This treaty really goes a long way toward shattering my illusions of Europe as the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Why did you ever think of Europe as being significantly different than the U.S. with respect to freedom? Most of Europe is under about the same amount of control by the multinational corporations as the U.S. is, because money is truly a global language that pretty much anyone of any nationality can be influenced by.
The only significant difference between the U.S. and Europe regarding this is who has to be "influenced" for the corporations (rather, their owners and major shareholders) to get their way.
JPEG2000 also has patents that cover it. However, the JPEG group claims that they have obtained waivers from all such patent holders, so everything should be OK.
If these "waivers" are real legal documents signed by both parties, then JPEG2000 is in the clear. If not, well...this incident demonstrates clearly that nothing less will do.
MySQL got there first and was "good enough"
on
Why MySQL Grew So Fast
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· Score: 5, Interesting
MySQL is an interesting example of how you can be wildly successful if you're at the right place at the right time with a product that's just good enough for the mission people have in mind.
MySQL, even now, is actually rather sparse as database engines go: it lacks stored procedures, triggers, constraints, etc., in short many of the things that a serious DBA considers necessary in a database engine.
But the mission it was originally created for is a mission that's a very common one: a simple, network-enabled data store with a SQL interface. That it lacked transactional capabilities didn't really matter: it was good enough for what many people needed.
So its popularity exploded. In the free software world, there weren't any other contenders at the time that were sufficiently reliable or fast to do the job. PostgreSQL back then just wasn't fast enough, and tended to eat data. Not that MySQL was perfect in that regard, mind you, but at least MySQL gave you the tools to recover your data quickly in the event of a hiccup. PostgreSQL didn't -- it required you to do a full restore from backups, whereas MySQL let you use 'isamchk' to get you up and running quickly. That made a big difference to a lot of people.
Today the story is very different. PostgreSQL is at least as fast, if not faster, than MySQL in many situations, especially under load, and has essentially all the features needed to make it a "real" database: transactions, stored procedures, triggers, views, constraints, etc. About all it lacks now is built-in replication (there exist third-party solutions), nested transactions, and point-in-time recovery (a.k.a. archive logs), things which MySQL is not likely to get anytime soon.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that PostgreSQL is very much a superior solution in just about every respect, MySQL is more popular and thus has better third-party support. And it's thanks to the fact that it was in the right place, at the right time, with a "good enough" feature set.
The right question isn't what kinds of businesses, new things, etc., can or cannot be offshored.
No, the right question is: what jobs can't be offshored? And the answer is damned few of them -- only those that truly require a physical presence.
And guess what? Technology reduces the number of jobs that require a physical presence. You think the fact that offshoring is happening right now is an accident? No, it's because we now have the communications technology to make it practical.
So the only question left is what all the extra competition is going to do. I think it's going to destroy the global economy, as corporations take the extra profit and distribute it to those who already have the most money: executive staff, board members, and investors.
In short, I think this will destroy what little middle class the world has left, and put us squarely back in the middle ages when people were either insanely rich or dirt poor.
In fact, because offshoring forces entire economies to compete with each other with the price of labor, and thus the standard of living, being the only variable, I think we'll start to see some countries start to use prison labor to compete. That'll definitely take us back to the dark ages.
To summarize: Post-modernists are idiots. They are wrong, but I am right. Because I am right, post-modernists should get out of the way and let me do what I want. Because I am right. Science is the best.
Nice caricature. Not very useful, though.
The post-modernists I've run across believe that "good" is relative. Some of them even believe that truth is relative as well, and as such no belief system is any more valid than another.
But science is a belief system only to the extent that one believes his own observations. This is sufficient to cover just about everyone.
The scientific method isn't just some arbitrary method of arriving at conclusions about the world. It is one that people the world over use and rely upon almost automatically. It is being used whenever someone asks "what happens if I do X?" and then proceeds to do X in order to see what happens. It is being used whenever someone attempts to solve a real-world problem or to control his environment. It is being used whenever the process of arriving at a solution or of controlling one's environment involves observation of the results and incorporation of those results into the next set of actions.
In short, those very same post-modernists routinely use the scientific method in their everyday lives. That alone gives the scientific method a level of validity above the level those same post-modernists would assign to an arbitrary belief system. Science is just the formalization of the most effective methods people routinely use to understand their environment.
Now, how does this relate to belief systems? More precisely, how does this relate to freedom of expression, human rights, etc.? Simple.
It is simple observation that people value their own happiness. This isn't something that can be debated, because the drive to be happy is instinctive. The amount of effort people expend in the pursuit of happiness exceeds everything else. There are many things that make people happy, of course, from having sufficient food to spending time with friends.
This gives us an objective basis upon which we can define "Good". "Good" is that which maximizes happiness. "Bad" or "Evil" is that which reduces happiness. All that remains is whether the happiness in question is restricted to one (or a few) individuals or if it is spread to a much wider audience.
Because people value happiness, and because observation and history shows us unequivocally that people are happier when they are free than when they are not, it automatically follows that freedom is a good thing. The concept of human rights is a codification of this observation, a statement that freedom is such a necessity for human happiness that everyone should have it.
These aren't arbitrary conclusions to be disposed of as easily as those of any other belief system, these are conclusions that come directly from real-world observation, the same sort of observation almost everyone, of any belief system, including the post-modernists who might disagree, uses to go about their daily lives.
Before, the patent (on browser plugins) being challenged belonged to an individual who was suing Microsoft and even managed to get an injunction (can't remember whether they actually ordered Microsoft to pay or not).
That patent was quickly challenged and nullified. While the w3c and other groups initiated the challenge, I think the reason the patent was nullified was that it belonged to someone who was being used to (successfully) target Microsoft.
Now the patent being challenged belongs to Microsoft, and is being challenged by some small-time nobody (as far as Big Business is concerned).
My prediction is that either the challenge itself will be rejected, or the patent office will "review" the patent and find it "valid". Not because of any merits the patent may have, but because of who owns it. The guys running the patent office know who butters their bread, and it ain't organizations like PUBPAT.
There's likely to be a difference between the DOJ's stated stance and its real stance.
Based on the DOJs behavior, its real stance is probably something like: we want the rest of the world to enforce the copyright laws when the owner of the copyright is a large U.S. corporation, and we want them to not enforce the copyright laws when the perpetrator is a large U.S. corporation. Otherwise we don't care.
Then I simply point my browser at 127.0.0.1:80 and voila! I'm on the target intranet. Adding their intranet hostname to/etc/hosts with ip 127.0.0.1 can be useful too.
Then you'll love the -D option: it sets up a socks proxy on the remote end and lets you connect to it via a local port. So you use -D , then set up your browser to use a socks proxy on localhost: and suddenly it's as if your web browser is running on the remote. The only downside is that name resolution happens on the local side.
If you combine this with a program called "connect", which will establish connections via a socks proxy, then you can use ssh to get into other systems that are accessible only from the remote end. Just put an entry into your.ssh/config file like so:
No fancy background they have a straight color background to keep refresh rates down.
If you mean that there's no dynamic background, then this makes sense.
If you mean that the background is a single solid color then this might not make as much sense, because you can tell the X server to use backing store for all mapped windows (which I assume applies to the root window as well).
How well that'll work for you depends on how much memory each workstation has (and how much memory the graphics cards have).
You might try experimenting with that option. You might find that it will allow you to be a little less strict in how you manage the operation.
I dont seem to be having much in the way of bandwidth problems running 150 desktops off of a single server. It takes about 150 k sustained bandwidth to suppor that. Now come back when you know what you are talking about.
Yeah, but the reason you can get away with that is that you almost certainly have a much higher burst rate than just 150k, and even if 150k were your burst rate limit, that's far better than 5k per second, which is what you'll be getting over a modem connection.
X is fine until your client has to send a bunch of pixmaps. Then it gets bandwidth-hungry. Typically this happens during application initialization, so I don't doubt that you're not having trouble with 150k sustained bandwidth. But I'll bet your burst rates peg the interface.
The widget protocol is not intended as a replacement of X -- in fact in the Linux world it would certainly be implemented on top of X. But the bandwidth savings are still there nonetheless.
I've done X over a slow-speed (modem) connection before and while it's not unusable it is slow. Transmitting widget protocol commands would make using a slow-speed modem connection work about as well as X works over a medium-speed (150k/sec or so) connection, because applications would transmit pixmaps only when supplying application-specific graphics. So programs like Photoshop would be slow to load images but would be reasonably fast once the image itself were loaded. The bulk of the graphics traffic that passes between X clients and an X server is composed of UI widget graphics, and that hurts application startup time over a slow link a LOT.
So...come back when you know what you're talking about.:-)
I quite agree. However, there is an unfortunate problem with making a new toolkit: Cross-Platform.
But the beauty of separating out the look and feel of the toolkit from the implementation of the toolkit via a network protocol is that porting the widget set to a new platform is now much more straightforward: you simply have to write a widget server on the target platform, which will take widget requests and display them through the native widget set.
Where you'll have to write some code is when the native widget set is missing a widget type defined by the protocol. In that event you have a couple of options: reject the protocol request, or implement the look and feel of the widget in software (using as much of the native widget set as possible, of course). You can always do the latter -- how else do you think new widget types are created on a platform such as Windows?
Also, you are arguing for a widget server, which will work best when it is the dominant/only widget set. Windows can do this. Linux is still too diverse.
No, this isn't the problem. The problem is that right now the existing widget sets under Linux all implement their own look and feel. They've duplicated a lot of effort as a result.
With a widget protocol, you implement GTK or QT the same way as before, except that whenever possible you make widget protocol calls instead of doing direct drawing, mouse handling, etc. For cases when the widget protocol doesn't supply the kind of widget you want, you'll have to implement the look/feel in terms of more primitive graphics calls (and thus the widget protocol will have to support the ability to do direct graphics, including 3D graphics) -- but even that should be done on top of existing widgets whenever possible.
There might be other ways to approach the problem of extensibility, e.g. by making it possible to dynamically define to the widget server the properties of a widget: the inputs it expects, the areas that have to be drawn on, etc. But I haven't thought any of that through.
I sent this in response to this, but I think it's quite relevant here, too, because it addresses the problem of desktop consistency:
Btw, if you have been following my posts on my blog
and on the desktop-devel-list, you will know that my feeling is that
all of the existing toolkits today (Gtk, Qt, XUL and VCL) will become
obsolete and we need to start looking at the next generation toolkit
system.
If you're going to do a next generation toolkit system, then do it
right: start by creating a network protocol for it.
You heard me right. The right way to do a toolkit is to
make it networkable in a client/server fashion. There are a few
reasons for doing so:
Speed over the network. Instead of having to transmit
low-level graphics primitives, you now only have to transmit
higher-level widget information. This should represent an order of
magnitude reduction in the amount of network traffic required. It
also means the bandwidth between the code that draws the widget and
the code that renders it will likely be as high as possible (a local
socket or some such).
Consistency. With a client/server widget architecture, all
applications running anywhere will have the same look and feel when
they're displaying through your widget server. Additionally,
changing the theme in use will change the look and feel of all the
applications using the widget server (which, ideally, should be all
of them).
Abstraction. Because the widgets are implemented on top of a
protocol, widget libraries simply have to all talk the same
protocol. This means that it doesn't matter what the widget library
itself looks like, what language it's implemented in, what object
paradigm it uses, or anything else: the look and feel will still be
the same. This is markedly different from the current situation with
GTK, QT, and all other Unix widget sets, each of which implements
its own look and feel. A client/server architecture can, and should,
abstract out the look and feel of the widget set.
Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally
eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in
look and feel between applications written for different widget
toolkits.
No, it's not. It's vitally important that you understand this: the real cost of producing something depends on the total number of man-hours involved. Offshoring doesn't improve the efficiency of the process, only the dollar cost involved, and only because of differences in the standard of living between the two locations.
Yes, it is. As the AC who responded to you pointed out, if you reduce
the cost of heating your home, that is an efficiency increase --
BECAUSE you are paying less to heat your home.
You're increasing your efficiency, but not necessarily the
efficiency of the economy as a whole.
Indians write software at 1/10 the price of Americans. Thus, even if
the average Indian is only 20% as efficient as the average American,
it is still more cost-effective -- and efficient -- to hire
Indians. At those rates, an employer could hire 5 Indians to achieve
the same productivity as 1 American. Spending the same amount on
Indian employees as the employer would on an American means the
employer DOUBLES his company's total productivity -- and thus, the
business is twice as efficient as before.
No, this is not true. What you're describing is only a
temporary effect at best. You're focusing on the dollar amount when
you should be looking at the manpower.
There are three things that increase the efficiency of an economy:
specialization, trade, and technology. Let's ignore technology for
the moment and assume that it remains constant.
That leaves specialization and trade. Specialization is what makes an
individual more efficient at performing a task, and trade is what
allows others to gain access to that person's abilities. Without
both, you don't get as much efficiency in the economy as you would
otherwise.
But in the case of offshoring to India or China, both
specialization and trade already exist. In particular,
specialization already exists within the U.S., and access to people
who have specialized in the fields in question also already
exists.
For offshoring to be of true economic benefit, for it to truly
increase the efficiency of the economy, the people who do the work in
the target countries have to be better than their American
counterparts. But they're not, at least not yet. And that means that
offshoring is a lateral move from the standpoint of the
efficiency of the economy, not an improvement.
The reason I say economics is a zero-sum game after factoring out
technology and population growth (the economy is always measured
relative to time, so time is divided out of the equation) is that
there is an upper bound to the amount of efficiency that can be gained
by specialization, and an upper bound to the amount of efficiency that
can be gained through trade. That means that if the economy reaches
that level of efficiency through those two mechanisms and neither
technology nor the population increase, then there can be no
further economic growth. I claim that a (more or less free)
economy that has been functioning as long as ours has already come
very close to that upper limit.
So the only thing that the current offshoring trend can do
right now is to redistribute wealth. In the case of the offshoring
we're seeing, that redistribution is happening by paying roughly the
same number of people (IT workers) a much smaller wage, and paying the
rest to a much smaller number of people (investors and company
management).
But ultimately, the reason that economics is ultimately a zero-sum
game when technology and population growth are factored out is this
very simple observation: whenever someone gains money, someone else
must lose the same amount of money. That's because every
financial transaction has a source and a destination. If I pay
you $1000, I lose $1000 and you gain $1000. The total amount of money
available is still the same despite the fact that our transaction
h
Which begs the question, why would an obviously talented legal thinker be passed over time and again for judicial appointments?
Because the people who appoint judges (especially to high courts like the circuit courts and the Supreme Court) aren't interested in appointing people who can think. They're interested in appointing people who are likely to rule in favor of their corporate masters no matter how strong the argument against them is.
Professor Lessig's involvement will undoubtedly give a major boost to the FSF's ongoing efforts to neutralize legal threats to software freedom.
Perhaps. But remember that he was on the losing side of the Supreme Court case against the Copyright Term Extension Act.
It certainly can't hurt to get all the assistance we can, so I'm pleased that he's been elected to the FSF Board, but let's not kid ourselves: we're very likely to lose the intellectual property fight -- there are far too many large corporations that are in favor of draconian and one-sided (favorable to them) intellectual property laws, and everyone that matters, including the Supreme Court, favors the large corporations.
Interestingly enough, those very laws are exactly what will keep Microsoft in their monopoly position.
And offshoring labor costs to cheaper countries is what? An efficiency gain (a better productivity/price ratio)...
No, it's not. It's vitally important that you understand this: the real cost of producing something depends on the total number of man-hours involved. Offshoring doesn't improve the efficiency of the process, only the dollar cost involved, and only because of differences in the standard of living between the two locations.
After all -- we offshored manufacturing labor in the 1980s to other countries. Where did the labor go? As I wrote in my original post, some went into knowledge jobs (IT, engineering, etc.), but most went into other blue-collar jobs -- construction, and so on. And guess what? The market for building construction remains as strong as its ever been (particularly housing). Those blue-collar laborers were freed up to do other work with their hands which couldn't be offshored.
And the end result was? If the construction jobs were already available, then that means that the construction job market was paying higher before than it was afterwards, since the supply of jobs was obviously greater than the demand for them prior to the manufacturing offshoring. The rest went into knowledge jobs which tended (at the time) to pay better, and the end result was that the increase in income for some of them was enough to pay for the additional construction jobs.
But despite that, the average inflation-adjusted income fell if I'm not mistaken. Evidence for this shouldn't be difficult to come up with. Look at the number of average-wage-years it takes to buy a home now compared with the number it took to buy a home 50 years ago -- that number has gone up. It should have gone down, because technology makes it cheaper to build a home now than it was then.
No. You're falling into the classic fallacy of "zero-sum" economics. Econ. is not a zero-sum game.
After factoring in population growth and efficiency gains due to technological progress, it is a zero-sum game. It has to be, because the amount of production capacity of the economy is directly proportional to the amount of human labor available. Market forces (when discussing a market which is free in all respects) can only serve to maximize the efficiency of the economy's production, but is limited by the amount of human labor available and the available technology (which serves to act as a multiplier).
And this is true because economics is the system of exchange of human labor. I don't imagine this assertion is hard to prove. Start by looking at the economy involving two people, then look at it involving three. If it's zero-sum when two players are involved and zero-sum when three players are involved, then it will be zero-sum when N players are involved, where N is an arbitrarily large number. It's probably possible to prove this mathematically using induction.
The economic strength of one nation doesn't *necessarily* decrease just because a company offshores jobs to another nation. The rate of increase is higher in China, than in the U.S., for instance. China's real GDP growth has been 8%, and it's quadrupled since 1978. Chile's GDP growth was approx. 7% from 1991-1997 (though it's been around 3% since then). U.S. GDP growth? About 3-4%. Those first 2 nations, however, have seen their GDP growth due in no small part, of course, to trade with the U.S. and other developed nations.
Hasn't it occurred to you that the increase in GDP of nations like China is much more likely due to the application of technology in those nations than anything else? Like I said, technology is a labor force multiplier. It is the only thing that significantly increases the efficiency and thus productivity of an economy over time.
In terms of medicine, basically the whole world's standard of living has improved, regardless of personal or familial wealth.
No, the average standard of living has improved in terms of medicine, and it certainly isn't independent of wealth: there are millions, perhaps billons, of people who basically have no access to health care of any kind. Their standard of living with respect to medicine has not changed at all.
Nah. If that were true, agriculture should've collapsed a long time ago, due to the "outsourcing" of agriculture to big, efficient farm machines. Yet the business of agriculture is alive and well worldwide (domestically, it's only alive because the U.S. govn't subsidizes agriculture so much, for national security reasons. Otherwise, it's completely unviable to farm in the U.S. anymore).
No. The difference here is that agriculture got more efficient. It takes much less total labor to produce the same amount of food via the large farming machines than it did when the farmers were doing their work. The end result is that the real cost of food dropped, so the ability of the displaced farmers to afford food never changed much, if at all. Additionally, the same advances that made it possible to replace farmers with machines also simultaneously provided a new type of job that the farmers could migrate towards. That's not the case at all with offshoring in general.
But as companies expand their labor usage globally (to India, China, etc.), they also spread the wealth of the rich nations they are coming from (i.e. the U.S.) to those nations. In so doing, they raise the standard of living in that nation, even as it drops in their former nation-of-focus.
That creates a new market for their products. In the meantime, they pay less attention to the old market while their labor prices fall.
No. This creation of a new market can compensate for the loss of the old market only if the amount by which the standard of living in the new area rises is greater than the amount by which the standard of living in the old area drops. But since it's the difference in the standard of living itself that is the force behind offshoring, this cannot and will not happen.
Put another way, the amount of resources being diverted to the new area is not as much as the amount of resources being removed from the old area, and therefore any market created in the new area cannot make up for the loss of market in the old area. Otherwise the companies in question would not be saving any money.
Furthermore, people in any economy will always spend the money locally first. That's because the necessities of life are always available locally. Only the money that's left over is available to be spent elsewhere. So the end result is that the company that offshores will see only a small fraction of the money it saves being returned to it in the form of new business. More generally, it means that only a small fraction of the money that is leaving the U.S. economy via offshoring will return to the U.S.
Once the labor price in the old nation falls sufficiently-far for them to start hiring in that nation again, they will do so, and those people will be able to buy the company's products again.
Yes, they'll start hiring, but no, that does not in any way imply that suddenly the people in the new area will be able to buy the company's products again.
As you noted yourself, the competition between countries will force the price of labor to a minimum. But that minimum is however much is necessary to allow the person to barely survive. That means that by definition the people in question cannot buy the company's products unless the products are a necessity for survival.
You can't properly think about this until you start thinking about the cost of goods in
The question that proponents of offshoring don't want to answer is also the most relevant one: which jobs cannot be offshored?
The answer is: only those jobs which require a person's physical presence.
Well, as the current situation with offshoring has shown, which jobs require a physical presence is subject to change as a result of technological advances.
For instance, some argue that sales can't be offshored because you have to be face to face with a customer to make the sale. But technological advances can (and ultimately will) eliminate that requirement. All it takes is a holographic projection system so that each person "sees" all the other people in the same "room". And that's if we don't figure out how to interface to the brain directly first.
But the logical extension of this is that eventually almost everything will be offshored as long as doing so remains cheaper. As you note, for that to not remain the case, the standard of living in the U.S. must fall to roughly that of the competition.
But competition drives down prices. Offshoring forces entire countries' economies to compete against each other for the opportunity to supply labor. After all is said and done, the only way they can compete is by controlling their standard of living. And since competition drives down prices, the only way they can continue to compete is to continuously drive down their standard of living.
And the reason should be obvious once you think about it. A person's standard of living is determined by the amount of resources that person has in excess of the minimum he needs to survive. And the only thing people need to survive is food and water. Even shelter is a luxury (people can live outside, and have done so long ago).
But I think things can easily collapse long before that becomes an issue. Why?
Because the parts of the world that have the highest standards of living are also the parts of the world that buy the bulk of the goods supplied by the corporations that are doing this offshoring thing. Since a person's standard of living is the amount of excess resources he has available to him, and since the offshoring trend must yield a reduction in the average standard of living, it follows that the customer base of the corporations in question must drop in size and in buying power as a result of offshoring. Economics doesn't allow for any other outcome.
And if the customer base of a company is reduced, the company sees a drop in income. The very first thing that company will do is offshore more of its labor force, which will feed back into the overall cycle and speed up the decline. Eventually, the company will be forced to start cutting its offshored workforce, and that's the point at which the system will start to collapse. Because it won't be just a single company doing what I describe above, it'll be most of them.
This is why I think the offshoring trend will result in a global economic collapse.
What proponents of offshoring don't understand is that ultimately the only way to grow the economy is to make it possible for more people to buy your product, not less. The proponents of offshoring are assuming, wrongly, that anyone who loses his job to offshoring will be able to find an equally paying job elsewhere, and thus that the money the company saves will yield a net gain in customers. But that can't happen if the average standard of living goes down, as it must in an offshoring scenario such as what we're currently dealing with.
No, the only way to ultimately grow an economy and to grow a customer base is to save money by being more efficient, not in dollar terms but in man-hour terms. Money is simply a representation of human labor, and you don't get a long-term real increase in efficiency though a process such as offshoring. You can only get it either by streamlining the production process or through automation.
The European parliaments are almost as bought and paid for as members of the U.S. congress and senate. So while it's more likely that this fight can be won in Europe than the U.S., it's not that much more likely.
But the defeat of software patents is such a worthwhile goal that it's worth fighting for no matter the odds.
Come on, forget abut M$ itself. How long do you think the US will be allowed such an exclusive domination in the IT world? I'm not talking about Politics here, just about Economics. This is totally unacceptable from an economic POV. For this to work, M$ should be slashing prices everywhere (and not just in a few Asian countries).
Allowed by whom? You and me? We have no choice. We have no control over our governments, and our governments have all the guns and ammo. We either do their bidding or we get labeled a "terrorist" and thrown into a dark cell somewhere in Cuba. And that's if they don't just shoot us.
Who controls our governments? Big corporations. Like Microsoft. You think it's an accident that Microsoft has suffered no ill consequences of any antitrust proceedings to date? And they won't, either. You can take that to the bank.
The reason they won't is that the very thing that all the other multinational corporations want is the very thing that will keep Microsoft in the driver's seat: intellectual property laws. Between that and the amount of control Microsoft has over just about everybody's computing infrastructure, nobody of any consequence is going to have the balls or ability to free themselves of Microsoft.
As for the last bit of Cringely's article, he ignores one thing: the environment in which all companies that previously "ruled the world" existed in no longer exists. In today's world, corporations control governments, not vice versa. This is true in the U.S. and it's true in pretty much all of Europe. People can only choose from the choices they're given and the choices they're given are not up to them. The multinational corporations control what those choices are.
No, the only thing that can take down Microsoft now is the fall of modern civilization. But that won't happen -- we'll find ourselves ruled by a global police state first, and police states are stable as long as there aren't any outside forces to contend with. A global police state won't have any "outside" to worry about. This will last many, many thousands of years at least.
which exploits a weakness in Mac OS X where applications can appear to be other types of files.
What the hell is wrong with these people who design these GUIs? If the Windows experience makes anything clear, it's that you don't hide vital information, like the full name of a file or its actual type.
If a file is an application, it had better look like an application. If a file is a data file, it had better look like one. The computer obviously knows the distinction when the user does not because it's executing the trojan even though the user thinks it's a data file. And if the computer knows the distinction, then it must present that distinction to the user in no uncertain terms. And in this case, it apparently doesn't.
Frankly, I would have expected the MacOS X team to know better than this.
On the tube he presented himself as a wild-eyed maniac. He never smiled, just bitched and complained. In the end he exited the scene just as entered it, screaming like a mad banshee.
Exactly. Now, how much of that was unedited? More precisely, how much of the image he presented on the tube was the result of the media picking and choosing what would be presented on the tube, and how much of it was the unedited truth?
If a lot of it was unedited then I concede that point and retract Dean as an example.
A few hundred thousand US citizens with pistols and AK's could take down the entire US military and the political apparatus within a year.
Nonsense. You're assuming that the government would not be willing to use its big guns on the civilian population. I assure you, they would, if that's what it would take to remain in power. I'd like you to tell me what the civilian population can do against the nuclear weapons in the military's arsenal, and that's just the big hammer stuff. We haven't even started talking about the chemical or biological weapons, not to mention the more advanced stuff like remotely controlled weapons. All you and I know about are the things that aren't classified. I assure you there's a bunch of stuff that is classified that the civilian population won't be able to defend itself against because it doesn't even know about it.
And if Ayatollah Sistani puts a hundred thousand armed Iraqis on the street sometime in the next nine months, the US military is out the door the next week.
What, you mean like the hundred thousand armed Iraqis that the U.S. military already defeated?? Please.
Vietnam proved what can be done by insurgents (and don't drag in the North Vietnamese Army, they did the same crap the VC did in addition to trying regular battles). And Iraq is proving it again.
I already said that Iraq is not a counterexample. And neither is Vietnam.
In Vietnam, the U.S. government was not willing to commit itself to winning the fight at all costs. They didn't obliterate Hanoi, for instance, even though they could have. That they bombed Hanoi at all was an exception in that particular war, and just the conventional bombing alone was enough to bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. It was because of the existence of an equally powerful country (the USSR) backing the North Vietnamese that the U.S. military didn't simply walk all over the North Vietnamese.
Actually, Vietnam supports my argument. South Vietnam didn't fall to communism until after the U.S. military pulled out. In other words, it wasn't until after the South Vietnamese basically no longer had a military that the North Vietnamese were able to sieze power in South Vietnam. That's exactly what the situation would be in the U.S. for the revolutionaries: no military force of its own to wield against the government.
In a war against domestic civilian revolutionaries, the government would literally be fighting for its own survival. There would be no incentive for it to hold back and every incentive for it to put everything it could into the fight in order to end the rebellion quickly. The end result for the U.S. government wouldn't look like Vietnam. It would look like Gulf War I.
All Iraq shows is that the government can't completely eliminate terrorism, which is really what the attacks there amount to. But we already knew that, from Israel's experience if nothing else. I guarantee you that the government would rather put up with a few terrorists than cede its power to a bunch of revolutionaries. Hell, terrorists are good for the government in small doses, since they allow the government to sell the population on the idea that freedom must be given up to achieve security.
Before you can credibly claim that the revolutionaries can win, you'd better first explain how any oppressive military dictatorship that is despised by its own population has managed to remain in power. Being overthrown from the outside doesn't count. So, in other words, you'd better explain how, for example, Hussein was able to remain in power in Iraq.
Because remaining in power is all it takes, and is all the government cares about. The revolutionaries cannot win as long as the government controls all the guns that count and all the information that counts. For the revolutionaries to win, the
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If they don't have any obligations to their country, then their country (which is supposed to be answerable to its people) has no obligations to them.
And therefore, I see no reason for those corporations to retain the protections of U.S. law, the U.S. military, etc.
That means, for example, that they should no longer be protected by U.S. "intellectual property" law.
Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff to me!
Why did you ever think of Europe as being significantly different than the U.S. with respect to freedom? Most of Europe is under about the same amount of control by the multinational corporations as the U.S. is, because money is truly a global language that pretty much anyone of any nationality can be influenced by.
The only significant difference between the U.S. and Europe regarding this is who has to be "influenced" for the corporations (rather, their owners and major shareholders) to get their way.
If these "waivers" are real legal documents signed by both parties, then JPEG2000 is in the clear. If not, well...this incident demonstrates clearly that nothing less will do.
MySQL, even now, is actually rather sparse as database engines go: it lacks stored procedures, triggers, constraints, etc., in short many of the things that a serious DBA considers necessary in a database engine.
But the mission it was originally created for is a mission that's a very common one: a simple, network-enabled data store with a SQL interface. That it lacked transactional capabilities didn't really matter: it was good enough for what many people needed.
So its popularity exploded. In the free software world, there weren't any other contenders at the time that were sufficiently reliable or fast to do the job. PostgreSQL back then just wasn't fast enough, and tended to eat data. Not that MySQL was perfect in that regard, mind you, but at least MySQL gave you the tools to recover your data quickly in the event of a hiccup. PostgreSQL didn't -- it required you to do a full restore from backups, whereas MySQL let you use 'isamchk' to get you up and running quickly. That made a big difference to a lot of people.
Today the story is very different. PostgreSQL is at least as fast, if not faster, than MySQL in many situations, especially under load, and has essentially all the features needed to make it a "real" database: transactions, stored procedures, triggers, views, constraints, etc. About all it lacks now is built-in replication (there exist third-party solutions), nested transactions, and point-in-time recovery (a.k.a. archive logs), things which MySQL is not likely to get anytime soon.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that PostgreSQL is very much a superior solution in just about every respect, MySQL is more popular and thus has better third-party support. And it's thanks to the fact that it was in the right place, at the right time, with a "good enough" feature set.
No, the right question is: what jobs can't be offshored? And the answer is damned few of them -- only those that truly require a physical presence.
And guess what? Technology reduces the number of jobs that require a physical presence. You think the fact that offshoring is happening right now is an accident? No, it's because we now have the communications technology to make it practical.
So the only question left is what all the extra competition is going to do. I think it's going to destroy the global economy, as corporations take the extra profit and distribute it to those who already have the most money: executive staff, board members, and investors.
In short, I think this will destroy what little middle class the world has left, and put us squarely back in the middle ages when people were either insanely rich or dirt poor.
In fact, because offshoring forces entire economies to compete with each other with the price of labor, and thus the standard of living, being the only variable, I think we'll start to see some countries start to use prison labor to compete. That'll definitely take us back to the dark ages.
Nice caricature. Not very useful, though.
The post-modernists I've run across believe that "good" is relative. Some of them even believe that truth is relative as well, and as such no belief system is any more valid than another.
But science is a belief system only to the extent that one believes his own observations. This is sufficient to cover just about everyone.
The scientific method isn't just some arbitrary method of arriving at conclusions about the world. It is one that people the world over use and rely upon almost automatically. It is being used whenever someone asks "what happens if I do X?" and then proceeds to do X in order to see what happens. It is being used whenever someone attempts to solve a real-world problem or to control his environment. It is being used whenever the process of arriving at a solution or of controlling one's environment involves observation of the results and incorporation of those results into the next set of actions.
In short, those very same post-modernists routinely use the scientific method in their everyday lives. That alone gives the scientific method a level of validity above the level those same post-modernists would assign to an arbitrary belief system. Science is just the formalization of the most effective methods people routinely use to understand their environment.
Now, how does this relate to belief systems? More precisely, how does this relate to freedom of expression, human rights, etc.? Simple.
It is simple observation that people value their own happiness. This isn't something that can be debated, because the drive to be happy is instinctive. The amount of effort people expend in the pursuit of happiness exceeds everything else. There are many things that make people happy, of course, from having sufficient food to spending time with friends.
This gives us an objective basis upon which we can define "Good". "Good" is that which maximizes happiness. "Bad" or "Evil" is that which reduces happiness. All that remains is whether the happiness in question is restricted to one (or a few) individuals or if it is spread to a much wider audience.
Because people value happiness, and because observation and history shows us unequivocally that people are happier when they are free than when they are not, it automatically follows that freedom is a good thing. The concept of human rights is a codification of this observation, a statement that freedom is such a necessity for human happiness that everyone should have it.
These aren't arbitrary conclusions to be disposed of as easily as those of any other belief system, these are conclusions that come directly from real-world observation, the same sort of observation almost everyone, of any belief system, including the post-modernists who might disagree, uses to go about their daily lives.
Before, the patent (on browser plugins) being challenged belonged to an individual who was suing Microsoft and even managed to get an injunction (can't remember whether they actually ordered Microsoft to pay or not).
That patent was quickly challenged and nullified. While the w3c and other groups initiated the challenge, I think the reason the patent was nullified was that it belonged to someone who was being used to (successfully) target Microsoft.
Now the patent being challenged belongs to Microsoft, and is being challenged by some small-time nobody (as far as Big Business is concerned).
My prediction is that either the challenge itself will be rejected, or the patent office will "review" the patent and find it "valid". Not because of any merits the patent may have, but because of who owns it. The guys running the patent office know who butters their bread, and it ain't organizations like PUBPAT.
Based on the DOJs behavior, its real stance is probably something like: we want the rest of the world to enforce the copyright laws when the owner of the copyright is a large U.S. corporation, and we want them to not enforce the copyright laws when the perpetrator is a large U.S. corporation. Otherwise we don't care.
Then you'll love the -D option: it sets up a socks proxy on the remote end and lets you connect to it via a local port. So you use -D , then set up your browser to use a socks proxy on localhost: and suddenly it's as if your web browser is running on the remote. The only downside is that name resolution happens on the local side.
If you combine this with a program called "connect", which will establish connections via a socks proxy, then you can use ssh to get into other systems that are accessible only from the remote end. Just put an entry into your .ssh/config file like so:
Works like a charm.
If you mean that there's no dynamic background, then this makes sense.
If you mean that the background is a single solid color then this might not make as much sense, because you can tell the X server to use backing store for all mapped windows (which I assume applies to the root window as well).
How well that'll work for you depends on how much memory each workstation has (and how much memory the graphics cards have).
You might try experimenting with that option. You might find that it will allow you to be a little less strict in how you manage the operation.
Yeah, but the reason you can get away with that is that you almost certainly have a much higher burst rate than just 150k, and even if 150k were your burst rate limit, that's far better than 5k per second, which is what you'll be getting over a modem connection.
X is fine until your client has to send a bunch of pixmaps. Then it gets bandwidth-hungry. Typically this happens during application initialization, so I don't doubt that you're not having trouble with 150k sustained bandwidth. But I'll bet your burst rates peg the interface.
The widget protocol is not intended as a replacement of X -- in fact in the Linux world it would certainly be implemented on top of X. But the bandwidth savings are still there nonetheless.
I've done X over a slow-speed (modem) connection before and while it's not unusable it is slow. Transmitting widget protocol commands would make using a slow-speed modem connection work about as well as X works over a medium-speed (150k/sec or so) connection, because applications would transmit pixmaps only when supplying application-specific graphics. So programs like Photoshop would be slow to load images but would be reasonably fast once the image itself were loaded. The bulk of the graphics traffic that passes between X clients and an X server is composed of UI widget graphics, and that hurts application startup time over a slow link a LOT.
So...come back when you know what you're talking about. :-)
But the beauty of separating out the look and feel of the toolkit from the implementation of the toolkit via a network protocol is that porting the widget set to a new platform is now much more straightforward: you simply have to write a widget server on the target platform, which will take widget requests and display them through the native widget set.
Where you'll have to write some code is when the native widget set is missing a widget type defined by the protocol. In that event you have a couple of options: reject the protocol request, or implement the look and feel of the widget in software (using as much of the native widget set as possible, of course). You can always do the latter -- how else do you think new widget types are created on a platform such as Windows?
No, this isn't the problem. The problem is that right now the existing widget sets under Linux all implement their own look and feel. They've duplicated a lot of effort as a result.
With a widget protocol, you implement GTK or QT the same way as before, except that whenever possible you make widget protocol calls instead of doing direct drawing, mouse handling, etc. For cases when the widget protocol doesn't supply the kind of widget you want, you'll have to implement the look/feel in terms of more primitive graphics calls (and thus the widget protocol will have to support the ability to do direct graphics, including 3D graphics) -- but even that should be done on top of existing widgets whenever possible.
There might be other ways to approach the problem of extensibility, e.g. by making it possible to dynamically define to the widget server the properties of a widget: the inputs it expects, the areas that have to be drawn on, etc. But I haven't thought any of that through.
If you're going to do a next generation toolkit system, then do it right: start by creating a network protocol for it.
You heard me right. The right way to do a toolkit is to make it networkable in a client/server fashion. There are a few reasons for doing so:
Speed over the network. Instead of having to transmit low-level graphics primitives, you now only have to transmit higher-level widget information. This should represent an order of magnitude reduction in the amount of network traffic required. It also means the bandwidth between the code that draws the widget and the code that renders it will likely be as high as possible (a local socket or some such).
Consistency. With a client/server widget architecture, all applications running anywhere will have the same look and feel when they're displaying through your widget server. Additionally, changing the theme in use will change the look and feel of all the applications using the widget server (which, ideally, should be all of them).
Abstraction. Because the widgets are implemented on top of a protocol, widget libraries simply have to all talk the same protocol. This means that it doesn't matter what the widget library itself looks like, what language it's implemented in, what object paradigm it uses, or anything else: the look and feel will still be the same. This is markedly different from the current situation with GTK, QT, and all other Unix widget sets, each of which implements its own look and feel. A client/server architecture can, and should, abstract out the look and feel of the widget set.
Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in look and feel between applications written for different widget toolkits.
You're increasing your efficiency, but not necessarily the efficiency of the economy as a whole.
No, this is not true. What you're describing is only a temporary effect at best. You're focusing on the dollar amount when you should be looking at the manpower.
There are three things that increase the efficiency of an economy: specialization, trade, and technology. Let's ignore technology for the moment and assume that it remains constant.
That leaves specialization and trade. Specialization is what makes an individual more efficient at performing a task, and trade is what allows others to gain access to that person's abilities. Without both, you don't get as much efficiency in the economy as you would otherwise.
But in the case of offshoring to India or China, both specialization and trade already exist. In particular, specialization already exists within the U.S., and access to people who have specialized in the fields in question also already exists.
For offshoring to be of true economic benefit, for it to truly increase the efficiency of the economy, the people who do the work in the target countries have to be better than their American counterparts. But they're not, at least not yet. And that means that offshoring is a lateral move from the standpoint of the efficiency of the economy, not an improvement.
The reason I say economics is a zero-sum game after factoring out technology and population growth (the economy is always measured relative to time, so time is divided out of the equation) is that there is an upper bound to the amount of efficiency that can be gained by specialization, and an upper bound to the amount of efficiency that can be gained through trade. That means that if the economy reaches that level of efficiency through those two mechanisms and neither technology nor the population increase, then there can be no further economic growth. I claim that a (more or less free) economy that has been functioning as long as ours has already come very close to that upper limit.
So the only thing that the current offshoring trend can do right now is to redistribute wealth. In the case of the offshoring we're seeing, that redistribution is happening by paying roughly the same number of people (IT workers) a much smaller wage, and paying the rest to a much smaller number of people (investors and company management).
But ultimately, the reason that economics is ultimately a zero-sum game when technology and population growth are factored out is this very simple observation: whenever someone gains money, someone else must lose the same amount of money. That's because every financial transaction has a source and a destination. If I pay you $1000, I lose $1000 and you gain $1000. The total amount of money available is still the same despite the fact that our transaction h
Because the people who appoint judges (especially to high courts like the circuit courts and the Supreme Court) aren't interested in appointing people who can think. They're interested in appointing people who are likely to rule in favor of their corporate masters no matter how strong the argument against them is.
Perhaps. But remember that he was on the losing side of the Supreme Court case against the Copyright Term Extension Act.
It certainly can't hurt to get all the assistance we can, so I'm pleased that he's been elected to the FSF Board, but let's not kid ourselves: we're very likely to lose the intellectual property fight -- there are far too many large corporations that are in favor of draconian and one-sided (favorable to them) intellectual property laws, and everyone that matters, including the Supreme Court, favors the large corporations.
Interestingly enough, those very laws are exactly what will keep Microsoft in their monopoly position.
No, it's not. It's vitally important that you understand this: the real cost of producing something depends on the total number of man-hours involved. Offshoring doesn't improve the efficiency of the process, only the dollar cost involved, and only because of differences in the standard of living between the two locations.
And the end result was? If the construction jobs were already available, then that means that the construction job market was paying higher before than it was afterwards, since the supply of jobs was obviously greater than the demand for them prior to the manufacturing offshoring. The rest went into knowledge jobs which tended (at the time) to pay better, and the end result was that the increase in income for some of them was enough to pay for the additional construction jobs.
But despite that, the average inflation-adjusted income fell if I'm not mistaken. Evidence for this shouldn't be difficult to come up with. Look at the number of average-wage-years it takes to buy a home now compared with the number it took to buy a home 50 years ago -- that number has gone up. It should have gone down, because technology makes it cheaper to build a home now than it was then.
After factoring in population growth and efficiency gains due to technological progress, it is a zero-sum game. It has to be, because the amount of production capacity of the economy is directly proportional to the amount of human labor available. Market forces (when discussing a market which is free in all respects) can only serve to maximize the efficiency of the economy's production, but is limited by the amount of human labor available and the available technology (which serves to act as a multiplier).
And this is true because economics is the system of exchange of human labor. I don't imagine this assertion is hard to prove. Start by looking at the economy involving two people, then look at it involving three. If it's zero-sum when two players are involved and zero-sum when three players are involved, then it will be zero-sum when N players are involved, where N is an arbitrarily large number. It's probably possible to prove this mathematically using induction.
Hasn't it occurred to you that the increase in GDP of nations like China is much more likely due to the application of technology in those nations than anything else? Like I said, technology is a labor force multiplier. It is the only thing that significantly increases the efficiency and thus productivity of an economy over time.
No, the average standard of living has improved in terms of medicine, and it certainly isn't independent of wealth: there are millions, perhaps billons, of people who basically have no access to health care of any kind. Their standard of living with respect to medicine has not changed at all.
No. The difference here is that agriculture got more efficient. It takes much less total labor to produce the same amount of food via the large farming machines than it did when the farmers were doing their work. The end result is that the real cost of food dropped, so the ability of the displaced farmers to afford food never changed much, if at all. Additionally, the same advances that made it possible to replace farmers with machines also simultaneously provided a new type of job that the farmers could migrate towards. That's not the case at all with offshoring in general.
No. This creation of a new market can compensate for the loss of the old market only if the amount by which the standard of living in the new area rises is greater than the amount by which the standard of living in the old area drops. But since it's the difference in the standard of living itself that is the force behind offshoring, this cannot and will not happen.
Put another way, the amount of resources being diverted to the new area is not as much as the amount of resources being removed from the old area, and therefore any market created in the new area cannot make up for the loss of market in the old area. Otherwise the companies in question would not be saving any money.
Furthermore, people in any economy will always spend the money locally first. That's because the necessities of life are always available locally. Only the money that's left over is available to be spent elsewhere. So the end result is that the company that offshores will see only a small fraction of the money it saves being returned to it in the form of new business. More generally, it means that only a small fraction of the money that is leaving the U.S. economy via offshoring will return to the U.S.
Yes, they'll start hiring, but no, that does not in any way imply that suddenly the people in the new area will be able to buy the company's products again.
As you noted yourself, the competition between countries will force the price of labor to a minimum. But that minimum is however much is necessary to allow the person to barely survive. That means that by definition the people in question cannot buy the company's products unless the products are a necessity for survival.
You can't properly think about this until you start thinking about the cost of goods in
The answer is: only those jobs which require a person's physical presence.
Well, as the current situation with offshoring has shown, which jobs require a physical presence is subject to change as a result of technological advances.
For instance, some argue that sales can't be offshored because you have to be face to face with a customer to make the sale. But technological advances can (and ultimately will) eliminate that requirement. All it takes is a holographic projection system so that each person "sees" all the other people in the same "room". And that's if we don't figure out how to interface to the brain directly first.
But the logical extension of this is that eventually almost everything will be offshored as long as doing so remains cheaper. As you note, for that to not remain the case, the standard of living in the U.S. must fall to roughly that of the competition.
But competition drives down prices. Offshoring forces entire countries' economies to compete against each other for the opportunity to supply labor. After all is said and done, the only way they can compete is by controlling their standard of living. And since competition drives down prices, the only way they can continue to compete is to continuously drive down their standard of living.
And the reason should be obvious once you think about it. A person's standard of living is determined by the amount of resources that person has in excess of the minimum he needs to survive. And the only thing people need to survive is food and water. Even shelter is a luxury (people can live outside, and have done so long ago).
But I think things can easily collapse long before that becomes an issue. Why?
Because the parts of the world that have the highest standards of living are also the parts of the world that buy the bulk of the goods supplied by the corporations that are doing this offshoring thing. Since a person's standard of living is the amount of excess resources he has available to him, and since the offshoring trend must yield a reduction in the average standard of living, it follows that the customer base of the corporations in question must drop in size and in buying power as a result of offshoring. Economics doesn't allow for any other outcome.
And if the customer base of a company is reduced, the company sees a drop in income. The very first thing that company will do is offshore more of its labor force, which will feed back into the overall cycle and speed up the decline. Eventually, the company will be forced to start cutting its offshored workforce, and that's the point at which the system will start to collapse. Because it won't be just a single company doing what I describe above, it'll be most of them.
This is why I think the offshoring trend will result in a global economic collapse.
What proponents of offshoring don't understand is that ultimately the only way to grow the economy is to make it possible for more people to buy your product, not less. The proponents of offshoring are assuming, wrongly, that anyone who loses his job to offshoring will be able to find an equally paying job elsewhere, and thus that the money the company saves will yield a net gain in customers. But that can't happen if the average standard of living goes down, as it must in an offshoring scenario such as what we're currently dealing with.
No, the only way to ultimately grow an economy and to grow a customer base is to save money by being more efficient, not in dollar terms but in man-hour terms. Money is simply a representation of human labor, and you don't get a long-term real increase in efficiency though a process such as offshoring. You can only get it either by streamlining the production process or through automation.
The European parliaments are almost as bought and paid for as members of the U.S. congress and senate. So while it's more likely that this fight can be won in Europe than the U.S., it's not that much more likely.
But the defeat of software patents is such a worthwhile goal that it's worth fighting for no matter the odds.
Allowed by whom? You and me? We have no choice. We have no control over our governments, and our governments have all the guns and ammo. We either do their bidding or we get labeled a "terrorist" and thrown into a dark cell somewhere in Cuba. And that's if they don't just shoot us.
Who controls our governments? Big corporations. Like Microsoft. You think it's an accident that Microsoft has suffered no ill consequences of any antitrust proceedings to date? And they won't, either. You can take that to the bank.
The reason they won't is that the very thing that all the other multinational corporations want is the very thing that will keep Microsoft in the driver's seat: intellectual property laws. Between that and the amount of control Microsoft has over just about everybody's computing infrastructure, nobody of any consequence is going to have the balls or ability to free themselves of Microsoft.
As for the last bit of Cringely's article, he ignores one thing: the environment in which all companies that previously "ruled the world" existed in no longer exists. In today's world, corporations control governments, not vice versa. This is true in the U.S. and it's true in pretty much all of Europe. People can only choose from the choices they're given and the choices they're given are not up to them. The multinational corporations control what those choices are.
No, the only thing that can take down Microsoft now is the fall of modern civilization. But that won't happen -- we'll find ourselves ruled by a global police state first, and police states are stable as long as there aren't any outside forces to contend with. A global police state won't have any "outside" to worry about. This will last many, many thousands of years at least.
Sigh...
What the hell is wrong with these people who design these GUIs? If the Windows experience makes anything clear, it's that you don't hide vital information, like the full name of a file or its actual type.
If a file is an application, it had better look like an application. If a file is a data file, it had better look like one. The computer obviously knows the distinction when the user does not because it's executing the trojan even though the user thinks it's a data file. And if the computer knows the distinction, then it must present that distinction to the user in no uncertain terms. And in this case, it apparently doesn't.
Frankly, I would have expected the MacOS X team to know better than this.
Exactly. Now, how much of that was unedited? More precisely, how much of the image he presented on the tube was the result of the media picking and choosing what would be presented on the tube, and how much of it was the unedited truth?
If a lot of it was unedited then I concede that point and retract Dean as an example.
Nonsense. You're assuming that the government would not be willing to use its big guns on the civilian population. I assure you, they would, if that's what it would take to remain in power. I'd like you to tell me what the civilian population can do against the nuclear weapons in the military's arsenal, and that's just the big hammer stuff. We haven't even started talking about the chemical or biological weapons, not to mention the more advanced stuff like remotely controlled weapons. All you and I know about are the things that aren't classified. I assure you there's a bunch of stuff that is classified that the civilian population won't be able to defend itself against because it doesn't even know about it.
What, you mean like the hundred thousand armed Iraqis that the U.S. military already defeated?? Please.
I already said that Iraq is not a counterexample. And neither is Vietnam.
In Vietnam, the U.S. government was not willing to commit itself to winning the fight at all costs. They didn't obliterate Hanoi, for instance, even though they could have. That they bombed Hanoi at all was an exception in that particular war, and just the conventional bombing alone was enough to bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. It was because of the existence of an equally powerful country (the USSR) backing the North Vietnamese that the U.S. military didn't simply walk all over the North Vietnamese.
Actually, Vietnam supports my argument. South Vietnam didn't fall to communism until after the U.S. military pulled out. In other words, it wasn't until after the South Vietnamese basically no longer had a military that the North Vietnamese were able to sieze power in South Vietnam. That's exactly what the situation would be in the U.S. for the revolutionaries: no military force of its own to wield against the government.
In a war against domestic civilian revolutionaries, the government would literally be fighting for its own survival. There would be no incentive for it to hold back and every incentive for it to put everything it could into the fight in order to end the rebellion quickly. The end result for the U.S. government wouldn't look like Vietnam. It would look like Gulf War I.
All Iraq shows is that the government can't completely eliminate terrorism, which is really what the attacks there amount to. But we already knew that, from Israel's experience if nothing else. I guarantee you that the government would rather put up with a few terrorists than cede its power to a bunch of revolutionaries. Hell, terrorists are good for the government in small doses, since they allow the government to sell the population on the idea that freedom must be given up to achieve security.
Before you can credibly claim that the revolutionaries can win, you'd better first explain how any oppressive military dictatorship that is despised by its own population has managed to remain in power. Being overthrown from the outside doesn't count. So, in other words, you'd better explain how, for example, Hussein was able to remain in power in Iraq.
Because remaining in power is all it takes, and is all the government cares about. The revolutionaries cannot win as long as the government controls all the guns that count and all the information that counts. For the revolutionaries to win, the