lack of in-game save, enemies that teleport in with obvious triggers...
Something actually/fun/, like _Combat Mission_ or _Dominions_ outlasts Molyneaux games by far. Hell, people are still calling for a sequel to _Master of Magic_, and praising _Master of Orion_. The same paeans do not generally go out to Molyneaux, and that's because "nifty ideas" + "cool gimmicks" + "idiotic decisions like forcing people to play the tutorial every time" + "incredibly poor relations with customers" != "good game", while developers who realize that they're not $deity's gift to gaming actually talk to their customers and find out what they want.
Judging from the IRS's inactivity on this, I would suspect that they vehemently disagree with you.
Keep in mind that MSFT does face quite a few potential large-magnitude cash-draining expenses, such as the very large number of options floating around that will cost them when the options are exercised. MSFT, INTC and others are extremely opposed to any "count options as expenses when issued" rule because of the sheer amount they give, and the impact this would have on their reported net income, so it's not exactly a small amount.
You miss the point. The sole purpose of the money is to advertise to voters to get votes -- there are pretty strict limits, for instance, on gifts given to the politician instead of the politician's re-election campaign, so personal bribery is not an option for those who do not relish joining Trafficant in jail. If the voters actually were to care about issues, and to take things a bit more seriously, instead of deciding on the basis of 30-second spots, then the advertising dollars would make a hell of a lot less.
Er, there were certainly others, at least in the DOS days. Hell, there was even a DOS clone back then, called DR-DOS (DR = Digital Research; if memory serves, it was later bought by Novell, then by Caldera). There were other multitasking environments back then, such as Desqview and GEM Windows. There was even an IBM-Microsoft partnership -- recall OS/2? Of course, that was before MSFT basically stabbed IBM in the back...
But as for developing a/new/ system -- interoperability would be critical.
(1) Nobody wants to migrate their entire application base, especially if it's impossible because the devs won't port it because the market is too small (Catch-22 here).
(2) Nobody wants to lose access to their documents or ability to exchange files with others, when the porting fails and nobody successfully, completely re-implements the different formats.
If you can't interoperate with the dominant software (e.g. Microsoft Office and its document formats, WordPerfect w/n the legal domain) you'll have serious problems spreading.
(1) Microsoft has, at the Redmond campus alone, over 30K employees if memory serves. They are paid sufficiently well to generate taxes for the town, state, and country. They move, others lose.
(2) Microsoft has considerable assets in the area, such as property which the city could tax if it chooses (I don't recall if Redmond does). If such a major employer leaves, that might also affect property values...
(3) Take a look at Yahoo's pages on MSFT finances. Hmmm. I don't know about your math skills, but to mine, $718M (income tax expense for the quarter ending 30-June) is a hell of a lot bigger than the 0 you're claiming -- and there's no such thing as a negative income tax in the long run unless you're an individual so poor that you're paying squat and getting the Earned Income Tax Credit, in which case you're getting a form of welfare c/o Congress.
I don't know about the others, but it's rather common for SuSE to have to release a patch really soon after a distribution release. Perhaps they aren't doing an OpenBSD-style audit when they do package integration...
There are already multiple insecurity fixes for the not-exactly-dusty SuSE 8.1 out, for what it's worth.
There are some issues which just cannot be negotiated, and which have absolutely nothing to do with material conditions or welfare. There is no middle ground, for instance, between those who advocate a secular constitutional republic and those who prefer government by strict interpretation of implementation of Sharia law and Wahhabiist principles, because these two outlooks are completely incompatible... and I would suggest that the bin Laden family wealth provides an obvious counterexample to any hypothesized moderating influence of prosperity. Numerous of the Sept. 11 hijackers received educations at respectable institutions in the West, and none were of the poor, downtrodden, oppressed variety that al-Jazeera likes to play over and over. Non-rational ideologies (in contrast to, say, pragmatism) can make for inevitable conflict, because they are often incompatible.
Such irrational leaders even become leaders of states. Mullah Omar appeared to have been firmly convinced that Allah would bail him out, for instance, and drive out the infidel. The government of North Korea seems to still believe in Stalinism. Many of the Middle Eastern states are knowingly playing with fire by funding schools of thought more radical than their governments...
War and conflict are inevitable, given a sufficiently large and contentious population. The relevant question is not how to bring about world peace -- you cannot -- but how you deal with the wars that will arise. Then, it becomes very useful to have the best military technology and training, so you can deal with it on your on terms and not via, say, wasteful WWI-style charges.
(1) Only works when everybody with sufficient access in the entire WMD system is rational. This is increasingly questionable; for an example, consider North Korea, which appears to prefer being able to hit the continental United States with a nuclear weapon (they have missiles with sufficient range, although accuracy has been questioned) to, say, being able to feed their people.
(2) Ignores the possibilities of accidental launches and launch systems which would have unclear authorship. For instance, it may be unclear who just launched an ICBM if it came from the middle of an ocean...
It's a bit tangential, but here's a bit on how the Northern Alliance and Taliban had difficulty conceiving of US military capabilities (unless certain GIs were pulling the leg of _Frontline_'s interviewer). Some may find it amusing or disturbing...
U.S. Special Forces ODA 595
ODA 595 fought with warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum in northern
Afghanistan.
read the interview [blank.gif]
[blank.gif]
You said earlier that Dostum thought you had a death ray. What can you
tell me about that?
Mark (Capt.):
Due to the altitude that the aircraft was flying with the laser-guided
munitions, when it dropped its ordnance the bomb was falling for a
minute and half to two minutes. If you timed it just right, as the
laser target designator is engaging and [targeting the] enemy
position, you let your Northern Alliance commander take a look through
the laser target designator. He sees it going, but he doesn't see the
bombs fly into the target. He hears that chirping noise from the laser
target designator and then the enemy position explodes. They believe
that we have the death ray, and this was a myth that we were willing
to perpetuate. Every one of us on our rifles carried a smaller laser.
We let the Northern Alliance guys look through our night vision
goggles.... I think Will has summed it up best. This whole situation
is like the Flintstones meet the Jetsons. And those guys could not
fathom that we have some sort of aiming device that would allow us to
hit a target at night on the first round.
Will (Sgt.):
I think something that's key in all this is that both Northern
Alliance and enemy communications were, for the most part, CB radios.
They would be arguing with each other in the heat of battle. The
Taliban would be saying, "nanny, nanny, boo, boo" and the Northern
Alliance would be saying, "hey, we're coming to get you." They would
also tell the Taliban about this death ray. At Kunduz, we were
negotiating back and forth to try to get these guys to surrender. They
were saying, "We'll surrender, we'll march into your camp, but we want
to keep our guns." Dostum finally said, "Put your guns down, take your
jackets off, march in here or we're turning the Americans onto you
with the death ray." Instantly you could see the guys bend over. They
put their guns down, they took their cloaks off and they started
marching in, in single file right up into the middle of our perimeter,
because they knew that it was over if that death ray was coming out.
Mark Capt.:
This was also perpetuated by the presence of the AC 130 Spectra
gunship. They had a female fire support officer that was on the radio.
Dostum heard her voice and he brought Mohammed Fazal, who's the former
Taliban chief of staff. He's trying to delay this surrender in Kunduz
while his forces are attempting to recapture Mazar-e-Sharif. Dostum
brings Fazal near the radio so that he can hear this female voice.
Fazal hears her voice as it's being explained to him, through the
translators, that we have the angel of death overhead, from the AC 130
gunship. Dostum explains to him that we have the angel of death
overhead and that we possess the death ray. If they don't surrender
now all of their troops will burn in hell. Fazal jumped on the radio
and his men were surrendering within minutes....
I wonder how well-informed the foot soldiers of the likely US enemies are, and whether an invisible missile/building-destroying laser would have a serious morale impact...
Offhand, I don't think there's any rational government in the world which would pass up military research that would reduce their own probable casualties, unless it's of such a nature that it violates their value system (for instance, using thermonuclear weapons to annihilate Afghanistan instead of risking troops would not have gone over well in the United States, I suspect, even though it would have reduced US casualties).
The age of the bonzai charge and bravado over brains is long gone.
I don't think a G.I. is going to be toting around a ship-based anti-missile laser anymore, even if he's taken more 'roids than a Major League Baseball hitter.
The simplest way to invite war is to not be prepared for it -- either in terms of actual power, or psychological capability.
One of the reasons why the Great Powers were able to roundly abuse other nations is that they/had/ the power. Militarily weak nations have, historically, been treated as such...
And when nations, in the name of international law and peace, turn the other cheek to an aggressor when those same laws are abused, the results are generally obvious -- the aggression continues. Condemnations have never practically stopped a massacre, nor have battalions been routed by a tongue-lashing, while negotiations fail when there is genuinely nothing to discuss because there is nothing of perceived satisfactory mutual benefit regarding an issue.
(*) Do you really think they'll stop firing missiles? Most countries likely to antagonize somebody with effective, field-capable lasers (large powers) are probably bothering somebody likely to remain without them (especially in the case of the US, whose forces are often deployed into an existing conflict)... so missiles won't be obsolete.
(*) There are conflicts today where old weapons -- even as old as spears and machetes -- are side-by-side with moderately old weapons (AK-47s, for instance... and the explosive grenade goes back at least to the late 1700's, as primitive explosive-charges were thrown to detonate the powder magazines in ships... and the general concept of the gunpowder firearm goes back to the late Middle Ages; RPG-7s) and where more modern weapon systems (vehicles with reactive armor, laser-guided missiles, Phalanx CIWS) are practically non-existent.
Hell, have you ever seen a Palestinian fire an automatic rifle -- perhaps a Kalashnikov or a captured Galil or M16 -- at an Israeli Merkava, when the latter is buttoned up? It's futile, as the bullets have neglible chance of finding a spot penetrable by the small rounds (/maybe/ the vision block), but that doesn't mean that they've ditched their rifles and are now swimming in RPGs.
Weapons cost time (training), money (lots), contacts (need to find somebody who'll sell... for an example of a client with problems, I doubt that the radical Islamists can readily buy modern weapon systems from the US, Russia, China, or Israeli as they are all involved in ongoing conflicts with their brethren... well, maybe they can go to France. *shrug*)
The last major weapon system concept to be completely obsoleted was probably the battleship, which yielded to the aircraft carrier battlegroup, and even now there are still gun-armed ships meant for surface engagements, I'm sure.
That *fwoosh* was the sound of his point completely going over your head. Note that he referred to intelligence programs...
Prior to Sept. 11, the intelligence agencies were remarkably unpopular with numerous politicians, in particular the more left-leaning Democrats who had some influence due to eight years of administrative control under Pres. Clinton. Human intelligence, in particular, suffered -- hell, the attitude was that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was time to reap the "peace dividend" and focus on domestic issues rather than security. The Clinton administration also proved remarkably optimistic in foreign policy, for the most part giving only the occasional token Tomahawk to bin Laden, pretending that the Palestinians and Israelis actually had a meaningful peace process (bringing back Arafat from exile in Tunis, in the process), pretending that the IRA/Sinn Fein and the UK had peace (the IRA refuses to disarm, and Trimble threatened to withdraw; basically the whole shebang there is in danger), and so forth.
Unfortunately, "optimism" and "security" aren't compatible, unless you include the word "imbecile". The FAA, for instance, for quite some time optimistically let people bring in 3" knives past "security", and if you forgot to bring one, the airlines often had metal steak knives on board just in case. Hmmm. The same attitude (screw security, it's not going to happen) showed itself in the incredibly slow takeup of bomb-detection machines (because false positives from nitrogen-heavy products would cause delays and weaken the bottom line), unsecured cockpits, flight attendants instructed not to resist...
Old versions are abandoned in Linux, too. Does Red Hat still put out patches for RH-3.0.3? Does SuSE support version 6.0 anymore? The individual package upgrades aren't free, as they're not offered anymore. So again, you need to upgrade your distribution if you want recent security fixes, et al...
Don't expect lifetime support for software. Period.
When the Bush administration, probably under the direction of Rove, said "to hell with our free-trade stance, let's go protectionist on steel", their were very, very vocal complaints from across the Atlantic. So yes, Europe seems to mind.
Er, what do you think ended the Second World War, if it wasn't overwhelming force? I'd say that it's a cardinal example of how force/did/ solve a problem far more effectively than the pre-war diplomacy did.
Well, part of it is that belonging to a "race" isn't a choice. If your ancestors all were melanin-challenged folks from Sweden, for instance, you can't exactly change that. In addition, since it determines nothing more than perhaps some genetic traits common to an ethnic group, it's not going to give/rational/ choice for homicide. There's no realistic pragmatic reason why a killer should target on the basis of melanin content.
It's more "understandable" if, say, a drug dealer offs his competition (business...) or tries to kill cops pursuing him (because he doesn't want to be arrested, and isn't thinking too hard about what happens if he DOES hit one, but gets busted anyway). "Lone survivor of alien/undead invasion" games like Doom and Quake also provide some understanding for rampant violence -- you're fighting for your life. None of these motives even comes close to supporting discrimination on the basis of melanin.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if any of the /new/ laws covered anti-trust (I doubt it; they're mostly aimed at out-and-out cookin' of the books, if memory serves), they can't criminalize actions occurring /before/ the laws were passed.
1- Buffer overruns are implementation-specific, not API-specific. The API itself wouldn't have the security hole, so that's no excuse.
2- Which it has no particular interest in doing.
Yup. He's smart enough to, say, hire a firm to manage his investments, and stipulate a maximum percentage of assets that can be in any one company. Keeping all his assets in one company would be incredibly stupid...
Innovation? It's all fine and good, but if the execution is lousy, or the design isn't fun...
Take 4X games, for instance. Much of what they do isn't terribly innovative -- balancing different needs of a state has been around since before the game "Hammurabi" appeared in "David Ahl's 100 BASIC Computer Games". Huge unit lists, spell lists, tech trees, upgradable units... those aren't innovative, with many of them going WAY back. However, it can be still pretty damn fun, if done well. I'll happily take "Dominions" over, say, something "innovative" like how "Seventh Legion" was -- adding cards to an RTS game may be an innovation, but anything where a side may randomly receive an "Armageddon" card that instantly obliterates everybody else's units strikes me as a remarkably idiotic design.
"Interstate 76" wasn't innovative, either -- the "heavily armed cars" theme featured in "Car Wars" and later the computer version "Autoduel" by SJG. However, the deliberately cheesy 70's atmosphere was done exceptionally well, and the actual execution was quite good.
Innovative != good. Trying to fly off a cliff with a set of mechanical wings was probably innovative at one point...
"Cool gameplay"? "Amazing"?
/fun/, like _Combat Mission_ or _Dominions_ outlasts Molyneaux games by far. Hell, people are still calling for a sequel to _Master of Magic_, and praising _Master of Orion_. The same paeans do not generally go out to Molyneaux, and that's because "nifty ideas" + "cool gimmicks" + "idiotic decisions like forcing people to play the tutorial every time" + "incredibly poor relations with customers" != "good game", while developers who realize that they're not $deity's gift to gaming actually talk to their customers and find out what they want.
Take a look at Usenet, e.g. comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic. For B&W, there was a brief flare of interest... and then the posts died when people realized that while it might be cool, and the ideas were interesting, the game itself wasn't much of a game.
Having played _Syndicate Wars_, I'd have to say that the designer was on crack, given the absurdity of it all -- missions requiring unrealistically exquisite timing, missions requiring save/reload to figure out where the "spotter with satellite rain" is, lack of in-game save, enemies that teleport in with obvious triggers...
Something actually
Judging from the IRS's inactivity on this, I would suspect that they vehemently disagree with you.
Keep in mind that MSFT does face quite a few potential large-magnitude cash-draining expenses, such as the very large number of options floating around that will cost them when the options are exercised. MSFT, INTC and others are extremely opposed to any "count options as expenses when issued" rule because of the sheer amount they give, and the impact this would have on their reported net income, so it's not exactly a small amount.
You miss the point. The sole purpose of the money is to advertise to voters to get votes -- there are pretty strict limits, for instance, on gifts given to the politician instead of the politician's re-election campaign, so personal bribery is not an option for those who do not relish joining Trafficant in jail. If the voters actually were to care about issues, and to take things a bit more seriously, instead of deciding on the basis of 30-second spots, then the advertising dollars would make a hell of a lot less.
Er, there were certainly others, at least in the DOS days. Hell, there was even a DOS clone back then, called DR-DOS (DR = Digital Research; if memory serves, it was later bought by Novell, then by Caldera). There were other multitasking environments back then, such as Desqview and GEM Windows. There was even an IBM-Microsoft partnership -- recall OS/2? Of course, that was before MSFT basically stabbed IBM in the back...
/new/ system -- interoperability would be critical.
But as for developing a
(1) Nobody wants to migrate their entire application base, especially if it's impossible because the devs won't port it because the market is too small (Catch-22 here).
(2) Nobody wants to lose access to their documents or ability to exchange files with others, when the porting fails and nobody successfully, completely re-implements the different formats.
If you can't interoperate with the dominant software (e.g. Microsoft Office and its document formats, WordPerfect w/n the legal domain) you'll have serious problems spreading.
You're full of it.
(1) Microsoft has, at the Redmond campus alone, over 30K employees if memory serves. They are paid sufficiently well to generate taxes for the town, state, and country. They move, others lose.
(2) Microsoft has considerable assets in the area, such as property which the city could tax if it chooses (I don't recall if Redmond does). If such a major employer leaves, that might also affect property values...
(3) Take a look at Yahoo's pages on MSFT finances. Hmmm. I don't know about your math skills, but to mine, $718M (income tax expense for the quarter ending 30-June) is a hell of a lot bigger than the 0 you're claiming -- and there's no such thing as a negative income tax in the long run unless you're an individual so poor that you're paying squat and getting the Earned Income Tax Credit, in which case you're getting a form of welfare c/o Congress.
"Help" does not mean "is the only one responsible for" or even "is the primary factor in".
Starting the Reformation was a pretty mean trick... ;)
I don't know about the others, but it's rather common for SuSE to have to release a patch really soon after a distribution release. Perhaps they aren't doing an OpenBSD-style audit when they do package integration...
There are already multiple insecurity fixes for the not-exactly-dusty SuSE 8.1 out, for what it's worth.
There are some issues which just cannot be negotiated, and which have absolutely nothing to do with material conditions or welfare. There is no middle ground, for instance, between those who advocate a secular constitutional republic and those who prefer government by strict interpretation of implementation of Sharia law and Wahhabiist principles, because these two outlooks are completely incompatible... and I would suggest that the bin Laden family wealth provides an obvious counterexample to any hypothesized moderating influence of prosperity. Numerous of the Sept. 11 hijackers received educations at respectable institutions in the West, and none were of the poor, downtrodden, oppressed variety that al-Jazeera likes to play over and over. Non-rational ideologies (in contrast to, say, pragmatism) can make for inevitable conflict, because they are often incompatible.
Such irrational leaders even become leaders of states. Mullah Omar appeared to have been firmly convinced that Allah would bail him out, for instance, and drive out the infidel. The government of North Korea seems to still believe in Stalinism. Many of the Middle Eastern states are knowingly playing with fire by funding schools of thought more radical than their governments...
War and conflict are inevitable, given a sufficiently large and contentious population. The relevant question is not how to bring about world peace -- you cannot -- but how you deal with the wars that will arise. Then, it becomes very useful to have the best military technology and training, so you can deal with it on your on terms and not via, say, wasteful WWI-style charges.
Retalliation and deterrence theory
(1) Only works when everybody with sufficient access in the entire WMD system is rational. This is increasingly questionable; for an example, consider North Korea, which appears to prefer being able to hit the continental United States with a nuclear weapon (they have missiles with sufficient range, although accuracy has been questioned) to, say, being able to feed their people.
(2) Ignores the possibilities of accidental launches and launch systems which would have unclear authorship. For instance, it may be unclear who just launched an ICBM if it came from the middle of an ocean...
It's a bit tangential, but here's a bit on how the Northern Alliance and Taliban had difficulty conceiving of US military capabilities (unless certain GIs were pulling the leg of _Frontline_'s interviewer). Some may find it amusing or disturbing...
... I think Will has summed it up best. This whole situation
...
(from Frontline):
U.S. Special Forces ODA 595
ODA 595 fought with warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum in northern
Afghanistan.
read the interview [blank.gif]
[blank.gif]
You said earlier that Dostum thought you had a death ray. What can you
tell me about that?
Mark (Capt.):
Due to the altitude that the aircraft was flying with the laser-guided
munitions, when it dropped its ordnance the bomb was falling for a
minute and half to two minutes. If you timed it just right, as the
laser target designator is engaging and [targeting the] enemy
position, you let your Northern Alliance commander take a look through
the laser target designator. He sees it going, but he doesn't see the
bombs fly into the target. He hears that chirping noise from the laser
target designator and then the enemy position explodes. They believe
that we have the death ray, and this was a myth that we were willing
to perpetuate. Every one of us on our rifles carried a smaller laser.
We let the Northern Alliance guys look through our night vision
goggles.
is like the Flintstones meet the Jetsons. And those guys could not
fathom that we have some sort of aiming device that would allow us to
hit a target at night on the first round.
Will (Sgt.):
I think something that's key in all this is that both Northern
Alliance and enemy communications were, for the most part, CB radios.
They would be arguing with each other in the heat of battle. The
Taliban would be saying, "nanny, nanny, boo, boo" and the Northern
Alliance would be saying, "hey, we're coming to get you." They would
also tell the Taliban about this death ray. At Kunduz, we were
negotiating back and forth to try to get these guys to surrender. They
were saying, "We'll surrender, we'll march into your camp, but we want
to keep our guns." Dostum finally said, "Put your guns down, take your
jackets off, march in here or we're turning the Americans onto you
with the death ray." Instantly you could see the guys bend over. They
put their guns down, they took their cloaks off and they started
marching in, in single file right up into the middle of our perimeter,
because they knew that it was over if that death ray was coming out.
Mark Capt.:
This was also perpetuated by the presence of the AC 130 Spectra
gunship. They had a female fire support officer that was on the radio.
Dostum heard her voice and he brought Mohammed Fazal, who's the former
Taliban chief of staff. He's trying to delay this surrender in Kunduz
while his forces are attempting to recapture Mazar-e-Sharif. Dostum
brings Fazal near the radio so that he can hear this female voice.
Fazal hears her voice as it's being explained to him, through the
translators, that we have the angel of death overhead, from the AC 130
gunship. Dostum explains to him that we have the angel of death
overhead and that we possess the death ray. If they don't surrender
now all of their troops will burn in hell. Fazal jumped on the radio
and his men were surrendering within minutes.
I wonder how well-informed the foot soldiers of the likely US enemies are, and whether an invisible missile/building-destroying laser would have a serious morale impact...
Offhand, I don't think there's any rational government in the world which would pass up military research that would reduce their own probable casualties, unless it's of such a nature that it violates their value system (for instance, using thermonuclear weapons to annihilate Afghanistan instead of risking troops would not have gone over well in the United States, I suspect, even though it would have reduced US casualties).
The age of the bonzai charge and bravado over brains is long gone.
I don't think a G.I. is going to be toting around a ship-based anti-missile laser anymore, even if he's taken more 'roids than a Major League Baseball hitter.
The simplest way to invite war is to not be prepared for it -- either in terms of actual power, or psychological capability.
/had/ the power. Militarily weak nations have, historically, been treated as such...
One of the reasons why the Great Powers were able to roundly abuse other nations is that they
And when nations, in the name of international law and peace, turn the other cheek to an aggressor when those same laws are abused, the results are generally obvious -- the aggression continues. Condemnations have never practically stopped a massacre, nor have battalions been routed by a tongue-lashing, while negotiations fail when there is genuinely nothing to discuss because there is nothing of perceived satisfactory mutual benefit regarding an issue.
(*) Do you really think they'll stop firing missiles? Most countries likely to antagonize somebody with effective, field-capable lasers (large powers) are probably bothering somebody likely to remain without them (especially in the case of the US, whose forces are often deployed into an existing conflict)... so missiles won't be obsolete.
(*) There are conflicts today where old weapons -- even as old as spears and machetes -- are side-by-side with moderately old weapons (AK-47s, for instance... and the explosive grenade goes back at least to the late 1700's, as primitive explosive-charges were thrown to detonate the powder magazines in ships... and the general concept of the gunpowder firearm goes back to the late Middle Ages; RPG-7s) and where more modern weapon systems (vehicles with reactive armor, laser-guided missiles, Phalanx CIWS) are practically non-existent.
Hell, have you ever seen a Palestinian fire an automatic rifle -- perhaps a Kalashnikov or a captured Galil or M16 -- at an Israeli Merkava, when the latter is buttoned up? It's futile, as the bullets have neglible chance of finding a spot penetrable by the small rounds (/maybe/ the vision block), but that doesn't mean that they've ditched their rifles and are now swimming in RPGs.
Weapons cost time (training), money (lots), contacts (need to find somebody who'll sell... for an example of a client with problems, I doubt that the radical Islamists can readily buy modern weapon systems from the US, Russia, China, or Israeli as they are all involved in ongoing conflicts with their brethren... well, maybe they can go to France. *shrug*)
The last major weapon system concept to be completely obsoleted was probably the battleship, which yielded to the aircraft carrier battlegroup, and even now there are still gun-armed ships meant for surface engagements, I'm sure.
(*) Remember when Snopes debunked the "NASA Space Pen" nonsense"?
Heh. I seem to recall hearing that there was a discussion regarding one tank simulation about the lack of aircraft.
The designer justified his decision to omit them by pointing out that
(a) Air defense would likely be somebody else's job, not the tanker's, and
(b) If the above failed, and enemy aircraft could roam at will above you, you're so outmatched that it wouldn't be a very interesting simulation.
That *fwoosh* was the sound of his point completely going over your head. Note that he referred to intelligence programs...
Prior to Sept. 11, the intelligence agencies were remarkably unpopular with numerous politicians, in particular the more left-leaning Democrats who had some influence due to eight years of administrative control under Pres. Clinton. Human intelligence, in particular, suffered -- hell, the attitude was that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was time to reap the "peace dividend" and focus on domestic issues rather than security. The Clinton administration also proved remarkably optimistic in foreign policy, for the most part giving only the occasional token Tomahawk to bin Laden, pretending that the Palestinians and Israelis actually had a meaningful peace process (bringing back Arafat from exile in Tunis, in the process), pretending that the IRA/Sinn Fein and the UK had peace (the IRA refuses to disarm, and Trimble threatened to withdraw; basically the whole shebang there is in danger), and so forth.
Unfortunately, "optimism" and "security" aren't compatible, unless you include the word "imbecile". The FAA, for instance, for quite some time optimistically let people bring in 3" knives past "security", and if you forgot to bring one, the airlines often had metal steak knives on board just in case. Hmmm. The same attitude (screw security, it's not going to happen) showed itself in the incredibly slow takeup of bomb-detection machines (because false positives from nitrogen-heavy products would cause delays and weaken the bottom line), unsecured cockpits, flight attendants instructed not to resist...
Old versions are abandoned in Linux, too. Does Red Hat still put out patches for RH-3.0.3? Does SuSE support version 6.0 anymore? The individual package upgrades aren't free, as they're not offered anymore. So again, you need to upgrade your distribution if you want recent security fixes, et al...
Don't expect lifetime support for software. Period.
When the Bush administration, probably under the direction of Rove, said "to hell with our free-trade stance, let's go protectionist on steel", their were very, very vocal complaints from across the Atlantic. So yes, Europe seems to mind.
Er, what do you think ended the Second World War, if it wasn't overwhelming force? I'd say that it's a cardinal example of how force /did/ solve a problem far more effectively than the pre-war diplomacy did.
Well, part of it is that belonging to a "race" isn't a choice. If your ancestors all were melanin-challenged folks from Sweden, for instance, you can't exactly change that. In addition, since it determines nothing more than perhaps some genetic traits common to an ethnic group, it's not going to give /rational/ choice for homicide. There's no realistic pragmatic reason why a killer should target on the basis of melanin content.
It's more "understandable" if, say, a drug dealer offs his competition (business...) or tries to kill cops pursuing him (because he doesn't want to be arrested, and isn't thinking too hard about what happens if he DOES hit one, but gets busted anyway). "Lone survivor of alien/undead invasion" games like Doom and Quake also provide some understanding for rampant violence -- you're fighting for your life. None of these motives even comes close to supporting discrimination on the basis of melanin.