If all the rich were duped into contributing like that, much of the aid would simply end up in the hands of corrupt local officials, countless warlords, and numerous rebel armies...
Remember, seizing all the food aid in a region and starving your enemies, or in fact everybody but your direct supporters, makes a GREAT recruitment tactic. It's been done, is being done, and will be done. Ditto with pretty much every other form of assistance -- remember that the recipients often aren't exactly just going to repent and reform instantly no matter HOW much aid you give 'em.
I suspect that you are conflating zero-sum games with non-competitive games.
Technically, zero-sum applies a strict constraint to the eventual score. Games which include raw scores, such as Cribbage, arguably aren't strictly zero-sum because points are accumulated -- in a 121-point Cribbage game, the loser can quite plausibly have 110. In a tournament, the actual raw scores could matter for purposes of tie-breaking and such. The same technically holds for Scrabble and so forth, as well.
Poker without a 'bank', OTOH, is strictly zero sum, because winnings are purely money shifting hands; no new money is ever introduced or destroyed.
Huh? The initial weighting is usually random, but after that, training and output computation is generally purely deterministic. We're talking about simple, simulated neurons modelled via nonlinear functions (often sigmoids), after all -- not something complicated like massively parallel, asynchronous biological tissue with cycles, massive connectivity, and so forth.
You can even write down the overall behavior of an output node as a single equation of an inputs -- it just might not be that enlightening in terms of understanding WHY it chose those weights.
If you can find the right neurons, and the guy doesn't mind having a bunch of electrodes stuck through his skull and membranes into the appropriate regions of the brain... probably.
A neural net is simply a nonlinear function fitter, after all; it takes a vector of inputs and produces output(s), based on preselected, preferably at least locally differentiable nonlinear functions of weighted combinations of inputs -- with the weights being what's trained. If you have enough nodes in a couple of hidden layers, and useful inputs, AND enough training time, you can have enough degrees of freedom for the fitting to work well.
But you need to find the appropriate inputs, which since it's meant for conscious control, means you need to find neurons which can be consciously influenced. That's probably harder, much harder, in the CNS than for nerves that control voluntary muscle movements, because we *have* largely voluntary control over most of our muscles (excluding reflex arcs and so forth), and since the nerves that trigger muscle movements aren't hard to find, compared to individual neurons in the brain.
Agreed. It'd be a nice demo for a Linux-based PC retailer -- to show off a system already running some recent, well-known, resource hog of a Windows game, then switching to StarOffice or some other vaguely familiar-looking Office suite, then switching to something completely unfamiliar... followed by explaining that you don't need a Windows-based machine to run a rather large universe of software, and that Linux can indeed handle it. Then perhaps a potential customer could listen regarding technical benefits and such, once their interest has been seized.
Re:Microsoft can't do anything about free..
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 1
If you're a big enough customer, MSFT may be interested in hearing from you. They do get *inundated* with feature requests, and some get acted upon.
They're not clueless enough to ignore an impact on sales. Think they'd slam the door in the face of IS people from a big company, such as a PC distributor (especially!), a data center, or what-not? Their marketing department isn't paid to be deaf, and they're not developing software for software's sake; they want to make money selling it.
But you're SOL if you opt for a smaller company which then decides it wants to get out of the OS-vending business, or folds entirely. Switching vendors? Welcome to reinstall land; switching between even two RPM-based distros can be horribly painful because they won't use the same names (the names tracked by the dependency database) for the same packages, or put files in the same places, or include compatible libraries, or so forth... even mixing between SuSE and RHAT packages doesn't work that well.
Novell also produced NetWare, which may have been seen as a competitor to the MSFT OS de jour.
The others fit into key application areas, or rather areas they see as key -- browsers, and productivity tools. And in these areas, consumers may not see any great need for redundancy, or even diversity -- if your co-workers mostly shuffle around Word and PPT documents and macro-laden XL spreadsheets, it's going to be easier on you to use the same thing as long as file formats are in flux... Contrast this with, say, games, where having an MSFT-published (or even developed) game probably doesn't exclude others (most gamers would have quite a collection, I'd think, whereas few collect office suites).
They saw a huge potential cash cow, which would probably also help boost iterative sales of their operating system (I doubt, for instance, that MSFT Office2K runs on Windows for Workgroups 3.11 very well, if at all).
There are actually a great many less-mainstream software areas they don't touch yet, except perhaps by licensing -- anti-virus tools, mathematical software, hard-core desktop publishing (I wouldn't write even a journal paper in Microsoft Word, let alone a technical *book*, greatly preferring LaTeX), CAD...
Re:Microsoft can't do anything about free..
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 2
Companies should NOT have to count on hobbyists who have other priorities than helping THEM. A company looking at Linux as a potential platform has to view it from the point of view of gain to the company, not gain to the OS. They can ask for such things as support for hot-swappable components, or whatever, but they cannot demand or compel it. And if they do it in-house, with the source, they may end up having to maintain their entire own personalized distro, with all the complications that entails -- what happens when the distributor breaks backwards compatibility with a compiler or library upgrade, for instance? It's not their core business, and it shouldn't be.
This is important. Linux development can be community driven, but that may not be good enough for customers with specific needs that aren't currently focused on by said community.
It's much more tenable to go to a vendor who sees a fiscal interest in doing things like patching the kernel for certain hardware, or for testing Oracle installations, or other foo -- if the vendor will remain in business.
And this is probably the segment that this piece is aimed at -- corporate customers looking to power servers and such. Whether or not Linux remains isn't that relevant to MSFT except regarding its impact on it's market share.
The kernel may be more secure, perhaps. But are the applications, and the configurations as shipped by distributers?
A new user shouldn't have to start by disabling hordes of services enabled by default with little explanation... and shouldn't have to search Deja or post regarding securing a newly installed Linux box; such documents would be good included on disk and *on paper* in a manual, given the utter importance of the topic -- and the number of new installations that are quickly rooted by people who can't believe they've been portscanned and analyzed that quickly.
How many show up with a reasonable hosts.deny setup, even?
Judging from the firewalling HOWTOs, the kernel has good support for this sort of thing -- but how often is this readily enabled?
And vendors could organize support better -- for instance, can you order a CD of updated packages from any vendor (useful for modem users who DON'T want to have to download 100+ MB of updates. I'm not kidding -- there have been distro versions whose updates occupy the better part, or more, of a Zip disk)? Can you subscribe to e-mail updates regarding package upgrades?
It has its good points -- but there are areas where many distros fall short, when used by people for whom Linux is primarily a platform for other tasks, not the focus itself.
Peace can be enforced via superior firepower. There's a strong argument to be made that while the nuclear arms race increased the possible severity of a war (perhaps -- at least, once numbers and range started increasing a LOT), it severely decreased the probable severity (since most leaders -- especially of the few countries which could play that particular game -- weren't interested in being obliterated, even if that were mutual).
Likewise, preparing against any possible space-based offensive, and letting everybody know that we've acknowledged that possibility and are indeed taking it into account, reduces the chance that any fool would actually try. A police officer should normally draw and aim at an armed robber, and convince the robber to surrender, rather than have to shoot and kill him because the latter thinks he can fire before the officer draws...
I believe that Lenin would have termed you a 'useful idiot', or more precisely its Russian equivalent. Why do you think that one of the most cynical leaders that ever existed -- Joseph Dzhugashvili, otherwise known as Stalin -- one who saw Western leaders as weak cowards to be despised, and always as enemies -- funded anti-nuclear, pacifist organizations that always clamored for unilateral (Western-only) disarmament? And what do you think we would have done, if these groups had the influence he desired?
There's a difference between poorly-trained National Guardsmen (who are locals, and under state control) panicking and shooting several people, versus a well-orchestrated combined armor and mechanized infantry assault, ordered from the very top, that ends up killing hundreds or perhaps thousands.
It's only useful with our friends. With our enemies, such as N. Korea, it's just blackmail (as in "KEEP sending us aid forever, or we'll build this arms plant").
Feed a stray dog, and it'll come back for more. And what happens when you stop feeding it, if it's big enough to bite you?
Consider it humanity's immune system; loons that get overly powerful and start trying to overrun their neighbors, sooner or later incur a LOT of collective wrath.
Because most other nations look far more strongly towards their own interests.
It'd be in our economic interests to side with the radical pan-Arabists, and let the Arabs completely eradicate Israel in exchange for cheap oil, for instance, back when Israel was just being re-assembled and the Arabs were relatively united against them. But we didn't. To a lesser degree, we could benefit significantly by "forgiving" Saddam and making amends with the Arab world; we don't, and probably won't, because it's a matter of principle here -- even 'tho this principle stands in the way of the economic interests of not only us, but many of our nominal allies who'd like to trade with Iraq, as well.
It'd might be in our interests to screw over Taiwan and sell them out to China -- basically green-lighting an invasion by withdrawing all nearby carrier groups for maintenance and sending a few words over various channels, in exchange for favorable trade deals; after all, China is a potentially HUGE market. But we don't.
The US actually occasionally plays nice; we usually act with NATO, rather than against it; even when the ideals aren't terribly practical, we often try. Contrast that with more purely opportunistic nations...
If you're looking for strategy games, why not focus on the *strategy* aspect?
(In which case, _Diplomacy_ and _Empires in Arms_ seem appropriate. Both involve alliances, treachery, and strategy; the latter is VERY complex, involves resource management, and rather detailed planning...).
It's arguable that the Federal government shouldn't even be involved in education at all -- at most, directing funds, with minimal strings attached, to the states. There is, for instance, not one instance of 'teach', 'school', or 'educat[a-z]+' in the Constitution, at all; the only possibly appropriate clause is the elastic clause, which requires both necessary and proper. Apart from the states possibly needing revenue sharing, there's really no mandate -- the states can largely do it all.
And a computer, with limited funds, is obviously far less important than, say, qualified teachers. An awful lot of teachers have been trained only in education; they don't have significant knowledge about what they're teaching. And regarding education majors... statistically, they perform very poorly compared to most other fields on standardized tests, in general. So there is some basis to the idea that incompetent teachers are a HUGE part of the problem.
And what they're teaching may also be critical. How many high schools, for instance, require mathematical logic or otherwise promote critical thinking? If they rely on electronically proctored tests, such as multiple-choice scan-tron / press-a-key, then there's correspondingly less emphasis on such aspects as communication -- writing a coherent essay -- and also a significant amount of depth is lost. The demands inherent in an essay regarding, for instance, the shifting attitudes of the American people towards war -- ranging from the 'tourist event' immediately prior to the First Battle of Bull Run, where civillians picknicked in anticipation of watching a minor action in a presumed-to-be-short war, to the jingoism, nationalism, and isolationism regarding the World Wars, to the impact of television coverage of Vietnam... now THAT requires more commitment and critical thinking on both the student and the teacher. It should also be achievable without any tools but a pen, some paper, and a mind.
The last -- a mind -- is the ONE tool that absolutely, positively, needs to be emphasized for schools. We don't need to require Mentat training, but tools such as Powerpoint, Word, and Netscape are peripheral, at best.
I'm sure you'll be more than happy to elucidate exactly what's going on in Putin's mind.
Frankly, things are getting a bit too interesting over there. Consider, for instance, NTV -- the only major private television network in Russia, apparently. Gusinksy, NTV's CEO is currently being held in, IIRC, Spain, under embezzlement charges; in the current situation, it rather looks like Gazprom, the Government-dominated gas company, will end up with the lion's share of NTV.
A former spook with what could amount to a state television network? Interesting. But there's more.
They're still opposing the sanctions on Iraq, they've been active trying to regain influence via arms trading, they're defaulting on loan payments while not being particularly cooperative with embezzlement and corruption issues of their own (such as the official who was recently apprehended by the FBI, on a Swiss warrant), and so forth.
You can safely bet that they'll continue trying to regain stature, opposing U.S. and NATO policy wherever convenient, and always looking out for their own interests -- which are often NOT coincident with our own.
The President, therefore, cannot be sure that they are really a friendly state.
As for Cuba and Iraq, have you not heard of sanctions, for instance? Helms-Burton, the no-fly zone (over northern and southern parts of Iraq), and so forth? Aarrrrgh. You must not read newspapers at ALL...
How? Maybe you didn't sign yourself up, but somebody else did...
For instance, my university appears to have an affiliation agreement with MNBA; MNBA offers credit cards to people listed by the university, and the university gets paid when people accept. Since I'm on two of the lists -- as both an alum and a current student -- I periodically get two slightly different (IIRC) card offers from them.
I'm also pretty sure that one of the index fund companies I use gave out my address (with, apparently, mispellings) to a financial newsletter chap, who focuses largely on particular aforementioned index fund company.
...yup, as specified on the second page of the filing (at least the.gifs are all named in sequence, so you can load the image in a window and then keep editing the link to avoid the banners down the sides...).
Primarily, I'd suspect, through a) whistleblowing, and b) alleged victims who suspect this, and raise havoc -- a large-enough scandal would prompt a Congressional investigation. Same as with most other possible government malfeasances, I'd think. It's impossible to prevent wrongdoings here, just about as it is in nearly every other aspect of life.
The Intelligence committees have some leverage here because if they don't like the answers, well, it's Congress that controls their money.
Couldn't the Agency simply ask its allies to provide them with information about U.S. persons?
We have been prohibited by executive order since 1978 from having any person or government agency, whether foreign or U.S., conduct any activity on our behalf that we are prohibited from conducting ourselves.
Therefore, NSA/CSS does not ask its allies to conduct such activities on its behalf nor does NSA/CSS do so on behalf of its allies.
Well, most corporations face effective competition. To a certain degree, if you don't like their products, their behavior, or anything else about them, you may be able to avoid them.
I doubt Firestone tires have been selling well recently. Nor Corsairs after Nader's work, and so forth. Don't like Reebok for alleged labor abuses? Don't buy them, and if you're curious you may be able to find out whether they sell shoes under other labels. Don't like Coca-Cola? They may be harder to avoid (because their sub-brands like Minute Maid (IIRC) aren't blatantly labelled Coca-Cola, so you may need to check the fine print), but still possible.
Want Proctor & Gamble to oppose GM foods, or to sign on to your human rights protocol de jour? Shareholders have proposed both of those motions; majority vote wins. You can basically force a vote for many public companies; there are advocates who buy shares solely for this purpose. You can't really force your representative or Senator to even propose a bill or amendment, or submit one yourself in most states (albeit some have referendum rules); in most cases, all you can promise is that you won't vote for him otherwise -- and in some states, such as if you're a GOPer in MA, proposing some right-ish measure, or a liberal Socialist in TX -- forget about it.
Try opting out of, say, taxes, the Census, or just about any other aspect of Government; it's a whole different matter. Who had more power -- Ralph Nader and his allies in the consumer movement, or McVeigh? Who had a broader effect? I think the answer is obvious...
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If all the rich were duped into contributing like that, much of the aid would simply end up in the hands of corrupt local officials, countless warlords, and numerous rebel armies...
Remember, seizing all the food aid in a region and starving your enemies, or in fact everybody but your direct supporters, makes a GREAT recruitment tactic. It's been done, is being done, and will be done. Ditto with pretty much every other form of assistance -- remember that the recipients often aren't exactly just going to repent and reform instantly no matter HOW much aid you give 'em.
I suspect that you are conflating zero-sum games with non-competitive games.
Technically, zero-sum applies a strict constraint to the eventual score. Games which include raw scores, such as Cribbage, arguably aren't strictly zero-sum because points are accumulated -- in a 121-point Cribbage game, the loser can quite plausibly have 110. In a tournament, the actual raw scores could matter for purposes of tie-breaking and such. The same technically holds for Scrabble and so forth, as well.
Poker without a 'bank', OTOH, is strictly zero sum, because winnings are purely money shifting hands; no new money is ever introduced or destroyed.
Huh? The initial weighting is usually random, but after that, training and output computation is generally purely deterministic. We're talking about simple, simulated neurons modelled via nonlinear functions (often sigmoids), after all -- not something complicated like massively parallel, asynchronous biological tissue with cycles, massive connectivity, and so forth.
You can even write down the overall behavior of an output node as a single equation of an inputs -- it just might not be that enlightening in terms of understanding WHY it chose those weights.
If you can find the right neurons, and the guy doesn't mind having a bunch of electrodes stuck through his skull and membranes into the appropriate regions of the brain... probably.
A neural net is simply a nonlinear function fitter, after all; it takes a vector of inputs and produces output(s), based on preselected, preferably at least locally differentiable nonlinear functions of weighted combinations of inputs -- with the weights being what's trained. If you have enough nodes in a couple of hidden layers, and useful inputs, AND enough training time, you can have enough degrees of freedom for the fitting to work well.
But you need to find the appropriate inputs, which since it's meant for conscious control, means you need to find neurons which can be consciously influenced. That's probably harder, much harder, in the CNS than for nerves that control voluntary muscle movements, because we *have* largely voluntary control over most of our muscles (excluding reflex arcs and so forth), and since the nerves that trigger muscle movements aren't hard to find, compared to individual neurons in the brain.
Agreed. It'd be a nice demo for a Linux-based PC retailer -- to show off a system already running some recent, well-known, resource hog of a Windows game, then switching to StarOffice or some other vaguely familiar-looking Office suite, then switching to something completely unfamiliar... followed by explaining that you don't need a Windows-based machine to run a rather large universe of software, and that Linux can indeed handle it. Then perhaps a potential customer could listen regarding technical benefits and such, once their interest has been seized.
If you're a big enough customer, MSFT may be interested in hearing from you. They do get *inundated* with feature requests, and some get acted upon.
They're not clueless enough to ignore an impact on sales. Think they'd slam the door in the face of IS people from a big company, such as a PC distributor (especially!), a data center, or what-not? Their marketing department isn't paid to be deaf, and they're not developing software for software's sake; they want to make money selling it.
But you're SOL if you opt for a smaller company which then decides it wants to get out of the OS-vending business, or folds entirely. Switching vendors? Welcome to reinstall land; switching between even two RPM-based distros can be horribly painful because they won't use the same names (the names tracked by the dependency database) for the same packages, or put files in the same places, or include compatible libraries, or so forth... even mixing between SuSE and RHAT packages doesn't work that well.
Novell also produced NetWare, which may have been seen as a competitor to the MSFT OS de jour.
The others fit into key application areas, or rather areas they see as key -- browsers, and productivity tools. And in these areas, consumers may not see any great need for redundancy, or even diversity -- if your co-workers mostly shuffle around Word and PPT documents and macro-laden XL spreadsheets, it's going to be easier on you to use the same thing as long as file formats are in flux... Contrast this with, say, games, where having an MSFT-published (or even developed) game probably doesn't exclude others (most gamers would have quite a collection, I'd think, whereas few collect office suites).
They saw a huge potential cash cow, which would probably also help boost iterative sales of their operating system (I doubt, for instance, that MSFT Office2K runs on Windows for Workgroups 3.11 very well, if at all).
There are actually a great many less-mainstream software areas they don't touch yet, except perhaps by licensing -- anti-virus tools, mathematical software, hard-core desktop publishing (I wouldn't write even a journal paper in Microsoft Word, let alone a technical *book*, greatly preferring LaTeX), CAD...
Companies should NOT have to count on hobbyists who have other priorities than helping THEM. A company looking at Linux as a potential platform has to view it from the point of view of gain to the company, not gain to the OS. They can ask for such things as support for hot-swappable components, or whatever, but they cannot demand or compel it. And if they do it in-house, with the source, they may end up having to maintain their entire own personalized distro, with all the complications that entails -- what happens when the distributor breaks backwards compatibility with a compiler or library upgrade, for instance? It's not their core business, and it shouldn't be.
This is important. Linux development can be community driven, but that may not be good enough for customers with specific needs that aren't currently focused on by said community.
It's much more tenable to go to a vendor who sees a fiscal interest in doing things like patching the kernel for certain hardware, or for testing Oracle installations, or other foo -- if the vendor will remain in business.
And this is probably the segment that this piece is aimed at -- corporate customers looking to power servers and such. Whether or not Linux remains isn't that relevant to MSFT except regarding its impact on it's market share.
The kernel may be more secure, perhaps. But are the applications, and the configurations as shipped by distributers?
A new user shouldn't have to start by disabling hordes of services enabled by default with little explanation... and shouldn't have to search Deja or post regarding securing a newly installed Linux box; such documents would be good included on disk and *on paper* in a manual, given the utter importance of the topic -- and the number of new installations that are quickly rooted by people who can't believe they've been portscanned and analyzed that quickly.
How many show up with a reasonable hosts.deny setup, even?
Judging from the firewalling HOWTOs, the kernel has good support for this sort of thing -- but how often is this readily enabled?
And vendors could organize support better -- for instance, can you order a CD of updated packages from any vendor (useful for modem users who DON'T want to have to download 100+ MB of updates. I'm not kidding -- there have been distro versions whose updates occupy the better part, or more, of a Zip disk)? Can you subscribe to e-mail updates regarding package upgrades?
It has its good points -- but there are areas where many distros fall short, when used by people for whom Linux is primarily a platform for other tasks, not the focus itself.
Peace can be enforced via superior firepower. There's a strong argument to be made that while the nuclear arms race increased the possible severity of a war (perhaps -- at least, once numbers and range started increasing a LOT), it severely decreased the probable severity (since most leaders -- especially of the few countries which could play that particular game -- weren't interested in being obliterated, even if that were mutual).
Likewise, preparing against any possible space-based offensive, and letting everybody know that we've acknowledged that possibility and are indeed taking it into account, reduces the chance that any fool would actually try. A police officer should normally draw and aim at an armed robber, and convince the robber to surrender, rather than have to shoot and kill him because the latter thinks he can fire before the officer draws...
I believe that Lenin would have termed you a 'useful idiot', or more precisely its Russian equivalent. Why do you think that one of the most cynical leaders that ever existed -- Joseph Dzhugashvili, otherwise known as Stalin -- one who saw Western leaders as weak cowards to be despised, and always as enemies -- funded anti-nuclear, pacifist organizations that always clamored for unilateral (Western-only) disarmament? And what do you think we would have done, if these groups had the influence he desired?
There's a difference between poorly-trained National Guardsmen (who are locals, and under state control) panicking and shooting several people, versus a well-orchestrated combined armor and mechanized infantry assault, ordered from the very top, that ends up killing hundreds or perhaps thousands.
It's only useful with our friends. With our enemies, such as N. Korea, it's just blackmail (as in "KEEP sending us aid forever, or we'll build this arms plant").
Feed a stray dog, and it'll come back for more. And what happens when you stop feeding it, if it's big enough to bite you?
Consider it humanity's immune system; loons that get overly powerful and start trying to overrun their neighbors, sooner or later incur a LOT of collective wrath.
Because most other nations look far more strongly towards their own interests.
It'd be in our economic interests to side with the radical pan-Arabists, and let the Arabs completely eradicate Israel in exchange for cheap oil, for instance, back when Israel was just being re-assembled and the Arabs were relatively united against them. But we didn't. To a lesser degree, we could benefit significantly by "forgiving" Saddam and making amends with the Arab world; we don't, and probably won't, because it's a matter of principle here -- even 'tho this principle stands in the way of the economic interests of not only us, but many of our nominal allies who'd like to trade with Iraq, as well.
It'd might be in our interests to screw over Taiwan and sell them out to China -- basically green-lighting an invasion by withdrawing all nearby carrier groups for maintenance and sending a few words over various channels, in exchange for favorable trade deals; after all, China is a potentially HUGE market. But we don't.
The US actually occasionally plays nice; we usually act with NATO, rather than against it; even when the ideals aren't terribly practical, we often try. Contrast that with more purely opportunistic nations...
If you're looking for strategy games, why not focus on the *strategy* aspect?
(In which case, _Diplomacy_ and _Empires in Arms_ seem appropriate. Both involve alliances, treachery, and strategy; the latter is VERY complex, involves resource management, and rather detailed planning...).
It's arguable that the Federal government shouldn't even be involved in education at all -- at most, directing funds, with minimal strings attached, to the states. There is, for instance, not one instance of 'teach', 'school', or 'educat[a-z]+' in the Constitution, at all; the only possibly appropriate clause is the elastic clause, which requires both necessary and proper. Apart from the states possibly needing revenue sharing, there's really no mandate -- the states can largely do it all.
And a computer, with limited funds, is obviously far less important than, say, qualified teachers. An awful lot of teachers have been trained only in education; they don't have significant knowledge about what they're teaching. And regarding education majors... statistically, they perform very poorly compared to most other fields on standardized tests, in general. So there is some basis to the idea that incompetent teachers are a HUGE part of the problem.
And what they're teaching may also be critical. How many high schools, for instance, require mathematical logic or otherwise promote critical thinking? If they rely on electronically proctored tests, such as multiple-choice scan-tron / press-a-key, then there's correspondingly less emphasis on such aspects as communication -- writing a coherent essay -- and also a significant amount of depth is lost. The demands inherent in an essay regarding, for instance, the shifting attitudes of the American people towards war -- ranging from the 'tourist event' immediately prior to the First Battle of Bull Run, where civillians picknicked in anticipation of watching a minor action in a presumed-to-be-short war, to the jingoism, nationalism, and isolationism regarding the World Wars, to the impact of television coverage of Vietnam... now THAT requires more commitment and critical thinking on both the student and the teacher. It should also be achievable without any tools but a pen, some paper, and a mind.
The last -- a mind -- is the ONE tool that absolutely, positively, needs to be emphasized for schools. We don't need to require Mentat training, but tools such as Powerpoint, Word, and Netscape are peripheral, at best.
I'm sure you'll be more than happy to elucidate exactly what's going on in Putin's mind.
Frankly, things are getting a bit too interesting over there. Consider, for instance, NTV -- the only major private television network in Russia, apparently. Gusinksy, NTV's CEO is currently being held in, IIRC, Spain, under embezzlement charges; in the current situation, it rather looks like Gazprom, the Government-dominated gas company, will end up with the lion's share of NTV.
A former spook with what could amount to a state television network? Interesting. But there's more.
They're still opposing the sanctions on Iraq, they've been active trying to regain influence via arms trading, they're defaulting on loan payments while not being particularly cooperative with embezzlement and corruption issues of their own (such as the official who was recently apprehended by the FBI, on a Swiss warrant), and so forth.
You can safely bet that they'll continue trying to regain stature, opposing U.S. and NATO policy wherever convenient, and always looking out for their own interests -- which are often NOT coincident with our own.
The President, therefore, cannot be sure that they are really a friendly state.
As for Cuba and Iraq, have you not heard of sanctions, for instance? Helms-Burton, the no-fly zone (over northern and southern parts of Iraq), and so forth? Aarrrrgh. You must not read newspapers at ALL...
How? Maybe you didn't sign yourself up, but somebody else did...
For instance, my university appears to have an affiliation agreement with MNBA; MNBA offers credit cards to people listed by the university, and the university gets paid when people accept. Since I'm on two of the lists -- as both an alum and a current student -- I periodically get two slightly different (IIRC) card offers from them.
I'm also pretty sure that one of the index fund companies I use gave out my address (with, apparently, mispellings) to a financial newsletter chap, who focuses largely on particular aforementioned index fund company.
...yup, as specified on the second page of the filing (at least the .gifs are all named in sequence, so you can load the image in a window and then keep editing the link to avoid the banners down the sides...).
The submitter could've checked.
A criminal defendant can refuse a jury trial if he has more confidence in a judge, IIRC.
Oh, how might it be enforced?
Primarily, I'd suspect, through a) whistleblowing, and b) alleged victims who suspect this, and raise havoc -- a large-enough scandal would prompt a Congressional investigation. Same as with most other possible government malfeasances, I'd think. It's impossible to prevent wrongdoings here, just about as it is in nearly every other aspect of life.
The Intelligence committees have some leverage here because if they don't like the answers, well, it's Congress that controls their money.
Actually, that's also prohibited, explicitly. Did you really think that if you thought of that, that its watchdogs would not? Really, now...
From the NSA FAQ:
Couldn't the Agency simply ask its allies to provide them with information about U.S. persons?
We have been prohibited by executive order since 1978 from having any person or government agency, whether foreign or U.S., conduct any activity on our behalf that we are prohibited from conducting ourselves.
Therefore, NSA/CSS does not ask its allies to conduct such activities on its behalf nor does NSA/CSS do so on behalf of its allies.
Well, most corporations face effective competition. To a certain degree, if you don't like their products, their behavior, or anything else about them, you may be able to avoid them.
I doubt Firestone tires have been selling well recently. Nor Corsairs after Nader's work, and so forth. Don't like Reebok for alleged labor abuses? Don't buy them, and if you're curious you may be able to find out whether they sell shoes under other labels. Don't like Coca-Cola? They may be harder to avoid (because their sub-brands like Minute Maid (IIRC) aren't blatantly labelled Coca-Cola, so you may need to check the fine print), but still possible.
Want Proctor & Gamble to oppose GM foods, or to sign on to your human rights protocol de jour? Shareholders have proposed both of those motions; majority vote wins. You can basically force a vote for many public companies; there are advocates who buy shares solely for this purpose. You can't really force your representative or Senator to even propose a bill or amendment, or submit one yourself in most states (albeit some have referendum rules); in most cases, all you can promise is that you won't vote for him otherwise -- and in some states, such as if you're a GOPer in MA, proposing some right-ish measure, or a liberal Socialist in TX -- forget about it.
Try opting out of, say, taxes, the Census, or just about any other aspect of Government; it's a whole different matter. Who had more power -- Ralph Nader and his allies in the consumer movement, or McVeigh? Who had a broader effect? I think the answer is obvious...
The CIA (and the NSA, as well) have minimal domestic jurisdiction in terms of eavesdropping and other forms of SIGINT, HUMINT et al.