It's become much more acceptable to advocate genocide and other illegal war tactics than a decade ago. While I think the center may still be able to hold, we're changing far before we're backed into a corner. I'm not quite sure westphalianism will survive it.
We're far days away from the end of this period. The bedrock problem is that everything, but everything, in our geopolitical infrastructure assumes that the war avoidance arrangement called westphalianism will hold and that nobody is insane enough to unravel it. But Al Queda is exactly that sort of crazy and now that they've shown the weak spot, every other two bit set of disgruntled people is going to hammer on exactly that weakness but even more so.
Westphalianism boiled down is the idea that wars are things that states do and nobody else. It didn't used to be true and that era is coming back. And we have to figure out how to transform ourselves to handle the challenge.
The universe of people who can use your calendering product is bounded at the bottom by the cost per user. If you have a nice solution that has zero cost per user like the Darwin Calendering Server, entrepreneurial startups everywhere end up with a marginally lower burn rate and a small number of them who would have run out of money right before they produced something useful will end up surviving and adding to the material goodness that is free market capitalism. It's part of a larger process of squeezing all the costs possible out of IT.
So go ahead and use what you like if you're established. It's quite likely that the cost to reimplement would swallow up any cost savings for many years to come but if you're creating a new division which is separate from the rest of the mothership or a new start up, there's a real need for something better on the cost front and preferrably stripped of the proprietary handcuffs.
Funny enough, my wife is affected by such things having signed three contracts that have exactly that sort of clause restricting her practicing her profession (MD). It's not some musty piece of law but a real live part of US jurisprudence.
You're thinking anti-trust while I was thinking restraint of trade, two completely different legal theories. Restraint of trade does not involve market share figures but rather that it is not in the public interest for a company to do such a contract and so it's legally unenforceable.
Barring a bullet or a profound change of heart, your average revolutionary leader who says I'm a marxist will end up quickly being a dictator. It's practically a mathematical equation. People still advocate marxism and expect not to be treated like they advocate dictatorship. That's wrong.
Whether other systems are right, wrong, or indifferent is a different conversation. Can we not muddy the waters?
Water is wet, gravity is a law, marxism leads to dictatorship, *that's* the point. When you get me your dry water and your non-gravity affected matter I'll be happy to start discussing marxism again but until then, it's a proven bloody system that should not be tried anymore. 100 million deaths is enough.
Sorry, you've got it backwards. Marx's ideas in a book were theory. When people actually tried to apply them and didn't give up in disgust in a few months, you always ended up with the same sort of stalinist violence, repression, and aggressiveness. People have been getting away with arguing that "true marxism" has never been tried for a century now. Give it up, it has been tried, repeatedly, and results in rivers of blood.
We're far more in danger of demographic collapse than a population bomb. For the past two decades everybody's been adjusting their population estimates downwards. Get with the times.
The fundamental biological reality of populations is that there is a carrying capacity past which populations crash in horrible orgies of disease and violence. Animal populations tend to have spikes and crashes. Humanity used to suffer those too until we started to have technological progress so rapid that we lifted our carrying capacity consistently beyond our population growth. Doing away with that is speaking out in favor of massive plague deaths, starvation, and war. There is no "neat" alternative because you simply are not going to get a significant portion of humanity to turn against the impulse to genetically compete. The PRC has done it but only through immense, horrifying violence and even they figured out that they've screwed up. Look up the 4-2-1 problem and you'll see how the PRC may ultimately fail because it's going to go gray before it gets rich.
Fascism, in practice, is a shell game, robbing peter to pay paul. Compared to communism, it can appear better but the improvements are unsustainable. Eventually you have to reform fascism out of the system or you have to suffer a collapse.
That being said, The PRC is *huge* and the shell game could go on before the collapse for a very long time. You can make good money in a crooked game like a Ponzi scheme. You just have to know when to get out. How much of the magic in the PRC is real and how much is a fascist con game is one of the biggest economic questions on the planet everybody's afraid to ask.
DNS poisoning is very likely against PRC law as much as it would be against US law. Why would companies think they could get away with this? The fascistic system prevalent in the PRC that means that 'favors' go both ways.
This past decade, a ship went down "just right" in the Danube. The river was blocked for months, putting a major hurt on european shipping. A lot of rumors were that it was done a purpose because the ship was loaded with pig iron and landed at a shallow spot horizontally, across the only channel. There are plenty of "accidents" that a port operator could suffer that would have similar consequences. Yes, we could seize the ports and, after some transition, return them to operation. See how Reagan restored flight operations after he fired the striking PATCO controllers for a practical example. But air traffic control suffered and we lost a lot of money in the meantime. And those PATCO controllers hadn't spiked the control towers on the way out. The problem of foreign ownership is problematic and not just for those countries that we are currently suffering from friction with. We went from friend to Bourbon France to almost fighting a war over the XYZ affair with revolutionary France in the space of a few years.
National security should not depend on foreign election returns.
One type of mass production this is good for is distributed mass production. There are lots of things that cost ungodly amounts of money but would be cheaper to replicate, plastic blender parts, for example. Right now, you strip a gear and ask how much it costs, the answer comes back at about 90% the cost of a new blender. Now I don't need 10,000 gears but I might be one of 10,000 people in a given year that needs those gears and if we each get them via these sorts of printers, we've got mass production in a distributed fashion. That's going to change business models because you can't really protect against somebody taking apart a new blender and measuring what they've got so when something goes bad they know how to make the part that is broken.
The really funny thing is that this is going to make things more expensive, not cheaper in the long run. Manufacturers will move away from cheap plastic gears that can be fabbed and to durable metal parts that have superior value and are likely not going to be fabbed (for environmental reasons if nothing else). Fewer units will be sold and thus R&D costs will be a proportionally higher % of the price of each unit.
Unix backup tools work just as well on OS X as they do on Linux. The problem is that Apple does more than Linux and most U*ix variants and thus the tools were inadequate. Backup, under certain conditions, would degrade your files to the level you would get on a normal U*ix machine. Aliases would degrade to symlinks, for example, because the inode of the file would change and the alias relationship would not be preserved. But Linux et al don't do better than symlinks. They don't have aliases, nor most of the metadata that is what has kept Mac a step ahead in user experience even as it gave up its distinctive hardware. How backup to a level equal to other U*ix variants is worse than the same tools on other systems is a little puzzling but that's the OS wars for you.
Try telling Radley Balko that sometime. He specializes in reporting on bad police raids. They happen, and with alarming frequency. You can set up a call that will result in the most dangerous type of raids, a dynamic "no knock" entry. The odds of mistakes and people getting killed go way up on those sorts of raids. A few easy keywords/phrases, methamphetamine, heavily armed, dangerous, wanted in police slaying in another jurisdiction, child sexual predator, the list can go on and on, socially engineering cops to be especially quick on their triggers. On the other side, you can prime the victim with threatening messages and calls so he thinks that loud shouts of "police" are likely to be false, so he goes to bed armed, etc. setting him up to be trigger happy.
Is it a guarantee? No, it isn't. Is there a good chance such an assassination by social engineering plot would succeed? I think the answer's pretty obvious.
Birth of a Nation was highly successful commercially. That makes its race politics no less odious.
Re:If you want change, change.
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If you look at history, the two party system works out quite well so long as you have the threat of swapping out parties. All parties comprise of coalitions of true believers and opportunists/careerists. The true believers want their program put in to place but don't necessarily care who does it while the opportunists/careerists want power and have weak ideological beliefs. The opportunists split themselves pretty evenly between the two parties and brown nose their way into getting power positions whenever the party succeeds. Eventually they throw the party out of whack and dominate the machinery, leaving the true believers out in the cold for the most part, getting lip service but no real movement forward on their goals.
What's gummed up the works is a conspiracy of opportunists who have made it inordinately difficult for a 3rd party to rise up and push one of the established bands of opportunists down into 3rd place (into irrelevance in the US system). When Pierre Rinfret threatened to do that in NY (by sinking the Republicans to 3rd), letters were sent out nakedly admitting the game and a call to arms to save Republican patronage jobs was issued.
Lower the barriers to competition and you've solved the US political problem.
The alternative of voting for parties that you truly believe in but who enter into soul destroying compromises *after* the vote is no better. The opportunity for mischief is extended well after the election as parties maneuver to create governing majorities and compromise their ideals without a second thought in order to satisfy their opportunists' thirst for power.
Re:Take your Blog and Shove It !
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So how did you like Dan Rather on the evening news last night?
Sort of, but not really. The Iraqi government has been told how to formally ask for our departure. They have been told that such a request would be honored. We have agreements on how we are to leave. They have not exercised the option. They have a constitution they wrote and passed themselves and a government elected on that constitution. That means that if they don't ask, it's not actually true that they want us to leave. And if there's a great mass of Iraqi opinion who wants us out, they can vote for a new government that will provide that request and then we'll leave.
In other words, Iraq doesn't make an empire. Want to try again?
There are people on the PRC death row for tax fraud, drug trafficking, and taking bribes. Death sentences are confirmed by courts and almost immediately carried out. It's a qualitatively different system compared to the US one.
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It's become much more acceptable to advocate genocide and other illegal war tactics than a decade ago. While I think the center may still be able to hold, we're changing far before we're backed into a corner. I'm not quite sure westphalianism will survive it.
We actually negotiated them down at the front end instead of going to court on the back.
We're far days away from the end of this period. The bedrock problem is that everything, but everything, in our geopolitical infrastructure assumes that the war avoidance arrangement called westphalianism will hold and that nobody is insane enough to unravel it. But Al Queda is exactly that sort of crazy and now that they've shown the weak spot, every other two bit set of disgruntled people is going to hammer on exactly that weakness but even more so.
Westphalianism boiled down is the idea that wars are things that states do and nobody else. It didn't used to be true and that era is coming back. And we have to figure out how to transform ourselves to handle the challenge.
The universe of people who can use your calendering product is bounded at the bottom by the cost per user. If you have a nice solution that has zero cost per user like the Darwin Calendering Server, entrepreneurial startups everywhere end up with a marginally lower burn rate and a small number of them who would have run out of money right before they produced something useful will end up surviving and adding to the material goodness that is free market capitalism. It's part of a larger process of squeezing all the costs possible out of IT.
So go ahead and use what you like if you're established. It's quite likely that the cost to reimplement would swallow up any cost savings for many years to come but if you're creating a new division which is separate from the rest of the mothership or a new start up, there's a real need for something better on the cost front and preferrably stripped of the proprietary handcuffs.
Funny enough, my wife is affected by such things having signed three contracts that have exactly that sort of clause restricting her practicing her profession (MD). It's not some musty piece of law but a real live part of US jurisprudence.
You're thinking anti-trust while I was thinking restraint of trade, two completely different legal theories. Restraint of trade does not involve market share figures but rather that it is not in the public interest for a company to do such a contract and so it's legally unenforceable.
Barring a bullet or a profound change of heart, your average revolutionary leader who says I'm a marxist will end up quickly being a dictator. It's practically a mathematical equation. People still advocate marxism and expect not to be treated like they advocate dictatorship. That's wrong.
Whether other systems are right, wrong, or indifferent is a different conversation. Can we not muddy the waters?
I don't believe it's legal, at least in the US, to segment markets this way. IANAL
Water is wet, gravity is a law, marxism leads to dictatorship, *that's* the point. When you get me your dry water and your non-gravity affected matter I'll be happy to start discussing marxism again but until then, it's a proven bloody system that should not be tried anymore. 100 million deaths is enough.
Sorry, you've got it backwards. Marx's ideas in a book were theory. When people actually tried to apply them and didn't give up in disgust in a few months, you always ended up with the same sort of stalinist violence, repression, and aggressiveness. People have been getting away with arguing that "true marxism" has never been tried for a century now. Give it up, it has been tried, repeatedly, and results in rivers of blood.
We're far more in danger of demographic collapse than a population bomb. For the past two decades everybody's been adjusting their population estimates downwards. Get with the times.
The fundamental biological reality of populations is that there is a carrying capacity past which populations crash in horrible orgies of disease and violence. Animal populations tend to have spikes and crashes. Humanity used to suffer those too until we started to have technological progress so rapid that we lifted our carrying capacity consistently beyond our population growth. Doing away with that is speaking out in favor of massive plague deaths, starvation, and war. There is no "neat" alternative because you simply are not going to get a significant portion of humanity to turn against the impulse to genetically compete. The PRC has done it but only through immense, horrifying violence and even they figured out that they've screwed up. Look up the 4-2-1 problem and you'll see how the PRC may ultimately fail because it's going to go gray before it gets rich.
Fascism, in practice, is a shell game, robbing peter to pay paul. Compared to communism, it can appear better but the improvements are unsustainable. Eventually you have to reform fascism out of the system or you have to suffer a collapse.
That being said, The PRC is *huge* and the shell game could go on before the collapse for a very long time. You can make good money in a crooked game like a Ponzi scheme. You just have to know when to get out. How much of the magic in the PRC is real and how much is a fascist con game is one of the biggest economic questions on the planet everybody's afraid to ask.
DNS poisoning is very likely against PRC law as much as it would be against US law. Why would companies think they could get away with this? The fascistic system prevalent in the PRC that means that 'favors' go both ways.
This past decade, a ship went down "just right" in the Danube. The river was blocked for months, putting a major hurt on european shipping. A lot of rumors were that it was done a purpose because the ship was loaded with pig iron and landed at a shallow spot horizontally, across the only channel. There are plenty of "accidents" that a port operator could suffer that would have similar consequences. Yes, we could seize the ports and, after some transition, return them to operation. See how Reagan restored flight operations after he fired the striking PATCO controllers for a practical example. But air traffic control suffered and we lost a lot of money in the meantime. And those PATCO controllers hadn't spiked the control towers on the way out. The problem of foreign ownership is problematic and not just for those countries that we are currently suffering from friction with. We went from friend to Bourbon France to almost fighting a war over the XYZ affair with revolutionary France in the space of a few years.
National security should not depend on foreign election returns.
One type of mass production this is good for is distributed mass production. There are lots of things that cost ungodly amounts of money but would be cheaper to replicate, plastic blender parts, for example. Right now, you strip a gear and ask how much it costs, the answer comes back at about 90% the cost of a new blender. Now I don't need 10,000 gears but I might be one of 10,000 people in a given year that needs those gears and if we each get them via these sorts of printers, we've got mass production in a distributed fashion. That's going to change business models because you can't really protect against somebody taking apart a new blender and measuring what they've got so when something goes bad they know how to make the part that is broken.
The really funny thing is that this is going to make things more expensive, not cheaper in the long run. Manufacturers will move away from cheap plastic gears that can be fabbed and to durable metal parts that have superior value and are likely not going to be fabbed (for environmental reasons if nothing else). Fewer units will be sold and thus R&D costs will be a proportionally higher % of the price of each unit.
How many lies does it take to impeach a witness in a court? Exactly one. We know that Gore propagandized 9 times but that's a minimum, not a maximum.
Unix backup tools work just as well on OS X as they do on Linux. The problem is that Apple does more than Linux and most U*ix variants and thus the tools were inadequate. Backup, under certain conditions, would degrade your files to the level you would get on a normal U*ix machine. Aliases would degrade to symlinks, for example, because the inode of the file would change and the alias relationship would not be preserved. But Linux et al don't do better than symlinks. They don't have aliases, nor most of the metadata that is what has kept Mac a step ahead in user experience even as it gave up its distinctive hardware. How backup to a level equal to other U*ix variants is worse than the same tools on other systems is a little puzzling but that's the OS wars for you.
Try telling Radley Balko that sometime. He specializes in reporting on bad police raids. They happen, and with alarming frequency. You can set up a call that will result in the most dangerous type of raids, a dynamic "no knock" entry. The odds of mistakes and people getting killed go way up on those sorts of raids. A few easy keywords/phrases, methamphetamine, heavily armed, dangerous, wanted in police slaying in another jurisdiction, child sexual predator, the list can go on and on, socially engineering cops to be especially quick on their triggers. On the other side, you can prime the victim with threatening messages and calls so he thinks that loud shouts of "police" are likely to be false, so he goes to bed armed, etc. setting him up to be trigger happy.
Is it a guarantee? No, it isn't. Is there a good chance such an assassination by social engineering plot would succeed? I think the answer's pretty obvious.
Birth of a Nation was highly successful commercially. That makes its race politics no less odious.
If you look at history, the two party system works out quite well so long as you have the threat of swapping out parties. All parties comprise of coalitions of true believers and opportunists/careerists. The true believers want their program put in to place but don't necessarily care who does it while the opportunists/careerists want power and have weak ideological beliefs. The opportunists split themselves pretty evenly between the two parties and brown nose their way into getting power positions whenever the party succeeds. Eventually they throw the party out of whack and dominate the machinery, leaving the true believers out in the cold for the most part, getting lip service but no real movement forward on their goals.
What's gummed up the works is a conspiracy of opportunists who have made it inordinately difficult for a 3rd party to rise up and push one of the established bands of opportunists down into 3rd place (into irrelevance in the US system). When Pierre Rinfret threatened to do that in NY (by sinking the Republicans to 3rd), letters were sent out nakedly admitting the game and a call to arms to save Republican patronage jobs was issued.
Lower the barriers to competition and you've solved the US political problem.
The alternative of voting for parties that you truly believe in but who enter into soul destroying compromises *after* the vote is no better. The opportunity for mischief is extended well after the election as parties maneuver to create governing majorities and compromise their ideals without a second thought in order to satisfy their opportunists' thirst for power.
So how did you like Dan Rather on the evening news last night?
Sort of, but not really. The Iraqi government has been told how to formally ask for our departure. They have been told that such a request would be honored. We have agreements on how we are to leave. They have not exercised the option. They have a constitution they wrote and passed themselves and a government elected on that constitution. That means that if they don't ask, it's not actually true that they want us to leave. And if there's a great mass of Iraqi opinion who wants us out, they can vote for a new government that will provide that request and then we'll leave.
In other words, Iraq doesn't make an empire. Want to try again?
I think you ought to look at better history books if you think the US military did not "do much". Korea and Vietnam were both Cold War campaigns.
There are people on the PRC death row for tax fraud, drug trafficking, and taking bribes. Death sentences are confirmed by courts and almost immediately carried out. It's a qualitatively different system compared to the US one.