I always wonder the same thing: for a country that never tires of telling us how great their democracy is, they don't seem too good at actually concentrating on the details of making it work.
We're apparently far too busy telling others how Great our country and our democracy is to do something like actually make it work like we say it does.
Besides, in the U.S., it's all about appearance, not substance. We apparently figure that if we claim something loud enough and long enough, everyone else will believe it. What else do you expect from a bunch of marketing and "business" types? We don't have any real manufacturing here anymore and our engineering is quickly disappearing, so marketing and "business" people are all that's really left. You know, the kind of people who will say anything and promise anything as long as it sounds good.
But we're talking about HD here, not normal video. For normal video, people already have DVD, and DVD can be transferred to disk easily enough.
Similar situation of massive overselling of bandwidth and a reluctance to invest in fatter backbones (though thankfully most last mile copper is capable of being able to sustain at least 1Mbps downstream which is just enough to comfortably stream video without having to wait too long, more usually 2-4Mbps and I'm not aware of any large city that doesn't have 24Mbps available, but I'm spoilt living in London - no doubt there are people in the country who will inform me they're still forced to use dialup).
You need quite a bit more than 1 - 4 Mbps to stream reasonably good HD content. And that just doesn't exist in the U.S., and won't for the foreseeable future. And 24Mbps? Forget it!
The cat is already out of the bag on that one though; users that have had the taste of a computer hooked up to their TV rarely want to go back to a regular plain DVD player and a TV guide.
The content companies, cable companies, and telcos don't give a crap what the users want because they're monopolies. And thanks to the FCC, these monopolies are allowed to grow bigger by the year, with ever greater consolidation. In some cases, there's not even a difference between the content producer and the ISP (with Time Warner being an example -- they produce content and own a cable franchise).
So what you say may be true of the rest of the world, but like I said, here in the U.S. you probably won't see digital distribution of any kind unless everything is locked down solid. The telcos will make sure the pipes remain slow because they don't care about investing any money into infrastructure when they can just sit back and rake in profits, and they have enough clout with the government to make sure the cable companies can't do that, either. That's what the latest FCC action against the cable companies is all about.
Meh, it doesn't really matter at this point. Digital Distribution is going to end this format war a lot faster than Sony's or Toshiba's corporate posturing.
Not in the U.S. The telcos, cable companies, and media companies will see to that. Not nearly enough bandwidth in the U.S. to make that practical, and that's something that simply will not change as long as monopoly corporate interests control the government. Which is to say, pretty much forever.
And the media companies won't ever "approve" of that until computers are totally locked down with DRM. Perhaps not even then.
If things go really badly, they could pass legislation similar to the UK's that makes it illegal to withhold encryption keys and passwords if you're hit with a warrant.
The U.S. version will probably conveniently omit the "warrant" bit...
Oh hang on we were fighting for freedom and liberty weren't we?
Why, yes, we were/are. But apparently you didn't get the memo. See, "freedom" and "liberty" here aren't referring to yours, it's referring to the government's.
Of course, not many people got the memo, so don't feel bad.
We consume these "opiates" because we hate the real world we live in, we see no hope of changing it, and we have given up and fled to imaginary land. In our zoned out state, we do only what we must to exist, because we are not really here.
And the inevitable result of your pathological lethargy will be the fading of America as a country of importance. Let us hope you are not all like that.
And as one of the older people, all I can say here is that it's our own damned fault. These kids are living in the world we built for them with the expectations we gave them. But the expectations and the world in question aren't those of what we told them. No, they've seen their parents (my generation) work their asses off, and as a result be forced to be parents in absentia, without anything more to show for it in the end than their grandparents (my generation's parents) had. They've heard their parents and their peers' parents talk about how upper management and the executives have been making millions while working a few hours a day, while the parents in question worked 16+ hours a day for months-long stretches, and after doing all that had to suffer through the indignity and financial burden of "downsizing", "rightsizing", and whatever else the management buzzword of the day was. All the while that same management got unprecedented bonuses for "cutting costs".
The people of my generation were constantly told by our parents that if we worked hard, we would be able to do better than they did. That turned out to be true for some of us (some of us got lucky in the dotbomb, for instance), but not nearly enough of us. The proof that we were lied to is that the middle class is, and has been, shrinking, while the distribution of wealth grows ever more topheavy. That has consequences. This is one of them.
The people coming into the workforce aren't stupid. They're being asked to do the same shit that their parents were asked to do. But unlike their parents, they know what will happen if they walk that same path, because they've seen it happen to their parents. And they're apparently not having any of it.
I love the qube, but even used they are still expensive. This way a simple distro that makes it a NAS http://www.freenas.org/ and easy to install, add a pair of cheapie 250gig hard drives and you are off with a terabyte.
So this box plus FreeNAS will let me store a terabyte of data across 2 250G drives + one 80G drive? Sign me up!
Complain if you will about the governments of first-world countries such as the US, but if so, you likely haven't seen the corruption of others up close.... Corruption tends to poison and overshadow even the benefits of democracy and capitalism, as it tends to keep power concentrated in very few hands.
Exactly. Which is why it's right for people to complain about it. We must keep corruption out of the U.S. government to avoid the positive feedback loop that ultimately results in the concentration of power in very few hands.
Ooops. Too late. That cycle started quite some time ago, and I don't think there's any stopping it at this point...
Dude, the article indicates that the everybody who interviewed him was impressed.
Yeah, well, the article doesn't indicate who interviewed him, so this "everybody who interviewed him was impressed" statement doesn't necessarily carry much weight.
I'm going to reserve judgment here until we see what this guy actually does, but it's folly to ignore past results, particularly if they're associated with the very thing the guy will be responsible for in his new role.
Since RedHat is apparently rather successful thus far, it seems like it would be a better move to recruit from within (as long as you promote the most competent people, not the least).
Yet through it all, our biggest headache is the Windows clients with their general operating system mishaps. They die unexpectedly, corrupting the MBR. The application suffers from a DLL error that comes and goes with different revisions of the software, etc.
Of all the OSes I've ever used, Windows is the only one that would slowly eat itself over time. Current versions of it are much, much better about this sort of thing, but Windows is the only one that has ever done that at all. I've seen other OSes crash before, and I've even seen them occasionally corrupt a filesytem (well, once...and that was a particularly crappy version of System Vr4). But Windows is the only one I've ever seen that would, after running long enough (where "long enough" depends on which version of Windows you're talking about), start to develop weird, unexplainable problems and generally get very unreliable -- on hardware that proved itself reliable afterwards.
I don't think Windows was release-ready until well after the release of Windows 2000.
As I said, it's significantly better these days, if you exclude Vista (I don't have any experience with Vista so I can't really comment on it). But chances are, that's because what's out there these days has been in the field for years and it's taken that long to work out all the major bugs. No other operating system I've ever used has been like that.
You would rather live a coward than die a free man, then?
Perhaps he would rather live a coward than die a slave.
Before claiming that we're not slaves yet, truthfully answer this: what are you truly free to do? What can you do that doesn't somehow, somewhere, require someone else's permission? Compare that list against the list of things that do require someone else's consent, and I think you'll find that the former list is woefully short. And that's here in the U.S., "land of the free". It's even worse in many other parts of the world.
The time when it was possible to fix this issue is long, long past.
No, you're thinking of the actual trials themselves. When I said "judicial overview" I was referring to the civilian court proceedings which reviewed the legality of the bill, as well as reviewing individual instances of it's use. For instance, Jose Padilla's case, while being tried in military court, was reviewed by a civilian court. That's the judicial overview I was referring to.
Ah, okay. Well, that kind of judicial oversight that all U.S. citizens get when accused of being an "enemy combatant" is certainly better than nothing, but it's still a blatant violation of the Constitution, which explicitly states that if you're accused of a crime, you get to challenge the accusation in a court of law in front of a jury of your peers.
That, my friend, is the road to utter paranoia. Using that sort of logic, you could make pretty much anything out to be a conspiracy. Basically, you're using lack of evidence as if it were evidence.
In the absence of anything else, yes, you're absolutely right. But the suspicions of wrongdoing in secrecy have a solid foundation, namely the wrongdoing on the part of the administration which has been revealed thus far.
The suspicions I have regarding what this administration does in secret are mere extensions of those things that have already been revealed about this administration, some of which the administration previously tried to keep secret.
Not all instances of absence of evidence are the same.
*shrug* The government's always had that power. What in the world do you think we did with enemy prisoners during WW2? US citizens are generally afforded better treatment when it comes to such things, but any US citizen caught colluding with the Nazis would have been summarily executed within hours. In such clear-cut cases, and especially during a time of war, I've got absolutely zero concerns about bypassing the regular legal system, and we've been doing it for centuries. The constitution doesn't come into play.
Excuse me, but the Constitution most certainly does come into play! It's the only legal document giving legitimacy to the U.S. government at all. It's the highest law of the land. Are you suggesting that you're okay with ignoring that? With allowing the government to do whatever it pleases simply because it claims "we're at war"?? I find this most distressing and disturbing, especially coming from someone who claims to have seen the actions of tyrants up close and personal. You know where the dismissal of a defining document such as the Constitution leads, because you've been there (or so I presume from your comments).
What track record is that?
Blatantly lying in order to justify the unilateral invasion of another country. Seizing and holding, without access to the outside or to any judicial relief, many people. Torture. Unprecedented secrecy. Routine use of "free speech zones". Warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens in direct violation of the law.
And that's just the things I happen to know about. Care to name some of the things this administration has done right? The good things this administration has done? Because from what I've seen, there really isn't anything.
I realize that previous presidents have done distasteful things, and that many of the things the Bush administration has done have been done in the past from time to time, but at no time I'm aware of have all these things been done all at the same time.
Perhaps for you things are fine until they really do get as bad as the totalitarian societies you have direct experience with. But I don't think it's such a good idea to be happy with going the wrong direction.
Seeing that it's being used so selectively, and considering the amount of judicial overview that these cases are going through, I don't think you have much to worry about.
There are several problems with this:
The "judicial overview" you refer to is being done by military tribunals. Not civilian courts. That means the people who are performing the overview answer to the executive branch. But abuse of executive power at the expense of fundamental human rights is precisely why all this is a problem to begin with.
The power in question is being used very selectively right now in order to quell fears that it may be misused and to give people time to forget about the issue. But I should add that we only think that it's being used selectively and judiciously. There's no guarantee that it's being used in any such way. We simply don't know everything the executive branch is keeping secret, and such secrets could easily include the detention of people who should not be detained at all. We've already released a number of people who were wrongly detained. What in the world makes you think we released them all?
The declaration of someone as an enemy combatant is accusing them of taking up arms against the government. I don't have a problem with accusing anyone of anything, as long as it's done so in accordance with the intent of the Constitution, which makes it plain that no man shall be accused and detained by the government without the right to quickly confront his accusers in a trial in front of a jury of his peers. What we're discussing here is doing away with all of that and literally allowing the executive branch to throw anyone they want to into a hole with nothing more than a show trial at most. I don't understand how or why anyone would be okay with that.
Between all that and the current track record of the current executive administration, I think we all have every reason to be worried.
Why wouldn't you be allowed to disagree with the government, though? you're obviously being sarcastic, but I don't understand why....
I said it more for laughs than anything else, but basically, the U.S. executive branch can now (among other police-state-like things) declare anyone they wish, citizen or no, an "enemy combatant" and throw them into a deep dark hole where not even their lawyer can get at them. And they apparently have done so on at least one occasion, from what I understand.
These days, the reason people can disagree with the government and get away with it is that their disagreement doesn't actually matter because it doesn't have the power to change anything. If that situation changes for someone (that is, if someone who vocally disagrees with the government manages to do so in such a way that it adversely affects those in power), I expect the executive branch will then take advantage of their newly-declared power.
I can't think of a clearer win on our part short of total surrender and cessation of hostilities on their part.
Note that I'm talking about a military win on our part here. In reality the entire Iraq occupation has been nothing short of a pointless, wasteful disaster, but not from a military perspective, nor from the perspective of the government.
Oh, wait, I'm not allowed to disagree with the government. I forgot. I meant to say that Iraq has been a complete and total success, and a wonderful illustration of the sheer brilliance of our leadership today!
It's going to take a serious kicking of our collective asses to force the Pentagon to reevaluate our military and put together something that's realistic and sane. But I'm not sure how big of an ass-kicking it'll take. We're getting a good one in Iraq and the lessons don't seem to be sinking in.
That's a joke, right? The entire death toll in Iraq is less than the number of allied lives lost on any one day of major offencive ops in WW2. You lost 3 times as many soldier in one year of operations in Vietnam as you did in 4 years of ops in Iraq. Even Korea cost you 30,000+. I'm not sure where you get the idea that Iraq has given you "a good ass kicking", but you couldn't be more silly if you tried.
That's exactly right.
I don't know what morons convinced some of you people otherwise, but the goings on in Iraq are nothing more than a nuisance. We're still there and we're not going anywhere unless we decide to, and that's despite the best their resistance can throw at us. I can't think of a clearer win on our part short of total surrender and cessation of hostilities on their part.
Iraq is a clear example of how even a reasonably well-armed (for a civilian force) insurgency will find it nearly impossible to forcibly overthrow a truly well-armed occupying force, much less a sitting government. The insurgency there is much more of a threat to the civilian population over there, which isn't a surprise: the civilian population is even more poorly armed and trained than the insurgents. Such is the nature of most civilians.
My point is this: if a reasonably well-armed insurgency is having an essentially impossible time kicking the U.S. out of what is to the U.S. a foreign land, imagine how much harder a time it would have if it were trying to overthrow the U.S. government directly, where the resolve of the government (which translates to its willingness to use force) would be orders of magnitude higher. This is why armed insurrection in the U.S. is essentially guaranteed to fail (unless it somehow convinces the U.S. military to take its side, in which case there's no need for it to be an armed insurrection, is there?).
Spears? Right... You not only stupid, but arrogant stupid. This stupid arrogance is why you lose every war you fight these days.
If you don't understand the difference between a military defeat and a politically-motivated withdrawal, then you won't ever understand what makes winning an armed revolution against a well-equipped government so difficult.
And the political interventions are part of the game, it doesn't excuse your defeats. They explain why they happened, and why they are going to happen again and again. This is not going to change.
The political interventions are part of the game, but they are also part of the context. That context is very important. The political motivations behind a government's withdrawal from a foreign land do not apply to its defense against an armed revolution. Against an armed revolution, the government is fighting for its existence. That would be like you fighting for your life. If you don't see the difference between you leaving someone else's house after they make things annoyingly unpleasant for you and you losing your life in your own home, then you will never understand where I'm coming from.
War isn't not just about winning, it's about getting ahead,
Oh, yes, I'm sure that's of great comfort to every soldier that found themselves on the losing side of a war despite winning a whole pile of battles.
Don't be absurd. You can "get ahead" in war all you want, but if that doesn't ultimately result in victory then all those "gains" are worthless.
War is ultimately only about winning. "Winning" can mean many things, obviously, but winning is the objective of war. Learning that lesson from Vietnam is precisely why the U.S. forces walked all over the Iraqis in both Gulf wars.
Investing more might make you be able to win, but it would make the cost sky-rocket and make the adventure even less profitable and thus even more stupid.
Well, that depends, doesn't it? If winning is the only way to survive (or to remain in power, or whatever), then you're better off eating the sky-high costs of investing more than you are by not doing so, right?
But oddly enough, your statement can ultimately be used against you. After all, the cost to the revolutionaries of attempting to overthrow a well-armed sitting government would be extremely high. By your own statement, that would make the attempt at revolution a stupid move.
Bet that's not exactly what you expected the consequences of your statement to be.:-D
As long as we (collectively and individually) think that there isn't anything can be done then we're screwed.
That's definitely true. But what you're failing to realize, and what I've been trying to get across here, is that even if we do think that there are things we can do, we're almost certainly screwed anyway.
What can be done is independent of what we think we can do. In other words, what we can actually do is dictated by reality and not any feel-good beliefs we might have.
You can look at a current conflict to see what a small minority with minimal firepower can do (see Iraq).
And just what do you think the people in Iraq who have that minimal firepower are actually doing?
The answer, as I said before, is that they're being nothing more than a nuisance.
You have to be much more than a nuisance to overthrow a sitting government from within. Especially if that government has orders of magnitude more firepower than you, a comprehensive surveillance system, firm control over the only sources of information that people believe they can trust, and control over an economic system that all but guarantees that if you have the desire to go against the wishes of those in power, you won't have the economic capability to do so.
If it comes down to an arms fight, it won't be pretty and a lot of people will die (like those patriots before us) but we can change things for the better.
Sure, we might be able to. Just like we might actually manage to routinely build interstellar spacecraft within the next 50 years. But the chance of either happening is close enough to zero that it's hardly worth considering.
If we're going to make any sort of meaningful change, it'll have to be through some means other than armed revolt. Unfortunately, the only thing to do that I can think of is the one thing we're all already doing here: talking about the problem. That hasn't worked very well thus far, but I can't see anything else that can be done.
Firepower, bullshit. This is what you get from being brainwashed about the US supremacy and how investing in military tech is going to make you invincible. Take a look at Vietnam, take a look at Iraq.
Yes, let's take a look at them.
In Vietnam, we impeded our own forces for political reasons. We weren't allowed by our politicians to take the fight to the enemy, and so we didn't. Our armed forces weren't allowed to destroy the enemy at its source, so we didn't. We ultimately withdrew, not because we were being defeated, but because our civilian population had had enough. In other words, Vietnam was not a military defeat of the U.S. forces. There was considerable resistance, to be sure, and it did cost us, but we "lost" only because while we were there, our military wasn't allowed to take the gloves off and because we ultimately left for political reasons. Vietnam was not a military defeat.
In Iraq, we slaughtered the enemy forces. They hardly stood a chance. We're there right now, and if anything, the only reason we're having any problems at all is that we're having to exercise restraint that I guarantee wouldn't be exercised in the case of a home-grown armed insurrection here in the U.S. When the government's very existence is on the line, there's no reason to believe it would hold anything back. In the meantime, like I said before, Iraq is a perfect example of how difficult a time an armed civilian revolution would have it: despite all the efforts of the members of the insurrection over there, we're still there, we're not going away, and if we go away it'll be because we want to leave, not because of any military defeat. And all that is despite the fact that their military forces outnumbered ours by roughly 2 to 1 (if not more).
There is one fundamental rule in warfare, and it is still unchanged: If the enemy outnumbers you more than 2 to 1 you automatically lose.
I see. Well, let's make an extreme example to show how absurd this is. I have an army of ten thousand men armed with all the modern weaponry our armed forces have available to them. You have an army of ten million armed with spears, and your job is to kick me out. Who do you think is going to win? The answer is obvious: I will. Your army will never even get close to any of my bases of operation. The technology at my disposal will enable me to see you coming night and day, to track your movements wherever you are, and allow me to destroy you from afar without you even getting within visual range of me.
You're an idiot if you believe military technology doesn't matter. It matters a great deal. The Iraqi military forces did outnumber ours 2 to 1, but we easily took the country anyway, with hardly any casualties on our side. Do you really think we could have accomplished that without the military hardware we have at our command?
It would be stupid of me to claim that our military technology makes us invincible against an enemy of roughly equivalent technological capability. But against an enemy of significantly less technological capability, it has a significant effect on the odds, and you're an idiot if you think otherwise. And history has proven this repeatedly.
Go ahead and dare, I know I wouldn't shoot, I'd desert or frag an officer that gave an order for me to shoot civilians. I can't go on with this seeing as how you're making things up.
So you'd stand by while said armed civilians captured the President of the United States and members of Congress? I'm skeptical of that, but only you can speak for you.:-)
If most soldiers are as you are then there's hope indeed. I hope to God that's the case, but history is not on your side. Want a perfect example? The American Civil War. Americans shooting Americans. Did the people in the U.S. military back then take an oath to uphold the Constitution any different from what you took? Were their views really any different than yours and those of your fellow soldiers? I honestly don't know the answers to that. Perhaps you do.
Chinese leaders had to call in army units from other places because the local units refused to fire on their own people.
What makes you think that leaders in the U.S. will do any different? And what makes you think U.S. soldiers are any different from Chinese soldiers in this regard?
Throughout history, soldiers have shown their willingness to kill their own countrymen in order to "keep the peace" and, especially, to protect those in power. There is absolutely no reason at all to believe that U.S. soldiers are somehow "special" and magically exempt from this.
Regardless, I'm not talking about demonstrations on the part of civilians or anything like that. That kind of thing will be handled by the local and federal police forces. No, I'm talking about civilians attempting to overthrow the government by force. What do you think a revolution is, anyway? Do you really think you and your fellow soliders will be allowed to just stand by and watch it happen? No. You'll be ordered to engage, and you'll do it, too, because you'll believe it to be "defending the country", when in reality you'll just be defending the people currently in power. You'll believe the revolutionaries are just a bunch of crazy nutjobs because that's what your chain of command tells you (based on their "intelligence") and what the mass media tells you.
If civilians started pointing guns at you, I dare say you wouldn't hesitate to point yours back at them. And if they started firing at you, I would bet good money that you'd fire back in self defense if nothing else, and the only reason you wouldn't is if the civilians didn't pose a credible threat to the safety of your or your fellow soldiers. Until that point, you wouldn't necessarily be asked by your chain of command to actively fire upon civilians. But you wouldn't allow those armed civilians to detain your leadership, either, would you? And yet, that's what their mission would be, and they'd be determined to accomplish it by force if necessary. That's what an armed revolution is.
One more thing: revolutions never happen as a result of the population as a whole rising up, at least that I know of. The percentage of the population that becomes actively engaged in combat varies, to be sure, but I expect it's generally relatively low. For instance, during the American Revolution, about 10% of the colonial population engaged in combat (I can't seem to find the source for that anymore, however).
I rather doubt that members of the U.S. military would have much of a problem firing on a group of armed civilians bent on overthrowing the government.
You're taking precisely the wrong lesson away from Kent State and Tianenman Square. The proper lesson is that they illustrate just how low the threshold really is before military forces will start firing on civilians. If military forces would even consider firing on civilians in those situations, it's pretty much guaranteed that they'll fire without hesitation on a group of armed civilians intent on overthrowing the government. Such a group of armed civilians by their very intent automatically becomes "the enemy".
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We're apparently far too busy telling others how Great our country and our democracy is to do something like actually make it work like we say it does.
Besides, in the U.S., it's all about appearance, not substance. We apparently figure that if we claim something loud enough and long enough, everyone else will believe it. What else do you expect from a bunch of marketing and "business" types? We don't have any real manufacturing here anymore and our engineering is quickly disappearing, so marketing and "business" people are all that's really left. You know, the kind of people who will say anything and promise anything as long as it sounds good.
Bitter and cynical? Who, me?
But we're talking about HD here, not normal video. For normal video, people already have DVD, and DVD can be transferred to disk easily enough.
You need quite a bit more than 1 - 4 Mbps to stream reasonably good HD content. And that just doesn't exist in the U.S., and won't for the foreseeable future. And 24Mbps? Forget it!
The content companies, cable companies, and telcos don't give a crap what the users want because they're monopolies. And thanks to the FCC, these monopolies are allowed to grow bigger by the year, with ever greater consolidation. In some cases, there's not even a difference between the content producer and the ISP (with Time Warner being an example -- they produce content and own a cable franchise).
So what you say may be true of the rest of the world, but like I said, here in the U.S. you probably won't see digital distribution of any kind unless everything is locked down solid. The telcos will make sure the pipes remain slow because they don't care about investing any money into infrastructure when they can just sit back and rake in profits, and they have enough clout with the government to make sure the cable companies can't do that, either. That's what the latest FCC action against the cable companies is all about.
Not in the U.S. The telcos, cable companies, and media companies will see to that. Not nearly enough bandwidth in the U.S. to make that practical, and that's something that simply will not change as long as monopoly corporate interests control the government. Which is to say, pretty much forever.
And the media companies won't ever "approve" of that until computers are totally locked down with DRM. Perhaps not even then.
The U.S. version will probably conveniently omit the "warrant" bit...
Why, yes, we were/are. But apparently you didn't get the memo. See, "freedom" and "liberty" here aren't referring to yours, it's referring to the government's.
Of course, not many people got the memo, so don't feel bad.
And as one of the older people, all I can say here is that it's our own damned fault. These kids are living in the world we built for them with the expectations we gave them. But the expectations and the world in question aren't those of what we told them. No, they've seen their parents (my generation) work their asses off, and as a result be forced to be parents in absentia, without anything more to show for it in the end than their grandparents (my generation's parents) had. They've heard their parents and their peers' parents talk about how upper management and the executives have been making millions while working a few hours a day, while the parents in question worked 16+ hours a day for months-long stretches, and after doing all that had to suffer through the indignity and financial burden of "downsizing", "rightsizing", and whatever else the management buzzword of the day was. All the while that same management got unprecedented bonuses for "cutting costs".
The people of my generation were constantly told by our parents that if we worked hard, we would be able to do better than they did. That turned out to be true for some of us (some of us got lucky in the dotbomb, for instance), but not nearly enough of us. The proof that we were lied to is that the middle class is, and has been, shrinking, while the distribution of wealth grows ever more topheavy. That has consequences. This is one of them.
The people coming into the workforce aren't stupid. They're being asked to do the same shit that their parents were asked to do. But unlike their parents, they know what will happen if they walk that same path, because they've seen it happen to their parents. And they're apparently not having any of it.
Good for them.
So this box plus FreeNAS will let me store a terabyte of data across 2 250G drives + one 80G drive? Sign me up!
Exactly. Which is why it's right for people to complain about it. We must keep corruption out of the U.S. government to avoid the positive feedback loop that ultimately results in the concentration of power in very few hands.
Ooops. Too late. That cycle started quite some time ago, and I don't think there's any stopping it at this point...
Yeah, well, the article doesn't indicate who interviewed him, so this "everybody who interviewed him was impressed" statement doesn't necessarily carry much weight.
I'm going to reserve judgment here until we see what this guy actually does, but it's folly to ignore past results, particularly if they're associated with the very thing the guy will be responsible for in his new role.
Since RedHat is apparently rather successful thus far, it seems like it would be a better move to recruit from within (as long as you promote the most competent people, not the least).
Of all the OSes I've ever used, Windows is the only one that would slowly eat itself over time. Current versions of it are much, much better about this sort of thing, but Windows is the only one that has ever done that at all. I've seen other OSes crash before, and I've even seen them occasionally corrupt a filesytem (well, once...and that was a particularly crappy version of System Vr4). But Windows is the only one I've ever seen that would, after running long enough (where "long enough" depends on which version of Windows you're talking about), start to develop weird, unexplainable problems and generally get very unreliable -- on hardware that proved itself reliable afterwards.
I don't think Windows was release-ready until well after the release of Windows 2000.
As I said, it's significantly better these days, if you exclude Vista (I don't have any experience with Vista so I can't really comment on it). But chances are, that's because what's out there these days has been in the field for years and it's taken that long to work out all the major bugs. No other operating system I've ever used has been like that.
You mean your ex-wife?
Just remember...there's no such thing as "nowhere to go but up", especially in software. No matter how bad it is, it's possible to make it worse.
Microsoft proves that all the time!
"Begun, this clone war has".
(in reference to the emergence of Compaq)
Perhaps he would rather live a coward than die a slave.
Before claiming that we're not slaves yet, truthfully answer this: what are you truly free to do? What can you do that doesn't somehow, somewhere, require someone else's permission? Compare that list against the list of things that do require someone else's consent, and I think you'll find that the former list is woefully short. And that's here in the U.S., "land of the free". It's even worse in many other parts of the world.
The time when it was possible to fix this issue is long, long past.
Ah, okay. Well, that kind of judicial oversight that all U.S. citizens get when accused of being an "enemy combatant" is certainly better than nothing, but it's still a blatant violation of the Constitution, which explicitly states that if you're accused of a crime, you get to challenge the accusation in a court of law in front of a jury of your peers.
In the absence of anything else, yes, you're absolutely right. But the suspicions of wrongdoing in secrecy have a solid foundation, namely the wrongdoing on the part of the administration which has been revealed thus far.
The suspicions I have regarding what this administration does in secret are mere extensions of those things that have already been revealed about this administration, some of which the administration previously tried to keep secret.
Not all instances of absence of evidence are the same.
Excuse me, but the Constitution most certainly does come into play! It's the only legal document giving legitimacy to the U.S. government at all. It's the highest law of the land. Are you suggesting that you're okay with ignoring that? With allowing the government to do whatever it pleases simply because it claims "we're at war"?? I find this most distressing and disturbing, especially coming from someone who claims to have seen the actions of tyrants up close and personal. You know where the dismissal of a defining document such as the Constitution leads, because you've been there (or so I presume from your comments).
Blatantly lying in order to justify the unilateral invasion of another country. Seizing and holding, without access to the outside or to any judicial relief, many people. Torture. Unprecedented secrecy. Routine use of "free speech zones". Warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens in direct violation of the law.
And that's just the things I happen to know about. Care to name some of the things this administration has done right? The good things this administration has done? Because from what I've seen, there really isn't anything.
I realize that previous presidents have done distasteful things, and that many of the things the Bush administration has done have been done in the past from time to time, but at no time I'm aware of have all these things been done all at the same time.
Perhaps for you things are fine until they really do get as bad as the totalitarian societies you have direct experience with. But I don't think it's such a good idea to be happy with going the wrong direction.
There are several problems with this:
Between all that and the current track record of the current executive administration, I think we all have every reason to be worried.
A very quick Google search shows otherwise, both with respect to bills passed and their interpretation by the courts:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090900772.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6167856
I said it more for laughs than anything else, but basically, the U.S. executive branch can now (among other police-state-like things) declare anyone they wish, citizen or no, an "enemy combatant" and throw them into a deep dark hole where not even their lawyer can get at them. And they apparently have done so on at least one occasion, from what I understand.
These days, the reason people can disagree with the government and get away with it is that their disagreement doesn't actually matter because it doesn't have the power to change anything. If that situation changes for someone (that is, if someone who vocally disagrees with the government manages to do so in such a way that it adversely affects those in power), I expect the executive branch will then take advantage of their newly-declared power.
I wrote:
Note that I'm talking about a military win on our part here. In reality the entire Iraq occupation has been nothing short of a pointless, wasteful disaster, but not from a military perspective, nor from the perspective of the government.
Oh, wait, I'm not allowed to disagree with the government. I forgot. I meant to say that Iraq has been a complete and total success, and a wonderful illustration of the sheer brilliance of our leadership today!
That's exactly right.
I don't know what morons convinced some of you people otherwise, but the goings on in Iraq are nothing more than a nuisance. We're still there and we're not going anywhere unless we decide to, and that's despite the best their resistance can throw at us. I can't think of a clearer win on our part short of total surrender and cessation of hostilities on their part.
Iraq is a clear example of how even a reasonably well-armed (for a civilian force) insurgency will find it nearly impossible to forcibly overthrow a truly well-armed occupying force, much less a sitting government. The insurgency there is much more of a threat to the civilian population over there, which isn't a surprise: the civilian population is even more poorly armed and trained than the insurgents. Such is the nature of most civilians.
My point is this: if a reasonably well-armed insurgency is having an essentially impossible time kicking the U.S. out of what is to the U.S. a foreign land, imagine how much harder a time it would have if it were trying to overthrow the U.S. government directly, where the resolve of the government (which translates to its willingness to use force) would be orders of magnitude higher. This is why armed insurrection in the U.S. is essentially guaranteed to fail (unless it somehow convinces the U.S. military to take its side, in which case there's no need for it to be an armed insurrection, is there?).
If you don't understand the difference between a military defeat and a politically-motivated withdrawal, then you won't ever understand what makes winning an armed revolution against a well-equipped government so difficult.
The political interventions are part of the game, but they are also part of the context. That context is very important. The political motivations behind a government's withdrawal from a foreign land do not apply to its defense against an armed revolution. Against an armed revolution, the government is fighting for its existence. That would be like you fighting for your life. If you don't see the difference between you leaving someone else's house after they make things annoyingly unpleasant for you and you losing your life in your own home, then you will never understand where I'm coming from.
Oh, yes, I'm sure that's of great comfort to every soldier that found themselves on the losing side of a war despite winning a whole pile of battles.
Don't be absurd. You can "get ahead" in war all you want, but if that doesn't ultimately result in victory then all those "gains" are worthless.
War is ultimately only about winning. "Winning" can mean many things, obviously, but winning is the objective of war. Learning that lesson from Vietnam is precisely why the U.S. forces walked all over the Iraqis in both Gulf wars.
Well, that depends, doesn't it? If winning is the only way to survive (or to remain in power, or whatever), then you're better off eating the sky-high costs of investing more than you are by not doing so, right?
But oddly enough, your statement can ultimately be used against you. After all, the cost to the revolutionaries of attempting to overthrow a well-armed sitting government would be extremely high. By your own statement, that would make the attempt at revolution a stupid move.
Bet that's not exactly what you expected the consequences of your statement to be. :-D
That's definitely true. But what you're failing to realize, and what I've been trying to get across here, is that even if we do think that there are things we can do, we're almost certainly screwed anyway.
What can be done is independent of what we think we can do. In other words, what we can actually do is dictated by reality and not any feel-good beliefs we might have.
And just what do you think the people in Iraq who have that minimal firepower are actually doing?
The answer, as I said before, is that they're being nothing more than a nuisance.
You have to be much more than a nuisance to overthrow a sitting government from within. Especially if that government has orders of magnitude more firepower than you, a comprehensive surveillance system, firm control over the only sources of information that people believe they can trust, and control over an economic system that all but guarantees that if you have the desire to go against the wishes of those in power, you won't have the economic capability to do so.
Sure, we might be able to. Just like we might actually manage to routinely build interstellar spacecraft within the next 50 years. But the chance of either happening is close enough to zero that it's hardly worth considering.
If we're going to make any sort of meaningful change, it'll have to be through some means other than armed revolt. Unfortunately, the only thing to do that I can think of is the one thing we're all already doing here: talking about the problem. That hasn't worked very well thus far, but I can't see anything else that can be done.
Yes, let's take a look at them.
In Vietnam, we impeded our own forces for political reasons. We weren't allowed by our politicians to take the fight to the enemy, and so we didn't. Our armed forces weren't allowed to destroy the enemy at its source, so we didn't. We ultimately withdrew, not because we were being defeated, but because our civilian population had had enough. In other words, Vietnam was not a military defeat of the U.S. forces. There was considerable resistance, to be sure, and it did cost us, but we "lost" only because while we were there, our military wasn't allowed to take the gloves off and because we ultimately left for political reasons. Vietnam was not a military defeat.
In Iraq, we slaughtered the enemy forces. They hardly stood a chance. We're there right now, and if anything, the only reason we're having any problems at all is that we're having to exercise restraint that I guarantee wouldn't be exercised in the case of a home-grown armed insurrection here in the U.S. When the government's very existence is on the line, there's no reason to believe it would hold anything back. In the meantime, like I said before, Iraq is a perfect example of how difficult a time an armed civilian revolution would have it: despite all the efforts of the members of the insurrection over there, we're still there, we're not going away, and if we go away it'll be because we want to leave, not because of any military defeat. And all that is despite the fact that their military forces outnumbered ours by roughly 2 to 1 (if not more).
I see. Well, let's make an extreme example to show how absurd this is. I have an army of ten thousand men armed with all the modern weaponry our armed forces have available to them. You have an army of ten million armed with spears, and your job is to kick me out. Who do you think is going to win? The answer is obvious: I will. Your army will never even get close to any of my bases of operation. The technology at my disposal will enable me to see you coming night and day, to track your movements wherever you are, and allow me to destroy you from afar without you even getting within visual range of me.
You're an idiot if you believe military technology doesn't matter. It matters a great deal. The Iraqi military forces did outnumber ours 2 to 1, but we easily took the country anyway, with hardly any casualties on our side. Do you really think we could have accomplished that without the military hardware we have at our command?
It would be stupid of me to claim that our military technology makes us invincible against an enemy of roughly equivalent technological capability. But against an enemy of significantly less technological capability, it has a significant effect on the odds, and you're an idiot if you think otherwise. And history has proven this repeatedly.
So you'd stand by while said armed civilians captured the President of the United States and members of Congress? I'm skeptical of that, but only you can speak for you. :-)
If most soldiers are as you are then there's hope indeed. I hope to God that's the case, but history is not on your side. Want a perfect example? The American Civil War. Americans shooting Americans. Did the people in the U.S. military back then take an oath to uphold the Constitution any different from what you took? Were their views really any different than yours and those of your fellow soldiers? I honestly don't know the answers to that. Perhaps you do.
What makes you think that leaders in the U.S. will do any different? And what makes you think U.S. soldiers are any different from Chinese soldiers in this regard?
Throughout history, soldiers have shown their willingness to kill their own countrymen in order to "keep the peace" and, especially, to protect those in power. There is absolutely no reason at all to believe that U.S. soldiers are somehow "special" and magically exempt from this.
Regardless, I'm not talking about demonstrations on the part of civilians or anything like that. That kind of thing will be handled by the local and federal police forces. No, I'm talking about civilians attempting to overthrow the government by force. What do you think a revolution is, anyway? Do you really think you and your fellow soliders will be allowed to just stand by and watch it happen? No. You'll be ordered to engage, and you'll do it, too, because you'll believe it to be "defending the country", when in reality you'll just be defending the people currently in power. You'll believe the revolutionaries are just a bunch of crazy nutjobs because that's what your chain of command tells you (based on their "intelligence") and what the mass media tells you.
If civilians started pointing guns at you, I dare say you wouldn't hesitate to point yours back at them. And if they started firing at you, I would bet good money that you'd fire back in self defense if nothing else, and the only reason you wouldn't is if the civilians didn't pose a credible threat to the safety of your or your fellow soldiers. Until that point, you wouldn't necessarily be asked by your chain of command to actively fire upon civilians. But you wouldn't allow those armed civilians to detain your leadership, either, would you? And yet, that's what their mission would be, and they'd be determined to accomplish it by force if necessary. That's what an armed revolution is.
One more thing: revolutions never happen as a result of the population as a whole rising up, at least that I know of. The percentage of the population that becomes actively engaged in combat varies, to be sure, but I expect it's generally relatively low. For instance, during the American Revolution, about 10% of the colonial population engaged in combat (I can't seem to find the source for that anymore, however).
I rather doubt that members of the U.S. military would have much of a problem firing on a group of armed civilians bent on overthrowing the government.
You're taking precisely the wrong lesson away from Kent State and Tianenman Square. The proper lesson is that they illustrate just how low the threshold really is before military forces will start firing on civilians. If military forces would even consider firing on civilians in those situations, it's pretty much guaranteed that they'll fire without hesitation on a group of armed civilians intent on overthrowing the government. Such a group of armed civilians by their very intent automatically becomes "the enemy".